~ spaetzle ~

Oh, how glorious that it is Wednesday! Last night was officially my last class for the semester. I've been hauling all kinds of bottom trying to finish up my final project, which culminated in a presentation last night. As you all know, I absolutely love public speaking. Me, getting up in front of people, explaining my budget trend analysis of a public agency, talk about a fun time! Yea... Those of you who are not in school, you probably enjoy that aspect of your existence. Those of us who are, what suckers!

This is where I've been spending a lot of time recently. On my computer screen is the concluding slide to my PowerPoint. It reads, "Confidence...in the trend line presupposes confidence in the data." For some time, I have bombarded many of the humans in my life with tales of frustration in my data collection process. Indeed, for two of the years I was analyzing, the data was incomplete and inconsistent. Unfortunately, I did not articulate my data collection frustration to all of the humans in my life, otherwise I could have unearthed the reason and the solution much sooner. On Monday, the day before my project was due, I chose to tell my boss these frustrations, and I discovered that she used to have a connection to the public agency. It was then that I learned of the crazy misuse of public funds scandal that happened during the time frame with inaccurate data. gar! I can't begin to say how many hours I wasted trying to make sense of the budget documents from this era, when there is no sense to be made of them. At any rate, my project is done, my presentation is done (and it went very well, in fact), and I am free to enjoy life again.

Sometime after 9pm last night when I arrived home from class, I cracked open a yummy beer and went bananas making "Wolfgang's Beef Goulash." For some time, as a result of school, I have been neglecting aspects of my personal life. Food is one of them, and boy, do I love me the food! As anyone who has sampled my cooking knows, I am not exactly a gourmet. Josh deserves accolades, not only for his stomach of steel but for his good manners in saying, "Yum" whenever I force him to eat something I made. I must say, I really enjoy the process of cooking even if the end result is questionable...and now that I am reminded, let us take a little stroll down memory lane...

...When my sister and I were kids, one play activity that we regularly engaged at our Grandma's house was 'play cooking.' Doing this, we made a huge mess in the kitchen, pulling out pots and pans and cooking up some horrendous concoction of spices. Thinking back, I have a difficult time understanding why we were allowed to do this. This tradition of improvised cooking remains with me today, as I continue to defy the limits placed on me by recipes.

This is what Josh has to look forward to next. On the right, my first attempt at spaetzle, cute little dumpling-type thingies. Amazingly, I followed the recipe... almost. I had a bit of difficulty following the process to transform the spaetzle goo into dumpling things. I made a ginormous mess, splattered spaetzle goo everywhere, and it was a big freak-show. Out of desperation, I whipped out the potato masher and made do with that. On the right, the goulash with no modifications! At 11:00, the concoction was done and I sat down to enjoy my diner. Yu-MMY!

This is my sad, neglected yarn and knitting projects stash. I am so excited to delve back into this, full force! I've got several projects I'm working on, and several that I've a hankering to begin. I must say, Raverly is distracting me to no end. Recently, I discovered a network to buy and sell out of print books and magazines. I guess it's no different than ebay, but still. What glory! A few days ago, I negotiated my purchase (for $5.00) of an out of print issue of Interweave Knits that I have been lusting after for some time. I am really excited about this.

In mountain biking news, I continue to be an accomplisher! Over the weekend, Josh and I rode the Corrals loop. There were a couple of parts to the loop that I had developed some kind of horrible fear last year when I was crashing all the time. It's crazy how fear can completely distort reality. There's one section coming down Trail 4 where it's particularly choppy and sandy. Even though I've never had a problem riding it, the fear I had built up about crashing caused me to feel irrationally terrified of certain sections of trail, and this one choppy section of Trail 4 I had built up in my mind as being a total death trap. So, riding this loop and coming down Trail 4, I just had to do so that I can eliminate all of the bad feelings that I developed last year. Successfully riding Trail 4 without being terrified was the last mental hurdle in the process. So, on the ride this weekend, as I started my descent down Trail 4, I kept telling myself, "You can do this, you can do this" and taking deep breaths. I was expecting for my knees to get all wobbly on the scary part. But as I started riding the choppy section, the knees never got wobbly. And there was nothing, NOTHING scary about it. I had a great ride.

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