The first date that almost happened

Yesterday, after a delicious, healthy, farm-raised, organic brunch with my friend, I decided to go with her to look at the gym she was joining. This was after she'd asked if I belonged to a gym, and I responded with wild suspicion and paranoia that she had overheard conversations I had with my sister about how I should join a gym. Let me just get this out there: I hate exercise. I don't get a runner's high. I don't like competing with myself on the treadmill. I am not driven by the pure, unadulterated joy of endorphins, and I don't believe everyone can run a marathon. I mean if you're training for a marathon, I believe you can do it, just not that I can or should. This might be because I am not from an intensely athletic family and was not raised to enjoy the spirit of competition... It might be because I'm kind of nerdy, and did better at the brain-based competitions like math contests than I did at the sports-based competitions. I don't know. It might be just that I'm lazy and I don't like being sweaty. Anyway, so I went to this gym with my friend, and it's pretty cheap. And I need a gym, you know, so I can go work out and be healthy and not be lazy. So I toured the gym, which had a lady's workout area for "religious reasons or something," said the salesman. Hmm okay. And a fancy free weight room, with weights up to 125. The five pound ones make my arms quake in terror. The selling point for me was the cinema workout room: movie on the big screen, lots of cardio machines, and it's too dark for me to see the other people running faster and/or looking more coordinated than me. I have often compared my running gait to a wounded water buffalo so the fewer people that can see that the better. So then all of a sudden we're sitting at the tables being presented with price packages; $59.99 with the "all you can tan" option. Perfect! Or $24.99 for the bare bones membership... sounds good to me; not so expensive that I can't convince myself it's okay to skip a day here and there. So I'm all ready to say, great, I'll think about it (i.e., stall another two months) and it happened so fast and it was a deal that was only occurring that day and if I didn't do that it was going to be one million dollars a month and so here, sign here, on the dotted line. I read the fine print of the contract: I am in violation of gym rules if I (a) have body odor or (b) do anabolic steroids. Good to know. So then they try to schedule me for a personal trainer consultation. At this point I'm so far outside of my comfort zone. I haven't gotten to ruminate on the gym membership at all, I just impetuously signed up. And now I have to meet a personal trainer?? I took his card and promised I'd call... in a month, when I worked through my motivational issues and decided the gym would be a good place to meet a man friend (I mean get in really good shape so I can lead a long and healthy life). And so now it's today, and there were four missed calls on my phone from an unknown number. So I answer it, finally, and it's the personal trainer from the gym. He says, "Oh, hi, I'm just giving you a call to see if you want to schedule your initial consultation." I say, "Umm, sure. Let me just check my very important and busy schedule." He says, "I am here tonight. What time do you want to come in?" Stop! Too fast! Slow down buddy! I get so flustered and randomly pick 7 pm. He tells me, ok, make sure you don't eat for an hour before and we'll do your orientation session. Which sounds suspiciously like a trick. I'm not ready to work out. Don't these people understand joining their crazy gym was a big step?? I 100% bailed out on my personal training session tonight. But I at least called to cancel, and told him I got stuck at work which was a big fat lie. But I totally promise I will consider going to the gym tomorrow. Maybe.

Too bad Siri can't paint

Do I blog about the my new iPhone, with which I am obsessed or my recent home improvement projects, which have left me exhausted? Perhaps a bit of both. First, Siri is all she was promised to be. It fascinates me that people hate on Apple so much, and were so overwrought there was no major design change with this new phone. Our expectations as a society are totally outrageous - first world problems, says the girl who had her loving brother pre-order the phone at 3 in the morning last Friday so I could get the phone with a minimum of standing around in the Apple store, and bought a Kate Spate case for it to boot. I've really been talking it up to people, which I think is probably making me sound like a huge dork. An example: I asked Siri to "wake me up at 8.30 tomorrow" and she set the alarm for 8.30. I said "thank you," and she said, "your wish is my command." Indeed it is. Just please don't come alive in the middle of the night and terminate me.

On the home improvement front, I spent the last two weekends doing some painting. My bedroom put me over the edge. On or about the 415th square foot of wall I sat down on the floor and internally began to sob. About 200 square feet earlier, I'd broken the roller and had to tape it back together again, which caused me to have an awkward arm motion while painting. Some people might have gone to the hardware store to buy another roller, but I was afraid I would just give up if I left. As I was sitting on the floor, considering whether I could live with a 4 foot square area of white in the midst of a yellow (I know! Brave!) wall, I got some sort of superhuman strength and finished it up. Two bathrooms, a living room, and kitchen to go! Or perhaps I'll just leave them white with their color sample squares for some pizazz.

My room before (that purple square on the back wall is a color that didn't make the cut because I don't like to sleep in a tomb)

My room after (look at all that wall space!)
Benjamin Moore Ylang Ylang

Guest after
Benjamin Moore Limesickle

It's fall because...

I made pumpkin chocolate chip bread. That is more predictive than equinoxes and weather as far as I'm concerned. I don't know why fall is so pumpkiny tasting. I was going to type I don't know why pumpkin is so fall-y tasting but my typing produced the first version instead. Oh the wonders of the subconscious. The leaves are changing here in southern Ohio, and the weather has vacillated between freezing cold, quite pleasant, and hotter than is to be expected in October. I'm not complaining... winter is around the corner, which tastes peppermint-y, in case anyone is wondering.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread
3 cups white sugar
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
1 cup vegetable oil
2/3 cup water
4 eggs
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon ground nutmeg
* You could probably also use 2 tbls pumpkin pie spice instead of cinnamon and nutmeg)*
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips (or regular sized but the minis disperse better in the batter).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease three 9x5 inch loaf pans. In a large bowl, combine sugar, pumpkin, oil, water, and eggs. Beat until smooth. Blend in flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, and salt. Fold in chocolate chips and nuts. Fill pans 2/3 full. Bake for about 1 hour, or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Cool on wire racks before removing from pans.

For me, the recipe makes 2 big loaves + 12 mini muffins. You can always throw extra batter (or all the batter) in muffin tins. My one piece of advice: do not overfill loaf pans; they take forever to cook, the outside gets burned and the inside is uncooked. Don't fill more than 2/3 full. Mini muffins took about 18 minutes. The loaves take about an hour.

Never paint with a dry roller, indeed

I went to Ace this morning to get some paint. I'm basically color blind, so I brought in a swatch of fabric and forced the Ace employee to find me a color that matched and/or accented. He picked out Limesickle. I told him the room was 12 x 10 (meaning 2 walls were 10 feet across and 2 were 12 feet across). He told me I needed 2 quarts of paint, which he quickly mixed up for me. Anyone who has painted before or doesn't have a learning disability in spatial relations like me will quickly realize this is not enough paint. So I get halfway through my little adventure, go back to Ace, and discover that I have to buy a gallon of paint (because one more quart wouldn't be enough). As I was painting, I kept thinking of my friend who was forced to helped me paint my bedroom in Miami, who gave wise but repetitive advice: don't paint with a dry roller. Yes yes, I know. But I still ignored it today. Plus I was clearly running out of paint early on so I was trying to make it go really far. After a few sweaty hours of masking and painting I stepped back to admire my handiwork. And... there were big patches of white showing through because I didn't keep the roller wet enough. I hate being wrong.

Ohio wins again

When I was a kid, I used to love watching things bake. I don't know if I actually did this (I assume I did because my memory is freakishly good on a bad day), but I remember sitting in front of the oven watching the things I made bake. My attention span never made it from beginning to end, but I still find something extraordinarily comforting about watching something go from batter to cake, or dough to cookie, or brownie batter to only slightly cooked brownie batter. Plus, it's warm near the oven and it usually smells pretty good. I discovered recently that my oven here in O-H-I-O has a light! I can see into the oven! For the first time since my youthful baking at my parents' house. I'm baking for a bake sale at work. I'm making the Rolo cookies (quelle surprise!) and cupcakes (the same ones my "friend" commented looked like dog poop on a cupcake). Based on his helpful feedback, I went and got some decorative pastry tips today at Sur La Table (my love for that place is big enough for a post of it's own and there wasn't one in PA or FL so score another point for OH) so that I wouldn't be known as the girl that brought dog poop cupcakes to the bake sale. Myself and the kitchen are covered in chocolate frosting due to my manly grip and my generic brand ziplocs that burst at the seams, but all the baked goods have been decorated, individually wrapped, and put to bed. Perhaps I'll take a picture of my next baking project with a new iPhone since I totally don't care that it's a 4S instead of a 5. It's only not a "5" because they used an S instead. Semantics. I will miss the robot voice that says "Droid!" a little bit... I wonder if the iPhone has an app for that.

Just because it's reggae music doesn't mean it's warm outside

Yesterday, I went to the Reggae Run, which is a popular 5K here in Cincinnati. Make no mistake, since moving to Cincinnati, I have not begun running 5Ks. I must maintain some semblance of my old life. You can buy a ticket just to the party, without having to put forth the effort of running uphill through Ault Park. So with your admission to the party, you get access to all the food and drink booths, as well as a freezing cold night of reggae music. All without running the race. I should state though, that we parked really far away and had to walk forever so it was kind of like I did the race. That was what I told myself as I enjoyed fried pickles, avoided goetta, and tasted the other bounties of fair-food that were offered. I was talking to some people who were asking when I moved, where I moved from, etc. and at some point it came up that I had lived in Ohio before. Typically, when people ask where I'm from, I flub around a bit. At this point it is easiest to say Cleveland given my current geographical location. So if you tell someone you're from Cleveland, they ask what part, because most people don't actually live in downtown Cleveland. So then I say Chagrin Falls, but I say it in this way of, oh you've probably never heard of it. The thing is, here, people have heard of it. So here I am in this huge group of people bopping along to reggae music, spilling beer everywhere, and 99% of them are wearing Ohio State sweatshirts, or Cavs hats, or Browns t-shirts and there's a tiny mental shift that occurs where I realize I live in Ohio. Again. And so far, that's not such a bad thing. They have fried pickles here!

Not BW's waffles

I have five or six drafts of posts I've written over the past few weeks that I haven't posted because they haven't made me laugh. That is how I decide what posts to post- they have to make me giggle a little bit, whether because they're actually funny or because they border on absurd. One was about how I house/dogsat for my parents last weekend, had a great dinner with two of my oldest friends (fun because it's them and funny because I spilled margarita mix all over the kitchen floor), almost got my fingers snapped in a mousetrap in the liquor cabinet (funny, but also kind of sad), and got a huge speeding ticket on the way home (so far away from things that make me laugh). I finished my first full week of work, and spent an inordinate amount of time putting tabs on my brand spanking new DSM-IV-TR and arranging books on my bookcases. I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books. You may have heard I live in Cincinnati now and I'm doing a lot of exploring. I went to Findlay Market this morning; it's a lot like West Side Market if you're a NE Ohioer, Reading Terminal Market if you're a Phillyian, etc. etc. I like markets like this because they have a local feel, they're more locally sourced, and it seems like there is one less step between the food and the customer in terms of processing. I wandered by Taste of Belgium, which offered waffles and crepes. They'd been mentioned on Twitter by the coffee shop I like here, Coffee Emporium. I'm totally a secret Twitter stalker- I do not do my fair share of tweeting to balance out the number of tweets I read. There I said it. Anyway, I had coffee in one hand, it was crowded, and I determined I was not going to be able to handle a crepe, but people seemed to be holding the waffles in one hand. Since I'm klutzy and don't balance well, I ordered a waffle. They were made out of dough, not batter! With big chunks of sugar in them. Delicious. I wonder if this is what I was supposed to be getting all these years when Belgian waffles were advertised in hotels at their free continental breakfasts. I demand a refund!