Average Jane

Average Jane Scales Back Thanksgiving

Guess who's still sick? It's me! And the spouse. Just phasing into a new stage of illness in the third week, still testing positive, and now dealing with sinus congestion and more coughing.

So, I'm obviously not hosting Thanksgiving dinner after all. Yet I have the food, so I'll have to at least cook the turkey so I can put the majority of it in the freezer for later. I'm actually leaning toward cooking the dinner on Wednesday because it sounds good and most of the meal is fairly easy to prepare.

I'll obviously make smaller portions of the side dishes - especially the dressing, which will now be a box of Stove Top. I might skip the dinner rolls because we will have plenty of carbs without them.

Mostly, I'm just looking forward to the leftovers.

In the meantime, I'm back to working from my bed with my trusty Snuggle Dog™. I'm taking off Thursday and Friday, but considering that I've basically spent the last 14 days in bed, I doubt that a four-day weekend is going to make that much difference in my recovery. At this point, I just have to be patient, I guess.

Average Jane Plans a Thanksgiving Feast

It's time to appease the algorithm deities by posting a fresh link to my Thanksgiving recipe booklet! It's a convenient, downloadable document that will walk you through the daunting parts of creating the traditional white people Thanksgiving meal, plus it has a couple of recipes for appetizers that everyone might like.

I'll be following it next week, with a couple of little wrinkles. Over the past several years, I'd gotten rather lazy and I'd been catering much of the meal and filling in with homemade rolls, pies, etc. Last year, I made an unfortunate choice of restaurant and our meal was so terrible that I went to the store and made the whole thing over again the next day from scratch.

That broke the spell of catering for me, so this year I'm making the whole shebang myself, including a ridiculously huge turkey that I bought well in advance because I was concerned about rumors of a turkey shortage. Today was the day to take it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to start thawing, which I did this morning.

Also on the menu: stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, my great-aunt's dinner rolls, and a couple of pumpkin pies. My aunt is bringing roasted sweet potatoes from her garden and I'm considering making 50/50 pumpkin/sweet potato pies this year to jazz things up a bit. I'll report back.

For an appetizer, I'll make the pomegranate salsa recipe from the booklet. Even if you're pretty confident about getting dinner on the table according to a strict schedule, it never hurts to have a little snack available just in case.

This weekend, I'll get my grocery shopping out of the way, then clean my house in fits and starts until it feels presentable. I'm only having three guests, five diners in total, so I really only need to worry about the living room, kitchen and bathrooms. We can close the other doors. Yes, I want my house to be clean but I also have a library book due on the 22nd. Priorities, you know.

The dog is guaranteed to be a pain in the ass the whole time because she is 100% pure chihuahua (did I ever mention that I got her DNA tested? Nothing but chihuahuas all the way down.) and she has zero trust in our judgment when it comes to letting evil strangers into the house. She will bark the whole time except when people are sitting quietly, and it will be annoying to all. But after nearly three years of houseguest-free existence, she's less socialized than ever, so that's just how it goes.

If I don't post again before the holiday, I hope you enjoy yourselves. If my recipes helped you out, let me know!

Average Jane Was Wrong

When I last posted, I had talked myself into believing that I was dealing with some fall allergies or perhaps a mild cold. So logic. Many delusion. 

That night - the night before I was supposed to work the election - I barely slept at all because I felt like absolute ass. Horrible headache, sore throat, cough, the whole works. I took another COVID test, went back to bed while I waited for my phone to announce that 15 minutes were up, and there they were: two lines.

I'd made it almost three years without succumbing to the 'rona, but I'd finally flown too close to the sun during some activity or other.

First, I had to call and leave a message for the election board that I wouldn't be able to work after all. I was supposed to be the assistant supervising judge for my polling location, but fortunately they had a spare ready to send in. If I'd tested negative, I might have been stupid enough to mask up and try to tough it out, but the test result saved me from myself. It would have been the most ill-advised decision I'd ever made if I'd really tried to go through with being on my feet all day.

I had already taken the day off from my job for the election, so at least I didn't have to worry about that. The day was largely a blur because I felt awful. But after a ton of run-around trying to get a Paxlovid prescription, my doctor called one in and a friend not only picked it up for me, but also brought me cookies, lemon drops, NyQuil, aspirin and Gatorade, all of which I am still enjoying at the end of the week. Getchu some friends like that.

The next day I felt considerably better. The headache has never returned, although I'm obviously still sick. I turned my bed into a complete squirrel's nest of cables with my work laptop and headset and my personal laptop and headset. Complete with snuggly dog, of course.

I ended up working a full day on Wednesday from my bed office and most of the day on Thursday before I got really tired and needed to stop.

Today I had some new symptoms that might be medication side-effects, and since I didn't have any meetings on the calendar it seemed like the ideal time to take a three-day weekend.

All this week I've mostly been consuming toast, oatmeal, soup and Sprite, all of which I got early on via an Instacart order. Yesterday I ordered a hearty and delicious comfort food lunch, but it may have overwhelmed my delicate system. I do truly appreciate all the offers from various friends to bring me stuff, though.

I sent the spouse to the library last night because my hold on N.K. Jemisin's "The World We Make" had come in and I was very invested to see how the story ended after having read the first book early this year while I was on vacation in Costa Rica. It can go back to the library tonight and I'll be moving on to my pile of other books between naps.

What have I learned from all this?

1. Keep wearing your masks! I'd recently upgraded to some nice 3M Aura N95s but guess what? They can't help you if you aren't wearing them.
2. Get Paxlovid if you can. It made an immediate, noticeable difference in how I felt. Yes, it makes your mouth taste horrible, but as long as you keep eating and drinking neutral things, you can make it dissipate. I know there's a risk of COVID bounceback after the treatment course ends, but apparently that's a risk with or without the medication.
3. Rest, rest, rest. Centralizing my existence on my bed was a great choice, not only to stay away from the uninfected member of the household, but also to force myself to take it easy. If I lived alone, I'm pretty sure I would have been overdoing things by now.

Finally, it's been terribly sad to have a first-row seat to the rapid breakdown of Twitter this week. If you're still there (I am, mostly to keep my account mine), turn on two-factor authentication, delete your DMs, don't provide any financial information, and consider restricting your account to your current followers. 

That's enough for now. I think I feel another nap coming on. See you here whenever you stop by!

Average Jane Is Sniffly

Ah, it's that wonderful time of the year when you get to play: Cold or Allergies? Except now it's: Cold, Allergies or COVID?

Last night I was leaning toward the virus theory because I was so tired, but of course I was tired! On Saturday I'd driven around all day leading a Caffeine Crawl and drinking entirely too much caffeine and sugar. Then I had to deal with the clocks being set back an hour. The wicked combination of my usual insomnia and the dog's breakfast time magically shifting to 5:00 a.m. meant I was behind on sleep and battling my own circadian rhythms. 

Yet somehow I woke up on Sunday inspired to actually complete my weekend to-do list, so I cleaned out my refrigerator, deep-cleaned the kitchen trash and recycling cans, and moved everything on the countertops to clean behind and underneath it all. Then I sat through more than two hours of election training, so I definitely came by my tiredness honestly. Ignoring the time change as I generally do at first, I turned in around 8:00 p.m. after loading up on remedies for post-nasal drip.

Today I took my umpteenth negative COVID test since 2020 and then had the wherewithal to cook myself a full breakfast, so I'm now betting on allergies unless something changes. 

Tomorrow I have 13+ hours of election work ahead of me, so I need all the energy I can get. Here's hoping a few more cups of cinnamon tea will put everything right.

Average Jane Plans Her Retreat from Twitter

You'd think that I wouldn't love a social media platform that helped make my own blog mostly obsolete, but Twitter has been my favorite online outpost since I joined in 2008. With it clearly circling the drain, I'm cautiously hanging on for now, but I can foresee the end coming soon, one way or another.

In the early days, local Twitter followers found each other quickly and if someone posted, "Who wants to grab lunch today downtown?" you could feasibly get a group of eight people together within an hour to share a meal. I made some great friends who turned out to live within a few blocks of me at the time and we still see each other regularly. I know people who found roommates, met spouses, and, like me, formed solid social lives around their "tweeps."

As the platform matured and I began following more people, it turned into an information firehose. I began deliberately shaping my feed to include perspectives from people in other communities, professions and cultures. I follow so many scientists, historians, activists and experts to learn interesting and inspiring things. 

Twitter has also been a vital source of news, from "on the ground" information when something is happening to filtered national news that surfaces the key stories of the day. I'm not sure what's going to take its place in that regard. 

More than once I've told someone, "I live on Twitter." It's been my hangout, my place to shout into the void when I'm feeling lonely, and a solid source of entertainment. I've been a small enough fish to stay off the radar of trolls for the most part. Plus, it probably helps that I also use it for the same kind of casual, everyday thoughts that this blog has always encompassed. 

Yes, many mornings it felt like doomscrolling was an unhealthy way to start the day, but I also know my own feelings enough to sense when to put down the phone and do something in the real world.

I've always been fully aware of the adage, "If you're not paying, you're the product." That's why I made sure I put in a ticket to get this blog back up and running after last week's outage. I am paying to be here, so I suppose this is where I'll plant my flag again. If nothing else, it makes me findable - and perhaps I'll start posting more regularly again to take the place of the 280-character running commentaries to which I've been so accustomed.

It's sad to see such a vibrant community deliberately destroyed. As much as I enjoy the Discord groups that have sprung up as an end run around the horribleness of social media moguls, they're too siloed to take the place of the Twitter experience. Fingers crossed that a good alternative presents itself soon.

Average Jane Does and Doesn't Get A New Stove

A few months ago, I was baking a quiche when the stove started beeping far too early and I looked over to see smoke coming out of the oven vents. The appliance had malfunctioned and within about 20 minutes, turned my lovely homemade quiche into a Pyrex pie plate full of near charcoal.

In its misguided, overheated fury, the oven couldn't be turned off with the usual button. I had to descend to the basement and flip its breaker, which meant it sat inert in its spot for more than two weeks while I waited for the new control panel it needed. Until then, I'd never realized how much I depended on it as a clock.

Repair day finally arrived and a technician put in a new primary control panel, which included the clock face and oven control buttons. That's the most expensive single part that my type of stove has, so if anything else ever breaks, it will be economically worthwhile to keep doing repairs.

Today, my stove is the same as it ever was, except that it's completely different. The LEDs are slightly brighter and greener now. When the timer goes off, the three tones sound for a noticeably longer time than they did before. I'd grown accustomed to baking things an extra five or ten minutes to make sure they were done in the middle, but now most baked goods are ready at the shorter end of the suggested baking range. The stove's brain and heart have been replaced and I never realized how intimately I'd gotten to know them over the approximately 20 years I'd had it until everything changed. 

I think a similar thing happens to people. Over a decade, two decades, three decades, everyone's brain and heart undergo changes. It's seldom all at once, except perhaps in instances like an ayahuasca experience, but the things that drive us and make us ourselves don't stay static. In relation to other people, that forces reckonings from time to time. Are those brighter, greener lights tolerable? Have our values and motivations changed so much that it's time to upend our lives completely?

Many times, we can get used to changes and figure out how to adjust slightly and continue moving down the same path. At other times, it makes more sense to veer in a new direction. And sometimes it boils down to what you can afford.

Anyway, I'm back to making quiches again.

Average Jane Accidentally Cleans Her Floors

Today on my lunch break, I noticed that my cat Trillian was being fairly active, so I looked to make sure her favorite toy, the Turbo Scratcher, was out where she could play with it. Trillian is a senior cat and has recently started taking pain medication for her arthritis, so I want her to be able to have some fun whenever she can.

The Turbo Scratcher was missing the ball that goes in the track, no doubt pried out at some juncture by Moose, our young chaos demon of a cat. It takes force to get the ball loose, but he's strong and determined.

Naturally, I started looking under various pieces of furniture to find the ball. I felt reasonably confident that I would find it pretty quickly because, really, where could it go? I was so young and naive then.

First I moved the sofa, which I apparently hadn't done in a while. I found a LOT of cat toys, including what was once a catnip-stuffed canvas banana but had become nothing but an empty peel. There were some dog toys under there, too, but no spinny ball.

I got out the dust mop because once I was aware of the sheer volume of cat hair under there, I couldn't just slide the couch back and pretend ignorance.

One of the "toys" under the sofa was a round lip balm that the cats had long ago stolen to bat around. I put it into the track of the toy, but Trillian gave it a couple of halfhearted bats and made it clear that it was not an acceptable alternative to the correct ball.

Next, I moved on to the rattan cabinet that sits by the window and is a popular cat perch. It partially covers the HVAC return for the living room and there were enough cat hair tufts festooning the grate that I put the dust mop aside and went to get the ShopVac. Down below the grate I found three neon-tinted toy mice that looked as though they'd fallen in more or less immediately after the cats received them. I vacuumed the grate, the duct and the back of the cabinet thoroughly and made sure to hold the mice firmly and get the dust bunnies off of them as well.

The clock was ticking, but I really wanted to get Trillian set up with her toy while she was in the mood for it, so I applied the dust mop beneath both beds to see what I could retrieve. I discovered that Dottie had torn up an entire paper towel under my bed, but my efforts only shook loose a couple of toys.

After work, I resumed my quest and went to retrieve the toy stash that gathers beneath the built-in towel cabinet in the bathroom. For some reason, it was designed to be open underneath, even though it's several feet deep and there's no way to see or reach under there. I put a sock over the nozzle of the ShopVac to get the small, light items out first and then removed it to suction onto anything larger. The good news is that I found a bunch of cat toys. The bad news is that the ball was not among them.

My floors were mostly swept, so that was good. But I was running out of places to look for the ball and I knew deep in my heart that if I ordered a replacement one, the original would turn up immediately.

Then I remembered that I hadn't moved my living room chair. As soon as I slid it just a little, I spotted something blue and round caught in the power strip behind the chair. EUREKA! It was the ball I'd been searching for all afternoon.

I put it back in the Turbo Scratcher and gave it a good spin, but Trillian had long since gone off somewhere to take a nap. But it's ready for her next play session as long as Moose doesn't step in again.

Average Jane's Blog is Old Enough to Vote

Yesterday marked the 18th anniversary of this blog! I've even categorized this post under "Weblogs" for old time's sake.

As you can easily see, I don't write here much anymore, but I keep it active so I can always find my favorite recipes and look up how old my pets are. Sometimes I read back through old posts just to appreciate the person I was when I wrote them.

In the early days, I wrote a blog post almost every weekday as a warmup for going to work and writing. My current job involves writing all day, but today I lack the energy for that much extra composition.

My primary social media hangout these days is Twitter and I can assure you that what I write there is fully as mundane as the posts that longtime Average Jane readers expect. Except now I sometimes post my Wordle scores as well.

To mark this point in time, I'm sitting in my living room with Dottie the chihuahua on my lap, Trillian to my left, Moose running around the living room, Xena and Dr. Jones sleeping on my bed, and Kaylee upstairs in the studio waiting for me to start work.

I've been working in my comfortable home office since March 2020 and expect to continue that indefinitely at this job because most of my colleagues work in other cities anyway.

It feels like I'm home all the time, but I did spend more than a week in Costa Rica this January at a yoga retreat and I traveled to Denver that same month for a beautiful wedding.

My coffee is ready, so I'll wrap this up. It's time for me to put some red beans in the crockpot with aromatics so I can make red beans and rice for dinner. Then I need to fix breakfast and start work in an hour or so.

Thanks for stopping by!

Average Jane Makes Apple Coffee Cake

I love having some kind of sweet baked good with my coffee. Since I work from home now, I’ve developed a repertoire of muffins, scones and cakes that I can whip up in the morning and enjoy all week. One of them is a recipe I found online and immediately started adjusting to my own preferences. I cover this cake with foil and the apples help make it more moist over time.

Apple Pecan Coffee Cake

• 1-1/2 cups flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. baking spice or cake spice blend (I use Penzey’s)
• 1 large apple, peeled and chopped
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup sour cream

Topping

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tbsp. melted butter
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans

Glaze

• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp. milk
• 1/4 tsp. vanilla extract

Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Sift the dry ingredients together in a large bowl, add apple pieces, and toss to mix. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, vanilla extract, vegetable oil and sour cream. Add to the dry ingredients and mix just until blended. Spread into a greased 8-inch square pan. In a small bowl, mix the topping ingredients and sprinkle over the top of the cake batter. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick poked into the center comes out clean. Place on a cooling rack after removing from oven. Mix glaze ingredients and drizzle over the top of the cake once it’s cool. 

Average Jane and the Nearly Forgotten Candy

Yesterday as I was searching my recipe file for something else, I ran across my late great-aunt's recipe for something called Stein candy. When I was a kid, she would make batches of this candy every year, cut it into squares, box it up, and mail it to all of us from South Dakota where she lived.

I don't know what "Stein" represents in the name, but the internet doesn't seem to have any record of such a candy, so maybe it's from someone she knew with that last name.

Because I was a kid and candy is made of sugar, I ate my share every year, despite the general acknowledgement by everyone in the family that it wasn't particularly good. The problem was that it was way too chewy, so you'd spend forever trying to gnaw away at a piece to finish it.

However, finding the recipe makes me curious as to whether it would be possible to make it come out better. The ingredients certainly sound good: brown sugar, tons of butter, corn syrup, chocolate, peanuts and vanilla. The amounts aren't stated for the nuts and vanilla, but you can hazard a decent guess. There's also no telling whether we're talking squares of unsweetened chocolate or an actual candy bar, but there's enough sugar that you'd probably be safe with the former.

One hint as to the problem is the instruction to cook 3 minutes or so past the soft-ball stage. That's a LONG time considering that firm-ball sounds like the goal for a caramel-type candy and they're only 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit apart. I think a candy thermometer and a goal of no more than 250°F might very well result in candy most people have a fighting chance at consuming. (See update below: once I was making it I decided to follow the cooking instructions as written and it worked out exactly the way I wanted it.)

So, what do you think? Should I give it a try this year? 

UPDATE 12/5/2021: I made it! I'm revising the recipe below to reflect what I actually did because it came out perfectly.

Stein Candy

2 cups brown sugar
1 1/2 cups corn syrup
2 sticks butter
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate
2 tsp. vanilla extract
6 oz. salted peanuts, coarsely chopped

Combine brown sugar, corn syrup, butter and chocolate in a saucepan and cook, stirring constantly, to soft-ball stage (235-245°F) and continue boiling for another 3 minutes or so. Remove from heat, then thoroughly stir in vanilla extract and chopped peanuts. Pour into a square baking pan that's greased and lined with parchment and allow to cool. Cut into 1-inch squares (a pizza cutter worked well for me) and wrap each in waxed paper.

Note: If you use unsalted peanuts, add 1/2 tsp. of salt with them.