Recently in Health Category

I read this story earlier today - I thought it was a link from one of the autism-spectrum topic blogs I follow, but none of them appear to have been the actual source. The story is about Nate Tseglin, a kid who was apparently a successful, bright, happy kid who happened to have Asperger's. When he ran up against some road blocks in school - inappropriate class offerings, lack of sensitive counseling service, and so on (problems with which I'm only too familiar, even if I don't have Asperger's) - he started having problems with impulsive behaviors. The solutions he devised (such as a system of soft restraints which he would request to use when he felt like scratching himself, approved by his doctor) were unpalatable to the school; a teacher reported them to Child Protective Services.

What happened after is a complete failure of common sense and state restraint. Rather than repost the entirety of the history, I encourage you to go read it at Get Nate Home. Excerpt:

Step one: make enough noise that they can't get away with this. I'll figure out step two when I get that far.

I'm in New England, again! This visit has been too short, largely because I've slept through so much of it; I had to have unexpected surgery last week to remove my gall bladder, which was apparently the source of many of the stupid-headed ailments I couldn't shake. Here's looking to better health. Anyhow, I've been hopped up on the narcolepsy-inducing wonder-drug Vicodin for a good deal of my trip. I have, however, managed to do some cooking, which is a favorite activity to do when I'm out here. Particularly cooking with fish. It's so jealousy-inducing fresh! Bliss. So, Will and I visited the grocery store Wednesday evening in search of good food to welcome me to New England for my second visit. Also, because of the aforementioned surgery, I'm on a (lower sodium) diet that's not terribly compatible with a good deal of his pantry. On our trip, we purchased:

• leeks
• asparagus
• white wine (Sauvignon Blanc - cheap stuff)
• red potatoes
• olive oil & black pepper triscuits
• lots and lots of jello
• a bar of dark chocolate (Chocolove Extra Strong Dark 77%)

We also stopped by the seafood counter to ask for fish heads, hoping to find a good bunch to make fish stock. They had none. "Have anything you want to get rid of soon?" I asked. "Well, if we keep it between you and me..." said the man manning the stand. And so we wound up with four nice looking salmon steaks that were just going to be thrown away about an hour and a half later, for a total of under ten bucks (about half price). Win. Salmon is not traditionally a choice for making fish stock. It's too fatty. But you know what I say to that? POOEY. I for one am willing to try (and fail) once. Using four perfectly good salmon steaks just to make fish stock seemed like kind of a waste, or as we say where I'm from, a fucking travesty. So after the stock was suitably stocky, we decided that there would be a salmon salad made afterwards. That's how we roll. Without further todo: Leek & Potato Soup with Salmon Stock Ingredients

• Four salmon steaks
• One bottle cheap Sauvignon Blanc (or other relatively dry white wine)
• Four large red potatoes, cubed to about 1 inch
• Four large leeks, thin-sliced, dark green parts discarded
• About 8 oz portabella mushrooms, finely diced
• 10-12 leaves fresh lemon basil
• extra virgin olive oil
• sea salt
• black pepper

Instructions

1. Heat some extra virgin olive oil (to cover pan bottom) in a large saute pan over medium heat. Bruise lemon basil by rubbing it between clean hands (or however you like to do it); toss in the pan. Stir in with the olive oil to flavor the oil well. Cook until leaves are a little brown but not crispy.
2. Put salmon steaks directly into lemon basil olive oil. Pan will be crowded. Don't worry about it. Let the steaks brown very slightly on one side (about a minute). Turn, allow to brown for a minute, then add a quarter bottle of the wine.
3. Turn down the heat and allow the salmon to gently cook through. This takes a little bit, about 15 minutes.
4. Transfer everything in the pan to a stock pot. Add the rest of the bottle of wine. Crush fish a bit without completely destroying it to release some flavor. Allow to cook another 15-20 minutes.
5. Strain fish stock off using a fine mesh strainer, reserving the fish and other solids. If you don't have one of those, a collander lined with cheesecloth works. In case of utter stock-making ghetto-i-tude (i.e., no fine mesh strainer and no cheesecloth), paper towels work for lining the collander, but will absorb some of your fish stock and will also pass the stock very slowly.
6. Back in the stock pot, put the fish stock along with an equal part water, your potatoes, leeks, and portabella mushrooms; allow to cook for an hour on low heat, long enough for potatoes to become tender. (Posterity note that is absolutely not advised: This is the point at which we also added milk. I like milk in my leek/potato soups; it matches well with the mild onion flavors and such. What I had failed to remember is that we had started this culinary adventure with wine, which is acidic enough to (upon addition of heat) make young cheese out of milk. Our milk started foaming after about 30 minutes, and by the time we got the heat turned down, we had a lot of cottage cheese in our pot. I think this soup might well have been very good with paneer in it, but cooking it this way also left all of the whey in our broth, and the cheese was not compact and well-made. We skimmed off and discarded as much as we could.)
7. Season with sea salt and black pepper to taste. Serve with crusty bread - regular old Italian works great.

Sweet Salmon Salad Ingredients

• Salmon steaks left over from leek & potato soup
• Two medium apples, finely diced
• One heart of celery, thin-sliced
• 1 tbsp nutmeg
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• mayonnaise to prefered texture

Instructions

1. The salmon steaks, after pulled out of their bath of extra virgin olive oil, lemon basil, and white wine, were still delicious-smelling and ready to be used in another recipe, but somewhat unfortunately still full of bones. We washed our hands well and manually deboned the entire mass of salmon. A number of the bones were soft enough that simply amounted to extra calcium, but some were still firm and pokey, so this step was necessary.
2. Mix apples, celery, nutmeg, cinnamon, and a half cup or so of mayonnaise in with the salmon. You will probably need more mayonnaise to acheive a lumpable salad, but mixing in a half cup at first is more manageable.
3. Serve, either on bread or on crackers. We had ours on Olive Oil & Black Pepper Triscuits, which was optimal - the sweet flavors from the apples and celery played very, very nicely with the savory flavors from the cracker. The salmon flavor was present and well-represented without being overpowering.

Having shared both dishes with self-proclaimed foodies, I can confidently say they were good and it's not just me liking my own cooking. Recipes approved for general release. P.S. Go Sox!

I suck at keeping up with this thing. Therefore, I provide here a mostly-complete update before I have to once again retreat for the evil that is school. I spent a good deal of late July and early August simply taking time for myself. I made a to-do list, and I used it. I cleaned up my office (most of the way). I handled some obnoxious financial badness, and also took some positive steps to clean up our finances without requiring disaster conditions as impetus. I took wedding photos for a friend of my mother, did loads of Spanish, and prepared for the upcoming school franticness - I always know it's coming, and I'm never ready. Then, last week, I flew out east. I flew from Omaha to Chicago to Boston on Monday, and landed early Tuesday morning. (As in, a few minutes after midnight.) I was slated to be delayed on my first flight enough to make me late for the second, so United booked me on a couple American flights, then proceeded to try to dick me out of the miles. (I still have to mail them the boarding passes to get credit for the flights.) Well-kept Boston secret: the shuttle from the airport to the train station stops running long about midnight. P.S. so does the train. My original transport with Kara from plane-landing-place to bed-sleeping-place fell through, so the plan was to take the shuttle to the train (subway, I suppose: do not call it either of these things when you are there, for it is the T, and if you call it something other than this, you will get funny looks) and the <strike>train</strike> T to the MIT campus to chill until Live Entertainment became available (i.e., the person I was visiting made it back to town). So I hopped on the wrong shuttle, and I wound up at the Chelsea Employee Station. Yes, it seemed a touch odd that everyone on my shuttle seemed to be an airport employee, but I chalked it up to hopping on around midnight - shift change time, yeah? Anyway, the very nice shuttle driver - Alberto - chatted with me for awhile (my favorite bit was discussing the many ways Spanish has to tell a woman you love her) and took me back to the airport to wait for the 4:30am shuttle to the 5:00am T. The only food open was a Very Suspect Dunkin' Donuts With No Shortage of Ghetto But a Definite Shortage of Croissants; I bought a twisty glazed donut, then a few hours later, an everything bagel with cream cheese. (It is strange how different "everything" tastes, out that-a-way.) And copious amounts of coffee, of course. I read the rest of American Gods (which I started on the plane), finishing just in time to catch my shuttle. (Reading American Gods and other Gaiman-foo on the trip has made me itchy to write. I have story ideas. This always happens when I fly.) Shuttle to the T station, blue line to the green line to the red line to Kendall/MIT station. I got off there around six in the morning, then proceeded to wander aimlessly, no thanks to a couple of helpful folks who, when queried, told me that MIT was "all over [there]". I struggled until normal-ish business hours to find a restroom, eventually finding one at the Coop. And a wireless internet connection, courtesy MIT! I took an amusing video to highlight my toilet frustrations, then dorked around online for awhile until stuff started opening. After a couple hours, I grabbed a map and navigated my way on over to 14N to check out the Science Writing graduate program. The lady in the Science Writing department - Shannon Larkin, I believe (and I think she'll forgive me if I'm wrong, as she's aware of how sleep deprived I was when I met her) - was extremely genial and very thorough in describing the program. She didn't seem put off by my tangential train of thought, which might reflect well on her, the department, MIT, or some combination. She was effusive and competent and just nice to talk with. That's so underrated - all of it! As a result of my talk with her, I'm pondering the brutal stabbing of the voice in my head that says, "But I'm tired of school!" and possibly an application to the program. I had lunch at a nifty little (Greek?) place up near Central square, Brookline Lunch. They have an excellent idea for what should be in an omelette, which is to say, everything. Then I hopped back on the T (thanks to my handy week pass) and dashed up to Harvard. Harvard left me completely cold. Everything that felt like home at MIT felt like an overstuffed and still uncomfortable chair at Harvard. Which is not to say that it's a horrible school, or ugly, or even unpleasant - I'm sure people get a fantastic education there, the campus is pretty, and so on. I suppose it was just that: Harvard seemed so conventionally pretty, so uniform, that I was struck by the overwhelming sameness of everything I saw. I like surprises and disconcerting nooks and pockets of space for my many moods, and MIT seemed to play well to that (even if my predominate mood during my visit was tired). So pretty well immediately after arriving at Harvard, I took to the streets and the T tunnels on my tired feet and went back to MIT. I found a couch up in the Writing department, figured out what was up with Kara, and promptly attempted troubled naps. It should probably be noted that I packed light, carry-on only style, to avoid carting around five-piece Samsonite hell during all of this. I had my purse and my laptop backpack, which contained reading material, toiletries (all of the dry variety), clothing, and the laptop. It was really all I needed. So the wandering was not loaded down, but the sleep was hampered by my rampant paranoia; though I was tucked away in a very quiet corner, I was committing some sort of cardinal sin by Traveling With Many Valuable Possessions. Sleeping curled around a backpack is fitful. A few hours and some obnoxious traffic hassles later (5pm-ish, at this point), Kara rolled along my way, and we headed to her place. Recollections get fuzzy, here, but I believe there was showering and Red Bones for dinner, then we struck out on an ill-advised and ultimately failed attempt to find a drag show. Sometime around 11:00pm, I decided that the feet just could not take it anymore, and after nearly 36 hours of nearly-awake, I had to call it quits. Back to the T station, back to her place, and we retired to el bed-o. Wednesday (which, if you're keeping track, was both my second and third day there, sort of), we woke up late, had Indian food that apparently didn't agree with me (but tasted good!), then set off to LUSH for requisite stocking-up-on-bath-foo. We grabbed some henna for our hair while we were there, bought a couple books off a street seller, then pondered going on a duck tour. Given a combination of weather, cost, and lateness, we opted to check out The Garment District instead. It was kind of a bust - little to nothing in the XL+ range, so nothin' doing for me - but looking at obnoxious hats was fun; it was determined I should wear pimp hats, and Kara should wear top hats, particularly ones with Hideous Numbers of Sequins. We then walked home, primped briefly, and drove to the wrong Melting Pot for the gift certificate I had for a Fondue Experience. They honored the certificate, and we had the promised Experience, though I believe I will go ingredient shopping and have the same Experience at home for about a quarter of the cost (perhaps with less capital E). Particularly if I am eating with a vegetarian-or-something-like-it again; there wasn't a veggie in the main course that couldn't have been suitably sauce'd up for five bucks. We went home and henna'd Kara's hair - we were going to both do it, but I think I erred on the thick side with the henna and we ran out almost before we were done with hers alone. Alas. But she smelled yummy and herbal for days after, which was more pleasant Experience (at about a fifth the cost of the Fondue sort, and just as gooey). Then there was more sleeping. I was apparently catching a cold, but I wouldn't be certain about that for a day or so. Thursday, we milled about, showered, packed up, and headed north to Portland to pick up Will. There was much rejoicing and hugging, and then driving in the direction of his new place. We were greeted by the arrival of his bed, and also baby kittens nesting just outside his door, because apparently someone shorted him on his damned cute quota, or wanted to see me convulse and revert to the vocabulary of my babyhood. We proceeded to shop for all manner of home stuffs for him, as his moving strategy apparently involved throwing away anything that appeared to have possible uses in a new apartment. (Tongue firmly in cheek.) Friday was a good deal more of that, plus poking at the Chamber of Commerce for Answers About The Community. This all culminated in sangria-making and some hardcore chillaxing at Casa William. Saturday, we went to Scarborough Downs for lunch and pony-watching. My chaotic influence must have been working overtime, as one of the horses broke free and tried to jet out the service entrance. After lunch and a credit card kerfuffle, we picked up a rental car. We took Kara back down to Cambridge so she could prep for further traveling fun, then proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the death spiral that is driving in the Boston Metropolitan Area. Sam, to the rescue! He helped us avoid driving past Harvard for a fifth time, and to find the evil sign for the right turn we'd repeatedly failed to make - the sign which, against all logic, is located on the far left of a large intersection, through a thicket of trees and several lanes of traffic. I liked Boston. And then I drove in Boston. We fell into bed in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Sunday was a day for relaxing in the most complete way possible. Except that part where there was life stuff that needed sorting, still. We took a little evening drive up to a suburb of Portland to check out a car - one that seemed like a killer deal, but wound up not being it because the seller seemed bent on not allowing a prospective buyer to do diligence, obnoxiously. We looked at another car Monday morning, which wound up being the winner instead. And then we bought me a new bag for my return trip, as my laptop backpack was staying with Will, along with the laptop and such, which he bought. The return trip was a minor nightmare. We packed after we bought the new bag, then drove down to Boston in the rental and dropped it off at Logan, as agreed, then found my gate with plenty of time, so I chatted with Will about the laptop a bit - showed him the essential programs, set up a user account and all that. (This is not the nightmare part, of course.) Then it was onto the flight. For whatever reason, it would only let me check in through my first stop, at New York's LaGuardia International Airport. When I landed, therefore, I had no boarding pass for my next flight. I exited the secure area, hopped on a bus to the other terminal (brilliance) since my second flight (to Chicago) was on United itself, rather than a United affiliate (US Airways). When I got there, I couldn't check in at the carry-on only kiosk - it told me it couldn't process the itinerary change. Itinerary change? I thought. What itinerary change? Turns out my New York -> Chicago flight was delayed by a couple hours - enough to kill my Chicago -> Omaha connecting flight. So, rather than getting me to Chicago and then dealing with it, they stuck me at the end of a long line of similarly delayed folks so as to delay me the maximum amount possible. When I got to the counter, I explained my situation. "Can you get me home by 8:30am? I start a new job." "No," the nice lady told me. And I must have looked sufficiently crestfallen, for that got changed to a, "Well... let me see." She wound up putting me on a flight that was scheduled to be leaving an hour and a half earlier, but was actually leaving ten minutes later than the scheduled time for my originally scheduled flight, which made silly forty minute connection at O'Hare a ridiculous thirty minute connection. A ten-minute-late takeoff made it a stone-stupid twenty minute connection. And so when I landed at terminal C at O'Hare, nineteen minutes before the scheduled takeoff of my final flight (gate F12), three terminals away from said flight and at an hour that the shuttle to the other terminal was no longer running, I hoofed it. I shoved off my plane, I ran down moving walkways and stupid halls that stupidly lacked them, up the up-escalators in defiance of gravity, around corners and passengers. I ignored my burning fucking lungs for my fifteen minute sprint-jog-powerwalk-sprint-jog-powerwalk, only to arrive at the gate and find the door closed. "I'm sorry," the lady behind the counter there was saying to a similarly beleaguered couple. "We have to close the doors ten minutes before takeoff." We had seven minutes left. In the only good news from the entire debacle, the flight crew was negotiated with, we were escorted out onto the plane, and I did, in fact, make it home shortly after midnight, Tuesday morning. I hadn't eaten in about twelve hours, and the Boston -> Chicago leg of my trip had introduced me to the joy of sitting adjacent Boys Gone Wild, a screaming child and his non-English-speaking mother, a woman with the plague, a deaf woman who was apparently surly about said impairment and anyone who noticed it, and a chatty businessman brandishing college Spanish skills with bravado. Taco Bueno soothed my hunger and the immediate sleep once I was fed soothed my surliness. And I made it to my internship on time. So there. </Travelogue> Still vaguely sick with this cold. My internship started this week. Next week: UNO classes, eight credits. Teaching at UNO, two credits. The week after: Metro classes, three credits. I'll be busy, but it's actually a decently happy busy. Ciao, kittens. I'm off to bed.

I am teaching eight hours per day. I am sick. My throat hurts. I am a couple days behind in my grading. All I want to do? Is not fix that. I want to climb into bed now. Not in two hours, after my students leave. Now.

You know, this summer so far has been absolutely wonderful. Love, time off for relaxation, creative endeavors - I'm a happy girl. But I would really love it if I could go an entire month without being sick - this body-ripping, congested, sore-throat, sore-everything kind of sick. I didn't sleep for more than 20 contiguous minutes last night, in spite of taking a nice healthy dose of Nyquil. After I drove Sam to work, I came to school, but I couldn't motivate myself to get out of the car. I wound up sleeping in my car for almost an hour, on and off, 80-degree heat making my mouth dry because I can't manage to breathe without it open right now but feeling like a blanket nonetheless. Fuck you, summer colds. Fuck you a lot.

1. A bum wandered into the TA office.
2. I spent 9 hours working on my optics take-home test.
3. Someone mysteriously left a bag of tortillas hanging on my doorknob.
4. My mom was released from the hospital.

Discuss.

My stomach is in knots. I'm nervous in ways I never am. A family member will be going into surgery tomorrow, and though I have no concerns about the medical team being anything other than first-rate, I'm still twitchy in ways I can neither control nor adequately describe. Good thoughts welcome.

Other than neglecting friends less and sleeping a little more than I would normally, today saw none of my to-do items get done. Some big family-related stress derailed the day early on. On the plus side, I did get to see my family today, and I did some things that aren't officially on my list that are nevertheless nice: six rows on the blanket I'm crocheting, the living room tidied, and a scene wrapped up on the MU* I play on. Downside, I now have a headache. I'm going to bed now, after I take some Aleve. Some days don't really ever pick up.

My stress level has dropped immensely this week, from the beginning (oh god two homeworks two tests three labs to teach and one to write up and no I don't have time for proper punctuation in there) to now (...wow. I don't have anything that I have to turn in by tomorrow.) Some of this has been refocussing, and some of it has just been that I was so busy I didn't have time to be stressed. I'm missing classes (two of them, both of which happily have dependable people who are willing to photocopy their notes for me) tomorrow for an appointment that got rescheduled during the morning, which conveniently means that I'll get to sleep in tomorrow. The getting-up-at-five thing will commence on a consistent basis after this weekend, I think, as while I do have homework, I'll also have a relatively large block in which I can sleep unstructured. I think I should be in a place where I'm not dragging ass from the cumulative sleep I've missed through the last month then, which will be good, and put me in a place where I don't feel like waking up at five is preventing me reaching my ultimate goal of being more focused and "on". I'm working on lab writeups this weekend; hopefully I'll be able to turn them all in before spring break, leaving the week-long holiday from school wide open for projects for which I've been trying to find time (photography and writing, mostly) and relaxation. Tomorrow night I'm heading to Liz's place for her birthday party; her hat's done, and I'm started on the fingerless gloves for her. The hat has an ostentatious pom-pon on the top. (N.B. If you're ever trying to make a pom-pon and you think to yourself, "Oh, that's going to be too small," - trust me, it'll be just fine that way.) I love Homespun. It is full of internets. That is all. In other news, my replacement iPod is back. I think the last replacement hated me for giving it the same name as the original, so I'm calling this one Jin instead of Jezebel.

I wasn't feeling well yesterday - a mixed product of lack of sleep (I gave up on my optics homework at 4:30am, then had to get back up at 6:00am to get ready to go to school), stress (over said homework and the looming dates of various tests, the grading that I desperately need to get done in time, the labs for which reports are due just far enough away to make me paranoid about forgetting to do them), malnutrition (in the "I have no time to eat properly so I guess it's ramen and instant oatmeal again all week" way, not the "I live in one of those third world countries my mother held over my head when I didn't want to finish my dinner" way) and probably a bit of actual illness (who knows). I wound up going to school for a couple hours - talked with my classmates about the optics assignment, finished all but half a problem, gave the end result to one of them to hand in, and went home. This strategy netted me four additional hours of sleep, a desperately needed half-hour shower, and something like ten waking hours at home in which I was emphatically not doing homework - which I enforced by not bringing any of it home with me. I paid for it in five missed classes, one of which contained a quiz. That's micro-economics, and since my time at home was higher valued than the potential ten points on the quiz (I have a freaking A+ in that class so far - it's not going to hurt me), I'm calling that opportunity cost, baby. I needed yesterday, anyway. I've been scrambling hard to keep up in my classes, with my teaching, and everything's just so stupidly difficult. I mean, don't get me wrong - I love physics. It's awesome. I get conceptually googly-eyed at least twice a day. You can't buy that. (Tuition notwithstanding.) The pace of seventeen learning-credits and two teaching-credits is just killing me, though. I have labs that need to be graded by 1pm today (this blog post brought to you by the phrasee "mild irresponsibility"). I'll be teaching for four hours today. Tomorrow I'll have six and a half hours of class, followed by time for more grading, followed by another four hours of teaching. Thursday I should perform some lab experiments and study a lot and do homework, as I have an assignment due in math methods on Friday and the first of three exams for optics as well. If I told you this was unusual, I'd be lying. It's been like this for three weeks straight. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday doing optics homework, and I spent Saturday night from 5:00pm to 9:00pm doing my optical diffraction experiment. After this week, I still get no relief - I've got optics homework due Monday, and a math methods test, and I think I might have a caclulus test, too... Anyway, the point is, I'm so, so stressed I don't know what to do with myself. 90% of my time is eaten by stuff that I absolutely have to do. In the remainder, I'm typically so braindead I can't do a lot of the stuff I usually do for relaxation (like text-based online roleplaying). So last night, I ate a little ice cream (coffee ice cream with bananas, strawberries and hot fudge, yo), I talked to Will for a bit (which always elevates my mood by ten billion), and then I grabbed my new yarn (Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick in Pumpkin and Spice) and started in on an earflap hat. Two movies (The Wedding Crashers and Batman Begins) later, it was done, and I went to bed ultimately satisfied with my ability to make adorably cute articles of clothing. It's stripey. It's orange. It's pointy. It has, if you like, three corners - one at the top and two at the bottoms of the earflaps. Crocheting is an awesome physical activity for me, because I can do it when my brain is mush, and the end product restores my faith in myself. I will prevail. To those of you I'm neglecting, I beg your patience. You know who you are. Heart you all. * "Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken" is the beginning of a traditional German folk song. It means "my hat, it has three corners".