Confession

Let me be clear about something. I am a slob. There is no doubt about it. I am a grade-A, genuine, certified, slob. I do not have the "neat" or "clean" drive. When something has been sitting where it doesn't belong for days (or weeks...) I do not feel a compulsion to pick it up and move it. All of my clothes have been sitting in the floor of my bedroom for two weeks and I haven't yet hung them back up, because I just don't care all that much. My bedroom in college was a FEMA-worthy disaster area, with dirty clothes all over the place because I was too lazy to take my clean clothes out of my laundry bag and actually have a place for the dirty ones. My college roommate didn't seem to mind (Bless her.) as long as she had a clear path through my room into the bathroom (it was a weird arrangement, see floorplan below).


Each two-room suite had an entrance from the stairway. Originally designed as a sitting area and a shared bedroom, one room has a fireplace and access to the main door, while the second has both closets and access to the bathroom. Now most students have two separate bedrooms, so the outside roommate walks through the inside room to use the bathroom/closet, and the inside roommate walks through the outside room to enter/exit. It seems like it wouldn't work, but it does. You're sharing a living space, without sharing a room.

Anyway, my college roommate didn't seem to mind, and when I had my Roommate from Hell at UMD, I made it clear that I always kept common areas clean, but kept my room a mess, and she said that was OK. (Turns out, she didn't care too much about cleanliness in the common areas as she left her T-shirt in the floor of the living room for literally three months, but my lack of need to clean allowed it to stay there until I finally picked it up, folded it, and put it on the arm of the couch, where I'm pretty sure it remained until I moved out.)

But I would like to be a little bit cleaner. It was awkward in college when a guy made it clear that he might like to see me socially for an evening, as it were, and I couldn't invite him over because my room put most fraternity houses to shame. Not that I was ever going to invite anyone back to my room anyway because I'm just not really that kind of girl, but the opportunity wasn't there even if I had been.

With my grandfather moving in with us, I think it's time for me to consolidate some of the stuff I've accumulated over the years and really try to live my life in a cleaner, more organized way. Maybe if things aren't so overwhelming, I'll eat better, exercise more, and be more focused. Probably not, because cleaning my room isn't likely to be a life-altering experience, but a girl can dream, right?

I think I'm going to start today with my office. For two weeks, I've been trying to clean my office in between students wandering in to see me (I really need office hours) and answering every question about university policy, grading, registration, etc., that anyone can think to ask me, plus meetings and other necessary functions of my job. So, I haven't been all that successful. To be honest, there is still stuff in this office from when I moved into it that I've never gone through or that I didn't even know was there until I recently discovered it. So maybe today, since I have to be at work anyway, in addition to doing a little bit of reading for marketing, which I'm behind in already, I will try to get some serious cleaning done and reclaim my office, before going home and trying to do the same thing with my bedroom, my stuff in the basement, my closet, and my storage unit. I'm pretty ambitious, but it sucks that I'm also pretty lazy. We'll see what can be done.

Victory over losers

So, today Jade and I had to go return a lost ID card to the ID office, where my horrible ex works. I generally avoid the office like the plague, but I've since started feeling much better about myself and the bad decisions I made (I still wish I hadn't made them, but I've stopped beating myself up for it) and I decided it was time to go do this. I have no reason to be afraid of going there or of giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he somehow has the upper hand. He doesn't. So, I went there. He hid his face like the coward that he was and forced someone else to help us and then he hid in his computer until I left. And you know what? I felt fine. Great, really. I mean, I used to see him and just start sobbing, and I literally have not felt bad about seeing him for even a second today. Which is pretty awesome. It looks like it took me two years to get over him, but now here I stand and I'm feeling pretty good. He's a loser, I'm not and he and his "fiancee" will be very happy together (until they divorce because he won't stop sleeping with other people, which he won't).

In other news, fall has... fallen. (Ok, so is there some sort of "spring has sprung" equivalent for fall that doesn't suck?) It was a chilly 60 degrees when I left work last night and damp. It got down into the upper-40s last night and it should be there again tonight. I'm absolutely a warm-weather person, but I love the season when it's still warm (70-80 degrees) but there's a crispness in the air and you can wear a light sweater/cardigan. I'm feeling very autumnal. I have a sudden urge to go out to a field and pick a pumpkin, sit on a hay bale, and wear a plaid shirt. I'm not sure why "autumnal" to me means Farmer Jane, but to each their own. I also am interested in sitting around in cable knit sweaters in front of a fire, drinking a hot toddy, and doing something else equally appropriate. I imagine I will be clutching my mug with both hands and have my elbows resting gently on the arm of the couch, with my feet curled up under me in large woolen socks. (Ok, it was like 75 degrees today, so maybe we're not quite there yet, but come December, this is what I want to be doing.) Also, I don't know what a hot toddy tastes like, but I've decided I want one. Cold Weather Project #1: Use Jack Daniels from Nashville trip to make hot toddy.

As it gets colder, my office will inevitably turn into the Arctic wasteland that it devolves into during the winter months. I have an adorable little space heater purchased on the company dime, but last year they told us we couldn't have them because they "fixed the heat." I'm not sure where exactly they did that, but it wasn't at Ice Station Zebra, as I have taken to calling my office.

Anyway, I will likely continue to use my illegal space heater, but in an effort to be somewhat more environmentally conscious (and help the university save a few bucks that they'll pay to a needy employee... what? That won't happen? Oh.) I think that I will get myself an office Snuggie. I already have a regular Snuggie. It is beautiful and leopard print and it is, after all, the blanket with sleeves, so there's nothing that could ever be wrong with it. But my friend Olivia has her office Snuggie and I think it's an awesome idea. Her's is UMD (vomit) so I think I might get a UVA one. I mean, how awesome would it be to look like this in my office:

Answer: SO awesome.

Though I'm not entirely sure how I'll afford to buy my Snuggie (or my new shoes, or anything ever) because we had a Fidelity at-work education presentation today and I decided to up my retirement contributions. I'll now be putting 10% into my 403(b), which I was already doing, and an additional 5% into a Roth IRA. (God, is this the most boring thing I could ever talk about? Possibly.) So I guess we'll see how I make-do with less money. I don't have a lot of it now, but I think I'd rather have a lot of it later. Speaking of which, I finally am getting a real paycheck again because they will no longer be taxing me on my tuition and taking it out of my measly paycheck. Yay for money! Now I can pay down my CC bill that built up while they were taxing me like crazy. Oh wait, now my money is gone. *sigh* 

Spicy Oven-fried Chicken

I really don't feel good today. In fact, I've felt kind of sick for three days. Luckily, it's just particularly rough PMS so it should be gone in a couple days, but I've had a bizarre relationship with food for the last few days (this must be what being pregnant feels like).

Normally, I don't have any "female issues." No cramping, bloating, fatigue, or whatever else they list in the Midol commercial. But I have not been well this week, and have been having a lot of trouble deciding what to eat. On Friday night, my mom suggested Hollis sandwiches, which are one of my favorite things ever, modeled after the sandwich served at the Pav at UVA by the one-and-only Miss Hollis. But when she suggested it, I felt nauseous. So then, she suggested Chinese and that sounded so much better. Sweet, fried, spicy. Perfect. Yesterday, I at the leftover Chinese food, so today I was left trying to figure out what to eat now that it was gone.

I settled on a Weight Watchers recipe that I got when I joined. It's called "spicy over-fried chicken" and my mom made it once, but it was kind of... bland. So, I decided to add some more Tabasco and see if it was any better. Here's the recipe:

If you're having trouble reading that, you should be able to enlarge it to full size. I'm not sure where you could find this on the site or if it's exclusive to joining. I hope WW doesn't sue me for putting it on my page, though. It's just so good!

And it is good. The almonds in the breading really make it crunchy, which helps deceive you into thinking it's deep-fried. I ground a few out of the mixed nuts using a microplane. I used fat-free half-and-half instead of low-fat buttermilk, primarily because I had the former without going to the store. I also used chicken breast, because, again, it was already in the freezer.

The resulting chicken, right from the oven, and cooked to an internal temperature of 170 degrees. It made the whole house smell great while it was cooking, which is weird, because it was really just baking a chicken breast. The areas with the larger pieces of almond are the ones that got particularly brown and crispy.

Because I added a lot of Tabasco, I figured this would be spicy, so I served it with blue cheese dressing on the side. To lighten the blue cheese dressing a little bit, I used a small amount of regular dressing and added crumbles of reduced-fat blue cheese. Blue cheese (which I'm not spelling bleu cheese bc I don't want to deal with the little red underline for misspelled words) is one of my favorite foods and I would pretty much put it on anything, and this reduced-fat kind, which I found at Giant, is really good.

It turned out it still wasn't all that spicy, so maybe next time I'll add a hotter type of hot sauce or more of it. I don't really like spicy foods, but I do like buffalo-style food, and that's the idea behind this, in my opinion. But it met my criteria for foods I've been craving the last couple days: sweet, fried, spicy. It was a great decision, and I don't feel like I totally destroyed my diet, despite eating Chinese food this week, which is not good for you at all, but tastes so good.

So that was my first recipe entry. I'd like to do more of them, and I'll take more pictures next time. I didn't think to make it a blog post until I was at the end, so next time I'll have more in-progress pictures. I'm also planning some "to-do" list kinds of posts. This is one of them: working through some recipes I want to try through the blog. I also want to document cleaning projects (I'm kind of a slob), make my way through my nail polish collection, and make my way through my shoe collection and wardrobe. If I can't find a use for something, I'll donate it to someone who can.

But for now, I'm going to go back to watching the Nationals and the Phillies and lay on the couch feeling generally crappy, but with a full and content stomach.

From recipe (on screen) to finished product (on plate)