Right at the moment I’m a little bit tapped out when it comes to writing. I’ve been posting like crazy over on Slashfood and Green Daily this week and working on my thesis to boot (however, the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight). This is one of those nights that, had I not made a commitment to do NaBloPoMo, I’d be skipping out on a post entirely.

However, since I’m here, I might say something of value. And here it is. I’ve been dealing with lots of change lately (although change has been fairly constant in my life over the last few years, predictable and yet totally unnerving all in the same instant). My life is changing drastically in that I’m nearly done with school and I’m figuring out how to be a grown up again. I’m settling into the idea that I will be able to support myself with brain power and hard work. A big part of making that happen for me is literally working on changing my mind in order to bring my thoughts into line with the reality I want to see. I realize that everyone has different levels of tolerance for the whole “manifest your reality” thing, but it’s something I embrace on a very basic level. How can things (good and bad) happen in your life if don’t actually believe that they are possible?

Each day, when I sit down at my computer to work, I try to spend some time noticing my thoughts. At first it’s hard to even pay attention, but it has gotten easier for me. When I start to feel worn down or defeated, I stop and notice what my interior monologue is doing. I shake my head to clear whatever message is running on the screen behind my eyes, take a deep breath and choose a different thought stream. And thus change my mind.

We smoked a turkey in the Orion cooker. We whipped up garlic mashed potatoes and gingery peas and carrots. Now we offer an easy pumpkin cheesecake and an even easier homemade cranberry sauce recipe (I’m a big fan of recipes where you just throw it all together, cook for a little while and then poof! Deliciousness!). These two are no fail, never let you down recipes. And I dare you not to love that pumpkin cheesecake.

And don’t despair, because we’ll be back again soon with a good way to use up some of those turkey day leftovers.

Sitting at my computer, I’m realizing that I don’t actually have enough mental wherewithal to create a single, cohesive post tonight.  Instead, here are two tidbits.

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There is an old man in my building who always used to flirt with me.  He’d see me coming and make a big show of saying something like, “Look at that face!  Such a beauty!”  He’d make eye contact with whomever else was around while patting his chest, as if my presence made his heart race.  Then he’d say, “If only I was thirty years younger.”

It was fairly embarrassing, but I knew he always did it from a place of harmless sincerity, so I played along (blushing and waving him away every time).  In the last six months he has gotten increasingly frail and doesn’t even look at me when he passes me in the lobby.   I never learned his name and so can’t greet him or try to find out how he’s doing from the desk clerk.  Watching this once buoyant person wither and decline is making me sad.

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Last week I had cause to park my car at a parking meter while I attended a meeting.  It was a two-hour meter and the meeting ran about five minutes over two minutes.  I booked it out of there, hoping all the while that the parking ticket gods would smile upon me and spare me a $20 fine.  As I walked up to my car, I saw that a woman from the parking authority was in the process of writing me a ticket.  As I approached I said, “Oh shoot, I guess I didn’t make it out in time.  I only just ran out of money.”

She started respond in a defensive manner, expecting me to start to get angry.  I explained that I accepted the ticket and thanked her for doing her job.  She stopped writing, took a chip of the plastic bag that was looped around her wrist, crunched down on it and stared at me.  As she swallowed she held out the back of her pad and said, “Here honey.  Write your address down and I’ll send you a remediation slip.  We can cancel the ticket if we’re in the middle of writing it and the vehicle owner arrives.”  I sort of blinked unbelievingly at her for a moment, then stammered out a thank you and wrote down the information.  It was a nice interaction and an appreciated ticket reprive.

For my money, there are few things in life better than an assortment of cookies, crackers and fruit clustered around a pot of molten chocolate.   This evening, my dining room table had the good fortune to support such a spread.  It was deliciousness in action.

One area of my life I don’t write about much is my involvement with an organization called the CA House.  CA stands for Christian Association.  These days the word Christian is fraught with right-of-center cultural assumptions.  Those people who consider themselves open-minded, left-leaning Christians are often afraid to “come out” as people of faith for fear that their friends and acquaintances will see them differently if they admit to the fact that they believe in God or Jesus or any other number of things associated with religious practice.

I must admit that I do not consider myself to be a Christian, being that by birthright I am Jewish and by lifelong practice I’m a Unitarian Universalist.  My beliefs don’t line up with any one particular religion (one of the beautiful things about being a UU is the fact that it is encouraged to cobble your belief-system together from a multitude of sources).  However, I associate myself with the CA because they are a voice for liberal, progressive religion at the University of Pennsylvania and I believe in making places like that possible and available.

The organization embodies all the forward thinking, people-centered, radical ideas that I feel the original Christians must have embraced.  They are guided by love and the belief that all people deserve to be treated justly, fairly and with open hearts.

This Sunday, November 18th, the CA is having a fundraiser.  It is silent auction to be held in the Hall of Flags in Houston Hall, on Penn’s campus.  There is an immense list of donated items that will be available for bidding, and chances are you stand to get some pretty excellent deals if you show up.

As most of you know, my younger sister is a folkie singer-songwriter. However, what I don’t mention too often is the fact that she came to her love of music honestly, because our dad is a long-time singer/songwriter/folkie in his own right. He learned to play right around the time he went through puberty, when his older brothers thrust a mediocre acoustic guitar at him and announced they needed someone to play rhythm. More than 40 years later, he’s still at it and this time he’s joining his music up with his hopes for a more peaceful world.

If you happen to be among the lucky people in the world who will be in Portland, OR on December 27th (happily, I get to count myself among that number) you have the opportunity to see both my dad and my sister playing in the very same concert. It is an event being put on by People of Faith for Peace, an organization that my dad has been very involved with over the last few years. Joining them on the bill will be Marilyn Keller, a local Portland jazz singer. It will be a fun way to hear some excellent music and raise money for peace. And how could that be a bad thing?

Last night Scott and I went to Ikea (he needed a new shower curtain and I apparently needed a child-sized set of pots and pans).  While we were on our way there, he turned to me and said, “So, do you know what tomorrow is?”

I thought about it briefly before saying, “My half birthday?”

He laughed at me and said something along the lines of, “Yes!  Because it’s all about you.”  He then said, “No, it’s the one year anniversary of Fork You.”

It was slightly amazing to me, because on one hand it feels like we just started this crazy little project.  On the other, it seems hard to think of a time when we weren’t devoting evenings and weekends to creating wacky food video.

Scott has expressed his thoughts on the subject over at Blankbaby and I concur with so much of what he said.  It’s sort of impressive that we’ve stuck with it with such determination.  Looking back at the first episode, I’m able to see just how far we’ve come in terms of comfort in front of an audience, quality of camera work and concise editing.  Some of those first episodes were really lengthy.  (And I must ask, what was up with my hair a year ago?  Why did no one tell me that it was far too long)?

I feel like time moves more quickly every day.  I remember when I was younger, looking at each day as a vast thing that clicked by in snail-like minutes.  A week felt interminable.  Now the weeks zip by and I struggle to grasp hold to the hours and tuck a few of them away for writing, school work, real work and time with friends before they slip away and are gone.  I am just really grateful that I’ve managed to grab a few of those hours and turn them into projects, like Fork You, that I am proud of.

Part two of our three-part series on how to do a yummy Thanksgiving has landed. In this episode we make creamy garlic mashed potatoes and gingery peas and carrots (this is not actually one of my traditional side dishes, but Scott doesn’t like string beans, so I changed my ways a bit). You can find the recipes for these dishes here. If you happened to miss it, you can find part one (in which we roast a turkey in an Orion cooker) here.

It’s been over a month now since I’ve read a book for pleasure.  That may be the longest I’ve gone since I learned to read when I was five years old.  I have an apartment full of books, but I can’t seem to make the time or carve out the mental space necessary to settle down and let some fiction wash over me.

When I was growing up, I was one of those kids who was never found without a book.  I could read in the car without getting sick and would often stay up way past my bedtime reading and rereading beloved books.

For the longest time, my books were split in half, the ones from the first twenty years of my life living in my parents’ garage in Portland the ones I acquired as an adult hanging out in my apartment here.  When I went home last spring to help clean out my parents’ garage, I went through all my books, brutally cutting down so that I only kept the ones that were truly precious.  I ended up sending nine boxes back to myself in Philly.  Only eight made it though, one got returned to Portland, where it’s waiting for me to resend it when I’m out there for Christmas.

I’m hoping that once I’m done with school and that particular pressure is off my brain that I’ll find time to read again.  I realize though that having chosen this path of freelance writing and editing that I’m always going to be making my brain spend its days working with words and thoughts.  Here’s hoping that come January I’ll be able to find time for books agian.

I love the light in my apartment in the late afternoon.  My windows face north, but there are several buildings in the blocks behind me that are made almost entirely of glass.  They reflect the rays of the sun back in to my apartment, laying down streaky slashes of light onto the back of the couch and half of my dining room table.

No matter how often I rotate my plants, after a week or two at any orientation, they have turned themselves back towards those places where they know the sun will shine.

This reflected light is perfect for naps, because the rays that sneak in are warm without being piercing.  More afternoons that I can count, I’ve found myself on the couch under the window, sleepily reading before drifting away into a short pocket of sleep.  The dreams I have in those moments are always clearer and more poignant than the ones I have during the nighttime hours.