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best of 2009: singing of heroes

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

December 20 New person. … Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

My unsung heroes are the nursing, physical therapy, and cafeteria staff who helped ease my mother’s suffering this summer at Enloe Medical Center in Chico. In the surgical ward where Mom spent her time, doctors make daily rounds and visit the patients briefly, checking on how patients are recovering after surgery and such. The nursing and related staff are the ones who take care of so much of the patients’ needs and these lovely people treated Mom with caring and true concern, tremendous patience, and great gentleness along with great competence and professionalism. Many of these lovely people went to extra lengths to help. Even the student nurses I met were wonderful, each in their own way. I don’t want to write a lot about this; it’s too much to revisit Mom’s ordeal in detail. But I just want to acknowledge all the wonderful staff who tried to make Mom as comfortable as possible, to ease her pain, and also extended much kindness to my brothers, my sister, and me as we spent our time at Mom’s bedside.

Thank you all; you were true heroes in our lives this year.

best of 2009: in a word

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.
December 17 — Word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. “2009 was _____.”

Whew, 2009 was a lot of things, a lot them on the downside, too. It was a very harsh year. It was a year of loss, of sadness, of longing, of deterioration. Looking back, I see that some of that isn’t completely true, that it’s just how it feels to me. There were some good things in it. One reason I’m doing this challenge is to seek out the positive and remind myself that the year has not been as wholly bleak as a quick reflection shows.

So I’ve been toying with words and phrases for 2009 all day. One good word is challenging. This year has been that. I ignored some of the challenges, put them off for the coming year.  But some could not be ignored and surprisingly I rose to some of the challenges and impressed myself that I had. I’ve often feared that I’m someone who would fall apart under these circumstances. We like to believe we are dependable but I doubted myself. When those challenges came this year, I didn’t fall apart. I endured and even contributed, pushing past some of my failings and frailties.

2009 was also a year of transitions. That’s partly a nice way of speaking of my losses: some of them have significantly changed my life. I’ve felt adrift a lot this fall. I have responsibilities and I plod on because of them, but within me there’s been turmoil and disorientation and always that doubt. I used to trust to the future and now there’s a lot of uncertainty.  But to balance that, I’ve also started to explore some areas I’ve always assumed were beyond my reach and to try to find a voice in disciplines I never considered before and to rekindle old interests I let die down long ago. And I’m trying to push myself to push myself more. I’ve grown complacent and defeated and old in recent years and it’s time to get past all that. So 2009 is a year of changing and hopefully a prelude to a stronger year ahead.

best of 2009: Tea!!!

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today’s topic might have been written for me: December 16 — Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What’s yours?

I’m a tea person, meaning I drink tea, lots and lots of tea. I drink it daily, all day long, mostly blacks, but there are times for greens, whites, and oolongs, too. I steep pots of tea for the office. Others share in, and when I’m out, some of the crew doesn’t even try to steep their own. My twitter bio includes the phrase “crazy cat and tea lady”. When I host gatherings at home, everyone knows that there will be freshly steeped pots of tea ready. I have shelves set up in my living room to hold most (but not all) of my tea paraphernalia:

I’m not an expert about tea but I know more than the average joe.

But thinking of the best tea of the year? Hmm, I almost want to say: All of them! But no, that’s not right. There have definitely been some pots I’d call sub-par. Still, the rest were just dandy. So my best tea is: yunnan and keemun which I’ve loved since college and a lovely sencha I steep on weekends and the old, nearly empty tin of Kashmiri chai that’s full of cardamom and the Earl Grey I made a few days ago that reminded me that sometimes I still like Earl Grey and the vanilla tea I brew for my friend on weekends, plus the Ceylon OPA that I buy in bulk at a local Indian market. Oh, also the Turkish tea I bought at the same market that my friend doesn’t like at all, but I do, more and more. And though they’re, strictly speaking, not real tea, there’s also the lavender I brew late at night sometimes and the barley tea that my favorite Japanese restaurant serves as house tea.

Ummm, tea!

best of 2009: simple and yummy

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

A delectable suggestion for today: December 11 — New food. You’re now in love with Lebanese food and you didn’t even know what it was in January of this year.

Okay, so I haven’t tried new cuisines this year. That would be wonderful, but new ones are hard to come by around these parts. I went on a gastronomic splurge in my college and just-after years and tried every cuisine that I came by and there aren’t so many options where I live now. It’s a shame, too; I love ethnic foods. I have my preferences, but I’m willing to try almost any new food. I’ll also eat foods I don’t like all that much, not all the time, mind you, but I don’t have to all the time and sometimes it’s easier in group situations.  I was the non-picky eater growing up: I even ate liver while my siblings refused (I’m a middle child and I’ve read that trying to please is one of the traits I get from that).  And sometimes it’s good to revisit foods you don’t care for; your tastes might have changed and you will find a new fave. It’s true, though I still don’t like liver.

So my best food discovery of 2009 is a recipe idea, one that I heard on the radio during the Christmas-New Year holiday break last year or maybe New Year’s Day of this year. I think it was a food critic or a famous chef on a show I had playing in the background. The conversation was about things to offer when hosting holiday parties, dinners, and brunches. And this caught my attention: the chef said one thing he often serves that goes over wonderfully but is very easy to do is use eggs as the “sauce” for pasta.

The idea is simple: cook up some good pasta, and make a few eggs over easy. Put the eggs on the pasta before the yolks fully set. Cut into the eggs and voilà, they become the sauce and embellishment for your pasta. The chef mentioned using fresh garlic cooked in olive oil and then cooking the eggs using that, not butter. Healthier and makes a better pasta sauce. I think he also might have suggested a bit of fresh parmesan cheese and herbs sprinkled on top, too. And that’s what I remember from the show.

I’m not much of a cook. I make simple things that don’t require a lot of fuss or a lot of pots and pans. I love pasta, preferably without tomato sauce, and it’s easy to make. I also like eggs.  I’ve been practicing creating this dish all year and added in one enhancement: walnuts. Wouldn’t have thought of this myself, but walnuts cooked in garlic and olive oil are wonderful. I saw it as part of a recipe on a box of whole grain pasta a few years ago. I was supposed to be switching to whole grain pasta (wasn’t hard: it tastes just fine to me) and adding walnuts to my diet, so I tried it.  Delish!

Anyway, my basic version of my best food of the year is:

    start some pasta cooking
    mince up a few cloves of garlic
    sauté garlic in olive oil.
    add walnut pieces and cook a bit more then push to the side
    cook eggs over easy in the oil
    and finally serve the eggs and walnuts and garlic over pasta

I’ve added other things from time to time: onions go well with walnuts and garlic and sometimes vegetables end up in the mixture, too. The only tricking part is not overcooking the eggs, including timing it all so the pasta is ready and waiting when the eggs are done, or the yolks will set too much. It’s still a fine dish that way, so even the failed attempts have been yummy.

best of 2009: music

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today we come to December 10 — Album of the year. What’s rocking your world?

There’s an implication that I should be writing about music that was released this year or failing that, music I discovered this year. Trouble is, I haven’t been listening to new music that I can name. Sure, I’ve heard new songs this year, and some have been great, but I have very poor memory for music and artists and I can’t name them now.

Recently though, I rediscovered and renewed just playing music and that is rocking my world.  Last month, I finally installed an MP3 package (aka Amarok) on my work system and I’ve started putting my CD collection on the machine.  And I’m playing it.  I’ve also started listening to more albums in the car.  This might all seem like nothing to you, but it’s a change in my world and it’s a good one.

The music is mostly old.  But if  you must know, the albums I’ve started with are: True Stories by Talking Heads, Life’s Hard and Then You Die by It’s Immaterial, The First Songs by Laura Nyro, Everything’s Different Now by Til Tuesday, The Bobby Darin Story, and a lot more.  I have a lot of CDs to convert to MP3.  But no worries…getting there is more than half the fun.