a what now? a count up?

Graduating was so weird. I literally had no idea how to spend my time, especially when I was looking for a job. And after I found a job, I came home and read books and played video games and watched TV and felt vaguely bored and miserable.

But after several months of not knowing what to do with my life, I am happy to find out that after I get home from work one of the first things I consistently want to do is do art. It's just enjoyable. I do all those other slacker-face things, too, as well as occasionally the dishes, I cook good dinners. . . and I also do art. For fun. Because I like it and that's how I want to spend my time. Wow. You know what this means?

I didn't produce art for all the scary professors standing over my shoulder all four years of college. I did it because of me.

In other words, I went into the art major for the right reasons, and that major gave me valuable tools to enhance the quality and viability of what I do for fun anyway. Gone are the days of throwing a temper tantrum because my tree drawing looks rather more like a stalk of mangled celery. It looks rather like a tree, so I'm satisfied.

Art is maybe even. . . a vocation?

So I'm no longer afraid I'll be one of those art-school casualties who either (a) had all the fun kicked out of creativity by school or (b) will stop working within a year after graduation for some combination of reasons.

Now I'm only worried that (c) I'll get too complacent with a life where I can earn a living with something dumb and make art on the side or (d) it will get too hard to take my art seriously in the real-world atmosphere and it will become a hobby, without any bones or honesty or strength in it.

The moral of the story is, to celebrate my productivity/ensure that I don't slack off, I'm going to start a count-up. Like all my count downs but in reverse. I am going to count up 24 months in which I do not stop making art for more than a week at a time. (Except that I am still going to count my unemployed post-college month, where I did literally nothing but sit on the couch and read and hunt for jobs, for morale reasons and because I think I genuinely deserved a break.)

Also, I hope I get accepted into a grad school within those 24 months. In which case the count-up will change into a count-down to graduation again. =)

Count-up -- three months.

lancaster, pa: where the organic chicken is the same price as the giant-brand chicken.

No lie. Greg just informed me that he buys our organic chicken from a stand in the middle of Central Market for about $3 a pound, the same as I spent today at Giant. So. . . a whole organic, grass-fed chicken for $12? Or four pounds of souped-up antibiotic- and steroid-laced chicken for $12?

For the past year and a half, we’ve been trying to create a diet for ourselves that’s healthy and as local and organic as possible. We knew that commitment might mean spending more on groceries than normal — but with vegetables and fruits, locally produced, organically produced, and affordable seem to go hand in hand. The problem has always been meat and dairy, and we resorted to not eating much of the former rather than exceeding our budget. Since we moved to Lancaster two months ago, we’ve been buying whole, organic chickens as a special treat, stewing them, and freezing the leftover meat to be used throughout the coming weeks. It’s been delicious. Slow-cooked chicken is my favorite. But I guess I never shook the idea that organic meat had to be more expensive than other meat, and that these chicken meals were a crazy splurge.

It turns out that they’re not! We could have them every week. (At least if Greg and I ate a whole chicken a week.)

I’m a little horrified that I bought chicken at Giant instead of this delicious, local, organic, affordable meat!

We all know I tend towards the frugal side, even when it comes to something important like the food we put in our bodies... But man what an all-around win our market chicken turns out to be.

Other recommendations in Central Market for the Frugally Minded:
Thomas Produce has organic, cage-free eggs for $2.50 a dozen. And homegrown potatoes for cheaper than any of those stands selling regular old Idahos that got shipped across the country. Bet you there’s no salmonella in any of their produce!

Also: today I successfully acquired a Pennsylvania driver's license, and it only took me half an hour of sitting and waiting around. Maybe Pennsylvania isn't filled with retards after all! Although their drivers licenses sure are ugly. . .

ooh, ooh! first post-grad revelation?

Today I came home from work and got really excited about making things. I started making baked oatmeal because our last few pieces went moldy. Then I thought, I'll just tackle that stupid fifth pumpkin that's been taking up half our shelf all year. Then I realized I don't have anything to take to work for breakfast tomorrow, so I make chocolate chip scones.

Why is it that I can't come home from work and be that motivated to go draw or do artwork?

Well, the kitchen is my favorite room of most houses. Granted, ours has NOT ENOUGH counter space, it's tiny, but it gets great afternoon light, it's far from the TV, and it's a radically different environment than I've been in for the rest of the day. And kitchen time is "me" time. I claim it as necessary and good time to take care of myself, to take my time and reflect, to make something delicious to feed my body with (and Greg, too). It somehow suits both my contemplative needs, my need to stake a claim to home somewhere, and my achiever needs (I tell you, I get stuff DONE in the kitchen. Except dishes).

Also it smells good when I have been baking, and I do not have to walk so far to get a snack! It is basically the perfect situation.

So I decided, why fight it? The kitchen is my best room. I'ma just draw out here. So I lugged all my stuff into the kitchen and spread out on the floor and started working with some music and some pumpkin bread with cream cheese on top.

Perfect.

send your pumpkin recipes express

Well, my lovelies, I haz a job. I actually haz 2 jobs. One is a job on Saturdays where I am a waitress. That one is kind of blah. The other job is the one where I work for a marketing company and man the phones, proofread stuff, and make other stuff in Photoshop. That one has the potential to be pretty sweet. At the moment, though, it is only 25 hours a week (moving to 29 next week). So I can't quite tell the waitressing place that I'm quitting. But soon, perhaps. This working-six-days-a-week thing is tiring, even when it still only amounts to 40 hours a week.

Also, my Messiah e-mail address will no longer be valid as of tomorrow -- so send your e-mails to my new address! Namely one kenzie.j.m at gmail.com. Of course, now I realize that it should really be kenzie.j.s, but changing it now would be silly and overly complicated.

Today I spent like two hours playing Zelda and didn't even feel guilty. What is this world coming to? Might I actually achieve balance in my life for at least a few short months?

Nah, that would be crazy talk.

Are you craving fresh vegetables yet? Tomatoes, sweet peas, lettuce, cucumber, zucchini. . . . ooh, and mint! I can't wait to make fresh mint tea or mint lemonade. mmmm. . . .

Once upon a time I read a book about how craving liver meant you were deficient in vitamins. Craving all these vegetables makes me wonder if I should be taking a vitamin supplement.

Oh, and do you want to hear a sad story? It is almost time for new vegetables, and we haven't even used up all the pumpkin we prepared and froze last fall! Lesson 1: 5 neck pumpkins is too much pumpkin for two people.

i will be the queen of 'i'll just throw this in here too' cooking

Like today, our celery was looking kind of sad. So I just threw it into the 40-clove garlic chicken recipe I happen to be making. Which I'm sort of adapting for slow-cooking in any case.

We are celebrating tonight! That is why we are making 40-clove chicken. I have a job! It starts on Monday! I think I will actually be able to gain marketing experience and knowledge. Woot woot for me! My labor IS worth something! They love me, they really love me!

Also, that is officially my exclamation point quota for the month.

This weekend we are going to a cabin with Greg's paternal extended family. Fun times, fun times. Last time I was so tired from school that I just fell asleep for several hours. This time I think I will manage to stay awake and have fun!

Alright my friends, enjoy the slowly-warming weather. . . . hopefully there is more of it to come!

the lancaster art collective

That's what I think we need around here. Greg found someone who graduated from Messiah whose press I can use for printmaking purposes, which is fabulous. But I still think a collective sounds like fun. Maybe Tim would let us join the Infantree, but if not, we'll come up with our own collective and make ourselves sound more official. At least that's my plan. I have yet to ask Greg. =)

It seems ironic that in the days when I have nothing much to do besides apply for jobs I can't seem to get around to blogging more. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I don't like telling the same stories more than a few times. So if I already tell a story to one person, I'm not likely to want to blog about it. And mostly I tell my stories to Greg. I suppose that's the general way a marriage is supposed to work?

I have a part-time job, on Saturdays, at a restaurant downtown that I find great fun. Basically I'm a waitress. It's nice to not have to have any kind of awesome skills besides basic organization and hand-eye coordination (although I did spill coffee on myself the first day I worked there). Go figure, my first day was on Valentine's day so we were packed.

Anyway, that's my tale from the city. Wish me luck as I try to find full-time employment before Greg is jobless!

we'll make our homes on the waters, we'll build our walls of aluminum, we'll fill our mouths with cinnamon now.

Well, the nice nails are emphatically flaking, and the honeymoon is over I suppose. It's sinking in that I won't be going home from this vacation – I really live here, and Greg really lives here and we're really married. (I could not have imagined a better wedding, by the way.)

I'm starting to realize, too, that I graduated and that now I have to find a job! I worked a half day today (if I could work from home every day it would be delightful) and Thursday and Friday I'm going in to the office to work. Then I'm done! The business office at the college somehow screwed up my W-9 form, and so I won't get paid at all until February. Which is probably fine. It'll be like I'm getting paid in a month when I don't have work. It's just also massively inconvenient.

But what honeymoon would be complete without a bit of adventure? In addition to spoiling ourselves with nice meals and a visit to Maryland, we experienced massive amounts of adventure (most of it in the last two days, actually).

We bravely sacrificed some of our craft principles and went to Wal-Mart to buy crappy shelves of particle board to put in our house. Silly us, we got the tall bookcases, however. The ones with a “safety strap” that you're supposed to pound into the wall, because the things are massively unstable. Yeah. Those bookshelves. Problem-solvers that we are, we just split them in half, though, so now we have four small shelves that hold their own instead of two big shelves waiting to clobber us.

That means the ol' homestead is looking a lot less cluttered and a lot more like home. Greg bravely tried to build a set of oak bookshelves without a single tool, not even a hammer, not even a screwdriver (my set seems to have gone mysteriously missing during the move). Needless to say, that went on hold when he discovered a few measurements that needed trimming and discovered that some power sanding was required. Um. . . yes. We're figuring that one out. Needless to say, the crappy shelves gave Greg some encouragement that yes, his set of shelves will totally be worth the time.

Yesterday, we also tried to visit Philly to use an Ikea gift card we received. We went to the library to look directions up on the internet, then headed out. An hour and a half later, when we got to the Ikea (after traveling through the decidedly sketchy part of its suburbs), we discovered that I forgot my purse at the library – with the Ikea gift card, my driver's license, and my social security card inside it, not to mention important things like my budget notebook and my day planner. All my debit cards and credit card were, thankfully, safe in my pocket.

So I panicked for a little while and got really angry and generally upset and we started to drive back. I got ahold of the library, though, and they found my purse and promised to hold it behind the desk for me. So we went BACK to Ikea to see if it was even worth a second trip once we'd recovered the gift card.

Ikea is a MAZE. And they sell every tabletop separate from legs and drawers and shelves and things. SO WEIRD. We walked around a ton. We debated for several hours about what to get. When we finally decided, we couldn't find the exit for like ten minutes.

We finally escaped the store and started the drive back to get my purse and some dinner – a full four or so hours after we started our trip.

On the way back, we mysteriously ended up in Delaware. Forty minutes south of where we belonged. So the trip back took nearly 3 hours, instead of the 1 ½ it should have.

On the plus side, when we finally got back to the library, my purse was there with all its contents intact. How lucky is that?

And then we had leftovers and were very grateful not to have to cook after a nearly 7-hour trip.

And then I remembered that it was Aaron's birthday. Woot woot for my favorite 20 year-old!

I know. It sounds so normal, doesn't it? Well, an average sort of vacation for me, anyway. Poor Greg. He didn't know what he was marrying into. =)

It's been immense fun, though, to sit and gorge on books and clean up the house and investigate Italian pastry places and cafes and used bookstores in the city. Ooh, and visit Central Market. I'll write you a whole 'nother post on Central Market. It needs one.

So until next time dear readers, I did not die in the weeks since I have posted last. I just experienced massive amounts of wedding and marriage and adventure.