Change

Is it really mid-November already?  When did that happen?

I can't believe how fast this year has sped by.  One minute I'm starting work on writing my Ph.D. thesis, and the next I'm facing another impending Christmas season in a completely different town......with a completely different job.....and a very different life in general, really.

I don’t really want to go into it too much, but I have been dealing with family-related stuff all summer and fall.  The amount of stress has really been ridiculous; although the fundamental setup of my daily life hasn't changed, pretty much everything else has.  Priorities have changed; for the short-term, life is much more uncertain than it was, too.  I can’t begin to describe the guilt: if I am at work, I’m not home, and if I’m home, I’m not working enough.  Not to mention taking care of myself – I haven’t done much of that lately.  Now, I know this is all stuff that working mothers deal with all the time – but I’m not a working mother (yet), and I have to hope that that stress is either less intense, or gets more bearable as time goes on.  For me, right now, the feeling that my life is imploding is the most identifiable emotion in recent memory.  Something had to give – and apparently, that something is me.

I’m now working on finding a postdoc somewhere closer to home.  The hope is that by getting rid of my 1-2 hour commute (each way!), I will be making time for both home and work obligations.  Right now, if I want to work an 8-hour workday (which is really short for a scientist), I am gone from home for up to 12 hours.  By working closer to home, I will be able to work 11 hours if I’m gone from home for 12 – and there is also the potential to work a bit less than that and have more home time.  My schedule will be more flexible – coming in at night or on weekends isn’t out of the question if it’s only a 25 minute drive.  There is a nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I’m giving up – but really, I’m making a decision to salvage my career and preserve my home life.

What this all means is, I am a bit of a mess right now.  Trying to find somewhere to go, trying to close things up around here….it’s pretty overwhelming.  I will be around as much as possible, and I am keeping up on blogs pretty well (but not commenting as much).  And I should be back soon – things will settle down some time!  But if I am a bit scattered for now, please understand that my life is currently under construction.

Happy Halloween!

I hope you all woke up to less snow than I did yesterday - we got 15 inches, and have downed power lines and trees all over the neighborhood.  It will certainly make for interesting trick-or-treating!  Our house is one of those houses - you know, the one that gives out king-size candy bars.  I hope that the snow doesn't deter too many of the kiddies from coming out - we have 50 candy bars to hand out!

Since we have apparently skipped straight from late summer to the dead of winter, I thought I'd share a few of the recipes I've been dying to try for fall.  I intend on making a few tonight, but I think we will have to stretch October well into mid-November to get these all in:

Pumpkin spaetzle with bacon - we plan on making this for dinner tonight!

Roasted pumpkin seeds - this year, we won't try to dry the seeds on paper towels and end up losing them all

Chocolate cinnamon bread - they used to make this at Starbucks, then gave out the recipe right when they stopped having it.  So glad they did!

Pumpkin smoothie - seriously, this looks ridiculously delicious.  Must have this week.


Normally I would end with some cute pictures of our jack-o-lanterns, but we still haven't carved them!  Hopefully we'll have some time to throw them together tonight......happy haunts, everyone!

Welcome to fall....and maple caramel coffee

I feel like I suddenly woke up and it's fall.  The air is much colder than before, and the leaves are starting to turn - Brendan and I even went up to Vermont last weekend to look at the fall colors.  The colors will be prettier in a week or two, but it certainly feels like fall already.  It's so much cooler here than it was in Philly during the fall!

The fall weather means that I have been having more warm drinks - hot apple cider, pumpkin spice lattes, and tea.  But I have been making a lot of coffee at home, too - those pumpkin spice lattes get expensive!  So I was thrilled when, as part of the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program, I got free samples of Godiva coffee.  I got a bag of Pumpkin Spice, and a bag of Caramel Pecan Bark - along with a challenge to create a fall-inspired coffee recipe.  Bring it on, Godiva!

At first, I was a bit stumped.  I didn't want to go the pumpkin spice latte route - too obvious.  I looked around for some inspiration - and my eyes landed straight on a bag of maple sugar candies that I brought back from Vermont.

(um, yes, I'd definitely eaten most of the bag by this point!)

Now, of course, not everyone has fresh maple sugar candies just lying around - but I'm sure maple syrup would do the trick, too.  But none of that corn syrup-based stuff - you've got to use the real thing!  To go with the maple candies, I used the Caramel Pecan Bark flavor coffee.

The recipe for this is simple, but here's what I did:

1. Add one maple candy to a mug  (more if you like extra sugar in your coffee!)

2. Add coffee to the mug

3. Add milk, stir, and enjoy!!

The result?  A delicious drink filled with rich fall flavors.  It was really yummy!

For what's left of our weekend (really, just Monday) we are off to find pumpkins, drink even more cider, and go to the Topsfield Fair - we've got a wonderful day planned!

Oh, and last week I joined a gym!  More about that later on this week, once I try everything out - I will most definitely have reflections on Body Pump :)

Back again!

OK, so I kinda fell into a black hole.....sorry about that!  Hope that whoever reads my blog stuck around!  My disappearance was due to a little family medical emergency - but everything is ok now.  And hopefully I'm back for real now :)

Hope you are all having a wonderful start to fall and enjoying the best season of the year!

Where did the last month go?

It's now August 12 - and another month has gone by since I last posted.  This time I have a better excuse than my usual laziness general busy-ness.  I actually ended up being surprised by some last-minute grant writing for my new job - whether I should have been surprised is up for debate, but nonetheless it sucked up every last minute of free time I had in the last month.  On top of grant writing, I also had a few other deadlines - revisions for a paper my old lab's revising, a few other things for my new lab, and a deadline for a newsletter I edit.  This was one of those times where I'm not sure how I came out alive - but I'm here now, and I made it.  I even got everything done on time!  Whether I got out with my soul is unclear - but that's a subject for another time.

For now, a few updates:

- My garden is coming along quite nicely.  We have seen the comings and goings of several flowers, I've done some major weeding, and we've successfully grown tomatoes and strawberries.  More on that soon, I promise!

- I am now seriously considering what I actually want to do with my career.  This goes back up to the whole "did I get out with my soul?" question above - and I'll talk more about it later too.

- I am planning on running a half marathon in November.  I may be insane, since there may be snow in November and it's right before someone's wedding, but it's the soonest I could get together a training plan that worked, and I'm actually pretty psyched to run on Heartbreak Hill (even if it is the sane wrong way).  The training plan doesn't start ramping up for another few weeks, but I've been putting some miles in lately and I feel pretty confident that I will be ready.

- We are going to Maine in a few weeks and spending a whole week there!  We've never done more than a weekend, since it's always been me coming up to Brendan's, then us traveling out to Maine, but now that I'm here we're doing a real vacation.  I am so, so in need of a vacation, and Maine is my favorite place to spend time with my sweetie.

Hopefully I will be back soon with more substantial stuff (and pictures!), but I just wanted to say hi to everyone - and a special shout out to my old lab, who is currently spending the day at the beach without me.  So jealous!

Hope you are all having a much more relaxing summer than me.....can't wait for the fall, though!

Our first harvest

OK, so the title is a bit excessive, given the size of our "harvest" - but we have a strawberry!  I mean, a real, actual, honest-to-goodness strawberry!

It was tiny, but red, peeking out from under the leaves of our strawberry plant.  Unfortunately, Brendan just had his wisdom teeth out today, so he couldn't share it with me - but I most definitely brought it in, washed it, and ate it.

And it was delicious - made even sweeter by the fact that I grew it myself.  So, so wonderful - can't wait to have more this summer!

Hiking adventure

Recently, Brendan and I went on a little hiking adventure.  It was a few weekends ago now, but I'm just catching up with a backlog of things to write about, so cut me some slack :)

We are total hiking novices, but wanted to do something a bit difficult and not just go for a regular walk outside.  We went to the Wachusett Mountain State Reservation, which is a ski area during the winter, but has some really neat hiking trails during the summer.  We hiked from the visitor's center, and took what seemed like a relatively easy trail around the side of the mountain for a bit.  The map is here, and we started out at the little house icon at the right and continued down the Bicentennial Trail.

And then things took a turn for the interesting.  Somehow, we decided that the Loop Trail sounded like a great idea.  Here's me, looking optimistic towards the beginning of the trail:

You'll notice that even at this spot, there's not so much a trail as a bunch of rocks.  That's how it was the whole time, but it got progressively more difficult.  I don't have any pictures of the harder parts of the trail, but we took quite a few breaks along the way to just breathe.  It did pay off with a good view somewhere along the way, though:

The trail was REALLY hard after this, and I don't have any pictures, but it looked something like this, with more green foliage  - it doesn't quite do the steepest parts justice, but it's all I can find (source):

We struggled upward for a while, and had a bit of a meltdown when we started to worry that we weren't coming upon the trail we expected to - did we miss the trail sign?  Nope, we were just going that slow.  The whole trail was only about 1.5 to 2 miles total, but the terrain was so strenuous that it took forever to climb to the top.  We eventually did make it up to the Mountain House trail, and discovered with delight that we could take an actual road down for a bit and reach Pine Hill trail, which is substantially easier.  Instead of random boulders, Pine Hill has rocks stacked in a bit of a staircase formation, which is a lot easier to climb (up and down).  Here's Brendan looking accomplished near the end of our journey:

As we finally reached the bottom, exhausted, we weren't sure that we'd do much more hiking - but both of us realized that we really did have a lot of fun.  I have been begging Brendan to go back since we got home, and we might just go next weekend.  Now that we know how long the trail is and what to expect, we'll have a lot more fun!

Anyone have any ideas for hiking trips?  Next time we'll bring a water pack instead of water bottles, but if anyone has any ideas for making hiking trips more fun, or anything important to bring, I'd appreciate it!

P.S. For you crazy people out there doing ridiculously long trail races - I don't know how you do it!  I can't imagine running up even the easiest part of the trail we did!  Major kudos.