Shift of Tow

Dear Grass In My Yard,

I got a little slack at the end of last summer, and you ran rampant through my flower beds. I am writing to put you on notice: That’s not going to happen this year, and I’m busy right now pulling all of last year’s remnants out so you don’t get any ideas.

It’ll be easier for both of us if you remember your boundaries.

Sincerely,
Shelly

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Dear Daffodils and Crocuses,

Hi! Welcome! I had no idea you’d be here so early!

Love,
Shelly

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Dear Yellow Jackets,

I’m totally calling an exterminator to deal with you this year. You could, you know, leave before I do that and save us both the pain.

With fear,
Shelly

P. S. Don’t sting me.

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Dear Previous Homeowner,

You were a really great gardener, but I’m afraid that this year I am not going to treat my garden as if I’m just maintaining it for you. I will not think things like “well, I imagine they wanted this area to just be ground cover, so I’ll leave it that way.” I don’t know much about gardening, so I’ll probably kill a bunch of stuff, but better that than letting it be overrun by weeds.

I know, this isn’t about you or your expectations, especially since I never met you. I’m just saying.

Sincerely,
Shelly

P. S. Did you plant mums everywhere, or do they just spread like a disease?

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Dear Readers,

Hello! It’s been a while, huh? We’re putting in a vegetable garden this year, which ought to be a grand adventure. It’s February, and all this week the temperatures are supposed to be in the 60s. I love North Carolina.

Love,
Shelly

I’m having trouble finishing my dissertation. I really hate writing. What are your suggestions for finishing this large project?

If you haven’t already, start by breaking the whole big thing down into bite-sized pieces. You should do that in whatever way seems most logical. If you have several chapters to go, figure out what you need to do to get those chapters done and make a to-do list. It should have things like “write introduction about x” and “finish analysis on y” and “insert figures 1.1 through 2.5” and “make sure margins are [whatever].” If you look through the list and see a way to break something down further, break it down. Put the list on your wall. If you are daunted by the list, take a few tasks each week and put them on a separate list that you’ll keep on your desk. Work from that. Set aside a certain amount of non-negotiable time each day that you’re going to work on those tasks. Then do it.

Here’s the thing: With something like this, your big choice is to get it done, or to not get your PhD. It is kind of easy to sit in limbo between those two choices—sometimes without even realizing that’s what you’re doing—for years and years. It is also, forgive me, lame. I am allowed to say that because I have been similarly lame about lesser projects more times than you can probably fathom, being someone who is about to get a PhD. This kind of procrastination is you putting off living your life.

I am sorry that you hate writing, and that to do this awesome thing you have to do something you hate. I am completely sympathetic, because I have trouble getting shit done all the time, and every time I’m having trouble I can give you a laundry list of reasons why. But in the end the only choices here are: Get it done, or don’t get your degree. If you are set on getting your PhD—and I assume that you are—you just have to do it. Sulk, listen to the Cure, drink yourself to sleep, cry while you’re writing, whatever — just sit down and work at it, one bit at a time, until it’s finished.

We have such a mosquito problem out back. I am tempted to not weed again until it’s cool out there and the plants are dying and the mosquitoes have gone to wherever they go in the winter (mosquito heaven?). Today I went out and took a few pictures, then spent my time picking up debris from the wee little tropical storm that came through, then sweeping off the patio, deck, and carport. I did this instead of weeding because when I got out there I was instantly attacked by several mosquitoes, and spent the rest of the time out there doing the “don’t bite me” dance. I could probably help this by mowing, but it’s super-cloudy and about to rain, and our mower plugs into the wall. Ah, well.

I thought this was a weed, but it’s suddenly blooming. Maybe it is a weed, but now I don’t want to yank it out:

The flowers are papery and have little speckles on them.

There are three of these growing along the shady side of our house, and I don’t know what they are:

These little guys were choked off by the coreopsis and weeds; I bet if they hadn’t been, they would’ve been really gorgeous. Next year!

Someday I will know the names of all of these things. In the meantime, if you know, tell me.

Melissa has to work all weekend, so tonight needed to be a good, relaxing night. We have season two of Dr. Who on DVD, and I decided to make tacos.

I made corn tortillas, green salsa, tomato salsa, and cooked the chicken. I was just going to do it up with onions and cilantro, but we got our farm share early (tropical storm coming tomorrow morning, which is usually farm share time), and it contained a big pile of tomatilloes and a bunch of tomatoes. I could not resist. For the green salsa I used this recipe, which calls for roasting the tomatilloes. For the chicken, I just dumped a bunch of cumin, paprika, oregano, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and a jalapeño in with the chicken and kind of braised it in the oven. Corn tortillas aren’t that hard, if you have a tortilla press and some masa. Well, unless you insist that they are round. I made one round tortilla tonight, and I was so excited that I brought it into the office to show Melissa. The rest were tasty but ugly. The whole meal was fantastic.

Oh, and also? We have a toaster now. I threw our old one away when we moved and have been using the oven to toast bread in the morning. I forgot how much easier it is to use a toaster, or I would’ve bought one a lot sooner. I have so much love for this toaster right now that I am going to show you a picture.

My cat, Engels, has his heart set on attending Yale. I think he’d be wiser to attend a local state school based on finances. How can I convince him to be realistic in his education planning?

I’ve decided to let our cat, Kepler, answer this one. I feel that with a name like hers, she will have more understanding and sympathy than I ever could. She has chosen to write a letter to Engels in order to help, and asks that you pass it along to him if you please.

dear engels,

hello. it is hard to bear the burden of a super-intelligent human’s name, is it not? it is especially hard if you are, yourself, super-intelligent. i am sorry that your humans do not recognize your intelligence sufficiently enough that they want to spend more on your education.

however, here is my advice to you: do not go to college. they have nothing to teach you. we cats are born more intelligent than any human, which is why we live in their houses and they feed us and clean up our shit and puke while they also have to go to work and earn money. if you go to college someone might expect you to get a job, and if you get a job, you may ruin life for all cats.

i beg of you not to do that. i like my life and my catnip carpet and would not like working even if i was the director of the factory where they make kitty treats or the head gardener at catnip acres. though i would not mind visiting either place, if you know where they are and would like to take me.

as my mother likes to say, i hope that helps.

- kepler

It’s September and I’m still finding little surprises in my yard. This is the latest:

I don’t know what it is, but a bumblebee liked it and it has huge, succulent-looking leaves that get bigger toward the bottom.

I hate this stuff:

Sorry for the shadow in the picture, but this one gave a clearer shot of the plant than all the others. I have ripped out many of these little fuckers, because they show up all over my yard where I do not want them. This patch is out front, and I left it for now because it doesn’t seem to be choking anything else out. It probably has a limited number of days left, however. I want to know what it is before I rip it out, though.

Is this lantana or mint? It’s in a shadier part of the yard than the plant I identified as lantana, and we all know how mint spreads. I honestly can’t tell, though.

This morning I went outside to yank things up–that’s all the gardening I seem to be doing whenever I get out there, because there are so many weeds. Want to see what’s going on in our yard?

My favorite thing right now is the little patch of native sunflowers:

Melissa and I saw some lovely lantana growing out in front of Guglhupf (our favorite bakery), all pink and orange and yellow and perfect. I looked at our list of plants a few days later and realized that we were supposed to have lantana growing in the yard. The problem is, the leaves look a lot like mint leaves and too many of our plants have gotten overcrowded by weeds and by other plants spreading (I’m looking at you, coreopsis), so I didn’t know where it was. Today, I know: It is just in front of where we have the pots of vegetables, and it was kind of choked off by the love-in-a-mist remnants that I only yanked out a couple of weeks ago. Now it’s free and blooming.

Our smaller tomato is going through a burst of productivity right now. I’m not sure whether it’s because I got more conscientious about watering it or if it was just time:

The bigger tomato isn’t producing much and never has–I think we needed to be pinching it back all summer, and we did not. The tag said it was a determinate variety, but given the monstrosity of a tomato plant we have out there right now, I do believe the tag lied.

We want to find a financial adviser to help us get everything in order and start aggressively planning for retirement.  How do we go about finding a good one?  I know what questions to ask potential advisers, and I know what to look for and expect, but I can’t even FIND one!  Citysearch and Google are no help; I’ve called two that I found from those resources and no one bothered to call me back.  I’m happy to pay a fee for service, but don’t even know where to look.  Help?

Start by looking into the plans you have available to you at work, if you haven’t already. You don’t necessarily have to use them (though, if they match what you save, absolutely use that plan up to the point where they stop matching, at least), but the various agencies they use to manage their 401(k) or 403(b) or what-have-you retirement plans will have a representative assigned to your workplace. Set up an appointment with one of them, or more than one, and talk with them to see what they have to say about retirement planning.

If that route doesn’t appeal, or if you’re already all set with your workplace’s plan and are looking for something more, look for companies rather than specific advisers. See if, say, Fidelity or Merrill-Lynch has an office in your area, and set up an appointment with one of their representatives. You should shop around.

You should also ask around amongst coworkers and friends and see what kind of financial management they have in place, and you could even try emailing a neighborhood listserv or two to see if there’s anybody independent out there that’s getting used.

You probably know this already, but you should also read and read and read about money management. I recommend the book Your Money or Your Life, to start, and I’m a big fan of Get Rich Slowly when it comes to finance blogs. There are tons of others out there, though. I recommend this for two reasons: You should know what you’re doing with your money, and most financial “advisers” aren’t going to be purely out to help you. They want to make money, and the way they make money is off of the fees you pay when they do anything with your money. It’s important to know when you need a broker and when you don’t.

I hope that helps!

If you’re in a relationship where the spark has gone, there’s no physical intimacy and you annoy the heck out of each other most of the time, but neither of you has the desire to go out and find “someone else” and you still care for each other, what else would trigger a break-up? Just “I can’t be truly happy around you” doesn’t seem a strong enough reason to go through the disentangling of two enmeshed lives. Opinion?

Oh, honey. I’m sorry that it’s like that. “I can’t be truly happy around you” is definitely a powerful enough reason to leave someone in the right context, but there are a lot of other factors, too. I’m not going to say whether you should stay or go because 1) you didn’t tell me much about the relationship and 2) it’s something you have to decide for yourself. I went through something similar a while back, though, and here are some useful things to think about while you’re making your decision:

Are you staying because you’re afraid to be alone? Because you’re afraid that your departure will destroy your partner? If those are your best reasons, it might be time to leave. The first is unhealthy for you, and the second shows a huge lack of respect for the person you’re with. It is condescending and cruddy to your partner to think that they won’t be able to live without you; what you really mean is that you can’t imagine their life without you in it.

Are you staying because you love your partner, but it’s not working? Get therapy. Work on it. Set a deadline after which you must either be okay with staying, or you’re going to leave, because you should only invest so much of your life in trying to make a failing relationship work.

Are you staying because you have children together? Young children should be your first concern, because they’re still so malleable. Are they going to benefit if y’all split? I think that sometimes it’s going to be better for the kids if the parents split, but sometimes it won’t.

Are you staying because you made a vow to stay? If you don’t want to break your promise I can get behind that, but you’ve got to find a way to be happy within the relationship. Or you need to leave and not get married again until you’re sure you can keep a vow to stay. Lord, we get married too lightly in this country, and I say that as someone with a divorce in her past.

How long have you been thinking about leaving? Is this something you think about once a year, or once a month? When you think about it, does it cause a big downward spiral, or are you just irritated? How much of your emotional life is spent worrying about this relationship?

What do you want from a relationship, and how does it differ from what you’re getting? Make lists.

In the end, there is rarely a perfect, crystalline emotion that tells you to end or begin or stay in a relationship, though I do think that there are sometimes pivotal moments that clue you in to your right answer.

Also, if you’re not happy, get therapy for yourself along with any couples therapy you do. It’s easy to blame your relationship or your partner when you’re unhappy, and while sometimes you may have it right, that might only be a small part of your story.

Good luck, and may you find a way to joy no matter which choice you make.

I had never made or even tried pot pie before, but Poor Melissa saw this recipe when we were flipping through the Foster’s Market cookbook and said “oooh,” so I thought I’d try to make it. I was more pleased by the squash I fried to go along with it than I was with the pot pie itself, as you can tell from this picture:

It’s not that the pot pie was bad, really. It’s just that, for one thing, I bought the cheapest vegetable broth I could find and didn’t realize until I was in the middle of cooking that the stuff had high fructose corn syrup in it. That pretty thoroughly grossed me out. It’s broth, why are you going to add stuff to it? Doesn’t that make it cost more to make? What in hell are you hiding, adding extra sweetness? Plus, I was ashamed of the fact that I bought pastry to put on top of the pot pie rather than making my own biscuits (like the recipe suggested). Third, I think that it really needed more gravy, in the end. I wonder if the cheap pastry I bought sucked it all up, or if I cooked it too long since I halved it.

In case you want to give it a try, and do it better than I did, here are the ingredients (mostly as written in the book. The Foster’s Market cookbook recipes usually make enough to feed eight to ten people, though):

• One 4 pound chicken (I used fake chicken; we’re vegetarian at home. You could probably just use any kind of chicken pieces without bones.)
• About a dozen biscuits formed but not baked—the recipe the book calls for is herbed biscuits
• 6 tbsp butter
• 4 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 4 ribs celery, chopped
• 8 oz. button mushrooms (I used crimini—I usually do when a recipe calls for button, because crimini has more flavor)
• ¼ c. all purpose flour
• 5 c. broth (I used veggie with HFCS; I recommend you do differently)
• 2 c. green peas, frozen or fresh
• 1 tbsp fresh or 1 tsp dried sage
• Egg wash (1 egg beaten with 2 tbsp milk)

Like I said, I didn’t use the biscuits, I didn’t use chicken, and I didn’t use egg wash. If you top yours with biscuits, just brush them with the egg wash before you bake it.

Here’s how to make it:

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Melt the butter over medium high and add the carrots, celery, and mushrooms. Cook those until they’re light brown.

Add the flour and cook, stirring frequently, 3 or 4 minutes longer. Slowly add the broth and whisk constantly while bringing it to a boil.

My whisk is problematic and kept getting bits of vegetables stuck in it:

Add the peas and sage, and season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

Add the chicken, or “chicken,” and stir it in.

Transfer the mess into a baking dish (9×13 if you’re following these directions and don’t halve it), then top it with whatever you’re topping it with—uncooked biscuits, pastry, puff pastry, or even phyllo.

Bake it for 25 to 30 minutes, then take it out and eat it.

It was pretty alright. Poor Melissa liked it more than I did, I think—I’m not willing to eat it as leftovers, and she is. Then again, Poor Melissa will eat just about anything set in front of her and is not picky like I am.

The squash was pretty sexy, in any case, and the meal was a nice variation from our quesadilla-stir fry-beans and rice routine. This was the first time I’d breaded and fried a vegetable in my new cast iron frying pan, and it was so easy to get perfect squash. Soon I am going to make fried green tomatoes, oh yes.