Boy I was in a crankie mood yesterday.

Mondays are yucky. Spring Mondays after the clocks change are yuckier. Plus, it was beautiful outside and I was stuck indoors doing work, I want to move my desk to the parking lot.

When the work day was over and Michael picked me up I got into a better mood. We did a big grocery shopping run and bought a lot of interesting things, including a bag of 50 clams to steam. Michael discovered recently that our Black & Decker Flavor Scenter Steamer Plus can steam clams! I love this steamer, everyone should have one. It makes rice, veggies, and clams! And it’s only $30, we’ve had ours for over a year now using it at least twice a week.

I recently decided that I really do need to limit my dairy intake. I’ve known my stomach was sensitive to it for years, but I love cheese and milk, so I didn’t fully want to admit it to myself. I figure I can deal with limiting my dairy intake, even if I can’t eliminated it entirely (and I can’t, a life without cheese would be sad). The first step was looking for a milk replacement. Last week we tried some Lactaid, but that stuff sucks. suggested I try 8th Continent Soy Milk, so I picked some up while at the store. I wasn’t expecting it to be good, I’ve tried soy milk in the past, but I was pleasantly surprised! It’s pretty good! Not milk exactly, definitely doesn’t have the thick body of milk, but I can tolerate this.

Because of my lessened dairy intake decision I can’t have bagels and cream cheese in the morning either. So I picked up some bread mixes and bread pans and decided to try some out. This past weekend I also got a bread cookbook so I hope to start making my own as well. We’re also seriously considering getting a bread maker, I’ve heard great things about them.

We didn’t finish grocery shopping until almost 7. Got home and made dinner. I made the Deviled Steaks and Michael got to work on the steamed clams. We were able to settle down for dinner by 8:15, and what a delicious meal it was! The steamer did a great job with those clams.

Yum. I should have taken pictures, but I couldn’t wait to eat those clams.

After dinner I cleaned up and made up one of the bread mixes, cranberry and orange bread. As soon as that was in the oven around 9pm I crashed in front of the TV to watch some MST3K with Michael. I’ll need to play around with the heat of my old oven when making bread, the bottom was darker than I’d like, the middle was perfect, and the top was a bit light. Tastes good though, I had some for breakfast this morning.

Saturday morning took me out to do some shopping. It was fun, I don’t get to go girly shopping often, and Bae is great company.

Probably the most amusing part of the trip was when we were in the mall and a woman at a kiosk offered to give me a demo of the nail product she was selling, Bae said it worked so I gave in and let her show me. Basically it was just buffing your nail to make it shine, but the woman selling it was blabbering all this nonsense about how the silk works with your natural nail minerals to make it shiney, and to top it all off, a lotion was included in the bundle “Have you heard about the Dead Sea?” she asked (had I heard of the Dead Sea, what the hell?) “Well it has a lot of salt and many healing properties.” Oh brother! Still, my nail is shiny, like it has clear nail polish on it, that’s neat. If she wasn’t spouting all that nonsense I might have actually bought the product. I think I’ll look into this, I’ve never been too girly about my nails, but maybe I should start, shiny nails without polish is cool.

Last night I just hung around the house with Michael drinking a few beers. We ordered some hot subs (er… hoagies!) from Moccia’s Train Stop which were very disappointing, we need to learn to just stick to their amazing pizza and sides. But I had a good night anyway.

This morning when I got up I frowned at all the scraps of paper on my desk with recipes on them. I kept meaning to type them up and put them online in some reasonable order, but I haven’t been in the mood. I decided to finally tackle it. I dusted off the Keeping House section of my site that I hadn’t touched since October, moved all the “Journal” entries I had there to the archive and replaced it with all new food stuff: Spinach lasagne recipe and pictures, Tandoori Chicken recipe and pictures, Mushroom-crust Quiche recipe and pictures, and the recipes for Deviled Steaks and Chicken Manicottis. My next step is going to be expanding the cooking section to include all the recipes in plain text and Word Doc format. I also need to get a binder and print out these recipes for myself so I have a nice place to keep them all, my current scraps of paper method is just a mess %)

After finishing up the work on the site, I decided to fire up my Ubuntu box. Gentoo has really been driving me up the walls lately, every single time I update something is broken, and I need to hit the forums to find a fix. This has lead me to two habits when updating:

1. I don’t update often, probably once a month

2. When I update I make sure I have plenty of time to fix things

So, Ubuntu. I don’t like Gnome much, so I thought I’d figure out how hard it was to get xfce4 installed. I was pleasantly surprised:

apt-get install xfce4

Kickass. It works perfectly. I’m using warty stable, so it’s only 4.0, but any xfce4 is better than Gnome.

And now it’s time to stop geeking out, we’re having company soon.

*wanders off to get looking more presentable*

Last night when we got home Michael headed inside to make dinner while I got out my gardening gloves and gardening tools to move my tulips.

The first thing that was obvious is that I should have moved them earlier, the roots had gone down very far, and I fear I might have cut some of them when digging them up. I hope the all survive. But now they’re all properly placed in the garden plots closer to the garage, and the beds they were in are all freed up for veggies/herbs!

The only things I know for sure that I’m planing in those plots are green beans (they are easy to grow and very yummie) and rosemary (we’ve recently discovered a love for this).

I thought about growing green onions again, but we just don’t eat them quick enough. I have a whole bunch of herbs on my shelf, but none that I use a lot. Oregano perhaps.

Last night Michael suggested that I grow Cascade hops. That would be cool, he could create beer from my super-fresh, home-grown hops! I’ll definitely look into that, see if I reasonably could grow enough for a batch of beer. Yum.

I was planning on working in my garden this weekend, but it looks like the weather isn’t going to cooperate, it’s going to rain and there is a flood watch until Sunday.

And now I go back to work, yay it’s Friday!

My family is holding the memorial service and spreading of ashes for my father at the end of next month. I spoke with Michael and we decided it’d be less tiring and cheaper all around if we just fly up and rent a car.

The first thing I did was to check out orbitz.com for the cost of a round trip plane flight from Philadelphia to Manchester, NH. I was surprised to learn that the ticket only cost $83! Apparently they’re trying to promote the Manchester airport. In fact, it’s now cheaper to fly into Manchester than it is to Boston ($133 to fly into Boston). That’s crazy. But good, since my family lives very close to the Manchester airport.

Then my family started telling me their plans. we’d arrive on the evening of Wednesday the 27th, spent the night at my Aunt’s. On Thursday or Friday they’d hold the memorial service, visit the storage facility, sometime I’d visit with family.

Now, both the memorial service and the storage facility are in Maine, which is about a 1.5 hour drive from where we are staying with family. I figure we’ll spend wed-fri with family and then friday we’ll just stay up in Maine.

I spoke with our friend Morgana, who we visited with last time we were in Maine, and worked out that we’d stay at her place Friday and Saturday night, sweet!

I looked into plane flights out of Portland, Maine, since I thought it might be better flying out of there on Sunday morning than driving back to Manchester. I was surprised with the results:

First off, even the cheapest rental car from Enterprise offers unlimited mileage within New England, no need to worry about putting too many miles on the car.

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s crazy expensive to fly out of Portland! The only non-stop flight costs $530, one way. The cheapest flight is $192, and goes from Portland, ME to New York, NY to Raleigh, NC to Philadelphia, and it takes 8 and a half hours! That’s nearly as long as it takes to drive!

So it looks like we’ll be flying in and out of Manchester, renting a car there at the airport. I’ll be making the reservations this weekend.

I’m engaged! *glee* Sorry, I’m still excited.

I came into work this morning and got to show everyone the ring and try to actually get work done instead of sitting around smiling at the ring all day %)

I spent a lot of time yesterday telling people, I guess I know more people than I thought. And of course most of them asked the same questions:

So, when’s the big day?

Not sure yet.

Right now we’re focusing on finding someone to do the ceremony. Since we want a traditional ceremony and neither of us are particularly religious we need to find someone who is flexible, understanding, and who we’re comfortable with to do it. A friend suggested speaking with a Quaker minister because they are flexible in such situations. But we’ll see, pretty much all our other plans depend on this (what sort of place he will preform ceremonies in, if he’s willing to drive a bit to marry us…).

I’m an ordained minister in $strange_church, can I marry you two?

No %P

Am I invited?

Probably not. We’re thinking of having a very small ceremony, quite possibly confined to us, the minister, and two witnesses (best man and maid of honor).

Will you have a reception for everyone who wants to come?

I highly doubt it.

Pictures then?

Absolutely. We’ll have a professional photographer at the wedding. The pictures will be all over my website and we’ll have lots of hard copies for ourselves, family and close friends.

Have you stopped smiling yet?

No! *grinning*

I had the day off today, so I spent a lot of time going through all our vacation pictures and putting together a little site:

Our weekend in Maryland and West Virginia and our engagement!

Of course there is a whole page devoted to just the proposal itself.

This morning Michael took me down the the Jewelers to get the ring resized (it was a little too big) we’re picking it up this evening.

Yay!

Yesterday afternoon at Audra State Park Michael proposed to me! I said yes! We’re now engaged! Barry took pictures of us.

white gold (my favorite!) and an emerald cut diamond

*so excited*

I have a whole write-up of the trip, and tons of pictures, but it’ll take some time for me to get them all together.

3.5 hours until my 4 day weekend.

The morning went by quickly, but this afternoon is shaping up to be very dull.

Tonight Michael’s mother is coming over and I’ll be making some spinach lasagne. She’ll be taking Caligula home with her so he won’t be left alone for the couple days we’re gone. There is also laundry and packing to do this evening, yeesh.

I expect I’ll even be staying up to watch the pilot episode of the Americanized “The Office” (which will probably be horrible, we speak the same language for godssake! Why do we need to translate and ruin good things?).

Tomorrow morning we’ll be getting up early to get ready to leave. We’ll be meeting Barry and Rae around 9 to get on the road to Maryland, planning on eating a late breakfast/early lunch on our way out there. We don’t have solid plans for once we get to Maryland, we’ll have to see how the weather is. Check-in at the B&B is 3pm. We have dinner reservations at a nice restaurant.

I’m so excited! This is going to be such a great weekend %D

I haven’t been in the mood to do computer stuff this week. Instead I did some reading, and finished Who Needs God by Harold Kushner.

Kushner is a Rabbi who has written a few popular books, but I hadn’t heard of him until I saw this in the library and decided to check it out. The book is written for the people who have drifted away from religion and the agnostics and atheists that this Rabbi encounters. He works to create a case for religion in our lives. It definitely made me think, and I think it’s something that just about anyone on the verge of turning away from religion would benefit from.

Kushner is definitely an intelligent, liberal theologist. It made the book interesting for me to read, and I found myself agreeing with much of his assessment of humanity. Keep that in mind as I write this, as it’s always hard to write a review of a book like this because I end up simplifying everything and it comes out sounding like just another God-book. He really did have some very good points.

In this book he focuses on some of the reasons for religion: loneliness, moral confusion, pointlessness of life, need for forgiveness, fear of death. And he explains why God in your life can sort these things out, whether you believe in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam (some other religions are mentioned in passing, but he focused on these three). Most of it was what I’ve heard before, people go to church to be a part of a community, people pray to God for forgiveness because no one else can grant it, people turn to God in times of hardship to give meaning to it all.

To me it still felt like weakness. Kushner mentions this feeling I have, and says it’s not weakness, but wisdom that leads people to God. He also contends that it’s foolish to believe that we can live our life without the help of God, passing up the offer of help when you severely need it. I can understand where he is coming from, but I don’t agree. Although “weakness” might be the wrong word.

I’ve also been reading The Road Less Traveled, which struck me as being freakishly similar. I guess I’d never looked at religion and the study of mental health as being deeply linked. On one side you have God offering a cure-all solution for life’s hardships, and on the other is a modern belief that we can work at perfecting ourselves so we can cope with the “loneliness, moral confusion, pointlessness of life, need for forgiveness, fear of death” ourselves.

So who is right? I think it’s both.

While I have the time and dedication to spend on cultivating my spiritual path and looking inward for answers and spiritual health, not everyone does. Organized religion and God offer an alternative that you can get very passionate about, but the steps are already in place and it’s easier to fit into your normal life to fit your needs.

There is nothing wrong with that. I completely respect that people choose to spend their time on other things, they still need to satisfy these spiritual needs somehow.

It’s just not for me.

Like many intelligent Christians I have spoken with, Kushner focuses on things that won’t change my mind. While I can accept that some of the stories in the Bible are just stories used for teaching, I don’t believe that Jesus is the son of God. I don’t believe that people actually have communicated with Angels. And at the end of the day I don’t believe in God.

They want to focus on overall mental well-being. Filling up that “empty” feeling that we have (“why do we feel this way if this space isn’t supposed to be filled with God?”).

I’m still stuck at “Hey, if God is real why doesn’t he make it obvious which religion is true? At least give some signals so that completely opposite viewpoints don’t all seem valid.”

Hrm, I was only going to write a paragraph or two. And now my lunch break is over and I don’t have time to refine this. I’ll need to do some meditating on it tonight. Maybe even start pulling together a second part to my As requested… why
I don’t believe in God post.

Bah, Mondays. I’m exhausted today. I shouldn’t be, I’ve been getting plenty of sleep.

I came into work and was mostly zombie for the first half of the morning. Then they gave me some spreadsheets to work on that I really do need to use my brain for. After mixing up the numbers a half dozen times and confusing myself I finally gave in and got a Mountain Dew from the soda machine (I don’t drink coffee anymore, and it’s been months since I touched a Mountain Dew).

It seems to be working, I don’t feel like my brain is a useless mass of mush anymore.

Ah, at least it’s only a 4 day week, after which I get to go on a nice little trip to Maryland with friends. Refreshing hiking, delicious food, the most comfortable bed on the planet! I can’t wait.