2010: Project 365 (Sort Of)

I've decided not to make any New Year's Resolutions in 2010. The fact is, I never stick to them, and I also never forget them, either. Oh, sure, the details might get obscured somewhat, but in the not-so-far-back reaches of my brain, I am acutely aware of the fact that at one point in the previous decade (somewhere between 2000-2002), I resolved to learn to quilt, bought a sewing machine and everything, and I never so much as completed a stitch, and what with being Catholic and all, the guilt is pretty crushing. Not to mention, I have craft shit all over the house, and we are running out of room to store the reminders of my epic failures and character flaws.

This year I decided to do something different, something more "productive" and less "instructive" and I'm going to be doing it right here, on the riffraff blog: a kind of hybrid "Project 365" type thing, where I will do something creative and post it every day. My inspiration for this was an article from Photojojo, which has been appropriated by other sites and extrapolated into other similar ideas for other media (e.g., digital scrapbooking).

Of course, I have the attention span of a gnat on amphetamines, and this sentence is going to bore me before I finish it, so I already know that I am never going to make it through an entire year of a-photo-a-day kinds of stuff. Plus, there are ideas in my head that I need to express in other ways, ways that passively observing and documenting cannot fully accomplish.

I mulled it all over, and I basically came up with this: even though I am pretty sure I'd never be able to get all the way through a single-medium Project 365, it's better than even money that I'll be able to do it if I allow myself to make this into my own-style thing. So that's what I'm going to do: a hybrid, multi-"media" Project 365.

Basically, every day in 2010, I will post something here. It might be a picture, or a poem, or a drawing, or a recipe, or some other kind of writing. There might be a theme for the week, and there might not. Maybe on Monday I will post a picture, and on Tuesday I will write a poem about it, and on Wednesday I will complete a digital scrapbook page inspired by it, etc., or maybe there will be a whole week of pictures of nothing but flowers. Something like that. I can't see the future, so I don't know what you'll get.

The other "rules" I've decided to set for myself, just to make things interesting: So that there is no overlap and therefore no "cheating," I will not post any pictures on both blogs -- it's either here, or on the 'riffic, but not both. (I'll be putting my Project 365 photos in a separate Flickr photostream.) Also, when I write, I will limit my entries to 365 words per post. I am anticipating writing some original fiction -- i.e., I might come back around to that novel that I was supposed to be working on for NaNoWriMo 2009, and didn't get very far with. 365 words is a manageable bite-size, so I might actually get it done.

So ... good idea? Bad? Terrible? Have I lost my mind? (More than usual, I mean?)

Riffraff Roundup

So. Here is what I've been doing while I was busy off being an incorrigible, degenerate slackass who wasn't regularly updating this blog:

• Scrapbooking: I finished the design work for two different calendars -- the 2010 Cupcake Calendar and the 2010 Cousins Calendar. Praise the Lord and hallelujah! If you click on the links, you'll go right into each set, where you can bring the pages up as a slideshow. I am really proud of all this work (most especially the pictures), but if you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose favorites, I would say that I like April and August best for the Cupcake, and May and September best for the Cousins. Both calendars are now off to the printer, thank goodness, and I am taking a break from digi-design work for a little while, so I can focus on getting other stuff done (like sleeping and eating and watching old holiday specials on TiVo).


• Reading: I finally finished Memories of the Future and all the other books I picked up for our October trip out to Chicago. The Hodgman book wasn't quite what I expected -- it's really more of a "book of facts" rather than something with an actual narrative -- but it's good to keep around for when you need some kind of bullshit answer for your friends and relatives who know eveything else.


• Reading: Now I've moved on to something else -- Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix. To be completely honest, I am not sure why I picked this one out in the first place; when I was reading descriptions of the book, I thought it was about adopted kids with mysterious backgrounds who suddenly started disappearing -- like okay crazy adoptive mother, are you insane? But this book has taken a left turn that I did not expect and it is turning out to be not at all what I expected, in the best possible way. There is another book in the series, Sent, which I will be picking up soon.


• Cooking: Well, I haven't been, not really, unless you count the three-spice dinner from the other night, and unfortunately I don't know that there will be much other cooking going on between now and Christmas, either. There are only two more weekends, and I still haven't finished my shopping, which is quite the embarrassment, believe me. But I get paid again on the 15th, and I have a pretty good idea of what all I still need to get (not too much, thankfully), so I think I will manage to get everything done in time.

Also, somewhere in there I had a nervous breakdown or two, but since that happens all the time these days, what else is new? And apparently Shae has a "monster" living in her room -- in her walls, I think she said -- and we are hoping to get to the bottom of that situation soon. Probably I'll talk about that on the 'riffic.

Saturday Dinner: Only Three Spices

Oh, hi there! Sorry I've neglected this blog a bit, but I'll make it up eventually. Hopefully with this set of recipes here, if you can even call things "recipes" when they involve only three spices total, among four dishes. But trust me: this stuff was good. Like, SERIOUSLY GOOD. We have ZERO leftovers (except Shae's plate, because this is one of those days where she won't eat anything that doesn't involve nuggets and/or peanut butter).

Why we liked this dinner -- it's simple, pretty easy, and perfect for a cold and snowy night. It's comfort food, but not heavy; it's really more of the kind of stuff that my great-grandmother would have made. It was almost like a holiday dinner, without the aggravation of a holiday. So, without further ado, here are what basically amounts to the instructions for our roast pork loin with three vegetables:

• Arrange racks in over to accommodate two casserole dishes and two baking sheets. Preheat to 375°F.
  
• Season an "always tender" pork tenderloin (between 1½-2 lbs.) with kosher salt and pepper. Arrange in a covered roasting pan and set aside.
• Cut 1½ lbs. fingerling potatoes in half on the bias (diagonally). Toss with 1½ Tbsp. olive oil to coat well. Season with kosher salt, pepper, and rosemary to taste. Arrange in a single layer in a shallow covered baking dish and set aside.
• Rinse and pat dry 1½ lbs. fresh Brussels sprouts. Cut off the very ends and remove any yellow or over-tough leaves. Toss with 1½ Tbsp. olive oil to coat well. Season with kosher salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer on a cookie sheet.*
• Put the covered pork loin, the covered potatoes, and the sprouts in the oven all the same time. Do not disturb for 15 minutes. Have a drink. Write a couple Christmas cards. Relax.
• After 15 minutes, cut 1 lb. baby carrots (minus whatever couple you needed to feed to your toddler to get her out of the kitchen for five minutes so you could swing that big Cutco chef's knife around) in half lengthwise. Toss with 1 Tbsp. olive oil to coat well. Season with kosher salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer on a cookie sheet.
• 20 minutes after the meat, potatoes, and sprouts have been put in the oven, put the carrots in there too. While your head is in the oven, give the potatoes and sprouts a shake, just to keep them from sticking. Continue cooking for another 20 minutes.
• After 20 minutes, take the covers off the meat and the potatoes. Remove the carrots and sprouts from the oven. Continue cooking the meat and potatoes for another 10 minutes.
• After 10 minutes, remove the meat and potatoes. Slice the loin into medallions. Plate the vegetables. Serve. Enjoy.

Try this, and let me know what you think! Like I said, we thoroughly enjoyed it.

* If you live in a house like I do where you're the only one who eats Brussels sprouts, you can cut the ingredients by ⅓ and use a toaster-oven-sized pan, but the cook time remains the same.