Wednesday is now the day to prod people

Too much of my job here involves getting people to do things they don't want to do. Graduate students get back to me, and bosses return my emails. But there are other people in my work life who either can't or won't do the things I'd like them to do. I suspect that this is due to the fact that I live in Miami. Procrastinating is just the complete immersion into Miami Time (which is closely related to Cuban Time)

For example, I've been here over a year, and it took me until this week to get a working key to the graduate student office. That room requires electronic access, which means someone had to input my ID number into a computer somewhere, and someone else had to input my ID number into the door reader itself. It took me months to even figure out who was responsible for these tasks, and then uncountable numbers of emails and phone calls. This was such an effort that I actually listed "Get key card access to the graduate student office" as one of my professional goals during my first-year employment review.

I have regular reminders in my calendar so that I remember to bug all the people I need to bug. Today it occurred to me that it would be more efficient to designate one day as "The day to prod". So now, every Wednesday morning, I'm going to go down the list and gently agitate each person who's supposed to be doing something for me.

If you deep fry your salad is it still healthy?

I had a dinner party this weekend, and once again failed to take pictures. So you'll have to use your imagination a bit for this post. I've been trying a new strategy for dinner parties. I plan fewer courses (three or four) and I choose one item to be a showstopper, which is often something I've never made before. If I end up with extra prep time, as I have lately, I'll try to throw together an amuse bouche with whatever's lying around. Thus, the menu this weekend was:

Amuse bouche: Watermelon soup with ginger

Salad: Summer Salad with fried soft-boiled eggs

Main: Ratautouille

Dessert: Blueberry Clafoutis
Unless you studied those recipes, it will not be obvious that the salad was the most time-consuming (but amazing!) of those recipes. The salad was relatively straightforward: greens, nuts, apricots, and herbs. The dressing was quite nice (although infusing oil by cooking it with lemon zest was not worth the time). The egg that topped the salad, though, made it something worth remembering. It was a complex preparation. First, I soft-boiled the eggs and then chilled them. After peeling, they were double dipped in a crumb mixture, and then deep fried right before they were placed on the salad. I think it's the closest thing a vegetarian will ever get to a Scotch egg.

Everything else on the menu was made from a recipe I knew well. The clafoutis, a baked product that I only discovered last year, is so easy: fruit in a pie tin covered in a pancake-like batter and baked. It's so much easier than pie, but allows me the same opportunity for showcasing summer fruit. The only hitch is I can't figure out how to pronounce 'clafoutis'. Does someone out there speak French?

Born in 1921

My grandmother Ruby is 90 years old today. There's so much of her life that I can't even imagine. She gave birth to eight children, lived on a farm that didn't have running water until after my mother was born, and raised and cooked most of the food her family of ten needed. As a result, today I have seven aunts and uncles that love me, and in a few weeks they'll all be getting together to celebrate nine decades. I won't be there, so here's my good wishes. Happy 90th, Grandma!

How do you make cat socks?

I need some engineering and design help. You may recall that Phi the cat, suffering from an eye injury, has been exploring the finer points of haberdashery with her cone:

She's been stuck in this cone for two months, and I feel terrible about it. She's so much happier without it, when she can bathe and run around and eat out of a bowl. But in order to take it off permanently, I need to prevent her from scratching her eye. She only has claws on the back paws, so I made her these socks:

The socks are made of tube sock material, and I sewed some extra elastic around the tops. She can't shake them off, but they only stay on a few hours before she pulls out of them. Does anyone have any ideas? Should I tape on the socks? Dip her feet in rubber? All suggestions are welcomed, short of stuffing her. We're rather fond of Phi.

New wheels

The fish-mobile (otherwise known as a '95 Ford station wagon) has been making some funny noises lately. I had always hoped that it would get us through graduate school, and now that Andrew and I are both graduated and gainfully employed, I decided I couldn't ask for much more. Andrew could have kept repairing it, but the allure of a more fun, more reliable car was too great for me to ignore.

We used the long Fourth of July weekend to go new(er)-car shopping. It was a draining experience for me, because I am loath to part with money. You can call me frugal or you can call me a cheapskate, but even though I wanted to treat myself to a car, I was scared by the actual amount of money that I'd be required to part with. I take after my parents - you may recall that it took them ten years to buy a house, while a furnace purchasetook two years. In exasperation, my husband declared that if everyone was like me (and my family), the entire world economy would collapse. Which is true, but the garage sale economy would skyrocket.

Eventually, though, we made a decision. The fish station wagon is gone to a (better?) place, and we've got a new (to us) car:

I think it's just the car for a childless couple in Miami.

Places I’ve been: Bar Harbor

I’ve been travelling so much this spring that I’ve fallen a bit behind in my blogging. I enjoy trying to capture on paper the feel of a place when I visit, so this week I’ll be going back to all the places I’ve missed telling you about.

Although I this post is titled Bar Harbor, it’s really about the college I stay at there. My Maine conference is always held at a little college within walking distance of the town of Bar Harbor. The College of the Atlantic on a beautiful, wooded campus where about 80 students all study Human Ecology, the one and only major they offer. The week-long conference is held in the summer, when maybe three students remain to work the dining hall and manage the dorms. What’s interesting to me, as a person who thinks a lot about environments (and particularly how they affect how people think and learn), is how much you can learn about the philosophy of the students and their school even when no one is there.

While they have one room that can seat the whole student body, there aren’t many classrooms. Although students study the same major, they’re supposed to create personalized classes with their professors. So most of the rooms are sort of friendly meetings rooms where students and a professor can meet and talk.

The communal focus on sustainability is everywhere, and it’s quite interesting to see how a whole institution can really think about sustainability beyond recycling. Of course they recycle extensively and the end of every meal, you scrape your scraps into the compost barrel and place your compostable napkins in a another barrel. You’re forced to think about how much food we waste when you see what’s left after every meal. The food scraps are taken to this enormous silo-like device, where they turn into compost which is used in the large on-site gardens. The human waste makes its way into the ecosystem through composting toilets which generate electricity. You want to know what a composting toilet is? It’s basically a deep hole in the ground, engineered to direct waste and smells away from you. It’s a pretty fancy duct system, though, because they are used in multi-story buildings. I wonder whether these choices represent what we will soon all become accustomed to as we attempt to institutionalize changes to our lives that produce less waste, or whether they will go down it history as good but quirky ideas that never go mainstream.

Drama Queen

Remember the girl in college, the one who always had boyfriend problems, or needed to talk to you about how her parents totally didn't get her and had cut off her allowance, or she was failing her trig class? Remember all the perpetual drama? I have become that girl. It appears that this blog has just become a long list of things that are going wrong. In actuality, I have a great life. I now live with my husband, full-time. I have a cat who still loves her life, even if she does walk around with the cone of shame. I love my job and I live in a city full of interesting food and people.

Nonetheless, it was one more thing to add the list when we went to work yesterday (Andrew has a new job!) and found that our car window had been smashed and the GPS stolen. Bleh. The police were kind enough to point out that we really shouldn't leave electronics visible, which I had kind of figured out by that point. One lost morning of work, though, and we had a new window. And maybe we'll be lucky enough, when we're trying to buy a replacement GPS on eBay, that we'll actually buy our very own GPS back again.