It's Seriously Been About 36 Hours Since I Showered Last

I'm tired. Today at work was a little rough. Carrie's having people over for games, but I'm gonna go grab some dinner. I spent too much at Rite Aid this evening out of sheer gratitude at their pharmacy people being so helpful when I had to send a fax to the health-insurance company today or else my health insurance might get canceled and it'd be all my fault augghhhh (that's not what I said to the pharmacy people, but it was still one of the more stressful to-dos on my list), but I may go out and grab dinner anyway. Board games are the kind of thing I have to be in the mood for. Tonight, I'd much rather read and/or sleep.

Sometimes I'm Not Smart Enough to Be Afraid When I Should Be

Day two at work: basically everybody, including both my bosses, independently made a joke out of the fact that I'd been brave enough to come for a second day.

Today was harder, and I did at one point get told by a tenant (over the phone) that I should be more on top of things if this was my job. (This was after I'd tried to explain my lack of knowledge about something by saying I was just filling in, so clearly my covert request for mercy got me nowhere.) But it was okay.

I forgot the book I'd meant to read over lunch and ended up spending most of my time (unsuccessfully) on a single level of Angry Birds - the same level that also took up (without success on it) most of yesterday's lunch hour. Maybe I need a twelve-step program. But I'm so close to beating it (and it's the last level in the episode) that I can hardly resist.

*whew*

Worked a temp job all day today; it appears that it'll extend at least into the near future.

It will probably turn out to be the busiest job I've ever worked. I pretty much have two bosses (not of equal standing in the company - one's the owner, and the other's just my more immediate supervisor, though not by much), and though they're both reasonably nice to me, they're kind of the good cop and bad cop of the company when it comes to how they deal with most people and things. Everyone's really busy, and so am I. It's going to be another round of being tired when I come home, though likely not as badly as with document prep.

Pray that I will quickly acquire sweet organizational skills, especially around 4 PM, when suddenly I have about six or seven things to remember at, like, any given moment.

It's not a bad gig, on the whole: the pay, though not enough for total financial independence, is reasonable for a temp job; I get some occasional downtime moments even in the midst of everything going on; and I even get an hour for lunch. But the best part is that, if it goes long enough, it might at least put me sort of in the running for more types of office jobs, because I should be acquiring more advanced skills.

It's an office that could use more charity all around (towards each other, towards the clients, coming to us from the clients), and probably a little friendship, though there may be some of the latter already. It'll be interesting to see what comes of my time there, and what I can contribute. Right now, I'm aiming for accuracy and courtesy. We'll work from there.

Seven Quick Takes: Tardy Edition

One: Call me an old lady and a believer in placebos if you want (whether you will depends on how you feel about menthol-based topical analgesics), but I now own a tube of IcyHot, and buying it was seriously among the best ideas I've had all week. The pull of the muscles really was surprisingly prolongedly painful (I actually showered at 12:30 in the morning as Friday began, because I just didn't even know what else to do to take a bite out of the agony I was feeling at that hour), but it really is harder to feel the ache when you've covered the pulled area (which is bigger than my initial posting made it sound like) in what smells and feels basically like Wint-O-Green LifeSavers ground to a paste. (Just don't rub your eyes. I've managed not to quite do that yet, but for all I know, it's only a matter of time.) So there's my nonpaid plug for all that menthol-salicylate kind of stuff. (And for Wint-O-Green LifeSavers, which were basically the unofficial sponsor of many a late-bus ride when I was in school.)

Two: Welcome to Not-Really-Winter 2012: twice over the past few days, I've heard a bird call and wondered whether it was for real or was just some-or-other electronic device going off. Definitely real birds, turns out. (In my defense, though, each call - I think, though I can't remember now, that each was from a different species - sounded unusual in some way. It seems unlikely that we're getting new types of birds around, so maybe it's just that usually more types are around at once, so hearing just one at a time is weird.)

Three: So what I'm saying is, the weather this month has been beautiful. As an added bonus, the Ides of March has passed, and so alternate-side street parking is over (well, in Binghamton, anyway - poor Johnson City always has to wait until April). Not that I have to do as much street parking at Carrie's as I did when I lived in the six-person house, but it's still nice not to have to bother about it.

Four: Maybe this is boring now, but it was kind of funny just after it happened: at Weis yesterday, I had to get an employee to fix the plastic-bottle return because it was showing an error (with accompanying high-pitched distress-call beeps) and not letting me use it. As the employee tended to the machine, a lady starting using another return (cans, or glass, or something) next to it. The employee finished and left. Presumably just after, as I tore myself away from admiring the envelopes of vegetable and flower seeds I'd been looking at during the repair, the lady finished and left. As I returned bottles, I saw that the other return, the one the lady had been using, had had the same error and was now beeping. I didn't have the heart to go bring back the employee, who'd just gotten back to her post.

Five: People! You should make your own pudding. I did it last night, armed with nothing but a few ingredients, a pot and a stove, and Carrie's Mennonite cookbook. It took maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and it was so tasty. You mix sugar, milk (all we had in the house was skim, and I didn't want to use all of it, so I also subbed in 1/4 cup of nonfat half-and-half that we had), cornstarch, and cocoa powder (Fair Trade, in our house, so it's nice that you don't need a ton of it) together in a small saucepan over pretty low heat, stirring all the time. Before too terribly long, it thickens (especially if you eventually cheat and turn up the heat and stop stirring for a minute, like I did), at which point you throw in a little vanilla or almond extract or suchlike - I went for almond, and I didn't regret it - and heat and stir it for maybe another thirty seconds. Then you let it cool, which doesn't take long, and Bob's your uncle! Enjoy.

Six: When freshmen in Openhym, more than once Jodi and I found ourselves watching Strong Bad's E-mail very late at night, "giggling helplessly," as I believe Jo describes it, as we sat at our conjoined desks. Apparently the grownup version of this is to be sitting in a dining room at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning, laughing at an OK Go video you've never seen before. Or at least that's what Carrie and I did today:



Seven: I'm up to the respiratory system in the medical-terminology course, but that's still not as far as I'd like to be. So I think I'll go work through that unit. Cheerio!

"myo = muscle"; "alg = pain" -> "myalgia = muscle pain"

As the above may suggest (but probably doesn't, unless I've already told you what I'm up to), I'm teaching myself basic medical terminology via, among other things, this course. This is so that I have a better shot at administrative-assistant jobs at hospitals, given that I need a career change, because attempting to support myself in New England via adjunct teaching would be a terrible and poverty-inducing idea.

Medical terminology, in fact, is kind of fun, especially if you're something of a linguo-geek (though compared to my boyfriend - who majored in French; audited German classes for fun; knows or knew a smattering of Quenya, Sindarin, and Esperanto; and ran circles around me in our college Basic Linguistics class - I don't merit that term). I know a lot of the roots and prefixes and suffixes already, and I've always liked learning about human anatomy and physiology.

I am currently experiencing some temporary myalgia, hence the post title. Every x-number of months, I end up pulling a neck and/or shoulder muscle or three while I sleep or as I wake up, and this morning, shortly before six AM, was just such a time. A particularly bad one, too - one of those multiple pulls where ibuprofen really only does so much, and you go around all day trying to find a bodily position that doesn't hurt (hint: this is not quite possible), which, if you're not working that day, as thankfully I wasn't, means that you're strongly tempted to loll around in bed. I did that several times.

I'll tell you, I think it's been a while since I was up at six AM. I ended up going downstairs, turning on Morning Edition, and making myself some of Carrie's homemade fruit-and-nut oatmeal mix. (She wasn't in the house, so I couldn't ask permission, but I'm sure she'd have given it.) And then, a little past seven, I went back to sleep for a while, pulling muscles again upon one of those stressful half-waking moments when you're trying and trying to focus your eyes, but you can't because you're still locked partway into REM, until suddenly your whole head jerks hard and you're fully awake and know what was dream and what was reality.

So it's been an unusual day. On the other hand, I can now tell you about various maladies of the digestive system, not all of which I knew of when I got up. And I've wallowed in the literary pleasures of C.S. Lewis, Tim Keller, and David G. Myers (yes, the latter does mean I broke out my sophomore-year social-psych textbook to reread something). The writers, whom on a more normal day I may not have gotten to, seem worth a little neck and shoulder pain.

Which I Will Never Be Able to Phrase Well Enough

None of these thoughts are original; they're really just rephrased from other, more articulate people.

So the problem with the idea of "you can believe whatever you want, but don't try to impose it on others" is, of course, that that statement itself is a belief. It's a belief about how the world should work. And no one who says it is like, "But if you don't want to separate your beliefs from your actions, fine, whatever, because I'm not going to impose that view on you." No, they want belief-imposers to stop holding their own view (that people should sometimes operate according to other people's beliefs instead of their own) and adopt theirs (that people's beliefs shouldn't have a bearing on what other people are made to do).

Also, of course, it's not like we take abusive spouses' beliefs about the proper attitude towards marital partners into account when we create legislation against domestic violence, so people don't actually mean that beliefs and actions should always be held separately. (Well, actually, despite not having asked any spousal abusers myself, I wonder whether many people guilty of it are against abuse in theory, but just have some-or-other way to justify, to themselves, their committing it. But I doubt all of them are.) What people mean is that there's something special about religious beliefs that makes them different from other kinds of beliefs. For most people, this boils down to, "Faith is something that can't be proven true or false, and so any decision made as a direct result of faith should be judged by whether we think it's helpful or unhelpful to people's self-fulfillment, rather than whether it's based on truth or falsehood."

And the question of what "proof" is is a whole other argument, so I'm not going to bother with it here. But my point is, people think of faith as something which only some people have. But that's not true: everyone believes something about the universe, and it directly affects which laws they think should and shouldn't be passed. If you believe that there's no God or that He doesn't judge people, then you're probably going to grant a ton of importance to what people want to do with their lives, because they've theoretically only got one life, so the primary object (whether we'd formally phrase it this way or not) is going to be for them to do what makes them happy, at least until it makes someone else unhappy or unsafe in some significant way (defining "significant" is where it gets complicated). And that's going to mean that your idea of what should be done in a situation is sometimes going to be very different from someone else's idea.

I'm in favor of compromise in most cases. But I think we're foolish if we assume that people of faith are the only people with "unprovable" opinions about the way the world works. Everybody has those. If non-religious people get asked about their worldview, they can't, either, prove it in the way that they do mathematics; they can only present their evidence and take their stand. That's what people of faith do as well. And I taught rhetoric, and I know that some kinds of proof are better than others. But secular people should not be so sure that their evidence for their opinions is so much better than religious people's. In my experience, it typically is not. And I'm not just talking about self-unaware secular people who haven't thought about it; I'm talking about people who have a formal argument to make.

Morals determined by democracy are unsatisfying because, at heart, they're really just a handcount. You present your evidence; you hope the handcount goes your way. But if we're determining issues in this city, state, country, and world, then let's not imply that some people should be sent out of the room during the handcount just for doing the same thing that everybody does, but being more up front about the fact that they're doing it.

But hey, I only have three regular readers left, and they all agree with me already as it is. So I'm not going to edit this to death right now; I'm going to do any one of the half-dozen things that I really ought to do instead.

I Was in Syracuse, Hence the Not-Blogging

I saw the St. Patrick's Day parade, in which my dad was one of the many marchers. It was okay, but not as good as Binghamton's, since Binghamton's had more NYC bands and generally more stuff going on. Plus, our parade route's narrower, so it's a closer-knit feel.

Hedging

I have tried to be precise and honest on these cover letters, but there has been one point where I've hedged somewhat: many job descriptions emphasize the importance of strong organizational skills. I've taken to saying things like, "Designing my course curriculum according to departmental standards and keeping gradebooks for each of my course sections taught me the importance of organizational skills."

I am hoping that "taught me the importance of" is not tantamount to saying "gave me." They didn't; they gave me deep regret that I was not more organized, and taught me organization's importance through what a bother and source of guilt it was when I failed (and failed, and failed) to stay on track. Because, I mean, the whole and painfully precise truth is, "I tend to be noticeably more organized with stuff that belongs to other people than I am about stuff that's mine, especially if I'm only minimally accountable to anyone besides myself. Please believe me."

But somehow I don't think that that's going to fly.

Resistance is Futile, and Most Job Applications Probably Are, Too

1) Where can I get a typing certification, as required for application to work as a typist for the Rhode Island state government? Ignore with me, for the moment, the probable unlikelihood of my getting such a job even if I succeed in getting the typing certification (especially since it's not like it's much more unlikely that I'll get that than that I'll get any other ruddy job). I'm really wondering, because they said to send a copy of a typing test, but I can't figure out where I would take one. Broome County doesn't do them unless you're applying to one of their jobs; the Yellow Pages results for "typing certification" are inaccurate. What next? I could check Syracuse, I suppose, but I was kind of hoping it wouldn't come to that. So far searches for places in Cortland and Owego have proven fruitless, too.

2) Not that Mother Jones is the world's most detached and balanced resource when it comes to reports about labor issues, but today at the dentist's office (woo, no cavities!) I read this article (warning: contains the occasional discussion, in passing, of items best kept private; also contains R-rated-movie-style profanity) about what it's like to work in a major packing warehouse for an online shipping company around the holiday season, and it kind of threw me. Maybe I almost wouldn't believe her tales about how bad it was, except that she's worked other places that have been, though bad, not that bad, which lends her some credibility in my eyes because the place I just temped last month is actually not that far from a factory system in the way it approaches office work (and it too puts security measures in place to limit what you can have out in public workspace, and who can come in and go out), so a lot of it actually felt a little familiar, though her experience was ramped up to a degree way beyond mine. But what she says about ever-increasing targets, standards based on maximum possible production, needing ibuprofen, and the phenomenon of working hard all day but having little pay to show for it are true even to the introductory degree to which I experienced them, and I could see how it really could, on a major-retailer scale, get that bad.

In her place, by the way, I know I would have been fired for crying.

3) Despite how the previous two numbers make it sound, this has been a nice week so far, and is shaping up to finish well, too. Happy Pi-Day-and-Birthday-of-Alberts (at least two that I can think of) tomorrow; may you (except where allergies/intolerances forbid) eat something with a crust and tasty filling or toppings. I will be: without even thinking about the Pi Day thing, I set plans in motion for homemade pizza tomorrow night.

With the Stove Temporarily Off, Since My Computer's Upstairs

For part of this afternoon, I worked the temp job that had necessitated the khakis. It went well, and I even got lunch thrown in.

Now I'm making the chicken stock that I never did make last night; I'm also about to do my house chores. And I'm theoretically going to not forget to put my clock forward. Good night!

Short, Because I Haven't Eaten Dinner Yet

I did succeed in finding consignment-shop khakis last night, although they were more expensive than I expected, and don't fit as well as they might. I do have a button-down shirt in a fairly-well-matching color, though, which is a plus. (One minus: it's short-sleeved. Oh, well, the event's inside anyway.)

Now (or at least after dinner) I'm going to do some laundry, so as to get the thrift-store scent out of the khakis. I may or may not also make some chicken stock.

In Which I Need to Buy Some Khaki Pants, Even Though I Don't Like Wearing Khaki Pants

And even though thinking about them makes me sing the chorus to Reliant K's "Sadie Hawkins Dance," either in my head or aloud (or both). Or something close to the chorus, except that it turns out I've been getting a couple of the words wrong.

Anyway, yes: having just gotten rid of my khaki pants recently, because I don't look good in khaki, and so I never wear them, I was informed yesterday that I am required to wear them to my upcoming one-day (and even then, only half a day) temp job. I asked whether the pants needed to be khaki, rather than gray or something, and was told that, in fact, they did.

Also, I need to wear a button-down shirt, which of course leads to the following question: do I own a button-down shirt in a color that goes with khaki-colored pants? I would not be at all surprised if I did not.

Carrie suggested, very sensibly, that I start by looking in consignment shops and the Salvo, since I probably won't wear the khakis a lot once I've gotten them. (Plus, though she didn't point this out, it'd be better not to spend half my upcoming paycheck on the clothes I'll need to wear in order to get it.) So that, after dinner, is what I plan to do.

Seriously, you're going to have to pardon this being one of the world's less interesting blogs. Though this probably doesn't account for all of the problem, by day I've been looking for full-time jobs (or procrastinating, but I've really done much less of that this week than you'd expect), and by night I've done church stuff or read, and I've been off the internet past 9 PM (though I'm still not going to bed early, thanks to, well, not really being serious about wanting to). So I haven't written all the long, nuanced, and/or engaging things (or at least I think they are) that occasionally cross my mind.

But if you would like something like that this evening, I refer you to Conversion Diary's Jennifer Fulwiler, who's much better at that genre than I am, and whose post today includes the sentence, "I have an odd personality type that could be described as 'mostly extremely lazy, with occasional flashes of Type A behavior.'" If that's not worth a giggle, then clearly your sense of humor differs from mine.

Another Entry that was Supposed to be about Something Else

(Tell me, which of those words should have been capitalized? Argh, it always seemed so straightforward when I taught my students.)

I'm in a hurry, but I have the following observations and questions:

1. I've now been rejected from a job in a mere four hours (thank you, Brown).

2. I (given some sharing with my friends...but not nearly enough to justify this) have gone through two boxes of Girl Scout cookies in only three days. That can't be good.

3. When am I going to get my room and car clean enough to be vacuumed, and am I actually going to succeed in vacuuming once those days arrive?

A Sometimes-Not-Very-Tuesday-Feeling Tuesday

It's been a full, rich couple of days - yesterday in particular. One part I can't blog about, because it's got someone else's secrets in it, but suffice it to say that my whole schedule was derailed, but it was altogether worth it.

Tonight we had Ife, Jerry, and the Kennedy boys over - A. is almost eight years old, and R. is five, and they're staying with Ife/Jerry/Tuttle while their parents are at a conference (their sisters are at other people's houses). We fed them a dinner that departed from our usual style - it featured hot dogs, leftover bagged salad, sweet-potato fries out of the Wegmans frozen-food section, and apple slices - but was still pretty tasty. We all talked to and teased R. throughout the meal, and made him laugh; so cute.

Seriously, is it really almost a month since my car was in the shop and I was driving a rental around? It feels like too vivid an experience for that. February went quickly, guys.

Still, I'm looking forward to spring. I just found out: Daylight Savings starts this coming Sunday! Don't forget to change your clocks.

The Previous Entry's Title Proved an Unfortunate Choice in One Sense

Warning: This entry may not be for the squeamish. No bodily fluids in it, but there's still a yuck factor, the level of which will vary based on how you tend to feel about such things as this entry concerns.

So here's what I actually did last night, which admittedly was a little more interesting than the plans I laid out for you:

I ate my orange slices out in the living room while reading Jo's Boys, and the orange was so good that I then got up and got our other big orange and did the same thing over again.

Then I dumped the orange peels in a small saucepan on the stove.

Then, instead of cleaning up the kitchen, I kept reading out in the living room, but ate caramels instead.

Then...I heard a potentially-ominous snap in the kitchen, though quieter than I'd expected. Soon after, to my combined alarm, dismay, and disgust, came a scrabbling noise, and then silence.

I should mention that the reason we had caramels in the house was because we'd used two of them to bait mousetraps. Carrie and I have found that it works better than peanut butter. (I think we partly melt them first.)

We were pretty sure we had another mouse (we get about one a year) because Carrie had found, a couple of days ago, what she thought might be droppings - not the bunch of them that we found last year, but a few, enough to concern her. So she took out a trap and baited it on Wednesday night or so with peanut butter, since at that point we'd had no caramel.

By Thursday night, though the trap was unsprung, the peanut butter was gone. That pretty well settled things, so yesterday, during a quick supplemental shopping trip, I'd bought a bag of caramels. Carrie baited our traps, which are nicer-looking than the classic ones like you see in cartoons. These ones probably qualify as "clam-style," though they're more triangular; the whole thing opens and closes, rather than just having a bar come down. The advantage of our kind is that it conveniently hides (I said this entry might not be for the squeamish) the dead mouse's head from view. (Like, I don't know if the designer meant to do that, but it's certainly one of the benefits.)

So there I was in the house, with Carrie out at InterVarsity. On the one hand, the stuff in the kitchen was all still out - dirty dishes, leftover dinner (though that, thank heavens, was covered over with a pan lid, and it wasn't the kind of lid a mouse was likely to just jog open), those uncovered orange peels. On the other hand, there'd been the scrabbling, and there was a chance that the mouse was still alive in the trap. And, I mean, even its being dead in the trap was still a distasteful prospect.

I was also kind of afraid, because I'd never seen a trapped mouse before (last year Carrie found the trapped one in the morning, while I was still sleeping, and disposed of it before I woke), that the mouse, if it were still alive, would get crazed and start running, and I didn't want to be in the living room if suddenly a trap with feet started careening around.

So I moved into Carrie's office for a bit and listened. No sound of a mouse potentially coming into the living room or anything. Ultimately, I went back into the living room, having gotten my iPod out of my room, and proceeded to play Angry Birds until Carrie came back. I did not go into the kitchen until her return.

Carrie understood that. She hates dead mice, though she's dealt with them before. So, with some feelings of dread, we went into the dining room, which adjoins the kitchen. I turned on the light. There was a chance that I wouldn't be able to see the mouse until I went into the kitchen, because though one of the traps was in plain sight, the other was behind the garbage can (we'd set them near two places we thought the mice could come in). Carrie wanted me to look first into the kitchen, to the visible trap. So, in the light shining into the kitchen from the dining room, I did.

"Yeeaughhh!" I said (or something), drawing back, and I meant it.

Now, I have seen a dead mouse before, because my family used to have an indoor-outdoor cat. In fact, I have pretty much seen my cat start eating a mouse, or at least some small creature, on my front porch. But somehow, don't ask me why, this was worse. I think it was the fact that the mouse was kind of splayed out. (I realized this morning, unfortunately, that the reason the snap of the trap had been quieter than I'd expected was because, unlike the times I've accidentally sprung it with my toe, this time said trap had actually caught and held something.)

After Carrie and I briefly considered the situation, I went upstairs and found my latex gloves, even though I had no intention of actually touching the mouse unless absolutely necessary. I brought Carrie down a pair as well, though she didn't take them. I put mine on and turned on the kitchen light.

I don't remember now how we moved the mousetrap out from by the dishwasher - I may have used a broom handle, or Carrie may have had some other solution. Either way, one of us took the lid off our garbage can, and I gingerly picked up the trap, with mouse attached, and dropped it in ("[The traps are] reusable," Carrie had said, "but [in this case] I'm okay with wasting plastic"), and then threw out the glove just for good measure. Then we washed our hands. Then, because it was a new garbage bag, and we're now going to have a dead mouse in its bottom, I sprinkled some baking soda in there to try to keep it from smelling over time.

I put cinnamon sticks and cloves and water in with the orange peels for potpourri, I turned on the stove to get the water hot and the scent spread around, and Carrie and I, via division of labor and combined efforts, put dinner away, emptied the dishwasher, and cleaned the kitchen.

And that is how I came to belatedly feel a slight sense of rue, when I thought of it this morning, for my choice to quote a cartoon mouse in last night's title.

"Gee, Brain, what're we going to do tonight?"

Perhaps surprisingly, no, I won't be trying to take over the world. Here are my plans instead:

I shall continue digesting our tasty dinner (pasta with sausage and kale).

I'll eat an orange (it's already sliced and ready) and reread a little more of Jo's Boys.

I mean to clean up the kitchen, at least in the sense of getting the dirty dishes washed or in the dishwasher.

Maybe I'll even clean the kitchen in a formal way, since it's one of my house chores for this week.

And I'll probably simmer a few of our ancient cinnamon sticks, plus my orange peel and maybe some cloves, as a little potpourri, basically because we have no intention of putting the cinnamon sticks in anything food-or-drink-oriented, but ought to do something with them (I'll use this site's directions).

If I'm smart, I'll also pay my health-insurance bill, get my Red Cross paperwork together (I have to submit reports as part of one of the programs I'm with), and do some laundry. But I have had a surprisingly busy day already, so we'll see.

Announcement, and Yet More on Food

I meant to write something serious and kind of expository today, but instead I looked for jobs and then cooked a small feast.

About the jobs: I'm planning to move to New England. It's time my boyfriend and I lived in the same state (or at least, as they say, "as near as makes no difference," since parts of Massachusetts are close to where he is in Rhode Island), and since he has a good job and I have not, I'm the one planning to move. It won't be until I have a job on which I can get an apartment and support myself, though, so I'm busy applying for full-time, grownup sorts of positions. This is no easy task when one's education has primarily served only to make her unfit for any other career besides the specialized but rather non-remunerative one she initially chose. (One says that one can do many things with an English major, but the question is, which ones don't require previous experience and/or a degree in a different field?) All the same, it's a fairly big world out there, and I'm not place-bound to one specific county, so I think it'll turn out all right.

Anyway, tonight I had Joe, Andrea, Pisey, and Ife over for dinner (Carrie ate, too), partly because I wanted to make orange chicken, like the stuff we all ate when Joe, Andrea, and Tom came to visit Albert and me late this past July. The recipe probably serves four in its regular form, so rather than scale it down to fit just Carrie and me, I scaled it up to feed six. With the extra time it turned out I had, I also made spiced carrot-orange soup. We ate the chicken over brown rice.

I've run out of time, but we all enjoyed it very much.