Making Progress on #3. and (Always) #11.

I've slacked off a little writing lately because our weekends (and weeks) have been pretty busy. I absolutely love the holidays, but I'm essentially a homebody and miss the quiet downtime of the rest of the year. On the other hand, plenty of excuses for baking!

Since it's still the holiday season, I only have time for a quick rundown of what I've been up to. More interesting (hopefully) posts to come after it gets a little less crazy.

#3. Book club ended for the year on November 30, and I have two months until the next meeting, so I thought it would be a good time to get into Anna Karenina. I'm only about 75 pages in so far, but I'm enjoying it a lot, and I'm actually a little surprised at how accessible it is. I'll post a full review when I'm finished.

#10. I've been a little thrown off in my workout schedule lately, which is frustrating because it really helps to keep me sane. But I'm signed up for another 5K on Sunday (pray that the rain and snow hold off!) and I'm determined that 2011 will be the year of the half marathon. I have a couple possibilities for May, and some back-ups for the fall, so it's definitely going to happen. (On this one, you should keep asking me about it. It'll keep me honest. (o:  )

#11. I've made two (very delicious) batches of cookies lately. For November book club I made the Giant Ginger Spice Cookies:

The photo doesn't do them justice. They might have been my favorites so far out of this book so far. And this weekend, just because I needed to get out of a funk and baking seemed like a good way to do it, I made Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies. I overcooked them a little (my family refers to this as Rachel's Cajun-style cooking), but they're still tasty.

I plan to do some more baking this week and next weekend, but probably out of Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook. Her gingerbread with coffee glaze sounds amazing. Plus I did an event at the store with her this week, and she was one of the nicest, most amazing people I've met in a while, so any chance I have to be more like her is well worth it!

More soon, but in the meantime, happy holidays!

#8. Finished My Hat! and #11. Coconut Apricot Icebox Cookies

Things here are pretty busy these days, with the store's busiest season coming up and us going out of town for a few days for Thanksgiving. I did have time to get a lot done this weekend, though, including these two projects:

1. I finished the hat I've been working on! I made my maiden voyage to Windsor Button on Saturday, and found a cute button to go with it, so I sewed it on last night.

I actually think this hat is really cute, so I'll have to make another one sometime for myself! Next up, though, I'm going to tackle a multi-color project: a cute take on a basic striped scarf. Knowing me, it'll be about down about mid-April....

2. Greg surprised me by bringing home a food processor earlier this week (it's no dozen roses, but almost as good!), so I had to try it out this weekend. I'd been wanting to try the Coconut Apricot Icebox Cookies out of Great Cookies for a while now, but didn't have the patience to chop either the coconut or the apricots by hand. The food processor worked miracles! The cookies were still a little labor intensive, but they're delicious (like little apricot-studded macaroons), and remind me a little of these little apricot bites I used to get when my mom ordered from Sweet Energy.

I'm not baking for Thanksgiving (thanks so a Groupon for Petsi Pies, our Thanksgiving pie commitment is taken care of), but I'll be making more cookies for book club next week. More pictures then!

#8. My Goal Sweater

I only started knitting last winter, when my grammie gave me a basic knitting kit for Christmas. Since then I've made a few dishclothes, and a pair of fingerless mittens. The mittens I sadly didn't finish until about April, just when I stopped needing them for the summer, but I've been making good use of them the last month or so.

Now that the weather's starting to get colder, I'm getting excited about knitting projects again. I'm just about done with the hat I started at the end of the summer (yeah, I'm still pretty slow). I'll post a picture next week when I find a button to finish it off. This one won't get much use by me either, though, since it turned out a little small. Christmas present for one of the nieces!

I haven't figured out yet what I'll do for my next project. The ones I've found lately that I like either seem a little too difficult for my skill level, or require a bigger yarn investment than I'm prepared for at the moment. I have to find something this week, though, because I'm off to Windsor Button next weekend to finish up that hat, and I'm hoping to pick up some new yarn too.

In the meantime, I did find a sweater that I aspire to making. I'm not sure it'll be my first (and therefore the one I get to check off my list), but it looks cozy and totally doable, if a tad complicated. Here's a photo from berroco.com, which has the pattern posted:

#11. White Chocolate Whalers

Shhh... Don't tell the members of my book club that I made last week's oatmeal chocolate chip cookies using a mix. It was a really busy weekend, and we already had a lot on our grocery list, so I took the easy way out. Still a pretty tasty way out, but I felt guilty.

Because I didn't get my baking fix last weekend, and because I'm constantly baking cookies that I refuse to let Greg sample because they're for work, I decided to do a batch of cookies this weekend, gentleman's choice. The only rule I gave him was that he had to choose a 1 or 2 star recipe. For culinary and literary reasons (one of Greg's scholarly interests is Moby Dick), he chose the White Chocolate Whalers. This was a great choice because I generally can't stand white chocolate, so it would have taken a long time for me to get around to these on my own.

Anyway, these are really crunchy cookies, with rice krispies, almonds, and white chocolate chips. The dough is really easy to make, then you scoop out and roll the dough in more rice krispies before flattening into disks on the baking sheet. The recipe was supposed to make about 18, but I made 24 with a little dough left over, so they could have been a little bigger. They're pretty tasty (even for someone who doesn't like white chocolate), although I'm not sure they'll make the list of recipes to go back to.

This blog post would be a lot more interesting if I had pictures, but our camera currently has no batteries, and I keep forgetting to pick some up. And I will get around to including recipes with posts, but I just don't have the time to copy it out tonight. Blogging fail...

Anyway, at least I'm still making progress, and here's what's up next:

1. Buy camera batteries to chronicle future endeavors.

2. Bake biscotti next weekend. (Tea weather is fully upon us, after all.)

3. Dig my Rubik's Cube out of its drawer and see if I can get any further with it.

#10. My First 10K!

Last January, one of my New Year's Resolutions was to run a 5K. I started running that week, and got totally addicted. I've since run three 5K's, and this morning was my first 10K. It was absolutely perfect weather (60's, partly sunny), and I showed up on Boston Common around 11am along with the more than 7000 other women who'd signed up for the Tufts Health Plan 10K for Women. I wandered around the park a bit, stood in a very long porta-potty line, and finally we started lining up at 11:30. They introduced the elite runners (I'd never heard of any of them), the amazing Boston Marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson gave some opening remarks, and the horn went off.

The course was really great, starting off down Beacon Hill, heading out to the river, then doing an out and back on Memorial Drive before heading back into the city. The route turned back on itself a couple of times, so it was really impressive to see the one wheelchair racer and the elite women at the front of the crowd. I think they were passing somewhere around 3 or 3.5 miles when I had only done about a mile and a half. Amazing.

The race itself was relatively uneventful, in that I didn't lose my energy or feel overly sore. I think I drank a little too much water before and during the race, though, because by the end I thought I might throw up. Thankfully I didn't, and after waiting in a long baggage claim line I managed to catch up with Greg (who had watched me finish, but then lost track of me in the crowd) and get some of the post-race food.

This afternoon they posted the results of the race, and I finished in 1:02:04, for about 10 minute miles. I had done a few 6 mile runs before this that I hadn't really timed, and a 7 mile run with about 11 minute miles, so this was a big surprise. I'm really excited that all the running I've been enjoying so much has been paying off! And racing is really addictive. I don't have anything on my calendar right now, but I'll definitely be looking for another one before too long.

Lastly, I have to send a huge "thank you" out into cyberspace to my gym (Healthworks Cambridge) and the running group they started this spring. Every Monday morning we meet at the gym at 8am for a run, and the trainers were a major part in my having the confidence to build up past just a few miles. My first runs over 5 miles were all with them, and I truly don't think I would have had the courage to try by myself. Thank you thank you thank you!

#11. Apple Pie Bars

One of my duties at the bookstore where I work is to run the store's book club. At some point during my tenure I realized that cookies and books go really well together, so I've made it a tradition to bake for each meeting. It's usually a good icebreaker for new members, and it gives me an excuse to try out new recipes. Win/win! Since we're starting up again for the fall tomorrow, I thought these apple pie bars from Great Cookies would be a good seasonal option.

Unlike brownies, these bars have to be cooked and baked in layers, so it was a much more time-consuming process than I was anticipating. First I had to cook the six Granny Smith apples worth of slices that would make the filling, then bake the crust while the apples cooled. In the meantime I had to make the streusel topping. Finally, I put everything together and baked for another 25 minutes. But although it took a good chunk of my afternoon, they were actually pretty easy, and came out looking really great!

Now, a couple hours after coming out of the oven, they've chilled in the fridge and they were even easy to cut and get out of the pan. The lemon bars I made a couple of months ago that were a similar construction didn't come out nearly as well, so this is definitely progress!

Look how buttery and thick that crust is! Yum!



Foiled!

The list is made, and semi-finalized (I did make one change this week: I'm going to conquer my fear of donating blood!), so it's time to start thinking about actually doing some of these things. One of the first items I planned to work on was
#16. Watch the Ken Burns baseball documentary. But while it was in the first round of DVDs we added to our newly formed Netflix account last month, it's suddenly become unavailable. Completely unavailable, according to our queue. I don't really understand how that's possible. Anyway, if it doesn't reappear in the next few weeks, I'll have to sign up for a library card and get it that way. His addendum to the series, "The Tenth Inning," airs later this month, so the project's about to get a tiny bit (by which I mean four hours) bigger.

In the meantime, here's what I'm somewhat actively working on at the moment:

8. Knit a sweater - Well, I'm not actually working on making a sweater yet, but I am about to cast-on for a winter hat, my first project with double-pointed needles. I'm trying to increase my skill set before I go for the big project.

9. Start and maintain a blog - Um, obviously.

10. Run a marathon (or at least a half marathon) - Again, I'm not technically working on this now, because I'm training for neither a marathon nor a half marathon. I am, however, getting ready for my first 10K in a few weeks, and I'm enjoying boosting my mileage bit by bit. And buying new running gear, like new sneakers last weekend and a new winter running jacket hopefully soon.

11. Make all the recipes in Great Cookies - I've made several of them already. I might restart. Because, hey, that just means more cookies, right?

13. Start an IRA - I know it's not as hard as I let myself think it is, but I finally found a website that makes it sound not so terrifying. I'm hoping to get to it in the next few weeks.

Progress on five of the thirty isn't so bad!

A Work in Progress

So it turns out that creating a list of thirty things I want to do before I'm thirty is harder than anticipated. It took me a couple of months to come up with my first draft. Now that I have it posted (and hanging on the chalkboard above my desk), I'm not sure I've finished it to my liking. First of all, I have four substantial reading-related entries. I mean, I love reading, but at some point this is going to start feeling like homework. And then there's "Finish my Rubik's cube" or "Knit a sweater." With all the other things I have going on in my life, what if I just don't have the time to devote to mastering these skills within the next three years? After all, these don't fall in the "try something new" category, but are squarely in the "get really good at something new" category.

So Lesson #1 from this project is to be flexible. I'm not going to change my list right now. I legitimately want to do everything I've added, so why not keep them? But I'm going to let myself keep the list fluid. If something comes up that I decide is more important to me than something on the list, I'll swap it out. And I reserve the right to "dumb down" a goal if it proves to be too hard. I mean, they're my goals, right?

So now it's time to get down to business. Greg made a list too, and he's already done with two and making good headway on a third. I'm way behind...

Here we go...

First, a disclaimer. The idea for this list and therefore this blog was blatantly stolen from my friend Alex, who had the brilliant idea of making a "Thirty Things to Do Before I'm Thirty" list. As soon as I heard about it, I knew it was a perfect idea for me for two reasons: 1. I love making and completing "to do" lists and 2. I'm naturally a homebody and someone who craves routine, so it takes a little prodding to get me to step outside my comfort zone.

So I made my own list, including places I want to go, things I want to see, new accomplishments in my hobbies (dance, running, knitting, cooking), and some completely random things I'd like to be able to say I've done.

One of the things that made my list and that I've been wanting to do for a while is start a blog, but I'd never known what it should be about. There are a lot of things I enjoy, but none I felt comfortable writing about exclusively. I decided I needed a way to write about all of them a little bit, and this seemed like the perfect fit. So this blog will follow my progress as I try to complete these thirty things before I turn thirty. I just turned 27, so I have three years. We'll see how this goes...