11.30.2010

Tuesday is still pizza day!

For the last couple of weeks I've been experimenting with breakfast pizza, but have no pictures to show for it. This recipe is great with either bacon or lunchmeat-type ham. Also, I hate onions, so I put sliced mushrooms on instead.

This week's adventure: asparagus pizza, taken from the smitten kitchen. For lack of scallions, I instead hyped up the flavor with three sliced cloves of garlic... and for the sake of my carnivore roommate, who so bravely eats whatever I throw at her, I added some of those addictive meatballs from Winco, cut in half.

Both of these turned out delicious and made great leftovers.

11.24.2010

Proportions

I'm less of a this-is-what-I-did-today blogger and more of a this-has-been-on-my-mind-lately blogger. This means that the more I have going on in my real life, the less likely I am to blog, an inverse proportion. But now that I've gotten rid of facebook, nobody knows what I'm up to unless I tell them. The proportion of mundane-stuff-I-do to mundane-stuff-everyone-knows-about is suddenly much smaller. Privacy is a magical thing to reclaim.

I got facebook when my brother was a freshman in college. That was just over four years ago. I'm 20. I had facebook for 1/5 of my life, 20%. That's longer than I spent in highland dancing, and facebook devoured a larger piece of my schedule than dance did. Dance counts as a hobby, something interesting you do in your free time.

Facebook went from something interesting to do in my free time to something I did whether I had free time or not.* That's a place of honor that I would prefer to keep available for things that matter a lot more, like... school. My Bible. Sleep. Keeping in touch with friends and family one-on-one by letter or email, rather than just broadcasting one snippet of information for all 733 of my fb-friends to read and forget about. Time for a new hobby, which is really an old one: real people and real life.

* This is not, I repeat not, the reason I deleted my account. Like my beloved brother, I am capable of shutting my laptop and doing something else. It's just the reason I'm not inclined to go back.

11.07.2010

vertical autumn

Last week's pictures were just in time. Today woke up gray and rainy, and the leaves are no longer photogenic. I stayed home, closed the blinds, lit some candles, reorganized my bookshelf, cleaned my fridge, and baked up some leftover chocolate cookie dough from last week. The result: a clean and neat, warm, delicious-smelling apartment. I curled up in the green armchair that used to belong to my parents and read P. G. Wodehouse's The Mating Season and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron while my roommate Kathleen played Beethoven and Chopin on her keyboard.

Autumn remains my favorite season in all its moods, but I'll stick to taking pictures when it's happy. Out of the ~125 shots I took last Thursday, almost all were horizontal. It's odd: vertical shots make me happy, but I almost never take my own. These three feel like keepers.

N'oubliez-pas means "don't forget," and that's what my blog is for: a collection of things I want to keep, revisit, and remember. The leaves covering 3rd Street on Thursday, November 3, 2010 are among them.