Overslept

Dang it, I overslept this morning… by 2 hours! I meant to hit snooze but must’ve turn the alarm off instead. Next thing I know, I open one eye and it’s light outside. Not a good sign since it’s dark when I get up and dark when I come home these days. I look at the clock…8:25!

So that was not a good start to the day. At work I had a bunch of people getting on my nerves and changing their minds about stuff that needs to just be done eventually. At some point, you just have to say, “OK, we’re not making anymore changes, we’re printing this sucker” (a couple of brochures).

In addition, I’m kind of stressed because I have to go ask for a raise. I hate negotiating and this time around, it’s gonna be pretty tough to get what I feel I am worth, having taken on so much new work that it’s essentially been a promotion. Or no-motion. The tricky thing is that the union I fall under divides up salaries into certain levels, from A to J, which determine your minimum salary. These levels depend on the type of work you do, how much responsibility or specialized training they entail, etc. My problem is that the woman who used to do what I’ve now been given to do was two levels above me. And I think I’m gonna have a hard time convincing them to let me skip a level all of a sudden. We’ll see.

Wish me luck!

Words of wisdom

Had a nice chat with a drunken guy at the bus stop after work yesterday.

There was an accident somewhere along the line, so the 17 bus never came. I walked down two stops to where another bus joins the line, hoping I hadn’t missed it (it and the one that wasn’t coming are staggered). I hadn’t, as the drunken guy informed me. I told him that if he was waiting for the 17, he was gonna be waiting a while. With a smile he said, “Well, good thing I’m prepared!” as he reached into one of his two big bags of alcohol and pulled out a half-empty plastic Nestea bottle filled with something likely more potent than Nestea.

I didn’t edge away from him like you normally would because he didn’t reek of urine, just alcohol. Apropos of nothing, he laid his perspective on life out for me: “You know, the most important thing is to have a sense of humor and be able to enjoy yourself. Look at me, for example. They tell me I have cancer, so they operate. They’ve operated twice, no… three times.  And it could still come back.”

“So enjoy life while you can,” I said. “No, that’s not exactly it,” he replied, but didn’t elaborate.

And boy are my legs tired!

I went for a run today with Stefan. Austrian workdays end just after lunchtime on Friday, so it’s the perfect day to get some outdoors time in before it gets dark (which is around 4:30 these days).

We only wanted to go out for 40 or 50 minutes, but I suggested we run a new route, one I’d heard about but hadn’t ever actually done myself: a circuit around the Kürnberg, which is the next hill over from us and is some kind of protected forest area or something.  Anyway, it’s all trees and paths and some logging roads.

Normally, we go left when we get to the main path, just using a small arc of it curving back around toward my work in Rufling and then heading back home. This time, I thought we should go right, just to see where it goes.

As it turns out, going to the right just means you’re gonna run around the whole mountain before ending back up at your starting point. Including wrong turns, we were out for 2 hours. We hadn’t planned that but when you’re running a circuit, particularly a new one, it’s so hard to judge whether you’ve passed the halfway mark yet or not, whether it would be faster to turn around or to just keep going. It was a lovely route though.

It was a good run, a bit too long though. It might have been ok but we took a wrong turn and had to backtrack which cost a good 20 minutes. The weather was gorgeous, but it got chilly as the sun started going down, towards the end of the run. Our shoes are pretty filthy now too, we had to run through a lot of muddy spots where they’ve been logging.

Well, I’m definitely spending the evening on the couch.

Home for Christmas

I can’t believe it’s time to start thinking about Christmas presents again.

We’re flying home for Christmas, three weeks of being exhausted by shopping, family and eating.

I’m ready for vacation, too. I’ve been having dreams about work which is not a good sign.

Anyway, I’m off to watch the latest episode of House. What did expats do before the internet, I wonder? It’s a lifesaver even though I don’t watch much TV. But having one or two shows, in English, the current season with the newest episodes… I really look forward to it, it’s like a little slice of home, even though I’ve never watched House, for example, in America.

What a waste!

Monday was a holiday in Austria, commemorating the day the last occupying Russian soldier left the country in 1955. We spent the weekend in Tirol with my mother-in-law.

We had Friday off too, which we spent driving all over creation to gather yet more paperwork and then hand it in to apply for my so-called “permanent” residency permit. Which has to be renewed every 5 years. I know.

When we handed in all our stuff, the lady informed us that we are the lucky winners of …….. a visit from the police!  Yes, everyone who applies for a 5-year residency permit has to make an appointment with the police and have them over to look around your place.  Not sure what they’re looking for, the woman would just say it was “to make sure everything is ok”. Which is NOT OK! I mean, we don’t have anything to hide, but that’s not the point.  It’s the principle of the thing! For heaven’s sake, the police don’t have the right to just come over and take a look around. What do they expect to find? 20 unregistered gypsies living in our spare room, who I forgot to send out for a coffee during our scheduled police visit?

I’m still fuming and Stefan is, in a word, furious. But there’s no way around it without taking this way up the chain, which would not be so good for the status of this application, if you get me. Just another thing. I’m not sure how many more hoops they can make me jump through backwards and on a motorcycle, but this is getting ridiculous. And has to be repeated every 5 years.

I’m going to try not to write about that again because it still makes me angry reading back over it for typos.

The other thing this weekend was this field of carrots. Sounds boring, right? There’s two types of carrots in Austria for some reason, yellow ones and regular orange ones. They taste the same to me, to be honest. Anyway, some farmer in Stefan’s home village planted carrots in a field near the village this year, which is unusual, normally it’s just pasture. My mother-in-law told us the field had been harvested, but there were lots of carrots left that were going to be tilled back under, so we thought we’d stop by and take a look.

Holy cats! The field was simply filled with carrots! It was simply incredible how much is going to waste! I’m not talking lone carrots laying around on the ground, I’m talking hundreds of carrots per square yard in pristine condition save the green having broken off during harvesting! We just couldn’t get over it. We picked as many as we could carry and hopefully eat (I mean, how many carrots can you eat before they go bad?) and we only picked the very very nicest ones. It was simply unbelievable. Because we as consumers aren’t willing to pay more than 59 cents a kilo or whatever, 30% of the carrots in the field would be left to rot because it’s too expensive to send humans out to gather them by hand. Amazing and slightly sickening, in a way.  I mean, no one goes to bed hungry in this country. But elsewhere?

We took them home, hosed them off on the lawn. I decided to slice them (thank God for the Kitchenaid attachment!) and kind of parboil them with butter, water, salt and onions before filling little 1 liter freezer bags with 2 portions each and freezing them. I filled 10 bags with generous portions and our freezer is now filled to capacity with carrots. It took two batches in my biggest pot.

Couch project – the end

Lots of text and pics of the new couch under the cut!

Goodbye, old ratty couch!

Mmmmm… quiche!

I have a ridiculous amount of emails to write. I’m such a bad correspondent, but people still send me emails, which I feel increasingly guilty about not getting to, until they are inevitably lapped by the next email from the same person. Terrible, I know. If I owe you an email out there in reader-land, sorry, I’m working on it!

Stefan’s off to Sweden on a business trip today until Friday, and I have a lot to get done while he’s gone. I want to do some work on the couch, at least the trim stuff that can be done by one person. We did the two seat cushions two weekends ago and they still look really really nice (I was worried about the fabric stretching out too fast. The staple gun we borrowed turned out to be too weak, so we went out and got some upholstery tacks, which are not as complicated as many webpages outlining the procedure would have you believe. Only thing is, you need an assistant to yank on the fabric while you steady the tack and hammer it in. The color is very similar to the old fabric, but it’s a much better quality. I don’t know why, but the old fabric (kind of a knit microfiber) was a serious cat hair and dust magnet. Really really staticky. This new fabric, though, you can just brush crumbs and cat hair right off. Fantastic!

I’ve also started on a crocheted blanket of scraps. I inherited a bunch of scrap yarn from my grandma when she stopped being able to knit and crochet because of her shoulder. I’m never going to use it for anything, what could you possibly make out of half a ball of 20 year old fuzzy blue wool? First I started on the spiral method, where you crochet a long center line and then just keep going around in circles, splicing in a new skein whenever the old one runs out. My mom has an ancient blanket just like that. My problem though, is that I have yarn of all different weights. So I decided to do the granny square method, where you crochet squares, all the same size, and then join them together in a patchwork pattern at the end. That way I can use a larger hook on the fluffier yarn but still match it to the template size.

I made a fantastic quiche the other day! Stefan felt like something homemade and was going to be pretty late coming home, so I whipped out a cookbook, which opened right to the quiche page. It was pretty simple, though it took a while since I made my own pastry.

For a regular sized piepan you need:

• pastry dough (or the ingredients for it – flour, cold butter or shortening, a few drops of water)
• 3-4 onions, sliced
• 3 eggs, beaten
• about a half a cup of milk or cream
• salt
• pepper
• oil or butter
• nutmeg
• any other leftover veggies
• grated cheese

Pretty simple, really. You make or unpack the pastry dough and line the piepan with it. Refrigerate for a few minutes and then blind bake at about 350 for 15 minutes. Blind baking means putting a layer of parchment paper on top of the raw pastry in the pan and weighing it down with something so the pastry keeps its shape (and doesn’t bubble up or anything). I didn’t have any dried beans to blind bake with, which is what the cookbook always suggests, so I used coarse sea salt which we always have on hand. That was heavy enough and after baking I just poured it back into the container. Alternatively, I bet you could just use a pre-baked pie shell, but you can’t get those here.

In the meantime, slice your onions and fry them on medium heat in a drop of oil or a little bit of butter. Stir frequently until the onions are nice and brown and sweet and soft. I also threw in some leftover cauliflower and two chopped carrots that were getting soft. You could throw in some spinach at the very end, too, and/or garlic. Set aside to cool a bit.

Beat the three eggs and add the milk. Grate the cheese, you’ll want a nice big handful. Stir the cheese into the milk/egg mixture. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Transfer the slightly cooled onions to the pie shell. Pour the egg/milk/cheese mixture over the onions. You might want to even the surface of the quiche if it’s too uneven. Bake in a preheated oven at 325°F for 30 minutes or until it’s nice and brown and you can see the whole thing rising. Cut into quarters and serve with a nice fresh mixed salad.

This was really great, although I felt a little guilty because I knew exactly how much butter went into the pie crust. It was great cold the next day for lunch, too.

Pick me up

I was just in town running arrands and picking up a present for Stefan’s birthday (my lightbulb moment came early this year, his birthday isn’t until Sunday). As I was walking down Landstrasse, which is the main drag, I passed a couple of guys dismantling the outdoor seating area of a cafe in the pedestrian zone. How depressing! A sure sign of winter on the horizon.

As a pick-me-up though, I then passed a guy carrying an armful of very real looking moose or elk antlers. Not mounted or anything, just the bare bones. He seemed to be in a hurry, but then again, that seems fitting somehow. You can’t do much window shopping with antlers.

Most expensive meal vs. best meal

Blogroll question:

What’s the most expensive meal you’ve ever had? What’s the best meal you’ve ever had?

Hmm… I rarely go out to eat at expensive restaurants, so I’m pretty sure the most expensive meal I ever had was at Bergdiele, where Stefan and I went out for our first anniversary. It’s tucked away in a non-descript street, but the Audis and Mercedes parked haphazardly along both sides of the street are a dead give-away. Apparently, this is where the hautevolee of Linz and Leonding go to eat.

The decor was very nice, very expensive looking. And the other guests were also very expensive looking, which made me feel a bit out of place. Those around us seemed not to care in the slightest how much they were spending on a meal, a feeling I’ve never experienced.

The waiter?maitre’d?owner? took our order. Stefan had a hankering for some chanterelles (they were in season) and asked about them as an appetizer. The guy immediately said no problem, and essentially put together a recipe on the spot. “What about chanterelles with eggs, maybe some shallots, cream, pepper, something like that? Kind of scrambled?” That was a first for me, creating your own dish at a restaurant.

To be honest, I don’t remember what I ate. I think it was medallions of pork tenderloin, but I’m not sure. I do remember our dessert, an extremely rich chocolate mousse made from Valhrona chocolate. That was really lovely, not too sweet, just how I like it. But considering the price for the two of us, which was over €100, I would have expected to still be pining for what I ate more than a year later.

The best meal I ever had was very different. I’m not sure what exactly made it the best meal, I’m sure it was a combination of a lot of factors.

I was still a child and my brother and parents and I were out at my grandpa’s farm, where my parents had an extensive vegetable garden. It was late summer or fall I believe and the potatoes were ready to be dug. My dad would kneel in the cold, black soil and dig sort of a trench along the mounded row of potatoes with a spade.

Each spadeful of soil was turned over to one side of the trench and pawed through by my brother and I for potatoes. I loved finding ones shaped like hearts, or siamese twins or ones with funny bumps on them. I loved the clean, white surface smeared with black soil when the spade cut one clean in half, or pulling one off the end of the spade when it speared one. I loved finding earthworms and rehoming them in little holes I dug just for that purpose.

Occasionally, my brother and I would take a break from the potatoes and race around the dying garden, throwing clods of dirt at each other until someone got hit in the mouth or hair and our mom made us stop and get back to the job at hand. We were always so filthy after doing garden work. Our jeans had dirt mashed right into the the fabric at the knees and butt. Our hair was full of dirt. Our shoes were full of dirt which made our socks unbelievably dirty. I often liberally showered the floor of the bathroom with dirt collected at my waistband when I untucked my shirt from where a clod had gone down the back of my neck.

The soil got colder as it got later until it was already pretty dark. My mom had gone into the old, semi-abandoned farmhouse to cook. This was before my aunt and uncle did a lot of restoration to the place, so it still had the old eeeeeeerrrrr-thwap! screen door full of holes, mud-dauber wasp nests on furniture, a stove with about one coil that actually worked and sporadic, frequently rusty water.

She made boiled potatoes. That’s it. Served with salt and butter. You peel and slice them, salt the slices and try to balance a piece of rapidly melting butter on top while maneuvering between the plate and your mouth. Normally, we drank milk with this meal, but I don’t recall if we had any that night. But the potatoes! The potatoes! They were unbelievable. I remember the taste even today, a good 20 years later. The best potatoes I’ve ever eaten, probably the best meal.

My very worst job

Blogroll question: What’s the worst job you ever held, and why was it so awful?

The worst job I ever had…was one that I really would have enjoyed under other circumstances.

Now, it wasn’t exactly a job in the traditional sense that I do some work and get paid for it. No no. It was an archeaological dig site that I worked at for a summer during college for credit, meaning I was actually paying for being allowed to dig holes in the ground under the scorching sun.

I had always been interested in archeaology (still am) but had never had much real contact with it, so I decided to sign up for a summer of field work to get a taste for it.

The work itself was exhausting and sometimes frustrating. It was a brutally hot summer, as per usual in southern Illinois. I don’t think there was a single day that the temperature didn’t at least hit 90°F. And it never, ever rained. For two whole months. Now imagine yourself standing on a square of dirt about 50 x 50 ft from which topsoil and corn has been removed by a backhoe. All around there is a kind of levee of the scraped off plow zone and beyond that, the remaining cornfield. There is no shade.

Now imagine getting up at 4:30 every morning to drive from your housing to the dig site. And working until about 4pm with a 30 minute lunch break under an only moderately opaque tarp stretched between some poles driven in the dirt. I was as tan as I’ll ever be by the end of the summer, despite liberal applications of sunscreen and a giant straw sun hat

The work consisted of carefully shaving layers of clay up off the ground with a sharpened shovel and depositing them in a bucket, then hauling that bucket to a screen, lifting it up and dumping it out, followed by forcing the clay through the screen to filter out any artifacts. Every day I wished I was in Egypt, like you see on TV: pouring sand on the screen, giving it a gentle shake, and it sifts right through like flour. If you shake a screen full of clay, the clay will just pill up into little balls. It was a real workout for the shoulders to get that clay squished through the quarter inch mesh.

All around me, my fellow students were uncovering broken pots, hoe blades, etc. One even found one of the largest caches of celts ever excavated in the US. The house pits I excavated had obviously been inhabited by obsessive-compulsive Cahokians; they were always clean as a whistle. The only place I ever found any chert flakes was embedded in my palm during screening. At least I never ended up at the nearby Urgicare center after stepping on a razor-sharp trowel or shovel, like several others.

It was hard, but I was good at it. So good that the site supervisors would have liked me, as they only student, to help them carefully excavate some human remains (but I didn’t have any A&P beyond high school. You have to know what the leg bone connects to so you don’t drive a shovel through it.).

I would have even enjoyed it, under other circumstances. But, as life would have it, I had just gotten involved in what was to be the most drama-filled, disappointing relationship of my life. My then-boyfriend and I hadn’t been together long when he decided to spend the summer studying abroad. The drama of being apart that summer was enough to seriously make me cringe, looking back at it. But what can I say?

Add to that the fact that half of my fellow students knew each other from one university, the other half knew each other from another university (it was a joint dig) and I knew no one.

Add to that our last weekend, when I hung out with the students from one of the universities for the first time and got as drunk as I’ve never been since, for good reason. I don’t think I’d ever had more than one drink before that and had no clue of my limits. It was a disaster, so much so that almost 10 years later, I’m still embarassed.

Add to that a slight breakdown the next day when the mother of all hangovers tipped the scales of stress.

I went home for two days following this little break down while the rest of the crew went on a kind of overnight field trip. I rejoined them for our “final exam”, which was actually the most fun of the whole class: the archaeolympics. It included a trowel toss, atlatl carving, a game of chunky and a clay-sculpting competition. I actually won at chunky and my sculpture of a mother goddess garnered much praise from everyone (sadly, I gave it to my then-boyfriend as a present and haven’t seen it since).

It’s a shame, really.  Just goes to show how important your working environment can be I guess. Can turn a lousy job into a good one and vice versa.