the weight is over

Yes, that was on purpose.  I do love a good pun.

Today, I leave for San Diego to visit my parents for my dad's 60th birthday.  My grandparents, who are approximately 9 million years old, will be there, and I don't get to see them very often.  Not to mention my parents, who I haven't seen since last Christmas.  And a surprise guest, which not even my mother knows about, because of how she ruins surprises on a regular basis.  I was wholly excited about this trip, until my mother said those three little words to me.  Bring. Your. Swimsuit.

(financial) freedom ain't free

I'm still looking for a job.  While I have a promising lead or two, I haven't done any actual interviewing yet.  This has resulted in several sleepless nights, where I have nightmares that we are going to be evicted from our house because we can't pay for it, and that it will be all my fault.  Also, in the dreams, I default on my student loans. 

No one thinks that law school is cheap.  That is because it is decidedly not.  According to some articles, attending a top 10 law school (like Berkeley, where I went -- although it's a public school, it's still pricey) costs about $43,000 a year, just in tuition.  Plus your undergraduate education.  Plus the expenses of actually living for the three years you are in school.  This is usually financed by taking out massive student loans, with the expectation that you will either make big bucks to pay them off, or at least qualify for LRAP. 

So, since this is not a dinner party with in-laws, I will tell you my numbers, so you non-lawyer types can get a sense of what this means in real terms.  I graduated from undergrad with no debt.  I graduated from law school with about $150,000 in student loan debt.  That is the size of a decent-sized mortgage.  Fortunately, like a mortgage, they give me 30 years to pay it off.  Unfortunately, and unlike a mortgage, my interest rate is locked in to pre-crash highs, and I can't refinance it to bring the rate down.  So the interest rate on my educational debt is higher than that of our mortgage, our car loan, and one of my credit cards. 

 

 (an example of a house I could buy with the same amount of money I paid to go to law school.)

muffin mania

I have never been that interested in baking, but lately I have started baking muffins like they are going out of style.  I have also started pinning a lot of muffin recipes on Pinterest.  B and C both have to take a snack and a lunch to school every day, and we were tired of sending them with pre-packaged crap.  So I started baking muffins, first from box mixes, then gradually more and more from scratch.  The advantage to muffins over quickbreads and the like is that muffins are easy to grab-and-go, so they are perfect when you don't have time for breakfast or to put in a kid's snack.  The downside is that they can be a teensy bit packed with oil, sugar, butter, and other things that make them delicious but perhaps not so good for you.  Sometimes I try to modify to increase the nutrition and decrease the calorie count, but sometimes I say f- it and just make a tasty muffin.

Here are my favorite three muffins that I've made recently...

1.  Apple muffins.  I wanted to make something fall-ish, and these were the first fall muffin recipe I found.  I made some adjustments, like using crushed-up granola to top the muffins and pureeing the apple peels and adding to the recipe to up the nutritional value.  The commenters to the recipe complained that the muffins didn't peak, but I didn't have this problem -- maybe because I was careful not to overmix, and/or because I melted the butter before I added it.  (The full list of modifications I made is in the comments on Pinterest, for my reference in case I want to make them again.)  In case you're curious, I used Gala apples.  Because they were the cheapest.

an open letter to whoever makes stocking decisions at the stores around here

To whom it may concern:

I try hard to keep our house relatively organized.  This is not easy when any attempt at organization is constantly undermined by three people under the age of twelve, and occasionally undermined by the resident adults.  

There is one organizational item that I disproportionately love.  That item is the holiday color coded bin: the big orange and black tubs you can put Halloween decorations in, the red and green ones for the Christmas decorations, etc.  This is essential when you have an attic completely jammed with all sizes and colors of plastic bins full of kindergarten art projects, baby clothes, high school yearbooks, your sister's sewing machine, cases from CDs you no longer listen to, and the like.  If you don't have color coded bins, you never find all the holiday stuff until the holiday is good and over and you are searching for the stuff for the next holiday.

(the ubiquitous bin*)

stripping down

I always thought that trees lost their leaves in the fall because they were unable to support green foliage during the cold, dry winter months.  This may be true.  However, when New York was hit with several inches of heavy, wet snow this weekend, before the trees were able to shed their leaves, I saw that this is not the only reason.  In my small town not far from New York City, we received only a few inches -- practically nothing compared to the several feet that upstate New York and New England received.  But still, even here, everything from small shrubs to large, decade- or century-old trees lost limbs.  Trunks were split down the middle, entire trees were lost, under the weight of the frozen water sitting on broad leaves.

I have heard that November is a month for goodbyes.  The leaves go, and the trees prepare for hard times ahead.  Last night, as I jogged through my town and surveyed the damage from the storm, still blocking off streets and lined up on curbs, I thought about stripping down in preparation for hard times.