When I was your age, we skied.

It only took 3 years, but we finally went skiing at Mountain High in the San Bernardino Mountains this past weekend, after a drive out to Anza Borrego on the Cesar Chavez holiday on Friday (I posted a few pictures from the trip on Petri's blog).

I learned a very important lesson this weekend: I'm old. Among the things that made me feel ancient:
General:

• The "High" in "Mountain High" has nothing to do with altitude.
• We were 2 of maybe 5 skiers in the whole resort (the rest were snowboarders).
• We were 2 of maybe 5 people over 30 yrs old. Apparently skis & age are related.
• "Surfer dude" speech exists on the mountains in addition to the beach.
• I remember when snow gear was just supposed to keep you warm. Now? I'm pretty sure there's probably a fashion magazine out there solely for snowboarders. My pants were so uncool...as was my North Face jacket (but it blocks the wind!).

Body related:

• When I lifted my leg, I could feel my ligaments/ tendons pull away from my bones, from the weight of the skis. That was a confidence booster...
• I got tired halfway down the first run.
• I'm pretty sure I fell every single run I did.
• I was afraid of going too fast (I mean, what the ****?! Who am I?)
• I didn't want to stay the full 8 hours that I paid for.

Cooking Crazy

I went wild cooking this weekend, which, as R will tell you, doesn't happen too often.

This came about from:

• My uncle visiting last weekend and buying us a slew of cool, new kitchen tools (his favorite past-time is cooking so this is our key bonding point
• Feeling fat. I just went to the doc and I'm at the heavier end of my fluctuating 10 pound weight spectrum...sure, roll your eyes, but I have to have a limit to what weight I'll tolerate before I let myself get to the point of no return. So now I'm at my limit and it's time to kick things back into gear.
• Discovering SmittenKitchen and 101 Cookbooks: Both are websites with new food ideas (for me, anyway) that are healthy and have great photos of their creations.
  

Recipes we made this weekend included:

• Huevos rancheros (SK): Now i know what to do with all those leftover corn tortillas when we buy them for one night of enchiladas. It's amazing how much the tortilla and a little mild cheddar will take the taste factor up a notch.


• Honey-toasted Fruit Muesli (101): Breakfast is set for the next week or two. R and I got hooked on the muesli/yogurt combo when we lived in Germany and in a way, muesli is muesli, but when it's homemade? You just can't beat that freshness.
  


• Orange Pan-glazed Tempeh (101): This is similar to another recipe we do over shredded cabbage except for the orange part and it's outstanding. We had some wheatberry salad with dried cranberries and shallots to use up and the citrus flavor went nicely with it. I thought it was going to be a bust because I got navel oranges, but when they boiled down, the juice got a lot sweeter. Can't wait to have this one again.


• Amazing Black Bean Brownies (101): I suspect they put the "amazing" part into its name to convince you it's not going to be sick, because who really wants black beans in their brownie? Well now I do! They're way more fudge-like than cake-like, have a heavy coffee taste, and not a hint of bean. I'm thrilled I can get my chocolate fix and not feel guilty because sugar is replaced with agave nectar as well. And btw, agave nectar is going to change my life.


• Miso Soup (101): This was insanely easy. It literally took all of 5 minutes (without soba noodles) to make and was better than your restaurant miso soups. I suspect I'll probably get sick of this one soon because I'll wind up making it as my new easy meal when I don't feel like cooking (i.e., most of the time).
  

TEDTalks - Elizabeth Gilbert (2009)

For anyone involved in the creaitve process and especially my writing
friends, check out this episode of TEDTalks, "A different way to think
about creative genius" - Elizabeth Gilbert (2009): http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TEDTalks_video/~3/535684943/453

I haven't read Eat, Pray, Love but this makes me want to. Also, if you
haven't seen/heard TEDTalks, these are some of the best podcast
episodes out there.

Sent from my iPhone

Grooveshark

Youtube was my go to for finding songs I was thinking about, but so far Grooveshark has proved pretty good PLUS you can embed a song on your web site. woo.

In celebration of this, here's Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing."

Brown Out

This past year I've started to try my hand out with a little bit of video. As exciting as our lives are, don't expect to see any earth-shattering productions.

Nonetheless, here's my first attempt at a voice-over:





And here's my interview with Ryan on the day of a brown out:



This is why recording the cat is more interesting than us.

2008 Recap

So I didn't do much in the way of blogging this past year and really that just means it was a good year.

Two major changes occurred that I suppose are safe to divulge at this point, and if you follow my tweets, you may already know that:

• After 4 very long years, I'm finally and officially employed.
• We got a cat.
  

Side note: I've grown to love twitter more than blogs...turns out I only really need 140 characters to say what I want to say and people only have that attention span anyway.

I've been working on and off for UCSD over the past 2 years as a temp who floats around different departments, and while I appreciated the work, let's just say that some days I was scolded for using different colors of paperclips. I wish I was kidding.

Just when I gave up on finding writing/editing jobs (i.e., what I went to school for), I got a call to temp as a senior editor. Long story short, after 5 months of temping, 4 months of interviews, somehow winning "Temp of the Month" (possibly the most hilarious award I've ever received), and narrowly missing the hiring freeze, I finally got the job in August. And I love it.

I've been reluctant to say anything because I'm in a probationary period until February, and while I'm not worried about my performance, like everyone else I've just kept an eye on this weird economic time we're in...last one in is the first one out kind of thing. Hopefully I'm not jinxing myself now, even. Anyway, I basically edit content for the university's Web site, which could also be the reason for the decline of the blog posts. I get plenty of HTML in my day and while the content I edit is rife with humor opportunities, I'd rather, again, keep my job. The best part is I work with some of the smartest, funniest people I've ever known. In other words, for having been painfully unemployed and downright lost for the past 4 years, I feel like my karma finally came back.

Another side note: I feel like everything I ever did on this blog or learned from creating this blog--be it html, photography, graphics, photoshop, Web research, etc.--directly fed into my ability to get this job. Who would have thought?

In other karma news, we got a cat. This is a huge deal and has been a long time coming. Long story short is that Ryan is allergic to cats, more than a year ago we started him on shots, as time went on we visited the humane society often to monitor his reaction in a room full of cats (he seemed good), and then when some lab cats became available at UCSD, to my surprise he suggested we take one home. We then let things settle in to see how his allergies were before we possibly had to give it back.

I think it's safe to say we're past that waiting period and that we're both in love with the furball of energy who's brought a lot of energy into our lives. As a courtesy to those who would rather not read about another woman going on about her cat, the little guy does have his own separate blog...which has, in its short life, become way more popular than this one.

Airport Security

A guy at the airport tried to bring a gas-powered leaf blower through.

"Let's see...I can only bring 8 oz. of shampoo on board...but I have a
sneaky suspicion that I'll get my leaf blower and its tiny canister of
gasoline right through."

Even funnier is imagining a terrorist taking a plane hostage with
their leaf blower. Note to self: fight back with my seat's personal
air vent.

Sent from my iPhone

KPBS Fame

Angela Carone from KPBS' These Days e-mailed me this past weekend to see if they could feature one of my photos on their blog, Culture Lust, today. This is awesome for a million reasons:

• Duh, it's my photography (though I have to admit that when I see my pic among the others, mine clearly seems to be the least artistic).
• It's my co-worker's band, The Midwinters
  
• These Days is all too familiar to someone who rarely changes the radio dial from the NPR/KPBS station.
• It was randomly found on Flickr. I'm still amazed how great and well-respected flickr has turned out to be in the larger publishing world.

Kind of weird that all that time of unemployment actually yielded a semi-competent talent because lately I've rarely been tooling around in my own hobby for me. I'm actually in demand for others. The only problem is that I can't bring myself to charge because they're friends (I have a ring of people who yell at me for this, but dude...don't mix friends and business) I'm in serious need of a pimp that will take care of my bidness for me.

Playing catchup

It's been a while since I did a fruit carving and I had to catch him
before he turned into a moldy puddle on our doorstep.

(Getting Back on the Blog Wagon)

Kell: Do you know what a group of cats is called?

Ryan: Cattle?

Capture Cincinnati Photo Contest

I entered this last year with little hope of getting published because I hardly have any photos of my hometown...at least since the digital age. That, of course, was a sad realization so when we were back this past summer, I went on a mission to remedy that and lo and behold, this contest is going on again.

Sign up, check out my latest batch of the 'nati and vote!

For the Flickr-ites

Shameless self-promotion alert: I entered a photo into the Lonely Planet Publications pool on Flickr and have made it to the final cut of voting. You can help me win a guidebook and possible publication by voting for my photo in 3 easy steps:

1. Click here to see my photo in the running (make sure you're signed in as well).
2. Copy and paste this code in the comments section at the bottom of the page:
   

   <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/lonelyplanetpublications/ "> This photo makes me want to travel and gets my vote in the Lonely Planet Publications group's Beach challenge</a>

3. Click "Post Comment" to vote.

Loads of Ireland pics coming soon...

To the motherland

Too Damn Hot

Even Bambi is like, dude. F'real?



(Side note - I miss Ohio nature. Cardinals? Wow. Totally striking birds. Even robins, as ugly as they are, look exotic to me now)

I'm looking forward to a rainy, damp, tuberculosis-y Ireland.

In Rainbows - From the Basement

Though it pains me to make the comparison, after previewing Radiohead's new In Rainbows - From the Basement video, this struck me:

Week 1 of Vacation

I'll try to update where I am on blogger but follow www.twitter.com/cowakazi (or the sidebar on the blog) for the fun little Cincinnati/Ireland details.

Featured in a Museum

Why do I love flickr? Because things like this happen: Two of my photos were selected for presentation in a digital slideshow at the San Diego Natural History Museum. It's for their next exhibit, Water: A California Story, opening July 19, 2008. As to be expected, the photos are history related:

• Swell Crashing into OB Pier--back in December there were some gnarley waves that rolled in.
• Old Mission Dam--Mission Trails Regional Park can tell you more about the history than I can.

I mean, wow. I made it to a museum. I'm officially immortalized...unless their computer crashes.

Banana Limbo

Get My New Posts in Your Inbox

Now I KNOW that many of you who read Kellinahandbasket visit almost every day to see if I posted anything new. And thank you--it's really flattering.

Because I don't post every day, however, I want to make things easier for you. I have installed this handy dandy little subscription form on my sidebar that lets you enter your email, and when I post something new, it alerts you via email. In fact it not only alerts you but you can read the whole damn post in your inbox. It won't be as visually pleasing as the real website (and I'm not sure if images will show up correctly) but if that's the sort of thing that bothers you and you need the bells and whistles, the post link is also included in your message so that you can hop right over to the real deal. And P.S. it's starting to sound like a sales pitch but it's not. From the goodness of my warm, squishy heart, I'm just genuinely trying to make your life easier.

All this courtesy of Feedburner. (Again, just a geek reference point. Not a sales pitch.)

The truth is you really should learn about subscribing to RSS feeds because this is the type of thing that makes us seem really old to teenagers, but if you're resistant I'll provide you with this alternative before I shove an RSS tutorial down your throat.

More on that later.

Review of Jott

So there's this service called Jott that transcribes your voice into text for emails, text messages, reminders to yourself, or as you'll see, to post to your blog. You get 30 seconds to say what you want to say. Though I won't switch my method of blogging to talking into a cell phone and uploading its contents, anyone who knows me knows that I have animated voices for my stories. Therein lies the appeal of Jott for me. Every once in a while I've wished for the ability to put my voice and intonation into a post. And so...curious about the service and its accuracy I tried it out:

What Jott heard: (listen: press on the next page) This is take four on me trying Jott on Blogger, [language of Jott not supported] it would be interesting to see if Jott understands Spanish.

What I actually said: This is take four on me trying Jott on Blogger. Count it. Numero quattro. It will be interesting to see if Jott understands Spanish.

• Not bad. And upon listening to it again, I admittedly garbled my future tense. I wish it would at least ATTEMPT to spell out what it thinks it hears. Could be funny on a tipsy night to see your slurred words spelled out for you.

............................
What Jott heard: (listen) No body got the blogger connection to fell(?). I'm curious to see how Jott transcribe something like [language of Jott, not supported].

What I actually said: Now that I've got the blogger connection figured out I'm curious to see how Jott transcribes something like hulghhughhugh hughl hyill!

• Not great. And I understand that we have bad cell phone coverage to contend with so that might be an issue, but there's obviously no grammar check to sort of amend what it thinks it might have heard. I'm not opposed to the lack of a grammar check, though.

............................
What Jott heard: (listen) You know how crazy your Spansih(?). I found because I don't may be I'm a French person, who speak English but don't know I want to use this Jott like every book is.

What I actually said: Now I try zee euhh French accent because euh, I don't know, maybe I am a euh French person who euhhh speaks English, but euh you know, I want to use zeh Jott like everybody else. mmn?

• Now I'm just being a jerk to Jott. At this point I felt like a kid with a tape recorder.

............................
What Jott heard: (listen) This Jott is more a test to see how long it takes the Jott to post to the blog, because I'm sitting here waiting for my other one and getting kinda bored. Anyway, it is exactly 5:58 PM right now, and I guess we'll know it what kinda post when it shows at the blog.

What I actually said: This Jott is more of a test to see how long it takes the Jot to post to the blog because I'm sitting here waiting for my other ones and getting and uh getting kinda bored. Anyway it is exactly 5:58 PM right now, uum and I guess we'll know what time it posts when it shows up on the blog.

• This was probably the best test because I felt the most natural in this Jott and for the most part it transcribed pretty well. Blogger said that the message posted at 6:06 PM so we're looking at roughly an 8 minute lag time between recording the message and actual post time. I like that it catches "kinda."

............................
Okay so it's alright. To its credit it also had to contend with crappy cell phone coverage, but on a more practical level this could be ideal when you want to send a text while driving just because it's safer than looking at your keypad. It might not be accurate, but you'll get to live another day. I'll have to test the driving Jott out, though, to be sure.

Powered by Jott