More various and sundry
Feb. 12th, 2008 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73• Huz was feeling enough better last night that I slept in our bed with him rather than out in the living room on the futon. Perhaps not as sound a sleep as I might have wished, but glad he's doing better.
• Am sleepy/tired due to less-sound sleep than I would have liked, but for whatever reason it's presenting itself more as feeling goofy rather than feeling unhappy, which I'll certainly take. Also been a little dizzy ever since I got into work, which I fail to comprehend.
• Ankle is slowly getting better. I skated twice last week (25-30 minutes each), and ankle complained some for the rest of the day in each case, but not horrendously so. I walked up the stairs at work both yesterday and today without obvious difficulty (going downstairs is still definitely not recommended if I can avoid it). OTOH, looks like I need to continue taking Aleve at night as well as in the morning for a while yet: I experimented last night by deliberately skipping it, and my ankle is quite distinctly more plaintive and unhappy this morning than it usually is. I'm starting to be unhappy about how long I'm having to take the Aleve - it's been more than a month now. Thoughts?
• Tazz has been on a regimen of 1 dose prednazol every other day for about a week and a half, and still no coughing. Yay!
• Had my first voice lesson in 3 weeks yesterday! (Last week I was sick, the week before that my teacher was sick.) She seemed quite pleased with how I was doing on Fauré's Aurore, which has been a bear with regards to pronunciation. Yes, it's in French. Yes, I took French in high school and actually did pretty well with it. But it turns out that sung French is kind of different from spoken French. All those nasalized vowels followed by N's - they're still nasalized, but you don't voice the N at all. (I was never that good at nasalization anyway.) Spoken French also tends to be done with your mouth not wide open - now that I think about it, when I spent a couple of weeks in France, I don't remember seeing any of the members of my host family open their lips wider than about 3/4 inch. And of course in singing, ya need to drop your jaw to let sound out, and just live with the fact that this is going to affect the vowel sound a bit. I think it might actually have been easier if I hadn't been familiar with French to start with.
• Mom gave me The Best 30-Minute Recipe cookbook for Christmas. It's by the folks who do America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated magazine. The conceit here is that they've come up with versions of various long-cooking recipes (soups, baked chicken, etc etc etc) that supposedly take only 30 minutes to make from start to finish. We've done 3 of them so far, and have yet to beat about 40-45 minutes... but that isn't bad, really. They've all come out pretty tasty, though we've learned to decrease the salt called for. There's an awesome caldo verde recipe which we've done twice now; a chicken pot pie recipe which I modified significantly on my first go with it, and which is really more of a chicken skillet stew recipe; and a one-pot pasta with sausage and spinach dish, which was good but needs less sausage and more other-stuff in it for our preferences. I'm going to try their Indian Curry with chicken, cauliflower, and potatoes tonight. Mmmmm. :)
• Last but not least, it seems to be spring! Temperatures are in the mid to high 60s this week. We have a spray of narcissus in bloom, a daffodil opened yesterday, and the flowering trees are starting to do their thing. (This of course also means we have dratted oxalis all over the dratted place, sigh.)
• Am sleepy/tired due to less-sound sleep than I would have liked, but for whatever reason it's presenting itself more as feeling goofy rather than feeling unhappy, which I'll certainly take. Also been a little dizzy ever since I got into work, which I fail to comprehend.
• Ankle is slowly getting better. I skated twice last week (25-30 minutes each), and ankle complained some for the rest of the day in each case, but not horrendously so. I walked up the stairs at work both yesterday and today without obvious difficulty (going downstairs is still definitely not recommended if I can avoid it). OTOH, looks like I need to continue taking Aleve at night as well as in the morning for a while yet: I experimented last night by deliberately skipping it, and my ankle is quite distinctly more plaintive and unhappy this morning than it usually is. I'm starting to be unhappy about how long I'm having to take the Aleve - it's been more than a month now. Thoughts?
• Tazz has been on a regimen of 1 dose prednazol every other day for about a week and a half, and still no coughing. Yay!
• Had my first voice lesson in 3 weeks yesterday! (Last week I was sick, the week before that my teacher was sick.) She seemed quite pleased with how I was doing on Fauré's Aurore, which has been a bear with regards to pronunciation. Yes, it's in French. Yes, I took French in high school and actually did pretty well with it. But it turns out that sung French is kind of different from spoken French. All those nasalized vowels followed by N's - they're still nasalized, but you don't voice the N at all. (I was never that good at nasalization anyway.) Spoken French also tends to be done with your mouth not wide open - now that I think about it, when I spent a couple of weeks in France, I don't remember seeing any of the members of my host family open their lips wider than about 3/4 inch. And of course in singing, ya need to drop your jaw to let sound out, and just live with the fact that this is going to affect the vowel sound a bit. I think it might actually have been easier if I hadn't been familiar with French to start with.
• Mom gave me The Best 30-Minute Recipe cookbook for Christmas. It's by the folks who do America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated magazine. The conceit here is that they've come up with versions of various long-cooking recipes (soups, baked chicken, etc etc etc) that supposedly take only 30 minutes to make from start to finish. We've done 3 of them so far, and have yet to beat about 40-45 minutes... but that isn't bad, really. They've all come out pretty tasty, though we've learned to decrease the salt called for. There's an awesome caldo verde recipe which we've done twice now; a chicken pot pie recipe which I modified significantly on my first go with it, and which is really more of a chicken skillet stew recipe; and a one-pot pasta with sausage and spinach dish, which was good but needs less sausage and more other-stuff in it for our preferences. I'm going to try their Indian Curry with chicken, cauliflower, and potatoes tonight. Mmmmm. :)
• Last but not least, it seems to be spring! Temperatures are in the mid to high 60s this week. We have a spray of narcissus in bloom, a daffodil opened yesterday, and the flowering trees are starting to do their thing. (This of course also means we have dratted oxalis all over the dratted place, sigh.)
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 08:19 pm (UTC)Also, I'm glad your ankle is getting better - I don't have any helpful suggestions, just wishes for a speedy recovery!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 08:35 pm (UTC)We actually had irises a few weeks ago. But they were too early - the frost that came by a couple of days later did the blossoms in. I *like* living in the Bay Area, I must admit! (Your daffodil icon is nice, btw.)
Can you tell I don't have much to do at work today? :)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 08:41 pm (UTC)Thpppppt to you! I'm off to drive home in the SNOW! *mope mope angst angst*
no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 08:47 pm (UTC)*hugs, and offers hot chocolate* Safe driving! Snow is nothing to fool around with.
Think of it this way... you'll have flowers and green grass at a time when our grass is starting to die for lack of moisture and it's starting to be annoyingly warm.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 09:08 pm (UTC)