Tired, and recipe

Bell choir went better last night. I finally managed to get through the new piece (an arrangement of "Seek Ye First") without totally blowing it. The director complimented me on how "well" I played, and I said the most on-brand for me ever thing: "But I was still missing notes."

And then I came home, and spent most of the rest of the evening just staring at a wall. I don't know why I was so tired. Allergies, maybe. Or maybe it was just a long day at work capped with an hour of pretty intense concentration. (The lab I taught yesterday: first up, a couple people were REALLY having trouble following directions. This is something I have noticed in recent years: formerly, I could hand out the lab, and in the pre-lab instructions emphasize a couple of points but now I find even with written lab + oral instructions + my writing guidelines on the board, it is often not enough. I think this is a cultural change, perhaps, as I do not seem to have become any less comprehensible*)



(*I have noticed with age, the periodic stammer I have when I'm stressed or distracted, and my tendency not to always come up with the word I want as fast as I want it is increasing, and this distresses me)

Also, a number of the students left dirty glassware or other things scattered around the lab, despite my having reminded them about cleaning up. (One student, the last person finishing up, stayed and helped me, and he commented: "You mention about cleaning up every week, and yet people still don't." And of course, he's one of the ones who DOES clean all his stuff up, but he's also one of the students I look at and go "You have a research career ahead of you" because he's smart and diligent and interested and also just "present" in a way some of our students aren't)

I THINK it's just inattentiveness on the part of the others and not malice. But I have made a big fat hairy deal about "The lab HAS to be clean when we leave; we share this room with another instructor and I DO NOT want to leave the lab a mess for him**"

(** Unspoken, but known-to-me addition: because a few years ago he was agitating for this particular lab class - because it's often messy - to be moved down to the metal building - which would mean carrying all the impedimentia needed for each lab down there, and carrying it back, and also the building is neither heated nor air conditioned so it would be kind of inhumane conditions much of the semester. So instead I just am extra careful about cleaning now. At least the student who helped me went - unasked - and washed down the countertops, a task I normally do)


I don't know if it's time to make a sign. I once toyed with an idea of grabbing the "Rosie the Riveter" image and superimposing the old slogan my dad used to use: "Your mom does not work here, clean up after yourself" but with the EXCELLENT addition one of his women grad students made: "And even if she did, you're an adult, and it's not her job to clean up after you any more."

But I'm not sure how well that would fly.

I've also contemplated using an image of Morpheo from "The Matrix" with the caption "What if I told you it takes almost no time to wash up your glassware when you're done" but that might be too subtle.

(Maybe what I need is the FFFFFF face, with the caption "Your instructor's face when you leave the glassware for her to deal with" but again that might be too subtle")

I don't know. I don't SEE for sure who's doing it because I'm busy helping people or else I'd just take points off - I threatened that at the beginning of the semester - but without a TA in there to help me, I'm really busy.

But yeah. Lab wears me out a lot of the time because some of the labs do require like two hours of completely sustained attention on my part - and the kind of attention where I'm having to pay attention to like eight different things at once. I don't have TAs, because (a) we have a shortage of TAs and budget to pay them and (b) for the more specialized labs, good luck finding someone with the experience. So I'm just grateful to have one for the intro lab I teach where she can do the grading of those labs for me. (For Soils lab, the grading comes at the very end: I have them prepare lab books, which I grade the last week of classes. And for ecology, I make the lab write ups fairly short, and generally I only have 24 or fewer students)

I did manage to do a little cooking - made the version (decidedly inauthentic*) of Bolognese sauce I make.

(*Based on a recipe in a book....I forget the author, but it was a British woman and the cookbook was largely a memoir of growing up upper-middle-class between the wars. Hyphenated last name. I can picture the book - it's a recent paperback - but can't think of the author or title now. I will say some of the recipes have errors in them in terms of the metric-to-standard conversions, and there are a number of other errors. Someone did not edit the book well....but the recipes I've tried are good, even if I have to get out my calculator some times)

Anyway, here's more or less what I do:

Cut up and saute maybe a half cup of onion (I was lazy last night and just threw in a bunch of freeze-dried shallots, which I keep on hand for times like this, and they worked fine)

Put a little good olive oil in the bottom of a Dutch oven (if you are not sauteeing onions first). Add some garlic powder, some oregano, some mixed "Italian Herbs". Heat gently, then add a point of ground beef.

Cook and break up until the beef is done. (Add the onions at some point if you sauteed them separately). Put in a 28 ounce can of tomato puree or crushed plum tomatoes (I like Cento brand, if you can find it) and 2 of the little (3 ounce?) cans of tomato paste. Add more herbs and garlic at this point if it seems to need it: I tend to underestimate on things that make a large quantity. Add a bay leaf (probably not authentically Italian but I like it) and a shot of Worcestershire sauce (if you can do bouillon cubes - I can't, too salty - a beef bouillon cube is what's recommended, or an OXO cube). And then put in a generous cup (I do more, one of the tiny little bottles that I buy for cooking) of red wine. Doesn't matter too much as long as it's not a sweet wine - I usually use cabernet sauvignon as that's what I can get easily and also I keep it on hand because it's good in other beef dishes* Bring the heat up enough to cook off the alcohol, then turn to the lowest setting and cover.


(*I don't actually drink wine: I don't like it, and also, with all the meds I'm on, I've been told much alcohol consumption would damage my liver, so I just forgo it. But I like to cook with it because sometimes there's nothing you can substitute that has a similar flavor in cooked food)

Then you simmer it for a while. Longer is better. I only simmered it for about an hour. I think three hours is better if you have the time.

Take the bay leaf out at the end.

I just serve this over thin spaghetti but this would also work with other pasta, I think. It makes A LOT but it will freeze. And if you're like me, it's a relief to cook something "big" one day and then have that to heat back up for the rest of the week. (I'm thinking a person could make a funky deep-dish pizza sort of thing by making a thick, bready crust and spreading a layer of this on after the crust had blind-baked a bit. Probably would need to eat it with a fork but then again a lot of the deep dish pizza you do.)

And to bring everything back together: one of my Twitter friends and I were "talking" about people who do the silly boasting about not-knowing how to cook, and how it always amazes me (as someone who was taught that ignorance was something to be corrected, and persisting willfully in ignorance was somewhat shameful) that some people seem to think not knowing those kind of basic life-skills is cool and funny. (I get not-cooking if you are very busy, or have a chronic illness that means cooking a whole meal takes more energy than you have, but this was just "LOL I don't even know how to boil water").

And I wonder if some of my frustration with some students is related to this: maybe these days, a lot of people DON'T learn that kind of stuff. I learned to bake (first) and cook (a little later) from my mom. I learned measuring and following directions and why you need to do things a certain way for things to turn out right. (And also when you don't trust the instructions but check). And I learned to sew from her using patterns and pattern instructions. And my dad taught me basic plumbing and showed me how to rewire a lamp (not that I ever have) and how to do things like change the oil on my car (though these days, given the difficulties of disposing of used oil and also the mess, I figure it's preferable to go to a "guy." And really, in the past 30 or so years, that's what my dad's done too).

But one of the things assumed in my family was that you just....knew how to do stuff. Simple, basic stuff. You knew how to fix things or clean things or make things. And also, that kind of stuff was not "below" a person (remember: both my parents have Ph.D.s and my dad was, for years, a low-level college administrator). I *have* encountered people in academia who thought that stuff like changing their oil or even cleaning their house was "below" them and that....kind of baffled me.

Again, I totally understand paying someone to do a task for you to buy you more time for other things, or because you don't feel physically capable of it (me and stuff involving going up on the roof, these days), or because you have other things you need to attend to (I know people who got their kids a maid service for a few months after the birth of the kids' child, and they talked about what a difference it made, to be able to spend time with the new baby but not have to worry about the house)

But to me, not-knowing-how to do stuff - well, it kind of leaves you at the mercy of having to pay someone. Instead of you having the choice of "Do I do this myself, or do I hire someone?"

(Several times I've done minor plumbing repairs myself largely because plumbers were unavailable in the timeframe I wanted, and it was honestly faster for me to run out to Lowe's, get the thing, and do it myself. This is the sort of issue you face when you have only one toilet in the house...)

And I also wonder if maybe people who don't grow up baking chocolate-chip cookies, or making teddy bears off of a printed pattern, or building Lego things, or....insert whatever here (building models, building your own computer, building Pinewood Derby cars) are less comfortable with "here is a list of instructions" and maybe don't have the skill at following them, or what? I don't know. This is one of the big obstacles for me in teaching: I literally do not understand why and how people (who do not have any sort of identified learning disability) can't or won't follow sequentially written and numbered instructions. But I see it a lot, a number of my colleagues complain of it, people I know teaching at other schools complain of it. I do not think I am so brilliant or unusual in that I can follow directions, and as I said: it used to be I could pretty much give people the list and most of them could do it; now someone who can work independently like that seems rarer.