TinyTall 2.0

I love about my office
It’s deadline season. I’m working 10 hour days on a regular basis. Some days, I really want nothing more than to leave. So I am reminding myself of why I like it here.

1- Once a week, every week, a baker comes in and makes treats of some form or fasion. Last week it was dark chocolate brownies with cranberries. Two weeks ago it was homemade granola. Denise, the baker makes these AMAZING things, and is soooo nice to talk to. It just adds that much of a smile to the day.

2- Jeans = perfectly acceptable. It’s an office environment, a cube farm really. In most cube farms, slacks are the standard. Around here, it could be anything from shorts and a T-shirt to slacks and a nice top. The four cubes around me today are wearing jeans and a button up shirt; cargo shorts and a company T-shirt; cords and a zip-up workout shirt; and a cute striped skirt with a button-up top. Dressing up doesn’t get weird looks, and dressing down doesn’t either.

2.5 – I can go barefoot. Sure, this should probably be under #2, but from spring to fall I like to wear flip-flop sandals, and take them off when I’m sitting at my desk. At Horror Job right after graduation, even wearing flip-flops got me a talking to. Around here, I can even walk out to the water fountain and back with bare feet and nobody even notices.

3- Sunlight! I lucked out when I moved in- my cube is right below a skylight. I took the diffuser off, and I get real, actual sunlight. Because it’s a cube farm, there’s no window near my office, so the constant sunlight helps keep me (and my many plants) happy.

4- Ping Pong. There’s a ping pong table in the community area / lunchroom / kitchen. When I first started, I hadn’t played ping pong much at all. However, after six months of playing once a day or so, I’m getting decent at it. I can even hold my own against a good portion of the office. It’s a great distraction, and a good way to focus on something other than the computer screen.

5- Eye candy. Sure, I admit it. I’m one of the largest people in this office. Ninety-nine percent of the people here are at least mid-level athletic. There are several “sponsored” athletes and just about everyone is in good-to-great shape. This makes for much good eye candy. I don’t gawk at others, sure, but every once in a while I do enjoy the peripheral view.

BONUS
6- Workout room and showers and a bike room. Those days I do get ambitious and want to work out or ride my bike to work – I can not only do so safely in the office building, but there’s a shower so I don’t have to stink for the rest of the day.

All things considered, this is a darn good company to work for. Even when I get sick of the place, it’s not a bad place to be.

Flickr account: TinyTall

So I finally picked up a camera again. It’s been about a year since I seriously took photos of anything or anyone. I stopped because my camera broke (and is still broken, actually) but this quickly became an excuse. I’m not sure why I stopped – but I’m back, and very proud of some of the stuff that has come from the last two photo shoots.

This is probably one of my favorites from the set that has started me back into this realm of creativity.

Criticism, suggestions, offers to pay me to take a set of you… all are welcome!

Edit

So five minutes after posting this, I opened up my IGoogle page, and here was the horoscope listed for me:

“If you have been unable to realize a long-term dream this year, it may be time to alter your plans. Instead of keeping your goals hidden from others, let them know how your current world is different from your ideal. Even though this may not change things overnight, bringing your unspoken desires out into the open can catalyze the situation in a positive way.”

So I’m saying it. My long-term dream? Dual goals of creating images that help people see beauty in themselves and in the world; and because I like being able to pay rent, be able to make at least a small percentage of my income off that photography.

So I’m not big into picking people up in bars. Every time I’ve pursued someone I met in a bar I didn’t know from another arena of life, it’s ended up badly, and there are plenty of stories I could tell to that end. I’m also not the traditional “gets hit on in bars” look, so I just kind of go with it and have fun without the worry of the “bar scene.”

The other night, NT and I were hanging out at a little neighborhood bar in town, having a few drinks and playing PacMan before going to the midnight show of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A group of 3-4 guys and a couple girls were playing pool – and the pool table was right next to the PacMan table we were sitting at. Some flirting ensued with a particular cutie that was being rather shy, but seemed nice enough. He got dared to sit in my lap to take a particular shot in the pool game- and he did!

He went back to the game, and I ended up chatting with one of his buddies and said buddy’s wife. They told me several times he’s a nice guy but very shy. NT and I were on our way out, and cuteguy wasn’t really paying that much attention. I realize that’s not usually a good sign, but hey, why not. I wrote my number on a sheet of paper, and slipped it under the glass of beer he had just set on the table.

No call yet, but I was rather proud of the smooth move. I think.

One of the other employees at my Day Job and I communicate mostly through IM. Sometimes, this leads to rather interesting exchanges of potential conversational shrapnel, such as:

[15:18] Her: sorry
[15:18] Her: didn’t mean to jump ya
[15:18] Me: uhmmmmmm
[15:18] Me: I sincerely hope you recognize the double meaning of that statement

So NT had been out of town, visiting his old life (AKA homestate) for 10 days or so. Over the last two days of that trip, I was coordinating another Guerrilla project. (See Guerrilla Cupid for the first of this “series”)

At the risk of being the Overenthusiastic Friend, NT is a musician, and an impressive one at that. When he moved to Spokane, though, his keyboard got left in his homestate. He’s been using pianos and keyboards in coffee shops, wine bars, my brother’s house, wherever they can be found. He’s talked about how he loves just sitting down at a piano, playing for hours upon hours. His face always gets an expression on his face when he’s talking about it – a combination of familiarity and calm happiness.

So, while glancing over Craigslist at work on Wednesday during lunch, I see a listing “Free piano. Move it, it’s yours.” Usually, pianos listed like this are barely worth the moving effort – in need of major repairs, broken strings and soundboards, etc. I emailed the person posting it anyway, asking what kind of shape it was in.

Turns out, it was in very good shape, all things considered. The guy was refinishing his floors, and since it had been given to him for free he was giving it away. Steger and Sons, ivory keys, carved legs, needs a bit of tuning but “plays well.” I’m supposed to give him a call as soon as we want to come pick it up – there have been over 200 emails about it and he wasn’t holding it for anyone.

So, by the time 5pm hits, I have a truck, a crew of people roped into helping. All I need is an address. So I call him at 5:15 and leave a message. And again at 6:15. Again at 7. By 9 I hadn’t heard from him, so I called it off for the day. I figured it was gone, and he just didn’t want to tell me – or at least, that’s what logically should have been concluded. But Andrea was in bulldozer mode- so I emailed him the next morning saying I was still interested. His reply email a few hours later told me to call him.

It was still available! Begging, pleading, and bribing later I had the piano-moving crew back together. I was probably incredibly annoying to the guy whose piano it was – I called him to get his address, then to confirm that 7pm was OK. With a few wrong turns, we ended up getting to his house only a few minutes later than planned.

The piano was in better shape than I thought. Turn-of-the century, carved legs, ivory keys, good tone. It used to be a player piano, although the mechanism was at one point removed. The box was a little scratched, dented, and stained with water stains of a hundred years of drinks resting on top of the box, candles providing light to sheets of music, and vases of flowers. One G-sharp, A-flat key had a hammer replaced badly and needs to be fixed. It even came with what appears to be the original bench- a uniquely constructed open box.

It took borrowed dollies, some heavy lifting, and elbow grease, but the piano is now safely resting in my brother’s truck, in our possession.

My original plan was to have it in NT’s house by the time he got back. However, I don’t have a key and couldn’t get a hold of his roommate. So it still needs to be moved into his house – but all things considered, I am very happy and excited and proud of myself. Sure, I may have been a bit bulldozer-ish, but it’s a gift that, I hope, NT likes.

This is Piano Guerrilla, over and out.

When I get home each night, I can smell the BBQ of the house half a block away. They cook on it almost every night, and I admit to being a bit jealous. Don’t get me wrong, I entirely enjoy making my own dinner in my huge-for-the-space kitchen. That siren call of charcoal calls me, though. For more than the burgers and chicken and shishkabobs, though. I miss the S’mores that always finished a good campfire meal. Something about crispy, crumbly graham crackers with a creamy, sticky, oh-so-slightly crunchy marshmallow smeared across the foil of chocolate that has just barely begun to melt from the residual heat of the marshmallow.

It’s the perfect way to celebrate summer. You don’t need to worry about a freezer for ice cream or dealing with the steaming heat of a just-baked cobbler. It’s easy to pack everything you need in a backpack, and it gives you a reason to sit around a campfire. What could be better?

However, my landlord seems to have issues with me trying to build a campfire in my living room. I don’t yet have the requisite weber kettle in my backyard. And no matter how hard I try, my brother doesn’t seem to like the idea of me visiting at 3am on a regular basis just to make s’mores.

So what’s a girl to do? There are solutions! There is the standby of a microwave – 5-15 seconds in the microzapper, and your marshmallow has puffed and begun to melt. No yummy brown crust, but somewhat acceptable. Even better, hold the chosen marshmallow over a gas-fired burner with a fork or shishkabob stick until it’s got the crust and the melty goodness. An electric burner works acceptably well too. If all else fails, get a three-wick candle and be sure to keep the marshmallow out of the wax.

There are options other than your standard s’more, though. Try these variations of fun-

Chocolate graham crackers with white-chocolate bars.
Peanut butter and chocolate graham crackers
Strawberry marshmallows and dark chocolate
Cinnamon graham crackers, coconut marshmallows, and white chocolate
Nutella instead of chocolate

There are millions of other combinations- celebrate summer while it’s here, even if it’s 3am and your only “coals” are the electric burner in your kitchen!

I promise, roux (pronounced “roo”) is not nearly as scary as it sounds. It’s actually a fairly simple mixture that goes a LONG way in making your everyday cooking easier / better.

All that a roux is made of is a fat, a starch, and a liquid. For white sauces like alfredo, this is butter, flour, and milk. It could be sausage grease, flour, and milk in a sausage gravy. It could be oil, cornstarch, and chicken stock in a slightly thickend Almond Chicken sauce. Just about anything that combines these three elements qualifies as a roux.

The benefits of this concoction are that it acts as both a stablizer and a thickener. The fat binds the starch molecules so that when they are exposed to heat and explode (ok, it’s not quite that dramatic, but a fun image) they have enough structure to trap liquid and thicken it rather than becoming lumpy. The higher the ratio of fat and starch to liquid, or the longer it’s heated (to a point) the thicker the liquid gets.

The benefit of this is that other things can be suspended in the “web” that the fat and starch create. Everything from cheese to chicken to spices can also be suspended, creating the creamy sauce we all imagine.

So, imagine my surprise when I pick up a shredded cheese blend from the store yesterday to make some homemade mac and cheese. I look at the back of the package, to see what they suggest, and they give instructions to boil the cheese with pure milk and dump in noodles.

While, at the surface, this appears to be a good idea, it would end up being a greasy, lumpy mess that wouldn’t really taste, look, or feel appetizing. The cheese grease would float to the top of the milk while the solids would sink to the bottom and get slightly gritty. Yuck.

So, don’t be afraid of a little roux. Want to try it yourself? A basic roux to experiment with:

2 Tbsp butter (melt over low heat or in the microwave)
2 Tbsp flour (whisk into the butter with a fork or whisk)
Slowly add 1 cup milk, stirring or whisking. Heat, stirring often, until it begins to thicken.

You usually want to add at least a little salt to roux, since all three ingredients can be a little bland without spice.

There you go! Add a few handfuls of shredded cheese before the milk (it will look like a solid mass, but it will smooth out once you add liquid), some garlic, and a bit of salt and pepper. Pour over noodles, and you’ve got homemade mac and cheese.

Or, use the white sauce with some extra milk, toss in diced-up leftover ham and pototo chunks for a darn good soup.

Or toss in parmesean and feta cheese for a greek sauce to pour over spinach and chicken.

The possibilities run far and wide. Don’t be afraid of roux!

I’m not a big believer in pre-destination. In fact, the entire idea that we have no option in what happens to us and are just playing out a pre-written script is pretty much B.S. We can change what happens in our life, and we can affect things.

However, that’s not to say that chains of events can’t stretch far and wide. The most important things can stem from the smallest catalyst. Looking back over the most stable 6 months of my life in the last long while, I’ve been making a mental list of those moments that sparked something bigger or were in and of themselves important. The moments that I ask myself “what if”

Each one of these is worthy of a novel… or at least an extended series of personal essays. Until those happen, though – in no particular order of chronology or importance -

What If I hadn’t:

Joined swim team?

Insisted on going to audition after audition?

Finally kissed her?

Answered that horribly written email?

Gotten around to suggesting we go out for a drink?

Moved… and moved… and moved… and moved again

Let him kiss me?

Killed that plant?

Gone to Karaoke?

Taken that walk with the camera in my hand?

Offered to brush his hair?

Found the reason?

What If I had:

Told him about my crush three years earlier?

Gone to U of I instead of Carroll?

Taken the other job offer?

Finished it on time?

Stayed on the meds?

Been more responsible?

Been less afraid of what others would say?

Millions of little choices are made every day. Sometimes it’s interesting and slightly scary and in many ways reassuring to look back and see where some of those little decisions ended up.

When I moved to my current apartment in mid-March, I didn’t move any TV with me. My last house had had satellite, TiVo, two big screens, surround sound, the whole setup. I admit I indulged heavily in The Food Network, The History Channel, and even managed to catch House most nights it was on. And lots and lots and lots of Law and Order.

When I moved, though, I left that all behind. For about 3 weeks, movies were shown just on a laptop screen (usually NT’s) – and I didn’t worry too much about finding a TV, though it was in the back of my mind.

Then, I found on Craigslist, a posting for a CRT projector for $50. For those of you who aren’t technophiles, check Wikipedia . A bit of sweet-talking my brother into helping me set it up, and soon an 8-foot screen graced an entire wall of my livingroom/bedroom.

I hooked this up to a DVD player, and eventually intended on piping in cable- or at least an antenna signal. Over the last 3 months, though, I have watched practically no TV and come to realize that this isn’t a bad thing.

I’m not going to extoll the virtues of turning off the TV. I still watch movies pretty regularly, and shows-on-DVD. When I have an extra hour or two, though, I don’t sit in front of the TV and veg out anymore. I’m writing a lot more. I’m taking care of paperwork and phone calls and “adult things” much more quickly. I’m putting more effort into my cooking (which in and of itself is scary for anyone who knows how I usually cook- with utter abandon and joy.) I’m visiting coffee shops and neat little art shows. I’m even riding my bike around town just for the fun of it. When all else fails and the day is warm, I sit on the roof right outside my window and read.

I still end up looking around for something to occupy my mind every once in a while. I miss not knowing what’s going on on the shows I used to watch. Really, though, not having TV hasn’t been a huge loss, and keeps me from becoming an utter couch potato. I don’t think I could give up movies- I still adore having my own private home theater – but it’s that former addiction to Judge Judy I don’t really regret having pulled myself away from.

In the tradition of Modern Acropolis

1- Being able to say “I’ll have my usual”

2- Running through the rain downtown like a madwoman, umbrella only half in hand, giggling like we’re 12

3- Being anywhere near a theater tech booth, especially dripping with sweat after a long, hard, and wonderful performance

4- The burst of barely-controllable energy that comes with a creative mood

5- Hitting the snooze just once more in order to snuggle into the sheets