Long-overdue updates

It’s been about six weeks since the last update here, but in my defense, I’ve not been entirely dormant in my progress down The List:

- I completed Reading-1 by reading through my Easton Press version of Of Mice and Men this week. Somehow I managed to get a high school diploma and three degrees from college and grad school combined but never read this book. (I think I saw the play once.) Anyhow, that makes three Easton Press books and I’m done. 

- I tried a new dish from The Joy of Cooking, bringing my completion level of Cooking-2 up to 4 out of 5. The new recipe was roasted tomato chipotle salsa. The recipe is way off in the quantity though; it said it makes 2 cups and it was closer to 2 quarts. But that’s OK because it’s extremely tasty, not only straight-up with tortilla chips but also, as I discovered tonight, on a steak hot off the grill. I’m going to try a second iteration next week for a Cinco de Mayo party. 

Back a few weeks ago I passed the 100-day mark in this 1001-day adventure, at which point I was going to sit down and re-evaluate the entire list. But I ended up having a very busy schedule around that time and I just never got to it. But school is over is a couple of weeks, and at that point I do have a few early-term adjustments to make. It’s hard to think of the time I’ve spent so far on this project as being “short-term”, but it is, as I am only 1/10 of the way through. 

So, more stuff to come soon. 

A trio of completions for Easter

Happy Easter to everybody. Here is a rundown of some recent completions from the list:

• We took some of our tax return money (the part that was left over from paying off all our credit card debt) and made a couple of long-overdue house upgrades. One was to add six recessed lights to the living room (Home-8). The living room, despite having three windows and being open to the breakfast area which has a large sliding glass door, suffers from “dark spots” where light just never seems to reach. We’ve tried adding floor lamps and so on but it just ended up cluttered. Now we can have a cool low-level lighting effect for TV watching or crank the lights all the way up to brighten the room up.
• The other house project was to change the thermostat (Home-7). Our former one looked like it was Soviet-era, despite the fact that the house is only two years old. The bad thing about our old thermostat was that it was directly at the top of the stairs to the basement, and so during the winter, cold air would blow up the stairs and onto the thermostat. The first winter we were in the house, before we had figured out some of the vagaries of our house’s construction, the second floor would frequently have temperatures that would climb into the 80’s overnight because the furnace was always on. And during the summer, sunlight shines through a high window in the foyer and directly onto the thermostat, so we encounter the opposite temperature problem. So we swapped it out with a programmable model which is not as susceptible to these temperature effects.
• This being Easter, I have now officially observed Lent in 2008 (Faith-11). Observing Lent usually involves making some sort of personal sacrifice for the 40-day period Lent occupies. Mine was to give up eating lunch on the weekdays. Although I did actually abstain from lunch during the entire period, I didn’t handle it well always — I’d frequently pig out at breakfast and dinner because I knew I was getting no lunch, and that’s not really the right approach. But on the bright side, I’m actually rather used to not eating lunch now and have been able to get a lot of stuff done in the 30 minutes or so that I freed up. So I will probably stick with not eating lunch from here on, for the most part.

This weekend will mark the 90-day point in this journey, and as part of the process I will be making some initial adjustments to the list and taking stock of how things are going so far. Stay tuned.

Completed: Profession-1

Quick note: I finished task Profession-1, which was to attend the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (ICTCM) in March. That was this past week. I posted copiously on my experiences at my other blog, Casting Out Nines.Also, I finished up another book from the Basic Sci-Fi library, Ben Bova’s Titan. I like that whole “Grand Tour” series although I though Titan wasn’t the strongest of the ones I’d read.

Completed: Family-7

Today, I — or I should say my wife and I — completed task Family-7, which was to pay off $3000 of our consumer debt.  In fact, without revealing details, we paid off significantly more than $3000 in our debt, and we did it in one fell swoop using our income tax return. That tax return was unusually large due to the tax credit given to families who adopt, which we received because we came home with P. in 2007.

We had planned over the last few years to take the adoption tax credit we got from L’s adoption and apply it to P’s adoption; and then take the credit from P’s adoption and bankroll it, saving it for a lengthy trip back to China when the girls are in their teens to help them learn firsthand about their cultural heritage. We may still do that trip. But tactically, we decided the best move for our family right now is to eliminate our debts. So we took very nearly the entire tax check and applied it to just that.

With that portion of the tax return, we were able to retire fully 1/3 of our outstanding non-mortgage debt, and virtually all of our credit card debt, in one shot. Now, the only major item we have to pay off (other than the house) is the minivan we bought a couple of years ago. This represents a major leap forward in getting our family finances back on track. And it frees up a significant amount of money per month which, until now, had been going towards monthly payments on our credit cards. Using Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball approach, we can now use that extra money to accelerate payments on the van and get it paid off, and hopefully within a couple of years we will be debt-free except for the mortgage on our house.

Of all the completions so far, I think this one is the one that feels best.

Completion update for February

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since my last update! I haven’t forgotten about anything. Here’s some recent activity off the list:

• I finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the second of three Easton Press books I am reading for Reading-1.
• I also finished Brainwave by Poul Anderson, which is off the (massively long) Basic Science Fiction Library list targeted in Reading-2. Excellent book, and my first Poul Anderson novel. I checked out There Will Be Time from the library yesterday just because I wanted to see more from Anderson; I can’t recall if this is also on the Basic Science Fiction Library list. (Update: It’s not, but I also checked out Titan by Ben Bova, which is on the list, and I actually started that one last night.)
• Last night I finished The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals by Gene Veith, thereby completing Reading-12. Another outstanding book, although I know already I will need to read it again just to make sure I am understanding all the chains of reasoning Veith lays out about the Lutheran faith.
• We completed the first item from the Home sublist, Home-11, by having a couple of companies come out to the house during February to give us estimates on finishing our basement. Both companies specialize in “basement finishing systems” that consist of insulation that attaches to the concrete walls and which have a sort of reinforced-fabric front, rather than just the usual drywall. Their products were very nice and we came this close to signing on the dotted line with one of them. But the price was just too high for us right now, since we are trying to eliminate our non-mortgage debt. We are probably going to wait until August or September and look again, focusing on good old-fashioned drywall rather than anything so expensive as the stuff we saw.
• Although we never got the makeup for the class we missed on baptism, I’m marking off Faith-6 as done, since we formally joined our church on February 10. I don’t think one afternoon class was going to give me enough space to think and ask questions about something that deep, anyway. But I’m working on it!

There will be several more completions that are currently underway and will be done in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

Completed: Technology-4

It seems like I almost never look at my blog stats any more, but looking at the weekly pageviews for Casting Out Nines (my primary blog), I have blown away my goal of sustaining 800 pageviews per week for four weeks (Technology-4). As this graphic shows, I’ve actually been up above 1,288 page views for the last six weeks.

I figured that Technology-4 would go hand-in-hand with Technology-2 (posting an average of once a day at CO9’s for four weeks) but that actually hasn’t been the case — I’ve let 4-5 days go between posts at times since January. So, hmmm… I’m writing less frequently, and getting more hits. What exactly is that telling me?

Books in the mail; flossing; church and Lent; and a new dish!

Some completion updates for you:

I am nearly done with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which will be Easton Press book #2 of  3 which I plan to read (Reading-1). Easton Press, by the way, is the name of a publishing house which specializes in fancy, leather-bound versions of the classics. When I first got out of grad school I treated myself to signing on to the 100 Greatest Books Ever Written program from them. I stopped around halfway through after I got married and had to actually start paying attention to the money I was spending. Most of these fancy books have been collecting dust on my shelves for nearly ten years, and so my task here is to read a measley three of them.

In the mail right now are some more books from the list:

• The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals, which will be my Gene Veith book (Reading-12);
• The Golden Ratio: The Story of phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number
  by Mario Livio, for my “other recreational math book” entry (Reading-5);
• Brainwave by Poul Anderson, which is from the Basic Science Fiction Library (Reading-2);
• Principles of Lutheran Theology by Carl Braaten, a layperson’s book on the subject (Faith-9).

I think I’ll probably start with the Poul Anderson book.

Almost without recognizing that I had done so, I completed my three-week stint of nightly flossing (Health-5). Of course I plan on continuing — having done it for 21 straight nights, it’s basically a habit now, which was the point.

Technically speaking, the Adult Information Class at our church is over, but we had to miss the crucial third week of the class (where our pastor talked about some theological issues that the Mrs. and I have major questions on). So I am not marking Faith-6 as completed until we schedule a makeup with the pastor, which might be this Friday night at our place over pizza.

Easter is unusually early this year, and therefore so is Lent, which begins day after tomorrow (Ash Wednesday). On that day I will start Faith-11 by observing the season with a 40-period of some kind of personal sacrifice. I am going to try to give up lunch during the work week (which might help with Health-7).

Finally, I tried a third new dish from The Joy of Cooking (Cooking-2) tonight — pasta primavera. I’d made the quick-and-dirty version before where you used alfredo sauce in a jar, etc. This recipe does everything from scratch, though, and there really is a huge difference. Again, I forgot to take a picture of the results before we had plowed into eating them. I feel like I learned something from having made the dish this way; for example, I had never blanched a vegetable before.

One down in Reading-1, two to go

Finished up the first of the three Easton Press books I had set myself to read as part of Reading-1. It was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I have to say… I didn’t get it. 150 pages of animated playing cards and talking animals and a precocious kindergartner doing absurd things and acting with shocking meanness toward each other — I suppose the book is trying to be clever and in its day was whimsical and inventive, but I just felt like was being forced to sit in a roomful of snotty stuck-up 5-year olds who are smart enough to make insults towards each other all the time and rude enough to do it. Maybe I just have no taste, but I disliked this book very much, I was glad to finish it, and I can’t fathom why this is considered a “childrens’ classic”.

I’m also biased because I go to bed and read every night having just finished up reading children’s books to L which really are fun and whimsical and inventive. Last night it was Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches which cracks me up every time I read it.

I started the second book last night as well, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which looks much more promising.

What’s cooking

A partial completion for Cooking-2 tonight, as I tried out The Joy of Cooking’s recipe for chimichurri sauce. I don’t know if that technically counts as a “dish”, but I’m counting it anyway. If you didn’t know, chimichurri is a spicy sauce made from various spices (TJOC’s recipe uses salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, and oregano) along with olive oil, garlic, onion, cilantro, and lime juice. (TJOC uses red wine vinegar instead of lime juice but I prefer the lime.) The picture at left shows it, although I just found that picture on the net — it’s not the batch I made.

I served it over a flank steak which I grilled on the stove top, along with some black beans. I liked this recipe better than the one I had been using. The old recipe had a much lower oil-to-lime-juice ratio — just one tablespoon oil and 1/4 cup lime juice in the old recipe, whereas TJOC has 1/2 cup oil and 1/4 cup juice — and the “bite” was fun but almost overpowering. And in the old recipe, there was no onion. TJOC’s recipe has a little more crunch because of the onion and a more subtle and mellow flavor because of the increased amount of oil. But it still has that twang that I like so much about chimichurri.

The only thing I regret is not grilling the steak on my grill outside. The grill pan I use just doesn’t do meats very well. I don’t mind grilling outside when it’s cold, but I draw the line at having to chip ice off the grill to get to it, which is what I would have had to do this time!

On the Mountain top

Finished The Seven Storey Mountain last night, a.k.a. Reading-9. It’s a good example of why, if you read a book somewhat early in your life before you had a lot of life experiences, you should make time to go back and re-read it with older and more experienced eyes.

I first read this book, which is the spiritual autobiography of Thomas Merton, when I was in graduate school — I must have been 24 or so, unmarried, no kids, pretty new to anything like a serious Christian faith. An awful lot of this book went totally over my head, especially all the Catholic liturgical references.  I read it mainly to feed a self-image of intellectualized faith.

Now I just read it, having been working in the real world for ten years, married for seven, and having two kids under 4 — as well as having been around the block many times, and up to the highest heights and lowest troughs of spiritual experience, coming to rest these days in the confessional Lutheran camp with its observance of many of the same liturgical elements that Catholics observe. And surprise, surprise — the book makes a lot more sense. And I feed off of it a lot more, and in the right ways.

Now I’m starting on Reading-1, beginning with my Easton Press version of Alice in Wonderland, which, surprisingly, I’ve never read.