I got my Knitpicks catalog in the mail yesterday, and while browsing through it, saw a little article on Miriam Tegels, the official world's faster knitter (Guinness even says so) (the book, not the beer). Constantly bemoaning my slow knitting speeds, I had to check this out.
I almost wish I hadn't. Watch this.
Knitting fast just for the sake of knitting fast has never been my thing (and good thing, too). I always enjoyed the meditative, relaxing pace of my knitting. But it does get frustrating when things take so long (as I've mentioned before). All I could think of while watching this was, "Wow, if I could knit even half that fast, I could actually start a sweater in the season I hoped to wear it in, and finish it in time!" If I could knit a sweater in a month to six weeks I'd be happy. Miriam could probably knit one in a couple of days (or less). I just tried to imagine sitting down and knitting, like, an entire scarf or baby blanket during one episode of your favorite TV show.
Of course - she must have to spend a fortune on yarn that way. See, there's always a bright side - I only have to buy yarn once a year or so.
But, I'm plugging away at my sweater - got several more rows done last night. I'm nearing completion of the third repeat of the pattern on the back, so that's not too terrible. (I don't remember how many I need to do, it's in my notes which aren't handy - 7 or 8 maybe?). I started it last winter with the intent for it to be a summer sweater (3/4 length sleeves and all). Then when summer blew by, I decided it would make an acceptable winter sweater (back to long sleeves). Now it looks like it's back to being a summer sweater - a next summer sweater. Ah well. It's all knitting, so it's all good.
Moving on ... okay, I don't make a particularly fancy lasagna - I don't use ricotta cheese or anything like that, just plain fare - lasagna noodles, sauce and hamburger, shredded mozzarella and grated Parmesan cheese - but I love the way I make it (and the Dread Reverend's pretty happy with it, too, so we're all that matter). But I always made it the 'old fashioned' way - boiling the lasagna noodles, then making the layers of lasagna in the pan, then baking it to melt the cheese and heat it.
Well. I went to make lasagna last night, and discovered that by accident I had bought the oven ready kind that you don't have to boil first. I intentionally never bought this before because I was just skeptical - 'oven ready' implied, to me, 'pre-cooked' - and I didn't see how pre-cooked lasagna could be any good.
So when I discovered that was all I had, and I already had the sauce and hamburger cooking on the stove, I decided to go for it. Man - was I glad I did. This was the best pan of lasagna I've ever made in my life! I don't know if it was just the lasagna, or that in combination with the sauce (I always buy plain sauce, then spice it up to my liking, never the same way twice - maybe it just turned out exceptionally good this time). But I was deeply impressed with the oven ready lasagna. It was definintely done after baking, not sort of chewy like I expected it to be. But at the same time it had some structure left to it, wasn't all limp and lifeless like my lasagna is when I boil it first (even when I boil it al dente - the baking after the fact seemed to kind of wreck it).
So, kudos for oven ready lasagna - I'll never boil lasagna noodles again! For what it's worth, here's my lasagna recipe. Seasoned cooks (ha ha, pun intended) might find this boring, but the unadventurous and / or new cooks might like it. And it's open to a lot of personal tweaking. I happen not to like chunky pasta sauces with veggies in them, which is why I use plain sauce and fix it up. But you could of course use one of those chunky veggie sauces, or add mushrooms, or anything you like.
A simple basic starting place, but really good even just as is.
12 lasagna noodles - oven ready!
2 cans Hunts Traditional spaghetti sauce
about a pound or so of ground round or hamburger
1 pkg. shredded mozzarella cheese
grated parmesan
spices: Basil, Oregano, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Salt
Pour the sauce into a pan and heat (mostly because it tastes yucky cold, and you're going to be doctoring it up)
Add spices - those listed or experiment - and taste till you like it
Meanwhile, cook and drain the hamburger
Stir sauce and hamburger together. Spoon some into the bottom of your pan - I don't have a pan measurement for you because I don't have a proper lasagna pan at the moment, but ideally it'll be just wide enough for 3 strips of lasagna to cover the bottom. Or 4 pieces across the bottom - then you might need more than 12, depending on how thick you like your lasagna. Three to four layers of noodles works well for me.
Place 3 lasagna strips across the pan, on top of the sauce and hamburger mix you just spread around the bottom of the pan. On top of that spread a layer of the sauce and hamburger mix, a generous layer of mozzarella cheese, and a good sprinkle of parmesan. Repeat those layers till you place the last layer of lasanga, top with sauce and hamburger, and lots of cheese.
Cover tightly with tinfoil and bake at 375 for about an hour (or whatever oven temperature your particular box of oven ready lasagna tells you to use; that's what mine said). Take the pan out of the oven but leave covered and let stand 10 to 15 minutes. Then dig in - num yummy! (Also to-die-for left over).
Friday, November 21, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Knitting and Work - If Only The Twain Should Meet
It'd be cool to make my living by knitting. I wonder how people do that?
I have started working on the sweater again. I got 10 or 12 rows done on the back last night. Not a lot, compared to how many there are to go, but definite progress. I'm kind of psyched about it again, and want to start working on it more regularly.
But since the time changed, it's dark when I get home from work at 5:00 or 5:30, and by the time dinner's over the night's feeling pretty well shot, there may be a lot more knitting evenings ensuing.
The work situation has roller-coasted through several layers of hell lately. Last Thursday my boss dumped so much additional work on me I thought my brain was going to explode. I had one of those insomniac nights Thursday night, and at 5:00 a.m. Friday morning (still awake) I called off work. I didn't go in Saturday either, and I spent those two days basically in a horrible depression about what I was going to do about that lunatic job.
Finally by Sunday a plan had formulated. I went in Sunday and spent four hours doing nothing but prioritizing and scheduling my work for the week, assigning things days based on their upcoming deadlines. Then I took everything that had deadlines I wasn't going to be able to get to, and dumped it squarely back on my boss' desk with a big note telling him, "This stuff all has imminent deadlines, and I can't get it done in time."
There. Let him deal with it. And that's the ongoing plan. Every couple days I'm going to take some time to sort and prioritize my new work, and anything with imminent deadlines that I can't get to, I'm returning to him. I figure that's the only way he's ever going to understand the concept of "too much work and too little time to do it" - if HE is the one who has to deal with it, rather than just continually throwing it at me and my co-workers and saying, "Well, you figure it out."
Since I've taken a lot of the pressure off myself, it frees up some brain space to start relaxing in the evening again - hence the knitting.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a slackass who doesn't want to work. I work hard at that job, and take my responsibilities seriously. In fact, that's exactly why I can't let him over-commit me to work I can't do - because I know I can't do it, and I can't just sit back and watch it not get done, and not care - or kill myself with stress trying to do more than is humanly possible.
Balance! That's all I ask - balance. If I have to physically force the balance by shifting things around myself, well, that works for me.
Looking forward to getting through today and coming home and knitting some more!
I have started working on the sweater again. I got 10 or 12 rows done on the back last night. Not a lot, compared to how many there are to go, but definite progress. I'm kind of psyched about it again, and want to start working on it more regularly.
But since the time changed, it's dark when I get home from work at 5:00 or 5:30, and by the time dinner's over the night's feeling pretty well shot, there may be a lot more knitting evenings ensuing.
The work situation has roller-coasted through several layers of hell lately. Last Thursday my boss dumped so much additional work on me I thought my brain was going to explode. I had one of those insomniac nights Thursday night, and at 5:00 a.m. Friday morning (still awake) I called off work. I didn't go in Saturday either, and I spent those two days basically in a horrible depression about what I was going to do about that lunatic job.
Finally by Sunday a plan had formulated. I went in Sunday and spent four hours doing nothing but prioritizing and scheduling my work for the week, assigning things days based on their upcoming deadlines. Then I took everything that had deadlines I wasn't going to be able to get to, and dumped it squarely back on my boss' desk with a big note telling him, "This stuff all has imminent deadlines, and I can't get it done in time."
There. Let him deal with it. And that's the ongoing plan. Every couple days I'm going to take some time to sort and prioritize my new work, and anything with imminent deadlines that I can't get to, I'm returning to him. I figure that's the only way he's ever going to understand the concept of "too much work and too little time to do it" - if HE is the one who has to deal with it, rather than just continually throwing it at me and my co-workers and saying, "Well, you figure it out."
Since I've taken a lot of the pressure off myself, it frees up some brain space to start relaxing in the evening again - hence the knitting.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a slackass who doesn't want to work. I work hard at that job, and take my responsibilities seriously. In fact, that's exactly why I can't let him over-commit me to work I can't do - because I know I can't do it, and I can't just sit back and watch it not get done, and not care - or kill myself with stress trying to do more than is humanly possible.
Balance! That's all I ask - balance. If I have to physically force the balance by shifting things around myself, well, that works for me.
Looking forward to getting through today and coming home and knitting some more!
Sunday, November 2, 2008
The Internet: Blessing, Curse
I've been having a problem with insomnia for awhile now. But it's lately developed a new twist: paranoia. (What's that called together - insomnoia? parasomnia?)
It goes like this. I will be exhausted throughout the early evening, or maybe just start getting really tired around bedtime, but either way - usually I am tired when I first begin thinking about going to bed. Then one of several things happens. Either I go to bed, but can't fall asleep - feel wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow and the lights are off - or I fall asleep, but wake up in a few hours totally wide awake and unable to go back to sleep.
This was annoying enough. But lately when I'm laying there totally unable to sleep (or when I wake up in the middle of the night), I'm suddenly beseiged by a bout of total paranoia. I will be worried about anything and everything, but not just normal every day worries. I will either take semi-legitimate worries and blow them completely out of proportion, or I'll fabricate totally unfounded fears and let my mind elaborate on them for awhile. Then my heart rate goes up, I start feeling all antsy and anxious, and that just keep me more awake. Oy!
This is really getting on my nerves. A couple months ago this was bad enough that sometimes several nights a week I would wake up in the middle of the night, and be up until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., when I had to work the next day (or, umm, that day).
At least tonight it's the weekend - and yes, you guessed - that's why I'm blogging this blather at a little after midnight. Not that that's late for some people, but it generally is for me, and earlier in the evening I was so completely exhausted I could barely hold my eyes open, and was only hoping I could stay awake until 8:00 p.m. (as going to bed any earlier seemed just wrong).
But as soon as my head hit the pillow, bam - I was wide awake. I tried staying there for about half an hour, then gave up.
An acquaintence of mine who happens to be a counselor told me once that insomnia has to be watched carefully, because if it goes on too long it can begin to create paranoia. Now I'm beginning to see what he meant.
So I'm up and awake, and decide to go do some browsing online. For fun, I typed into Dogpile "insomnia and paranoia" to see what I could find out. I turned up a blog where someone was talking about a disease they'd found online (probably during a late night insomniac bout of the same type of sleepless surfing I was indulging in) called "fatal familal insomnia." Just what it sounds like - the patient develops insomnia which worsens over several months until they can't sleep at all; hallucinations and complete delusions occur, followed by death. There is no cure.
"Oh, great," I thought. "Just what an insomniac who is also paranoid needs to read in the middle of the night!" I'd have been convinced I have it, except it's extremely rare - it's definitely genetic, and only 28 families in the world have been discovered who have the gene. I think I'm safe in assuming mine isn't one of them, or I'd probably know it by now.
Unless I've developed some mutant strain of it ...
Okay, enough of that. To be more serious (not that death by wakefulness isn't serious) ... I actually am pretty sure I know what's causing mine, and I just have to get my head out of my ass and do what needs done to fix it. It's actually a number of things all piling up. Stress - both job and home. Drinking way too much diet Coke, especially throughout the evening (apparently my former immunity to caffeine is wearing off as I age). And I need to do a bit of personal cognitive-behavioral therapy on myself. I've just let myself become too negative, too always ready to assume and expect the worst, and way too much of a worrywart. I recognize that I do this, in just about every aspect of life (day or night, so it's not just a late-night sleeplessness thing). I've always been a somewhat negative person (okay, those of you who know me - stop with the sarcastic "(snorf) Somewhat!?").
But in the past year or so it seems to have gotten much worse. And that is something I could have some control over. While I don't practice what I preach, I am a firm believer in the concept of mind over anything. Our thoughts really do to a great degree create or effect our reality, and I really could work on not always seeing the world through soot-colored glasses.
As for stress, well, unfortunately it just got ramped up. My boss fired one of my co-workers Friday. I understand why he did it, but man, it wrecked my job. I was already just barely treading water with my own work - we recently hired a new person who had no law office experience at all, so I am training her totally from scratch - a very time-consuming thing.
My boss had also recently assigned me to create and handle a 'case management' system to monitor and track the status of all his domestic cases (several hundred) because we hadn't previously had such a system, and too many things were falling through the cracks. Now, I think this is a great idea, and I didn't mind doing it, in fact I was sort of looking forward to both the challenge, and the increased organization it would bring to the office. But it has been a very time-consuming thing to create and tweak the system until it works for us, and to begin entering all the cases into it. Out of the several hundred, so far only 30 are actually up and running in the system.
With all of that, I was barely keeping up as it was. Now I have to take on all of my former co-worker's work as well as mine. This just about doubled my work load, and I do not honesty know how I'm going to possibly do it - even increasing my hours from 25 a week to 40+ and working Saturdays, I still don't see how it's going to get done on time - because it's not like I can just say "I'll get to it when I get to it." It's a law office - everything has deadlines, and everything that isn't an emergency right now will be in 3 days.
They will replace her, but in my past experience of this (many experiences - there have been at least 14 or 15 people there who have quit or been fired) it takes quite awhile to find someone, and even if we're lucky enough to find someone with law office experience, I still have to train them for how we do things, our systems. So I'll be training two people, with all the rest of it.
Yeah, it's enough to make my head spin. In the 12 years I've been there, I have never, ever been in this bad a place with my work. I'm completely overwhelmed and do not see any way I can do all this.
That alone ramped my stress up to possibly unmanageable levels. And I'm sure it's what's contributing to tonight's wee-hours blogfest.
But there's one bottom line to all this: I am the only one who can do anything about any of it. I have to get myself straightened up, and start normalizing my life. I have to stop with the diet Coke and maybe in fact any caffeine for awhile, until I get this situation under control. I want to start eating better, and taking my vitamins again. Some exericse would probably do me a world of good - both for reducing stress, and maybe for helping me be relaxed and tired enough in the evening to actually sleep. I want to start meditating every day, to help calm my over-anxious paranoid mind.
And as for work ... I really don't know yet what I'm going to do about that, except do the biggest emergencies each day, and the rest of it will just have to wait. And my boss is just going to have to understand that. Fortunately, he's very cool that way, and he won't give me nearly as much grief as I give myself.
Well, I feel a little better for having written it all out. I'm still wide awake, but not as stressed.
And the bonus - I bet I put you right to sleep!
It goes like this. I will be exhausted throughout the early evening, or maybe just start getting really tired around bedtime, but either way - usually I am tired when I first begin thinking about going to bed. Then one of several things happens. Either I go to bed, but can't fall asleep - feel wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow and the lights are off - or I fall asleep, but wake up in a few hours totally wide awake and unable to go back to sleep.
This was annoying enough. But lately when I'm laying there totally unable to sleep (or when I wake up in the middle of the night), I'm suddenly beseiged by a bout of total paranoia. I will be worried about anything and everything, but not just normal every day worries. I will either take semi-legitimate worries and blow them completely out of proportion, or I'll fabricate totally unfounded fears and let my mind elaborate on them for awhile. Then my heart rate goes up, I start feeling all antsy and anxious, and that just keep me more awake. Oy!
This is really getting on my nerves. A couple months ago this was bad enough that sometimes several nights a week I would wake up in the middle of the night, and be up until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., when I had to work the next day (or, umm, that day).
At least tonight it's the weekend - and yes, you guessed - that's why I'm blogging this blather at a little after midnight. Not that that's late for some people, but it generally is for me, and earlier in the evening I was so completely exhausted I could barely hold my eyes open, and was only hoping I could stay awake until 8:00 p.m. (as going to bed any earlier seemed just wrong).
But as soon as my head hit the pillow, bam - I was wide awake. I tried staying there for about half an hour, then gave up.
An acquaintence of mine who happens to be a counselor told me once that insomnia has to be watched carefully, because if it goes on too long it can begin to create paranoia. Now I'm beginning to see what he meant.
So I'm up and awake, and decide to go do some browsing online. For fun, I typed into Dogpile "insomnia and paranoia" to see what I could find out. I turned up a blog where someone was talking about a disease they'd found online (probably during a late night insomniac bout of the same type of sleepless surfing I was indulging in) called "fatal familal insomnia." Just what it sounds like - the patient develops insomnia which worsens over several months until they can't sleep at all; hallucinations and complete delusions occur, followed by death. There is no cure.
"Oh, great," I thought. "Just what an insomniac who is also paranoid needs to read in the middle of the night!" I'd have been convinced I have it, except it's extremely rare - it's definitely genetic, and only 28 families in the world have been discovered who have the gene. I think I'm safe in assuming mine isn't one of them, or I'd probably know it by now.
Unless I've developed some mutant strain of it ...
Okay, enough of that. To be more serious (not that death by wakefulness isn't serious) ... I actually am pretty sure I know what's causing mine, and I just have to get my head out of my ass and do what needs done to fix it. It's actually a number of things all piling up. Stress - both job and home. Drinking way too much diet Coke, especially throughout the evening (apparently my former immunity to caffeine is wearing off as I age). And I need to do a bit of personal cognitive-behavioral therapy on myself. I've just let myself become too negative, too always ready to assume and expect the worst, and way too much of a worrywart. I recognize that I do this, in just about every aspect of life (day or night, so it's not just a late-night sleeplessness thing). I've always been a somewhat negative person (okay, those of you who know me - stop with the sarcastic "(snorf) Somewhat!?").
But in the past year or so it seems to have gotten much worse. And that is something I could have some control over. While I don't practice what I preach, I am a firm believer in the concept of mind over anything. Our thoughts really do to a great degree create or effect our reality, and I really could work on not always seeing the world through soot-colored glasses.
As for stress, well, unfortunately it just got ramped up. My boss fired one of my co-workers Friday. I understand why he did it, but man, it wrecked my job. I was already just barely treading water with my own work - we recently hired a new person who had no law office experience at all, so I am training her totally from scratch - a very time-consuming thing.
My boss had also recently assigned me to create and handle a 'case management' system to monitor and track the status of all his domestic cases (several hundred) because we hadn't previously had such a system, and too many things were falling through the cracks. Now, I think this is a great idea, and I didn't mind doing it, in fact I was sort of looking forward to both the challenge, and the increased organization it would bring to the office. But it has been a very time-consuming thing to create and tweak the system until it works for us, and to begin entering all the cases into it. Out of the several hundred, so far only 30 are actually up and running in the system.
With all of that, I was barely keeping up as it was. Now I have to take on all of my former co-worker's work as well as mine. This just about doubled my work load, and I do not honesty know how I'm going to possibly do it - even increasing my hours from 25 a week to 40+ and working Saturdays, I still don't see how it's going to get done on time - because it's not like I can just say "I'll get to it when I get to it." It's a law office - everything has deadlines, and everything that isn't an emergency right now will be in 3 days.
They will replace her, but in my past experience of this (many experiences - there have been at least 14 or 15 people there who have quit or been fired) it takes quite awhile to find someone, and even if we're lucky enough to find someone with law office experience, I still have to train them for how we do things, our systems. So I'll be training two people, with all the rest of it.
Yeah, it's enough to make my head spin. In the 12 years I've been there, I have never, ever been in this bad a place with my work. I'm completely overwhelmed and do not see any way I can do all this.
That alone ramped my stress up to possibly unmanageable levels. And I'm sure it's what's contributing to tonight's wee-hours blogfest.
But there's one bottom line to all this: I am the only one who can do anything about any of it. I have to get myself straightened up, and start normalizing my life. I have to stop with the diet Coke and maybe in fact any caffeine for awhile, until I get this situation under control. I want to start eating better, and taking my vitamins again. Some exericse would probably do me a world of good - both for reducing stress, and maybe for helping me be relaxed and tired enough in the evening to actually sleep. I want to start meditating every day, to help calm my over-anxious paranoid mind.
And as for work ... I really don't know yet what I'm going to do about that, except do the biggest emergencies each day, and the rest of it will just have to wait. And my boss is just going to have to understand that. Fortunately, he's very cool that way, and he won't give me nearly as much grief as I give myself.
Well, I feel a little better for having written it all out. I'm still wide awake, but not as stressed.
And the bonus - I bet I put you right to sleep!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)