Funniest work compliment I have ever received (sent in an email today):

“Melanie, these are absolutely amazing charts. You are my favorite plotter of all time.”

So I may not have any analytical skills or guidance & control talent, but at least I can plot stuff in Matlab.

Notes on domestic life

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had chapped lips. It was probably a combination of my stupid habit of rubbing my lips together when I’m nervous, which happened all the time at gymnastics practice (not to mention continuously drinking from my water bottle), and playing wind instruments growing up. It seemed that I could never get enough Chapstick on my lips, so I started carrying a tube around in my jeans pocket all the time. The days that I forgot it or lost it to the dryer meant dry, peeling, cracked ugliness, and those were the times that I would say to myself that when I finally grew up and had my own place, I would stock every room with Chapstick so that I was never more than an arm’s reach away from one. I had forgotten that until recently, and the day after I recounted my dream to Josh, he showed up at my place with a three-pack of Chapstick whose contents we have since divided and stashed around my apartment. It’s glorious.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about food. I’ve been thinking to myself that I should really make more of an effort to eat more healthfully and eat a wider variety of foods. Enter my bread machine. It was a gift from my dad several birthdays ago, and I used it a couple times in Houston and once in Boston, but mostly it sat in its cardboard/styrofoam home on top of the cupboards. But several weeks ago, I was inspired to make stuff from scratch, so I pulled it out again and baked a loaf of whole wheat bread. I did this several times, and the loaves always came out fine, but the recipe constantly wavered somewhere between slightly off (fresh) and downright gross (week-old). Over the weekend I finally discovered that it’s because the whole wheat recipe uses molasses instead of sugar. Blech. Molasses doesn’t belong in bread. So I tried the basic white loaf (which uses sugar) and substituted one cup of whole wheat flour for one cup of the white flour. Yum! The only thing I’m going to do differently next time is reduce the salt. The bread machine is officially in business.

Still on my kick, I went to the library today and checked out a Cooking Light cookbook titled 5-Ingredient 15-Minute Cookbook. Perfect for people like me for whom anything more than boiling pasta water is “a lot of work” for dinner. It’s quick (duh), healthy (duh), there’s a picture of every recipe, they suggest side dishes to go with each meal, and they even write out a grocery list for you. Yeah, I know… how lazy can you get… but trust me, I need all the help I can get.

I’ve also discovered a hidden benefit to quasi-living with someone else – there’s more inspiration to cook because you won’t have mountains of leftovers, and – AND – there’s someone else to split the work! I usually “cook” dinner for the two of us, and Josh is awesome on dish duty.

Belated birthday

My 26th birthday was just over a week ago, and it feels very strange to say that I am 26 years old. My actual birthday was very low-key, since work has been so busy lately and Josh and I had just gotten back from our whirlwind wedding weekend extravaganza. It was crazy—a friend’s wedding in Richmond on Friday night, driving back to DC early in the morning to catch a plane to Detroit for my dad’s wedding on Saturday night. And that still feels weird to write too! Anyway, I had to stay late at work on Monday, so Josh and I just went out to dinner at TGIFriday’s that night. I told Josh several weeks ago that I wanted to go to the Melting Pot for my birthday dinner, but I knew we wouldn’t get a chance to go before we left for the weddings, so maybe when he gets back this weekend we’ll be able to do it. We made plans to go there nearly three years ago when we both worked in Houston, but it never worked out, so I’m hoping that the second time’s the charm. :)

Florida

This past weekend Josh and I went to Florida to see his family and to celebrate his nephew’s 4th birthday. We spent Saturday in his hometown and then drove to Orlando on Sunday morning. We spent Sunday at SeaWorld and Monday at Disneyworld. Sunday night when we were all eating dinner, Josh and his dad were talking about the plan for the next day and how long the park was open. They kept talking about how we were going to Magic Kingdom, and finally I had to ask if that was the actual Disneyworld. I am definitely not from Florida...

It turned out that I actually didn’t make it to Magic Kingdom the next day. My eyes finally revolted after the past two nights of 4-5 hours of sleep and then spending all day Saturday walking around in the sun and the wind at SeaWorld. My eyes were getting red, itchy, and dry by the evening, and when I woke up the next morning, they were all red and crusty (lovely, I know). I knew they wouldn’t be able to handle another full day of being outside, so I spent the day in the hotel while everyone else went to the park. It turns out I may not have missed much, since the kids hadn't gotten much sleep the past few nights either, so it sounded like everyone was kind of cranky. Regardless, I really missed being able to spend the day with them and hated wasting a perfect 75-degree vacation day cooped up in the hotel.

I spent a lot of this weekend and the previous weekend thinking about generations of family. Josh’s siblings both have kids, and a handful of my older cousins have kids already, and it’s nice that those kids will be able to spend many years with their grandparents. I’m definitely in no rush to have babies, but in a way I wish I were because then my kids would be able to spend more time with their grandparents and even their great grandparents. I have wonderful memories of how fun my grandparents were when I was younger, and I would hate for my kids to miss out on similar memories if their grandparents are older and less able to play with them.

It’s hard to see my extended family members age, and there were times when I was at home last weekend that I wanted to freeze that exact instant in time and preserve it for my maybe-eventual kids. I suppose time seems more precious now because of my grandmother passing away last spring. I certainly had several years with her, but many of them weren’t her best. I guess I fear that the same thing will happen to my children, but I want them to know my parents as the funny, energetic, loving people that they are now.