edge of the continent

Each year on the day before Thanksgiving, the office staff throws an informal potluck complete with way too much good food and games before closing shop early and heading home for a long weekend. I’m in charge of the music — mix-CDs (tapes!) of classic R&B and funk to get people relaxed and grooving — and I usually prepare lumpia because I really enjoy torturing enticing my office mates with the smell of all that hot, crispy goodness wafting through the halls while I fry it up fresh in the kitchen. Much to their disappointment I decided to bring dessert this year, but little do they know that I’m giving out small bundles of lumpia with cooking instructions for the holidays. Thankfully, none of them read this site so the surprise is safe with… some several billion other people across the internets. Master of Secrets, I am not.

I’ve been salivating over Ina Garten’s recipe for Carrot Cake Cupcakes for several months, so despite the fact that our potluck table is always, always dessert heavy I thought the lunch would be the perfect excuse to bake. Some key learnings I have taken away from last night’s baking craziness:
1. It’s been so long since I’ve baked that I forgot how I lose interest about halfway through the process.
2. I really shouldn’t have picked a recipe that I hadn’t tested before. I needed to have practiced it a few times so that the first dozen I pulled from the oven didn’t have to be the “test” (read: hockey puck-ish) batch.
3. Don’t inhale the nonstick cooking spray. Really. It’s not worth it.
4. Whining about why cream cheese really needs to be “creamed” will elicit little sympathy from others.

The second batch was more than edible — I got lots of good responses to it — but I was too worn out by it all to even take a picture of the final product. Most days, reheating leftovers or assembling a sandwich is as good as it gets so I like to have proof a picture of my more involved cooking/baking efforts to remember them by.

Turner Classic Movies has been showing films with war themes this Veteran’s Day weekend and tonight they went with two animated features: Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (1999) and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Maybe it’s the stress, maybe it’s that I have a terrible habit of crying at the drop of a hat when watching movies, maybe it’s just that these two films were so well written and beautifully done, but I blubbered through both of their endings. Quietly and with great dignity, of course.

I’ve been agonizing dying slowly stressed out a little bit these past few weeks over my work and class schedule; specifically, about how successfully I can manage my courseload this semester while meeting the challenges of my recent promotion. While I had eagerly cut down my office hours from 50+ to 40 each week in order to make it to my evening classes on time, I’m just taking more and more of it home instead: it gets squeezed in between class projects and studying and I’m getting some of it none of it completed as well as I’d like. Family and friends are becoming strangers, personal projects have been relegated to permanent backburner status, and most of the time I’m just trying to figure out how to make it to the end of the day without dropping too many balls in the process. My to-do list at work is titled, “5 Things I Need To Accomplish Today So That I Don’t Get Fired”. For reals.

After an eye-opening discussion with an intern at my last doctor’s appointment and a hard look at my schedule, I decided to withdraw from one of my classes and to take some time off next month to rest and review my priorities for the upcoming year. I haven’t decided what to do, if anything, with work at this point, but reducing my courseload from three classes to two has introduced a little bit of breathing room into my life again… which I have promptly turned around and used for stressing out. But one thing at a time, right?