Uncategorized

Good Things are Happening

/ Ashley / 6 Comments

So that whole 30-day challenge has sort of gone out the window, but not without good reason. I’ve been much too busy the last week preparing to change jobs. I was a little surprised to see that I hadn’t shared this with you all, but I was promoted last week. I’ll start my new position on Wednesday.

I’ve been a data entry and service support technician for the last five years (full-time in summers and winter breaks, and part-time through my final five semesters). This is a fancy way of saying I enter hundreds of trips and fuel receipts for large (and small) trucking companies for tax reporting purposes. I also helped out with other projects in the department that mean nothing to anybody who doesn’t work with me, but whatever: I helped out with file audits, title tracking, prepared quarterly tax reports, base plate renewals – lots of really fun and interesting things. In my new position, I will working directly with two of our major clients (a large electric company and a wine (!) company) to assist with their compliance  of federal, state, and local regulations. My new position comes with more responsibilities and probably a lot of unique challenges as I’m trained and beginning to learn and understand the regulations that are relevant to my clients. I’ll also be making a bit more money than my last position and I have a full benefit package also. It’s like I’m an adult or something.

In other exciting news, I’ve been nominated by the uniquely witty Jess over at Mitten’s Blog Stop for the Lovely Blog award. This is my first blogger-nominated award, other than being Freshly Pressed a few weeks ago. Though I don’t blog for the glamour and prestige, it’s nice to be recognized by bloggers I respect and enjoy reading.

I guess the rules of this award are  that you thank and link the person who nominated you, write 7 things about yourself, and then nominate people in turn and tell them!

So…seven things about me:

  1.  I’m currently reading DFW’s Infinite Jest and my environment has to be completely silent for me to concentrate and appreciate his novel with 50 conflicts and roughly 250 characters. I might be exaggerating, but my point is that it’s a very complex novel and I wish I had a week to lock myself up without any distractions so I could plow through the thing.
  2. I just had a Christmas party with two of my closest friends. We had brunch for dinner, exchanged gifts, and drank champagne.
  3. I took four semesters of Russian in college and remember close to nothing.
  4. I’m planning a vacation for spring break with my best friend. We’re hoping LivingSocial will give us a good deal on an all inclusive resort someplace hot and exotic where we can have short-lived romances with foreign boys.
  5. I have a strange fascination with Kanye West. I wouldn’t call myself a fan because I listen to his music with when I’m not feeling like myself. Kanye is the soundtrack to my existential crises (breakups, drunk nights, jogging, etc).
  6. Virtually all of the fiction I have ever written is memoir in a bad costume. I used to think I just wasn’t very creative and then I learned that memoir and personal narrative are legitimate art forms.
  7. I was born on Leap Day, so technically, I’m only six.

I think Jess said I’m supposed to nominate 15 bloggers for this award, but really? Fifteen? That’s like…all of the blogs I read. Though I appreciate all the wonderful posts and content I read, I think that awards should be selective and reflect those bloggers who I truly think have Lovely Blogs. My nominees are as follows:

I would love to nominate Jess because I truly love and admire her posts, but I’d hate to start an award-war (reminiscent of the once-charming “poke wars” on Facebook). Regardless, congratulations to my nominees! Feel free to just accept the award, repost it & nominate your own choices, or display the award on your blog.

I’d like to thank everyone who reads and supports me in my blogging endeavor. It means so much to have a group of friends and family like you guys.

I love to eat dutch babies.

/ Ashley / 13 Comments

In sixth grade, my language arts teacher asked us to name a favorite dish our families made. Since my name lies in the middle of the alphabet, I’ve always been  able to listen to my peers and make a comfortably boring response. I must have been daydreaming about buying my first Abercrombie t-shirt, because as my classmates named things like roast beef and french bread pizza, there was a pause before I answered.

“Ashley?” Mrs. Hertz said.

“Dutch babies.”

Cue my classmates’ laughter. Cue my mortification. Cue my red face. Cue the urge to crawl into the hallway.

I remember thinking that I wanted to give a different response. I wanted mine to stick out of the crowd. This surprises me to this day. From what I recall, middle school was not a time when I wanted to be an individual. Like every awkward adolescent, I wanted to bring as little attention to myself as possible. So of course saying my favorite dish is dutch babies makes perfect sense.

My teacher was puzzled and probably stifled her own laughter. “Dutch babies?”

I began the furious scrambling of embarrassment. “It’s like a cross between pancakes and french toast.”

“How do you make them?”

I was eleven years old. How the hell was I suppose to know? “Umm. I don’t know. You bake them?”

“Okay, when do you eat dutch babies?”

Until that moment, it never occurred to me what it sounded like. It sounded like I enjoyed eating infants from The Netherlands.

“At breakfast. My mom makes them on the weekends sometimes.”

“Oh okay,” she said. Luckily, she moved onto the next person, because I was probably on the verge of tears or something.

Unwittingly, I had given a boy, Andy, more ammunition. A few weeks earlier, he had started to tease me for reading too much. I remember passing him on stairs towards lunch, and he would taunt me: “How many books did you read today, Ashley? Twenty?”

His point wasn’t that I always had my nose in a book, his point was that I read because I didn’t have friends. Or at least that’s how I interpreted it, and why it hurt. Looking back, that wasn’t true. I had friends. we might have been a little on the dorky side since we bonded over orchestra rehearsals, but we were still friends.

But now he got to make fun of me for being a cannibal.

It wasn’t that I was ruthlessly teased. It was just one of those stupid middle school things – he was cool, and I was somewhere lost in the middle of the crowd.  It felt like he said these things out of a compulsion to make noise. I think he held the responsibility of entertaining his friends, so every time a punchline presented itself, he was obligated to take advantage.

So now he asked, “Eaten any dutch babies lately, Ashley?”

He was so creative.

Anyway, I guess I haven’t changed much, because this morning I found myself being a bookworm cannibal while reading Infinite Jest and eating dutch babies.

And you know what, Andy? IT WAS AWESOME.

By the way, if you’d like to try my 11 year old self’s favorite dish, here’s the recipe:

4 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup flour

5tbsp butter.

Preheat oven to 375. Blend eggs, milk, and flour. Melt butter separately and pour into a 9×13 pan. Pour egg mixture into pan. Bake for 30min. It will bubble up and be lightly crispy. Serve with warm syrup.

This morning, I put a little vanilla in the egg mixture, sprinkled some cinnamon before baking, and then served it with sliced bananas.

In case you were curious…

/ Ashley / 1 Comment

…raw meat is still fucking gross.

My cousin gave me a small slow cooker and accompanying cookbook for Christmas last year. I decided to put it to use today by making turkey breast with cranberry-sage dressing. I chopped up my celery, shallots, sage, and parsley without issue. In fact, it gave me pleasure. The scent of freshly chopped sage is heavenly. And parsley is surprisingly aromatic. I mixed it with my dressing and chicken broth. It was just fine. But when I went to put the turkey breast in the cooker, I had problems.

The recipe specifically called for a 2-3lb bone-in turkey breast half, so obviously that’s what I bought. But the damn thing wouldn’t fit in my 2-quart slow cooker. Nevermind this book of recipes is made specifically for 2-quart slow cookers. Right. Have you seen a 2-3lb turkey breast half? It’s huge. So, I decided to cut off the meat and put it in the slow cooker.

I know why boneless, skinless chicken breasts are so popular. Setting aside all moral and PETA-related concerns, they make cooking easy and completely undisgusting. Bones make you remember you’re preparing the meat of a creature. Bones make you realize you’re cutting off flesh that was once alive. Bones make you realize that the meat you eat is attached by tendons. Bones make you realize that raw meat is gross.

I tried to get as much meat as I could , but it was attached to the bone and that made it difficult. I paid almost $10 for this piece of meat, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be eating about $6 worth. But if the smell of my kitchen is any indication, the meal will not make me make this face:

 

…and then I cried to a strange asian woman.

/ Ashley / 4 Comments

So, you know how  my last post was about how I got anxious about driving and losing everything in a second? There was an accident on the highway yesterday morning. Thankfully, I wasn’t part of it.

But my car did die on the way to work. That word sounds so dramatic. Die. I suppose context doesn’t matter either. But in this context, it’s almost certainly not the right word, but I don’t know what else to say.

My car ceased to work on the way to work. My car lost power. My car decided to nap on  the way to work. Instead of driving to work, my car preferred to overheat and force me to coast into a parking lot.

I tried to call my dad. And my brother, Corey. And my parents’ house. No answer at any of them. I was particularly worried about Corey, because he leaves for work around the same time I do, and his phone went directly to voicemail. I was half convinced he was in what Facebook updates lead me to believe was a 12-car pileup (he wasn’t).

I didn’t know what to do. I was about to change out of my heels into the flats I keep in my trunk to walk the mile to my parents’ house when I remembered that I know people outside of my immediate family.

So I called my grandma.

She sounded sleepy, so I just gave her my spiel. “Grandma? This is Ashley. My car just died on the way to work and I can’t get a hold of my dad or anyone else. Could you come pick me up and take me to my parents’ house?” Of course, I started crying too. Because I’m awesome like that.

“What?”

“I just need a ride to my parents’ house. I’ll be able to borrow one of their cars.”

“Who ah you?”

“Is this Grandma Bea?”

“Who ah you?”

“You’re not Bernice, are you?”

“Who ah you?”

I realized I had just cried to a strange asian woman. So I hung up. I called an aunt who was going to pick me up, but then my dad called me.

He saved the day, like he always does.

Of course later that day, my dad was able to get the car started and running without any problems. I love when that happens.