Author Archives: metamegan

Resolutions

New Years Resolution Status:
10 pies – 5 down ( 2 plums, 1 cherry blueberry, 1 straight cherry, and a chocolate pie) 4 to go
10 science experiments – 4 down, 6 to go (no change from last month)
10 blog posts per month – I have a 6 post deficit for February, so now I am 8 posts behind.
10 crafts – 0 crafts this month, 10 to go.

Last month I did a little something different, where I wore a pedometer every day and I tried to get 10,000 steps a day.

As you can maybe see from my blurry picture, I managed 290,443 for the month, so I did make it to my goal! Two things I learned about myself: I barely move on Sundays, and I get a lot more exercise when I work from the office than from home. Also, I do not like to fail at my goals so I definitely started to skimp on strength training in order to get all my steps in. I need a new workout goal for March because, “Oh no! I have to be lounging in a hot tub in a bathing suit for spring break” has so far gotten me nowhere. Possibly because the thought just occurred to me a few seconds ago.

Turns Out My Mom Isn’t Going Deaf After All

I like to talk to my mom on the phone about once a week. We talk about her wonderful grandchildren, books we are reading, movies, current events, world politics, life etc. But for the last few months, all our conversations have gone like this.

MetaMegan:And now I am going to tell you about why you are the best mom ever.

MetaMegansMom: Hello?

MetaMegan: I’m still here. So, what I was saying was

MetaMegansMom: HELLO? MEGAN? HELLOOOOOOOO? Hello? HELLOOOOOO!!!! Hello?

MetaMegan: Ugh. Mom. I can hear you.

MetaMegansMom: HELLLLOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

MetaMegan: Click.

So, now that I am forced to use my phone for work sometimes other people call me besides my mom. (Yep. I only talk to my mom and people from work.) And now I know that the speaker on my phone just stops working halfway through a call. Because now I have conversations where the person says stuff like this, “OK, I can’t hear you anymore so I am just going to tell you what I need to tell you and then hang up.”

I’ve been to the apple store once, the AT&T store once, and today I head back to the apple store. Wish me luck!

Sorry Mom!

I Misunderstood

Jack and I had the following conversation this weekend.

Me: We sure are having a fun day.

Jack: What did we do?

Me: We painted, played play dough…

Jack: And now we are talking…

Me: And we are going to a playground.

Jack: I’m sorry, did you say we went to a playground?

Me: No, I said we were going to a playground, because we are on our way now.

Jack: Oh. I’m sorry, I misunderstood.

Me: (thinking: big word for a 4 year old.)

Jack: You know, misunderstood is pretty hard to say…. with a banana in your mouth.

Substitute Pie

I made a “classic diner style chocolate pie” from the Baked cookbook for Valentine’s Day. It’s definitely filling a void in my life where cake used to be and which pie has been half-assedly attempting to fill. Fruit pie that is. Chocolate pie is a whole different thing. Chocolate pie is good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And it is chocolatey.

I am calling it substitute pie, because it was 12 degrees on the day I made it, and I refused to go to the store for the many ingredients I didn’t have. So instead of Ovaltine I used cocoa powder, instead of milk and dark chocolate, I used semi-sweet, instead of whole milk, I used a combo of heavy whipping cream and 2%, and vanilla paste instead of a vanilla bean.

It is supposed to be frozen for 4 hours before you eat it, but the question is, then what? I made it two days in advance, and on Valentine’s Day I re-read the recipe. How soon before we want to eat it do I take it out of the freezer? The answer is unknown, but it’s definitely longer than “immediately before dessert.” I took the pie out and start to hack away at it for a couple minutes before we decided we needed 20 minutes to do dishes and let the pie warm up. I told the kids we’d just have to wait a day for pie and they were devastated. Twenty minutes later, it wasn’t any easier, but we suffered through some cold and delicious pie.

I cut the first round of pieces too big, and the look on Luke’s face slowly became frightening. He was really trying to finish, because it was really good, and I am sure he didn’t want to let down Team Pie, but he sort of looked like he was going to either cry or throw up. I had to tell him there was no shame in not finishing your pie.

Pink Pancakes

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This morning, I was walking Lucy, and I was fondly remembering the days when my mom would make holiday themed/colored pancakes, so I immediately rushed home to whip up a batch of pink pancakes. (I actually used beet juice to color the pancakes to avoid the artificial coloring. Just kidding, I used food coloring.)

Note to self: Food-coloring-pancakes look much better with white flour. The whole wheat flour just made this turn out really weird. I started off making smiley faced pancakes, and while those were cooking, I got out the cookie cutters because I was making Luke’s lunch and I wanted to cut his sandwich into the shape of a heart. (I know, I am the best.) And then I found the heart shaped pancake cutters! I forgot about those! So in the mean time, I slightly over cooked the smiley face pancakes. I gave the kids the first batch off the stove and they were deemed, “sunburned on one side and really tan on the other side.) There was a lot of laughing. Then I moved on to heart shaped pancakes which turned out slightly better. They were delicious! My goal in every motherly thing I do is to create a memory that my children will look back on fondly, and the sunburned faces might do the trick.

The recipe is from this book, which I love.

Meta metamegan: I disabled comments for a while because all of a sudden I was getting a million spam comments. They are back on now, on new posts only.

End of January

I didn’t make any exercise related resolutions this year and that is because exercise resolutions are boring. Right? Who wants to hear, “blah blah blah, blah blah blah”? Exactly. I guess interest levels may rise, if people were getting hit in the face though, right?

For instance, I take a crazy “intervals” class at the gym, and on Monday, we did a crazy thing and then craziness ensued. (That was my first attempt to explain the class. Now trying a second time.) We were all standing on these exercise disks (to work your core as you try to balance) and we were in a circle, and every other person had a 4 pound medicine ball. You had to throw it to the person on your left, then turn and catch one from the person on your right. If anyone dropped the ball, the whole class had to do 8 push ups. So how did that go? Well, I threw my ball to the person on the left, and then turned to the right. Did I catch it? Yes! After I was hit in the face, I caught it. And I didn’t even fall off my my balance disk. Did I die of embarrassment? Yes! This was in no way my fault, and the instructor and the person who threw a four pound ball into my nose were both horrified. But I just had a strange feeling of, “This does not surprise me at all.” Of course, this is the class where on my first day, I tripped, and tried to catch myself for almost the entire length of the room before I finally landed on the floor.

Hmm, what else? There was a newspaper reporter at one of the classes I took, writing the “workout of the week” article. And in the paper, there was a giant picture of the class. I’m the one that looks like I am just standing there, confusedly.

And speaking of New Years Resolutions, remember my whole “10” thing? Well I decided I would wear my pedometer for the month of February and make sure to get 10,000 steps a day. So today, when the kids were in bed and I was ready to start watching Downton Abby, I saw that I had 2000 steps to go. I almost blew it off and just laid down on the couch, but then I thought, you can’t give up on the very first day! It’s the shortest month, how hard can it be to do something every day in February! Come on! So I got Lucy, and I put on my puffy coat and my hat and mittens, and we went for a walk. During my walk I realized two things. 1.) It’s a leap year, which means I need to take 290,000 steps instead of 280,000. 2.) February doesn’t actually start till tomorrow.

New Years Resolution Status:
10 pies – 1 down (plum) 9 to go
10 science experiments – 4 down, 6 to go
10 blog posts per month – This makes 8, 2 to go. I may have to make up for it next month
10 crafts – 0 crafts this month, 10 to go.

Books 2011

I have finally compiled the list of books that I read in 2011, and they are available in the “Books 2011” section to the right. But just in case I ever delete that section, here they are for posterity:

A Visit   From the Goon Squad
An Object of Beauty
Bossypants
Catching Fire
Cutting   for Stone
Freedom
Harry Potter and the Chamber of   Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Scocorer’s   Stone
If He Hollers Let Him Go
Little House in   the Big Woods
Mockingjay
My Hollywood
Swamplandia
The Bridge of Sighs
The Girl Who Played With Fire
The Golden Compass
The Happiness Project
The House on First Street:My New Orleans Story
The Hunger Games
The Last Picture Show
The Leftovers
The Lightening Thief
The Lost Girl
The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity
The Passage
The Plague of Doves
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

2011 marked an exciting return to YA fiction for me, a genre I have loved for 30 years. I tried to keep up with Luke, but I couldn’t quite cover everything. He’s one Harry Potter ahead of me, at the moment. And he is reading Anastasia Krupnik books at school, and he is always surprised when he says, “Then guess what happens…” and I happen to remember what happened next.

The library has been conspiring against me lately, sending me all my holds at once, so I have been reading furiously. So far, 2012 has already been a great year for books.

If It Looks Like a Duck and Walks Like a Duck…

Now that I work from home, and rarely leave the house, or interact with people in any way, I seem to be sort of out it in regards to the news as well. So last night I enjoyed some NPR on my drive to Golden. And in 25 minutes, I think I heard Mitt Romney say, ” If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.” about 6 times. I thought, somebody has been watching old 90210 reruns! Here is the story on NPR, and I was looking for video, but I couldn’t find it.

But if you want to get the gist of it, just watch this.

This post is dedicated to my sister.

National Pie Day

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave.

Did you know that today was (in)ternational pie day? Seems like it would be on March 14th, but that’s because I am a nerd. Regardless, today was a good day for Team Pie. Luke asked if I was going to join team pie, and I said, “Sure, why not? It’s Pie Day.” Then Jack started sobbing, so I had to renew my allegiance to Team Cake. Either way, I have 10 pies to bake this year, so today was a good day to start.

I was secretly hoping that Luke was going to hear that it was Pie Day at school, then come home to surprise me with the news, only to find a pie cooling on the counter. But I guess it’s also Chinese New Year? Oh well. Oh, and the pie was still in the oven, and I was heading out for a girl’s night out, so I had to tell him how to do the milk and sugar glaze and then I headed out.

Long story short – I made a rustic plum pie, because I had some local plums that our neighbor had shared with us this summer, and there was such a bumper crop that I froze a bunch. But that’s a story for another post. I made two changes to the recipe: I used only 1 T of lemon juice because I was afraid it would be too tart, and I used half brown sugar instead of all white because I ran out of sugar, if you can believe that. AND I didn’t measure the plums.

It’s very delicious.

Hearts

Jack and I stayed home yesterday, while Dave and Luke braved the 45 mile an hour winds at Eldora. Jack had me making a list of activities before I was even out of bed. By about 10:00 am we had everything crossed off and I wanted to just sit for a minute. Jack wanted to glue so I decided to work on my scrapbook while he made a collage. The top two items in the recycling bin were the latest Anthropologie catalog and the Ohio University Alumni magazine.

Jack wanted to know – “If we glue the heart on top of these guys, will they come to life?”

We decided not to risk it, but just placed the hearts there for a second to take the photo.