bento friday: a semi-success

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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a simple bento: chicken teriyaki, veggies, and soba

This bento was kind of thrown together, and didn't take very long to assemble at all.  I'd set aside a few individual chicken thighs to hang out in the freezer against the day of another teriyaki bento, so that was easy.  Unfortunately I overcooked the chicken a bit (oops), and my hastily-concocted teriyaki sauce somehow lacked balance (double oops).  I thought I kinda dropped the ball on that, but Husband's box came home quite empty so apparently he wasn't too disappointed.

Please ignore the terribly blurry photo.  My dinky little dumb-phone camera appreciates your kindness.  

For veggies, I tossed in some simple steam-fried baby bok choy and some spicy sautéed carrots, all with veg from our sadly-only-once-a-month local farmer's market.  The bok choy was tossed with some fresh ginger, and the carrots were given a liberal coating of schichimi togarashi, a spicy Japanese pepper blend.  Tasty.  Add to that some soba from my stash with green onions and some bottled teriyaki sauce I'm trying to use up, and we're in business. 

Also, this bento marks a new experiment, as it was packed in a 3-cup Pyrex container.   For christmas a few years ago Husband was marvelous and got me some subdivided plastic bento boxes that I fell in love with after Maki's review, and those were great for a while.  Unfortunately the latch on mine broke, and then broke again just to spite the attempted repair with contact cement.  But then I found my little metal tiffin, and all was well again with the world.  Husband's bento are still usually packed in his unbroken plastic box (though I assembled a Frankenbox by using the lid from mine; weirdly, the black lid came with really inane rugby trivia on it.  Ah, the Japanese.).

Bento, largely due to having been developed before refrigeration and easy heating were the norm, are designed so that they'll be safe to sit around at room temperature until lunch time, and then are intended to be eaten at room temperature too.  I do this, but Husband chooses to refrigerate and microwave his, and hey.  I pack his lunch; I sure a heck don't tell him how to eat the thing too.

Anyway.  So far, I'm digging the Pyrex, as the glass is non-plastic (makes the environmentalist/chemical-phobic me happy), microwaveable, and relatively attractive.  I don't mind the extra weight, as it really doesn't add much.  And yeah, the lids are still plastic, but I can only fight so many battles at once.  It seems to be relatively leak-resistant, fairly attractive in a grown-up blank-slate kind of way (as opposed to kawaii), and at least the food itself isn't sitting in plastic all day.  Plus, Pyrex is great for not staining, a feature I greatly enjoy in food containers in general.

Plus it was half off at the store.  So there's that. 

chocolate

Happy chocolate-themed, excessive-spending-laden, cutesy-idealization-of-heternormative-love day!  Also known as the day before OMG ALL THE CHOCOLATE IS ON SALE day.  I like that holiday a lot.

So, chocolate.  For some, it's a deeply profound experience.  For others, it's something enjoyable, but nothing to write home about.  I do have one coworker who actively dislikes the stuff.  That, at least, baffles me entirely.

I fall somewhere toward the decadent-indulgence end of the spectrum, as a really good piece of chocolate really can send me to blisstown, though my taste for sweets has decreased rather dramatically in the past few years.  In any case, my poison is the really dark, bitter stuff, so that's not in too much danger of dropping in priority.

For an incredible description of both the process of chocolate-gasm and the bewilderment this leaves some with, see this incredible little story by John Scalzi.  No really.  Go read it.

Also, this menu for an all-chocolate-all-the-time dinner kinda gets me going.  Nothin' quite like a good savory chocolate dish.  Mmm, molé...

Finally, on a not chocolate-related but still very romantic note, I totally dig this guide to cooking with your sweetie.  In my household we call this the 'kitchen dance,' and it's a tricky proposition indeed.  It's funny how the other person unerringly stands in front of the one cupboard you need to access.  Perhaps it's a natural law or something.  We often fall into temporary head/sous chef roles, depending on if we're cooking on of 'his' or 'my' dishes, but I liked the suggestion in the article of formalizing that relationship.  Then it's clear who's in charge of creativity and who just needs to chop the damn onions already.

Hey, you do what works.

look at stuff

"Take a look at the standard way of the world. Everybody goes to school, then they go to college, then they get a job. Does that fit your life or are you just doing it? Take a look at stuff. It’s possible to take this whole life and shape it so that it’s something that fits you as opposed to trying to fit so hard in to it. That’s the root of it. That’s the real reoccurring theme of the record , fucking doing what you want, because it will lead to happiness."
--Stef Alexander (via Gala)

Living an unexamined life is giving away your power.  It's given away to habit and cultural expectations and 'common knowledge' and autopiloted scripts into which we're supposed to pack ourselves.  The only way to fight against this is to take a good hard look at who you are, where you are, and what you want.  To 'look at stuff.'  To figure this shit out.

I, for one, want out of the cycle.

Möbius strip house

Möbius strip house.

You guys.

Mobius.  Strip.  House.

The universe has now thought of everything.

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Every Wednesday(ish), I write about something I love that day.  It doesn't necessarily have to be remotely related to anything; it just has to be fabulous!

repost: conservation of dollars

Metapost: my first attempt at the newfangled blogging thing ended when I decided I no longer identified with the name I'd chosen, and thus The Organized Geek was abandoned.  However, there was some good stuff in there, and I'll be reposting a few selected entries occasionally, so they don't get entirely lost to oblivion. 

Originally posted on 01.03.12, this post lays out my fundamental approach to finances and budgeting.  

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Budgeting.

It's not a dirty word, I promise.  For most of the past year I've been tracking all of my spending, and adding it to a spreadsheet on a month-by-month basis.  A few small cash expenditures almost certainly slipped through the cracks, but overall my spreadsheet represents everything that comes both in and out.

Before I started tracking, I naïvely assigned fairly arbitrary 'budgeted' values to the various categories I'd made up off the top of my head.  The reality of my spending adjusted those numbers quite a bit.  I'd like to share a little bit of my financial tracking system here, as well as illustrating the lessons I've learned.

The Equation
I've always loved being able to reduce a seemingly complicated system into its simpler parts.  If all the rest can be derived from a few core principles, why bother remembering all the fiddly details?  Despite all the specific, complex, and/or baffling budgeting tips out there, it all comes down to one fundamental equation.

$ in > $ out     (1)

As long as this holds, your financial plan is sound.  It's really all you need.  All the rest (earn more, use x or y pesky little money-saving tip, clip coupons, etc.) follows.  

The Tools
For day-to-day tracking, I'm in love with the pocketmod.  It's really just a way of folding a piece of paper into a little book, and you can specify the type of list or information you want on each page, and it will let you print it out.  I use the first two pages for a running to-do list, and the rest for recording transactions.  It's super low-tech, but it works for me, and always lives in my bag.

I know people out there love Mint, Quicken, etc., but I'm a fan of old-fashioned spreadsheets.  More specifically, I love Google Docs simply because I can update and read my budget from anywhere, and never worry about not having an up-to-date version of the file.

To calculate how long it will take to pay off various debts, I was thrilled to find this debt snowball spreadsheet.  It lets you choose from a variety of methods, including the downright sobering figures on how much interest you'll be paying for how long if you choose to only make minimum payments.  While the higher-interest-first method makes the soundest financial sense in that you wind up paying less interest, there's a lot to be said for the psychological encouragement that comes from the lowest-balance-first plan since you get more victories earlier in the game.  Fortunately, for me those wound up being one and the same.  Thanks to this sheet I know exactly how much to throw at each debt in turn, and exactly how long it will take.  You can also enter in 'snowflakes,' or one time payments, in case you want to toss a little extra money on the highest priority debt, and it will take that into account.  Get Rich Slowly also posted a review of this spreadsheet.

Lessons Learned

• Don't bother setting initial budget values.  Just track your actual spending, and go from there.
• Feel free to revise your categories.  Today I wen through and made a brand new sheet for this year's tracking, and took the opportunity to reformat, recategorize, and edit.  There were several categories that are no longer relevant, and instead of having a random list I have to poke through every time I want to add a value, I sorted them into categories.  The pie chart at the top of this post has my new projected monthly expenditure breakdown for 2012.  There's not a lot in the 'savings' wedge, admittedly, but that's because I'm throwing everything I can at my debt snowball right now. 
• Include notes in your budget.  If you're using a spreadsheet for tracking spending, I highly recommend a second column next to each month's numbers, for notes.  That way, in case you wonder why the heck your 'other' category was so high in April of last year, you'll know that it was because your best friend got married and you suddenly had to buy an overpriced chartreuse layer cake gown.  If you set the column to not wrap the text, then you can simply make it super narrow and it effectively disappears.  Then it won't be in the way of looking at the overall figures and you can always expand it if you get curious. 
• Tracking really isn't that hard!  I got lazy sometimes and would figure that I could always just look at my debit card bill and figure it out from there.  Unfortunately, the 'what the heck was this charge for' line on account statements are often far from clear, and I've spent my share of time looking up addresses in an effort to divine where I spent that particular $15.  Just writing it down when I'm at the store is a lot easier.  
• Put a place for income on your spreadsheet.  The corollary to this is that you get a savings entry, being the difference between your income and your spending.  This number gives you a healthy little panic attack when it goes negative, meaning that you broke the cardinal rule.  See equation 1!
• Don't accrue more debt while you're paying it off.  My general financial awareness improved by several orders of magnitude when I set a personal moratorium on credit card spending.  When you're spending real money instead of pretend numbers on a statement, you suddenly care a lot more.  A couple of times I've gotten pretty close to being genuinely broke, and then had to become a serious cheapskate for a week or so until my next paycheck came in.  It was a good experience.  While I was previously in a pretty good habit of paying off what I spent on the credit card (above a certain amount of permanent balance; bad me!), it just feels different when you feel each purchase rather than just tossing whatever lump sum you've got around on the card later.  I'm definitely spending less on trivial things this way.  

Some Final Thoughts

Tracking my spending and building a real budget has been quite an illuminating process, and is actually kind of fun.  You don't need to learn complicated software or get a budgeting app, and the manual process is probably more satisfying anyway.  Give it a try!

new prime discovered

Apparently a dude in Missouri computed the 48th Marsenne prime number.  It has 17 million digits.

Computers are neat.

today I love...

...Leo's recent post about savoring life.

Sometimes all that's needed to re-center from a state of frantic distraction is to take a moment, really pause, and really be where and when you are.

It's something I desperately need to learn, and am working on embracing.  Leo, of course, articulates it incredibly well.


Every Wednesday(ish), I write about something I love that day.  It doesn't necessarily have to be remotely related to anything; it just has to be fabulous!

bento!

In my household, we've settled into a weekday pattern surrounding food.  Husband gets home an hour and a half earlier than I do, so he generally pulls dinner together, and I get the lovely benefit of a tasty meal that's all prepared when I walk in the door.  He's awesome like that.  

I, on the other hand, take care of the lunches we bring with us to work.  

What are the goals of a brown-bag lunch?  To save money, certainly.  Many of my coworkers go out for lunch every single day, and I can't imagine spending that kind of money on daily mediocre restaurants.  To use up leftovers, and this does happen a lot.  It's a handy way to eat through overly large batches of food from dinner.  To provide more nourishing, healthy food than grabbing a burger.  And finally, and certainly NOT least importantly, to be interesting and beautiful and tasty.  

Ultimately, sandwiches and leftover pizza, though easy and cheap, get boring.  

A few years ago, I discovered bento.  More specifically, I discovered Just Bento, an absolutely fantastic site that makes bento accessible for even ignorant Americans like myself.  I found the idea... intriguing.

Fundamentally, a bento is simply a meal packed in a box, and almost any packed lunch would technically qualify.  But generally it means several different dishes packed together, and intended to be eaten at room temperature.  Often they contain Japanese food, as bento is a Japanese concept, but they certainly don't have to.  Admittedly, I've been getting a hell of a kick out of expanding my repertoire to Japanese cuisine, but eventually I'll probably calm down and branch out into other options. 

Some bento, called charaben or kyaraben, are incredibly detailed works of art that must take hours to assemble.  I don't have that kind of time in the morning, people!  But Maki of Just Bento focuses on tasty, healthy bento that are appealing to the eye without involving painstaking amounts of effort.  

So I worked up my courage, picked out some simple-seeming Japanese recipes, and packed lunches for us in some random tupperware.  For a first attempt, I remember it being reasonably tasty and reasonably pretty.  I got the satisfaction of having prepared something special and thoughtful for our lunches, and it gave me something to look forward to through the morning in a way that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is simply incapable of.  And Husband was surprisingly supportive.  Also, it made my coworkers somewhat jealous. 

I was hooked.  It's a simple way to expand my culinary ability, take care of Husband, and feel taken care of myself.  

So,  I'm going to post occasional bento, with pictures and descriptions.  I don't have pics of all of my past creations, but I have a few and will get those up gradually.  Also, most of the pictures were taken with my crappy phone camera, so don't expect stunning quality (side note: learn how to take actually decent pictures of food someday).   I generally bento about once a week now, generally on Tuesdays.  My bento aren't spectacularly pretty or incredibly detailed, but they are yummy, and maybe someone out there will be inspired to give it a try.  It's easy and it's delicious. 

Without further ado, some bento!  

Yesterday's lunch: cashew chicken and brown rice. 

Ironically, this week's bento was remarkably plain, and probably  not one I'll be repeating.  I found a recipe for cashew chicken in a magazine, and it's been living in the 'to try' section of The Book for a while now.  I mostly followed the recipe, except for adding in a bunch of zucchini, as it was notably deficient in veg content.  I packed it with brown rice.  

It was... okay.  The chicken was kind of dry (it would have been much better with dark meat rather than white), I slightly burned the cashews (oops), and the sauce was a pretty straightforward and uninteresting blend of chili garlic sauce and soy.  It's a very simple recipe, and possibly one I'll adjust and keep around in my head, but it definitely needs some tweaking and I think I can safely throw away that magazine page now.  Live and learn!

thinking, and new directions

I've been thinking a lot lately.  This will likely get fairly rambly.

About the world, about my life, and about this little corner of the internet that I have staked out for myself.

There are many directions I could go with this space, and I've come to the definite conclusion that I am completely unsure of where this blog is going (see what I did there?).  It started off as a simple platform to get me writing, and to provide some measure of accountability for personal goals and projects.

Heh.  Yeah, about those resolutions and goals.  The ones I'm constantly thinking up and then abandoning.  It's not too encouraging.  And about that blogging schedule I haven't kept to, largely out of not feeling like I have anything pertinent to say.

However, maybe that's not the point.  Maybe the point is that I have this space, and I can say whatever the heck I want to say within it.  Even if it doesn't fit into my preconceived notion of what my topic is or should be.  So I'm going to go on an adventure.  I'm going to write about whatever is on my mind, whether it seems relevant or not.

Wow, when I write it out like that, it seems much less momentous than it did in my head.  I'm going to blog OFF TOPIC.  So brave.  But hey, small steps, right?

So,  first topic.  Feminism.

Yep, I said it.  Dropped the f-word.

You see, I'm a feminist.  I always have been, but it was in the lazy, non-introspective, inactive way.   Perhaps it's because I was so involved in my studies, but I never really bothered to poke my nose out into the world and see what was going on.  I didn't actively deconstruct problematic cultural messages, and I had never heard the words 'kyriarchy' or 'intersectionality.'  I pinned buttons with cheeky feminist phrases on my purse, but I didn't know, in a real way, that feminism had progressed past the free love movement of the sixties.

In other words, I was a complete dunce on the subject.

But in the last year or so, largely in response to unidentified feelings of ennui and quiet rage, I've really started immersing myself in the literature and connecting with some of the truly amazing folks writing about this stuff out on the big bad internet.  People like Melissa McEwan, Ana Mardoll, David Futrelle, and Libby Anne, to name just a few.

I've come across so many different perspectives, many of which make me breathe a huge sigh of relief. Finding safe spaces was a revelation.  I hadn't known that such thoughtful people were out there doing the work of identifying subtle double standards, of explaining tricky problems, of inspecting and dismantling rape culture.  People who expect more.  I got a huge awakening to what was going on in the world, and a call to examine some of the shitty messages I've internalized over the years.  Boy, can that stuff be unpleasant to unpack and really look at, especially when it comes to addressing one's unexamined privilege.  But it's also profoundly important, and I'm willing to put up with a little discomfort in order to become a better person.

I guess you could say I'm a baby feminist.  I've got a whole heck of a lot to learn and grok and incorporate into my goal of becoming a more thoughtful human being.

So let's just say that I was deeply and pleasantly surprised by what I found out there when I finally got around to looking, and immersing myself in the feminist blogosphere has rapidly become my main free-time preoccupation.  It's increasingly becoming a critical part of who I am.  This is something that I'm passionate about, and something I need to write about.  So perhaps this space will take on a whole new direction, or maybe it will just become a more representative sample of my thoughts.  There are no internet police to say I can't have privilege-deconstructing posts alongside sock-folding posts, after all.  They coexist in my head, so why not here?

My space, my rules.  Would you like to come along for the ride?

thoughts on resolutions

Metapost side note: I've been away for a while for a number of reasons.  Here's a rambly set of ruminations on the most recent holiday.

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I've never really done the new year's resolution thing.  Oh, I probably parroted a few lines occasionally out of a general feeling of social obligation, but it never really meant anything to me and I never really followed through on any resolutions I might have made.

Last year I started blogging, and made a few monthly resolutions, thinking they'd be more tractable than year-long projects.  I think I got as far as March.

On the one hand, the new year is undeniably a time of renewal, and the desire for a fresh start deserves to be honored.  Deciding to make a change in one's life is a big deal.  It usually involves seriously nontrivial amounts of work (or else why bother with the fanfare), potentially represents a significant improvement in some facet of life, and can be really hard to follow through with.  Not to mention that figuring out what change to implement in the first place can be a hell of a project unto itself.

But compressing this process in a one-line throwaway gesture that no one really expects to happen can be not only useless, but genuinely counterproductive.  Taking a really important personal mission and summing it up into a sound byte might be useful in clarifying the goal itself, but it also might trivialize a very real and relevant quest into a silly exercise in pointlessness and frustration.

So I'm not sure how I feel about all this.  Leo says that having no goals is awesome.  Scott says that defined goals are key to accomplishing really cool stuff, and he's a guy who knows all about accomplishing really cool stuff.  I suspect that the ultimate answer is intensely personal and individual.

I'm in the middle of what feels like a rather important period of change, even if it does seem to drift aimlessly sometimes.  For now, I think I'll spend January without any lofty goals or aspirations, and see where it takes me.