Moving to Wordpress!!

http://theinternationalwomanofmystery.wordpress.com

Wordpress seems like the next step so I'm going to try to do a better job of blogging there during the next 6 weeks and decide if I like it or not. Please check it out!

The Unemployed Life

9AM: Wake up. Start making bread while the bf makes French toast out of yesterday’s bread.

Mid morning: Try to find pet-sittter so I can go a one month mini-trip…

11:30am: Indulge in last piece of leftover birthday ice cream cake.

12pm: Feel very guilty about cake and go for 1 hour run. Listen to 2 Planet Money podcasts and develop small crush on Barney Frank.

1:30pm: Have left-over lunch: cream of broccoli soup and dal

2pm: Spend 30 minutes rounding up recycling, wallet, phone, and keys. Have high hopes of running errands + squeezing in a bike ride in town.

3pm: Begin adventure of driving very hard to drive vehicle 10 miles into town. Doing much better getting going in 1st. Missed 3rd at least 3 times. Oops. Soothing voice of Terry Gross helps me relax as I stumble into gear.

3:45pm: Drop off recycling. Wait until no other cars around before literally diving into magazine/newspaper recycling bin for this weeks new magazines. Practice Re-use as well as recycle.

4:30pm: Pick up backcountry.com order from UPS. Yoga pants have become my new sweatpants. Hope that vehicle does not roll away b/c of slightly sloping parking.

4:45pm: Small detour to get a mocha. Give up hopes of biking due to weather/time constraints. Decide to walk up to mini drive through instead of trying to wrangle aforementioned very hard to drive vehicle through drive through.

4:50pm: Small crisis averted. Coffee woman did not have change for large bill. But fortunately I found a bag of quarters hiding under bike shorts in my very large purse/bag.

5pm: Grocery shopping. Can not bring myself to buy chicken (Thank you Michael Pollan). Go for Wild Salmon and Portobello mushrooms instead.

7pm: Start dinner prep: Salmon with rosemary and capers. Red peppers and Eggplant.

7:03pm: Start to feel like an invalid because I don’t know how to pre-heat grill. Realize that I don’t really enjoy playing with very hot appliances that run on gas/propane. Don’t care how silly that makes me.

7:10pm: Get in trouble for not using enough olive oil. Arguing is futile. Begin to feel the fat cells in my thighs jumping up and down. Ick!

8:30pm: Another kitchen crisis. Somehow misread ingredients for Quinoa Pudding and end up with 1 extra cup of milk + almond extract instead of vanilla extract. Another 10 minutes in the oven seem to soak up the bulk of the extra liquid. Good thing no one knows what consistency quinoa pudding should be.

9pm: Serious internet research regarding alternate streams of income.

10pm: Read my new magazine finds and drink Mind Relaxing Tea (found at your local Asian market). Fall asleep to smell of one gassy dog.

Bread and buttter

In the past 3 or 4 months, I've totally changed the way I think about food and approach cooking/recipes. Until this point in my life, I was fundamentally opposed to bread. Carbs = bad, right? Then I discovered this invention called the bread machine. As I listened to the instructions patiently pretending to be interested I never thought I would get this into making bread. But, it never ceases to amaze me, dump a whole bunch of powdery stuff in, press start, and fresh bread in 3.5 hours.

This summer I've made tons of types of bread: garden herb (with fresh herbs from the garden), banana/strawberry, banana oatmeal, mutligrain, honey whole wheat, sesame seed, lemon poppy seed, coffee-cinnamon, cinnamon-raisin, garlic Parmesan, carrot etc. Mostly we use it for sandwiches. This morning I had french toast with cinnamon-raisin bread.

I guess the whole point of this post is in response to food blogs and how to live cheaply blogs that I've been checking out recently. There was a post the other day about making sandwiches to save money. It was followed up by 80+ comments none of which included making your own bread. What kind of "frugal" life-stylers don't make their own stuff? I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure that my home baked bread would cost around $4 or $5 at stores, yet I'm sure it doesn't cost that much to make. Especially the plain/basic ingredient kinds.

Also, before, I would have never had flour, sugar, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, yeast, or cranberries hanging out in the closet. But now I realize that if you buy in bulk it's not so expensive and the ingredients last for a while. I admit that in the past I dismissed natural food stores as "overly expensive hippy-villes" but now I realize the benefit of buying simple natural ingredients. Also I found out that our local natural food store does a 15% off (the entire store) sale once a month. If the natural food stores in the middle of nowhere can do it, I can only imagine the sweet deals in real cities!

So there all you wannabe cheapskates. I make my own delicious bread and it doesn't really cost that much.

Colorado

I found this in my documents folder. Written Mid June (?):

Today I am forcing myself to take a day off from working out. My stomach is just not quite right and I haven’t been getting enough sleep to properly recover. It is a beautiful day outside (80 degrees and sunny) and so I’m hoping I don’t screw myself by not taking advantage of the beautiful weather. Instead of working out, I thought I’d channel some energy into blogging. I have a few half written posts that I will get up soon but in the meantime, I thought I would write about Colorado….

I never realize just how much stress I sign myself up for. Really, who moves to a new state a million miles away where they don’t know anyone to start studying for possibly the biggest test of her life? All of this 2 weeks after returning to the US after 10 months away. It hasn’t been easy. The cold and rainy period was really icky after I had been promised beautiful summer weather (where it would be warm by 9 or 10am). Right.

On the bright side, I’ve scored some great deals on puffy jackets and other warm weather gear to keep me warm. Driving from Denver to Gunnison, I saw more snow than I’ve ever seen before. And this was in May. Not prime-time snow time for Colorado.

Other things that are different:
-Hills and mountains everywhere. I’m trying to get over my mental block about biking up hills, but it is coming slowly.
-Altitude. From sea level to 8000 feet. Yeah, it takes some getting used to. Coupled with the hills, some days I feel like my lungs are going to explode (or collapse). Other days, I look around and really enjoy the view
-Flowers: The wildflowers are starting to come out. Man, I miss tropical flowers. Poppys are popular here Mostly everyone has the same 2 or 3 kinds of flowers in their yard. They pop out amidst the green grass and bright blue skies. Not quite hibiscus style, but they will do for now
-The River: it flows right behind our backyard. I’ve sat on the back deck thinking that if I tried hard enough I could make it sound like waves, but I never can. The river is fun though. The dog enjoys cooling off in it and I’ve enjoyed rafting down it.

In case you didn’t get the theme, my list involves everything relating to the outdoors- that’s because the outdoors is what people do here. Sometimes it is intimidating when it seems like everyone here is in better (physical) shape than I will ever be able to achieve. However, it is really spectacular to go mountain biking with rockstars (including semi-retired pros) all the time. I love it so much that last week I spent 15 hours playing outside. That 15 hours of work/play (not including driving time, etc.).

I miss the beach. A lot. And I feel sort of guilty for this, but I’m sort of glad I’m not sweating it out in FL right now where it is 110 degrees.

Back in the US

It’s been a little while. I flew back via Australia and Singapore. In Singapore, I spent one last afternoon soaking up the small region known as Little India trying to remember the colors, the sounds, and the smells.

Quickly upon arriving in the US, it was time to get down to business. One 30 hour driving marathon later, I found myself in what I like to refer to as the middle of nowhere. I go through love/hate cycles of living in the middle of nowhere. There are enough outdoor adventures around to keep me going for years. Once I adjusted to life at 8000 feet, I learned to love the mountain biking and running trails. I finally feel like I have an understating of the term “hill.” While I still do not always enjoy the grueling process of climbing them, I have learned to love the feeling of accomplishment at the top.

I spent the better part of 3 months studying for what may or may not have been the biggest exam of my life. After establishing a study for 6-8 hours per day routine, I’ve been sort of lost since I finished the exam at the end of July. I threw myself even more into working out but might have over done it.

Another project I poured myself into was a photo slideshow for the SE Asia trip. Looking at my photos was really interesting since I hadn’t looked at them for a few months. There were some that I had never seen before on a computer monitor. Re-living the trip has made roused a lot of the feelings I had while traveling: the main one being a sense of urgency to take action. The second being that I want to see the rest of the world.

After coming home and talking to a lot of my friends, I was saddened in that it seemed really difficult to relate the intricacies of my trip. A lot of them seemed disinterested and didn’t ask me anything about it. I later realized that they probably didn’t know where to begin.

Speaking of knowing where to begin, my blog for the next few months will hopefully chronicle my journey into figuring out the best way to exert all of this energy build-up I have. I expect it won’t be quite as interesting as a 5 month jaunt around SE Asia, but you never know!

Back to BKK

Bangkok

We caught the overnight train from Chiang Mai to BKK. Overnight trains and buses always seem like a good idea until you actually arrive at your destination at 6AM sleep-deprived and disoriented. Luckily, we sort of knew our way around Bangkok. In the interest of time, we thought it best to straight to the Chatuchak Market. Well, that turned out to be a horrible idea.

First of all, the market has no luggage deposit so we were stuck with our backpacks. They were only 30L so not a huge burden, but still uncomfortable and clunky. After getting some food and iced coffee, I motivated to do some souvenir shopping. I never do souvenir shopping and I quickly remembered why. I totally got ripped off. After 5 months of arguing hard for everything, I totally got ripped off. Second, the market is not so captivating the second time around. All of the vendors and their products just seemed a lot less enchanting .

Finally, after an indirect bus ride back to Khao San Road area, we went back to the place we stayed before. Khao San Road was even less amusing, but I was glad to be able to have some ‘muesli’ and fruit. My partner had a flight at some odd hour like 1am, so I walked him to the bus stop (really cheap airport shuttle) and said goodbye for a few days.

At that moment, I suddenly realized that our adventure was over and I was really sad. As I walked back to the guesthouse, I felt free though. I felt the feeling of anonymity that I love feeling in cities. I walked along and I could have stopped anywhere and told the people thee anything. There’s something about being able to be anyone you want that is really appealing. I asked some strangers to open my beer at a gas station near the guesthouse. They invited me to join them, but I had tim-tams to eat and packing to do.

More Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai:

While there are definitely some over-touristy parts of the city, Chiang Mai turned out to be better than expected. I think it was mostly due to the fact that we had a scooter. We stopped at a different market almost every day on our way back from climbing and sampled everything that appeared strange and new. The people in Northern Thailand seemed a lot nicer. Plus, we knew our numbers now since it was the same as Lao so I’m sure that helped out a lot at markets.

Food: Papaya salad was a maintstay in our diet. We were concerned about getting enough protein (b/c we were expending so much effort climbing) so we frequented the eggs-on a stick woman. I don’t know how it works but somehow the yolk just blends in and so the yolk isn’t like a hardboiled egg but the white is. We also found some chicken on a stick guys. A lot of the food vendors weren’t willing to negotiate which was sort of discouraging, but we ended up scoring some good stuff. I developed an unhealthy addiction to mango sticky rice. It was about 25 baht outside of town and 30-35 at our ‘local’ market. I think it involved butter, condensed milk, salt, sugar, and mango, but there was nothing like it after a hard day of climbing. That and our ridiculously cheap beer substitute- yum!

Chocolate: So, I had this challenge the whole time I was in Asia. I’m a chocolate eater. I enjoy cheap sketchy chocolate. But, I didn’t want to buy US candy bars while in Asia. Especially for more money than I would spend in the US. We went to this one chocolate/coffee boutique place in chiang mai and it was sort of a waste. I don’t know how many times I have fallen for this (and will fall for it again), but baked goods that aren’t quite sweet enough will never satisfy my chocolate cravings. Tim-tams (even though they are the ‘Asian’ modified kind) were my lifesavers. If you don’t know what tim-tams are, find your nearest Aussie.

Errands: We found a few other markets around northern Chiang Mai that were pretty interesting. It’s hilarious how the ‘geared for tourists’ market are starkly different from the local parts. We found the ‘dried fruit and tea’ section of the market and bargained for dried strawberries, lychee, and bael fruit (for making tea.) We later went upstairs where all the women were calling to us in English and trying to charge us double the price. Unfortunately, the US wouldn’t let the bale fruit in, but it made it all the way across the pacific.

I also took our ‘off day’ in Chiang Mai as an opportunity to get some much needed pages added to my passport. It’s sort of neat that I’ve been to 4 different continents and lots of different countries. Of course I want to see the whole world, but filling up a passport was an accomplishment, in a weird way. It also helps that the Asian countries all give visas that take up 1 page. Why can’t they just have stamps like everyone else ? 