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September 30, 2007
C is for Cookie and for Courtney
Given enough time and resources, I think I could eat infinite cookies.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:58 PM | Comments (2)
I was there
I was at a party alluded to in the New York Times, and photographed by the guy who is the star of the story. On this page, click on the multimedia slide show. The first pic, with the blue background, and one or two subsequent photos were taken at Ground Kontrol, where metafilter held a meetup. Morgan was there too.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2007
What should I do with all this food?
I have acorn squash, spaghetti squash,5 ears corn , 2 leeks, 6 carrots, 4 onions, 5 apples, 8 potatoes, 1 zucchini, 15 tomatoes, 8 assorted peppers, 2 eggplant.
Not pictured: beet greens, parsley, spinach, garlic, feta, Parmesan, canned beans, dried lentils, eggs, butter, vinegars, herbs, oils and lots of pasta, rice, bread and other grains.
Maybe I'll make a tomato sauce and eggplant Parmesan tonight, but that still leaves me with a lot of food for two people to do away with before we get the next batch.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 01:10 PM | Comments (5)
September 28, 2007
Time management
Is it pathetic that as I near 30 I still can't manage my time? I procrastinate. I goof off. I do everything except what I ought to do. Yet I still feel stressed, as though I have been working hard. My life would be so much better if I just got to work right away. But I revel in being lazy.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:08 PM | Comments (2)
September 26, 2007
Economics
I've signed up for my second economics class at Portland Community College. I took micro at the start of this calendar year, and now I'm enrolled in macro. Pretty soon I'll know everything about how the world works.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 06:52 AM | Comments (2)
September 25, 2007
Silly Norwegians
This video keeps making me laugh, over and over again. Also, the milk man looks like this guy Ben works with who also goes to our gym.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2007
butter
This list is clearly rigged. "Portland is a filthy pigpen of butter abusing hogs," the Mercury maintains, and then the alt-alt-weekly proceeds to list the city's purported top butter consumers. Guess whose name is not on the list?
The evidence of my affinity for butter goes back nearly seven years: letters to ...; "I am going to eat..."; cow made out of ...; cholesterol; grateful 1, 2, 3 times.
Most recently, I had butter just a few hours ago. I can't believe I didn't even make the list.
On an unrelated topic, if you'd told me this morning that five and a half years ago I hated avocado, I'd have called you a liar. Me? I love avocado. I have no memory of ever feeling differently, but apparently I once did.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2007
Difficult day
All of a sudden I couldn't make out the words on the computer screen. Double images filled the center of my vision, on the periphery the world was warped, like I was looking through a curved piece of glass. I took off my glasses, and it was still warped, just fuzzy too. I took a break, went for coffee, and when I got back it was better for a few minutes and then it got worse. Then I got a headache. And it got worse and worse, it felt like paralyzing brain freeze, the seizing stabbing that a too-cold milkshake can inflict on the inside of my forehead, and I knew I couldn't work any more so I went home.
Ben drove me to urgent care. I was diagnosed with an ocular migraine. My first migraine. I hope it's my last, but who knows? I spent three hours this afternoon lying on the couch with my eyes closed, with cats climbing up and down off of me throughout. I mostly feel better now, but I'm nervous that the pain will come back. I'm typing with my eyes closed, in case it's the screen, the light of the monitor, that caused this thing in the first place. I don't feel any real pain, my vision is normal, but I'm cringing in fear that the symptoms will return.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 07:43 PM | Comments (9)
September 16, 2007
August 30, 2008
We're running out of stars, according to David Owen of the New Yorker:
In 1610, Galileo Galilei published a small book describing astronomical observations that he had made of the skies above Padua. His homemade telescopes had less magnifying and resolving power than most beginners’ telescopes sold today, yet with them he made astonishing discoveries: that the moon has mountains and other topographical features; that Jupiter is orbited by satellites, which he called planets; and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars. ... Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.
The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see.
"The nighttime sky," he goes on to write, "throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder." So I've started building a map of the darkest skies in the Northwest, with nearby camp sites, using data from the Dark Sky Finder.
I'm mapping areas where, on a moonless night, the Milky Way should be visible. Under the darkest skies, clouds appear black rather than illuminated during a new moon, more than 14,000 stars fill the sky and the Milky Way is awash with color and light. I haven't found any skies so dark, but I've come close.
Cloudless weekend new moons are hard to come by in western Oregon, when rain blots out the sky for half the year. Last night, the moon was small and the sky was clear. With Ben, I made the long dark drive to the edge of the Tygh Valley.
Even as just a sliver, the moon's light nearly obscured the Milky Way. I could just make out our galaxy's hazy outline. A three-dimensional field of stars glimmered above our heads as we breathed air heavy with pine sap, and from time to time meteors appeared and vanished in a streaking blink.
The sky will be darker still on Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008, Labor Day weekend. I'm thinking of reserving two campsites, enough room for a dozen people or so. I'll build up a big fire, put marshmallows on sticks and eat s'mores and grilled veggie burgers until long after dark. Someone else can sing the camp songs, I don't have the voice for it. Then, when the flames die down, those of us whose jaws have been too tightly hinged for too long can lie back and wait for them to drop as we take in the night sky of our ancestors.
Would anybody care to join me?
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 04:39 PM | Comments (2)
September 14, 2007
I got at least 300 e-mails at work this week. Some people are good at handling the constant rushing flow of information and communication, but I find it very overwhelming at times.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:53 PM | Comments (2)
September 13, 2007
Brothers!
My brother Morgan moved to Portland in May, and now it looks like my brother Austin is coming out here, too. I've missed my family a lot over the six and a half years I've lived in this city, and I'm really excited to suddenly have more of them in the area. Once I lure a few more Sherwoods across the continent, maybe I'll start work on my eastern U.S. friends next. Even if my parents and brothers Darcy and Chance don't wind up relocating to the Northwest, maybe we can have occasional Portland Christmas gatherings. That would be so great.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:39 PM | Comments (1)
September 12, 2007
braids and buns
My hair is getting kind of long. It's now at the point where I can tie it back without any assistance from pencils or ponytail holders. I just wrap bits of hair around other hair, and it stays in place reasonably well.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:19 PM | Comments (2)
September 11, 2007
Leaky toilet
Ben and I made our first fixer-upper oriented trip to Home Depot today in search of parts to silence our leaky toilet. As we were debating the pros and cons of two alternative flapper systems, a man in a green "Plumber" T-shirt walked by and said "definitely get this kit, you have no idea how many of that other kind I have to replace." So we followed his instructions.
Now Ben is up to his elbows in smelly stagnant water, nearly done with the repairs, while I sip sherry, pet the cats, read home improvement blogs, and daydream about all the other projects "we" could do. Poor Ben.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2007
Today
This may be the last warm, sunny day of the year, according to the TV weather specialists. So to take advantage of the weather, I spent two hours in a pitch-black cave that's 50-some degrees year round. I did the Ape Cave again, hike through a mile-something long underground lava tube formed by volcanic activity thousands of years ago. It was difficult and it was awesome.
On the way home and faced with yet another vegetable on the verge of death, I finally splurged and got Bittman's "How to Cook Everything."
The verdict, so far: dish #1, lower-fat pasta with eggplant and basil, was delicious, despite several "oops" moments on my part. Also, I love that there is a recipe for cinnamon toast for one.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2007
Waning summer
For a period of about two years, Ben and I lived through a period of constant chaos. I changed jobs. We moved to Woodland and Ben endured the commute from Hell. Jason died. I changed jobs again. Ben's car was totaled. We moved to Portland. Jazzy died. We got married. We got evicted. We got a new cat. We moved within Portland. Our basement flooded and our roof leaked. We bought a townhouse. We moved again.
Since May, however, things have been calm. Portland cheated us a bit this summer. There was some humidity and some rain, and that's not supposed to happen. Overall, though, the days have been long and I've been enjoying life.
A couple of days ago, I left a movie at around 9 p.m. and it was already dark out. Just a month ago there would have been some lingering sunlight in the sky. For the first time since spring, my alarm clock went off before dawn today.
Living this far north, the days swing long and short across the pendulum Earth every year. While the 78 degrees last, I'm going to aggressively enjoy them. And as dark winter approaches, I feel at peace with my life for the first time in years.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:20 PM | Comments (2)
September 03, 2007
slaying
Ben's been playing Warcraft again after taking a break from the game for a while. He has this group of people he's been playing with for years, and they all wear headsets and talk to each other over the internet while they kill monsters together.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2007
Rocks and roots
Our back patio is mostly concrete, but about a third of it - a five foot by five foot square - is soil. Or so I thought, until today. Next summer I want to have a small garden on our patio. So I started digging so I could lay some edging. There are some big rocks in that five by five space. Some really big rocks. Some thick rope-like roots from the neighbor's walnut tree, too. I'm gonna keep digging, but if the entire soil square is this awful I'm not sure anything is going to grow there.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:22 AM | Comments (1)