My jigsaw puzzle

The snow today looks the same. It’s a nice, sunny day, and even though the temperature has only gone a few degrees above freezing, there’s been a constant drip from the roof as the sun melts a bit of the snow. I feel tired and haven’t gone out or taken pictures.

You can see my progress on the 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I still have a book and a half to read, I have enough food for another week or more, but I miss my co-workers and friends.

I won’t be trying a new recipe this week — no food delivery.

I ran into four people in my neighborhood yesterday, all tired from all the extra work.

Our sidewalks and roads have been cleared, but my bus still isn’t running. and there’s been no mail delivery. The TV is showing a lot of people out driving. The large highways are clear and dry, but some of the smaller ones are still awful.

Beverly’s neighbor had a branch come down and break a window in her townhouse. A huge branch near me is blocking the sidewalk. We’ve had no more hiccups in the power, thank goodness.

The airports have reopened, but all above-ground metro tracks remain closed, and trains are only running every 30 minutes. The MARC train has resuming running, with major delays.

I’m ready to gt back to work at this point, but I have no way to get there because my local bus line still isn’t running. My office is presumably open tomorrow.

However, the second storm is due to start tomorrow afternoon.
I didn’t know how substantial this second storm is supposed to be. They’re saying 7-13 more inches (14-26 cm)! That’s going to throw a monkey wrench into things.

Actually, this is the good part, so I’m trying to enjoy it. The bad part will come when I have to leave the house and go to work in the cold with all the slush and delays.

Saturday 8 am

Saturday 4 pm

Sunday 11 am

10 more photos taken today:

The front walk

The bent tree has recovered somewhat.

This is a normal-height sign.

This is a yellow Volkswagen.

Street in one direction

Street in the other direction

Parking

Where to put it all

Note the uncleared cars.

Another sign and the same bent tree -- its twin trunks now forked.

At 8:00 am, the TV said it was 32 degrees out (0 C), and it looked like there was a lull in the snow. I even saw someone outside about to clean off a car.

I went out to try to surprise my friend Beverly by getting a jump on digging out her car. Silly me. It was still snowing, the wind blew sharp, icy bits into my face, and with the wind chill, the temperature was clearly well below freezing, probably below 20. Note that you can’t tell what kind of cars these are.

My boots are 13 inches tall. The snow reached my knees, 18 inches (1/2 metre) or more. As soon as I stepped into an unshoveled area, my jeans and socks immediately got soaked as snow fell into my boot tops. Note that the U-Haul truck’s cab has disappeared.

I tried to get to the bent tree to shake off some of the snow, but “walking” in snow up to your knees is more like climbing. I kept losing my balance, even with the shovel handle as a walking stick. The maple tree trunk looks shorter, and the sign.

I walked the two and a half blocks down to Beverly’s townhouse. The snow behind her car was 4 feet wide (1 -1/3 metre) and several inches more than knee-deep. I would have to cross this to get to the sidewalk. I found a place to cross, but the sidewalk, too, was impassable.

By this time, I was too winded from clambering over mounds of snow and trying to walk in knee-deep snow to accomplish much anyway. Even in the road, I had to walk in the ruts left by the plow, which were about 8 inches deep or more, and I nearly feel on some unexpected slick ice.

My camera batteries died before I could take any photos of this area or the road, so I gave up and went home. All this took more than a half hour!

At 8 am when I took these pictures, the storm still had 14 hours more to go. It’s projected to end around 10 pm. It’s now 3 pm and it has been snowing steadily all day. I’ll take more photos tomorrow when it has all fallen. We’re supposed to get 5 to 9 more inches (10 – 18 cm.). I doubt I’ll be getting to work on Monday.

If the power stays on, this will be just an adventure. So far it has “hiccuped” four times. Beverly, Martha and I are worried that some branches will come down and take out a power line. We all have candles and multiple flashlights, and our stoves are gas, if we lose heat, but we’ll be BORED without TV and the Internet!

I have two jigsaw puzzles, if the lights go out, but B & M won’t be able to join me in putting one together. Now off to make some cocoa!

The metro system has announced that aboveground trains and all buses will stop running if the snow reaches 8 inches. My office has announced that it will close early if the snow gets bad. So it may be messy, but I think it will be okay.

I’m not sure my scintillating prose will be enough to make you want to follow me on my journey through learning to cook. (My grandmother taught me how to bake, as in desserts, but I never learned to cook.)

I’m not sure the mistakes I make are going to be extravagant enough to make you laugh. But I am sure that if I’m supposed to blog about it, I’m more likely to cook rather than just nuke something.

So, until we determine just how interesting/boring this is going to be, I plunge onward. Last week’s lesson learned: Don’t nibble on the ingredients beforehand. Now here are all the ingredients for today’s dinner, plus bean sprouts which didn’t make it into the shot.

Unless you’re a celery addict, you might not try this recipe. I happen to like celery and wanted to see what this was like. First, I chopped and entire bunch of celery.

That’s an awful lot of celery! Look at it! It filled the entire pot. How will I get the other ingredients in there? I don’t have a pot bigger than this one.

Phew! The celery cooked down a bit. Here we have all the ingredients in the pot, including the sprouts.

Awwwright! The results look like the recipe picture! How often does that happen?

Now for the taste test. This stew (it really tastes like a stew) is surprisingly hearty and filling. And it tastes quite good. During the 40-minute simmer (raw foods advocates everywhere are cringing at the thought of simmering sprouts for 40 minutes), the celery and tuna flavors mellow so much that they nearly disappear.

The celery ends up with a texture like potatoes in stew, and the sprouts retain some of their crunch. In fact, crunching this is fun! While it’s not a highly-flavored dish like the ones I LOVE, I found myself looking forward to having another dish of Bagdad Hash for dinner.

Lesson Learned: Estimate the number of portions and divide, if necessary, BEFORE ordering the ingredients from Peapod, or else make room in the freezer.

Best Part of This: When I have this for dinner, I feel full and satisfied, yet the next morning my blood glucose is nice and low.

Saturday, the temperature here never went above 15 degrees (-9 C), and the forecast one inch of snow turned into four or five inches. I see that Momisodes in Boston got snowed in and Mike Goad in Arkansas ended up with 1/4 inch of ice. The snow here was very light, soft and fluffy, which is as rare as 15 degrees here.

Groundhog Day

Today is Groundhog Day in the U.S. Will Punxsutawney Phil see his shadow, meaning that we’ll have six more weeks of winter? Or will he see no shadow, meaning a quick end to winter?

Tai Shan

Tai Shan at one year old

Tai Shan, the beloved panda born three years ago at the National Zoo, moves to his new home in Chengdu, China on Thursday, February 4. A female panda, Mei Lan, of the same age from the Atlanta zoo will go with him.

I remember watching Tai Shan on the panda cam when he was an infant. He was so tiny and cute! He was affectionately nicknamed “Butterstick” because he was only the size of a stick of butter when he was born. However, that was not chosen as his official name. We will miss Tai Shan.

Is Tai Shan well-known where you live? I suspect Chengdu will not have a panda cam.

Apologies

My apologies for that “test” post, an odd post you may have seen in my feed recently. Despite the fact that it was only there for about 60 seconds, it went into my feed.

My apologies also to Patricia of Patricia’s Wisdom, who tagged me for a meme back in December, to which I never responded. Patricia, thanks for the link and for thinking of me. I was sick at the time and when I got better, I had forgotten all about until something reminded me this weekend.

Scary Clown Award

An Award (Yay!)

Deeper Issues received the Scary Clown Award from Jannie Funster. Visit that link to see all 22 of the awards she gave out. The Scary Clown Award is “…given to blogs which display a great sense of humor, and just the right leaven of attitude.” I’ll try to be more scary when clowning.

Jannie’s kind and gentle humor always buoys me up, and her site “maniger,” Blue Bunny, makes me laugh every time I read his comments. Jannie has been a great friend to Deeper Issues and to me since her very first visit. Thank you, Jannie! I appreciate your kind words.

Winter and Depression

Is it spring yet? If you suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder, or depression from sunshine-deprivation), you might be interested in this information. I asked my therapist about alternative medicine treatments for depression, since my antidepressant isn’t always enough. Her suggestions were exercise (the kind that gets your blood pumping), vitamin D and fish oil.

When I’m depressed, cardio exercise is the last thing I want, but it does clear out all the toxins and improve my mood. I’ve noticed that the vitamin D and fish oil definitely make a difference forme. Could SAD be a vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight?

Doctors, Doctors

When I visited the gastroenterologist, he told me that black stools (which was the symptom that took me to the internist in the first place) is a medical emergency, and that the internist should have contacted him and gotten me an appointment right away, instead of my having to wait three-and-a-half weeks. However, my blood test shows that I’m not anemic, so any blood loss was minimal. Lucky for me, but not encouraging news about my internist.

New Theme (Again)

It has become clear to me that, although I love tinkering with the graphics and code in a theme, I don’t really have the skills, time or even the inclination much of the time to customize this theme to what I want. So I’ve decided to keep it simple (stupid) – find a theme I like and just live with it, instead of trying to tweak it into the “perfect” theme for me, especially since “perfect” changes as my interests change. So one of these days you’ll see a new theme, and I will do my best to just stick with it and focus on the content instead of the graphics.

I tried Vered’s iced cupcake recipe this past weekend. Not that it’s exactly a good recipe for me as a diabetic, but they looked so good. I worked extra-hard on getting everything measured and doled out accurately, since I suspect Vered is meticulous.

Here they are just out of the oven, looking at least somewhat like the ones Vered showed in her blog post. I was hoping they’d be more uniform, since I always have a hard time judging whether things are even.

These drippy messes are the cupcakes cooled and iced, ready to be covered with foil and put into the fridge (I already devoured one while it was warm). I stole some of the cream cheese for my morning bagel, so I needed to decrease the powdered sugar in the icing. Apparently I decreased it too much, because the icing came out sticky and drippy. Still yummy, though! I need to freeze some of these so I don’t binge on them.

Help With the Cooking

After seeing the movie Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (and reading the book), I have a sort of half-formed plan in my mind to start trying out lots of new recipes in hopes of coming up with a list of reliably good “regulars” I can cook in rotation for myself, plus a list of more elaborate “specials” I can make once in a while. This might be fun to blog about, too, though I only aim to try four recipes a month, not one a day for a year!

Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, which was used in the book and movie, is not for me. I like French food, but aspic, liver and kidneys are out. Plus, the recipes aren’t very healthy. My mother used Joy of Cookingreligously, and I rely on it, too. Their recipes are good, but not often great. I used to subscribe to Gourmet magazine, but their recipes involved so many ingredients that I wouldn’t use them for regular fare.

I might start with the Harvest Cookbook that Patricia so generously created, but there aren’t a lot of main courses in there. If I try any recipes from the blogging community, I won’t be doing any ratings or criticism, just describing my efforts and how they came out.

I’m looking for REALLY FLAVORFUL, healthy recipes, because I DON’T LIKE BLAND FOOD. (Except oatmeal.) The problem is, there are recipes everywhere, especially online. I don’t want to have to test a zillion recipes to find the good ones. Can you help with the cooking by giving me suggestions for sources?

Disclosure: The book and movie links are affiliate links.

Health Update: My stress-echocardiogram test must have been normal, because my doctor hasn’t called. I saw the gastroenterologist Monday. He wants me to have an endoscopy and a colonoscopy to make sure there isn’t more than one source of bleeding. The ulcer symptoms continue to fade, and I’m feeling better than I have in a long time!

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