Here’s the setup:

• Four 1” thick center cut porkchops (or whatever porkchops you have, enough for 4 people)
• Two small or one large onion, cut into bite-sized chunks
• Two cloves of garlic, diced.
• 1 8oz can of tomato sauce (plain or seasoned)
• 1 14oz can of no-salt-added diced tomatoes (plain or seasoned) with liquid
• Non stick skillet
• Oil
• Shallow pyrex baking dish (I usually use an 8” square pan)

Pick your seasonings before hand – I’ve tried several, and these two seem to work wonderfully:

1. Salt, Pepper, Italian Seasoning Blend, a sprinkle of parmesan cheese
2. Salt, Pepper, Grill Seasoning (I use Lawry’s Seasoned Pepper plus a little crushed red pepper flake)

So here’s how it goes:

Preheat your oven to 350F.

Place about 1 TBSP oil (or a spray of non-stick cooking spray) in the bottom of a non-stick skillet. Heat to HIGH. Season your porkchops liberally with whatever seasonings you choose. Sear the porkchops for about 1 minute on each side – you’re looking for golden brown and delicious, not cooked all the way through.

Evenly space the porkchops in your baking dish. Dump the onions and garlic over top of them and kinda spread them out some. Follow with the tomato sauce, and then the diced tomatoes. Mush it around so it’s mostly level and you don’t have any really high/low spots (some onions poking through is OK).

Sprinkle the salt, pepper, and seasoning of your choice over the top of the tomatoes and don’t be shy – probably a full teaspoon of whatever seasoning blend, plus a good pinch or two of salt, and several grinds of pepper. Your tomatoes should look well seasoned.

Bake for 45 minutes or until the porkchops are done.

Serve plain, with mashed potatoes, with (brown) rice, with egg noodles, with salad, or with whatever side dish your heart desires.

Good, simple, easy food. Healthy and delicious.

(I apologize to anyone who is not expecting political talk on this blog. I rarely go there, and if you hate me for it, you can pretend this post doesn’t exist. )

Let me start this off by saying that I am not a rocket scientist. I don’t claim to be one, but I am married to one. My rocket scientist spouse is a contractor for NASA working on the Space program – both with the Shuttle and with the International Space Station.

Today, President Obama released his proposed budget for 2011. You can read all of it online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/- the part I want to talk about is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/trs.pdf – specifically page 18, “Termination: Constellation Systems Program”.  You can read all of it, if you like. I did.

In the words of a very famous person… “Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

The President’s 2011 Budget proposes to cancel the Constellation program, allow the current Orbiter/Shuttle program to die of natural causes when it terminates sometime in the next 1-2 years, and replace it with a yet unnamed, yet undetermined, “bold new approach” with “game changing technologies” that “embraces the commercial space industry.” Constellation is being canceled because it costs too much money and because it “doesn’t meet our national priorities.” This budget will, instead, accelerate work in “climate science, green aviation, science education, and other priorities,” all with money previously slotted for space exploration.

There are a lot of problems with this, not least of which is “And what are you going to do with all the people whose living depends on these programs, considering we’re in the midst of a very large economic recession and that job futures are extremely dim for just about all of the aerospace and defense sectors already?”, but I’ll let that go for a minute and focus on that last sentence.

The President wants to increase funding for science education… and get rid of the only active space exploration program (Constellation) to do it, with no actual replacement in mind.

To put it in other words: the President wants to spend lots of money promoting young scientists into making robots, aerospace engineering, all of the specific and technical fields that make Space possible… and then cancel the program that puts those scientists to work, in favor of some amorphous “new and awesome thing that we’ve not decided on yet.” Everyone thinks that it is great! when someone features a young group of scientists that make a robot that will find, pick up, take apart, and store tennis balls. As soon as those scientists grow up, go to college, get jobs, and make a robot that will find, pick up, take apart, and store molecules and objects from other planets, asteroids, or whatever… nobody cares.

It’s as though they don’t see the connection.

We instill in our youth the joy of space exploration – go see a movie like October Sky – only to take away their opportunities to follow that career later in life to greater fund “green aviation” and funnel more kids into math and science careers. (I’m sorry, I don’t work in the field, but even this pea-brained Anna can tell you that it’s a lot cooler to say “I ran data for that project that went into space” than it is to say “I ran the data on those fuel efficiency cells on an airplane that nobody’s ever heard of” not to mention the buzzword “green” thing.)

As for embracing the commercial space industry…

“… investment in a well-designed and adequately funded space technology program is critical to enable progress in exploration, that increased international cooperation could lead to substantial benefits, and that commercial services to launch astronauts to space could potentially arrive sooner and be less expensive than Government-owned rockets.”

When I read that, this is what I hear: “We think that commercial space programs are going to get here sooner, so we’re not going to bother, because it’s expensive. Instead we’re going to do a Bold New Thing like make all our people that are here to work in space exploration into R&D scientists in buzzword technology like “green aviation”. All those kids that we’re spending all that money on can either pray that they get picked up as a corporate shill or come join the lab rats working at NASA.”

To add a layer of complexity, there is currently one commercial space exploration company in the United States – SpaceX. To some extent, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, The United Launch Alliance (which is both Boeing and Lockheed Martin) and Orbital Sciences all operate rockets as well, but currently SpaceX is the only US company actively entering the manned spaceflight field. All other commercial manned spaceflight is foreign, and that – combined with the phrase “increased international cooperation” smacks too close to outsourcing to make me really thrilled, especially considering the constant pushing of “science education” and the number of engineers already trained and working in the US.

The other possibility with this statement involves the government purchasing spaceflight technology from those companies instead of developing it themselves… which probably doesn’t do a lot in the saving money department, or will end up screwing over the engineers that developed it in the first place. (I bet they don’t tell students about that when they’re doing all that “science education” promotion.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s 2010, we’re at the ass end of a NASTY bit of economic downturn, and though the “end is nigh”, we’re not seeing a lot of bounceback yet. I get that it’s all about the dollars.

But if it’s all about the dollars, why bother funneling millions into creating new aerospace and robotics engineers at the expense of the jobs of an entire generation or two of existing aerospace and robotics engineers that really would like to continue working in that field.

It doesn’t make any sense.

I love them. I have them in multiple sizes and colors. (I even have some 12”x12” ones. Yes.  one foot square) I use them to remember stuff, to overwrite things in my planner, to make notes that can be moved around. I even use them to organize things in a video game. Upon upgrading my desktop to Windows7, I discovered that there is a /program/ for sticky notes. (It’s called, ironically StickyNotes) StickyNotes lets me put notes of different colors on my desktop itself.

Currently there are three notes on my desktop:

• Stop. Breathe. Be here now.
• Write it all down.
• Mind like water.

That should tell you something about how my last few weeks have been.

That was the trip out. Trip back will probably look similar, actually. (Usually I fire up some podcasts too, but I forgot my iPod, so I’m actually listening to this stuff ON CD’s. GASP!)

What do you listen to on long trips?

It means a new beginning, a new year, a new end to the date on the checks I write every month, at least 17 of which I will screw up before March, and probably one more in June or something, when I’m not paying attention. In popular reckoning, it’s a new decade (thanks to our base-10 system) even if, to the people that make calendars and know things about math and whatever, the new decade doesn’t start until next year.

Quite honestly?

I’m not that into it.

I don’t typically make resolutions on New Years – there’s nothing special about Jan 1 that makes resolutions more likely to stick. In fact, in my experience, they’re /less/ likely to stick, since I come up with them arbitrarily to fulfill the need to have /something/ to say to the ubiquitous “so what’s your resolution for the new year?” question.

I refuse to make resolutions like “I will eat healthier” or “I will lose weight”. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with those kind of resolution, but promises to better myself made in January – when I am inevitably in a mental lull and usually struggling against cold/damp induced pain flares – just aren’t a good idea for me. And really? I eat very well, and am at a healthy weight. I’m not the buff 19 year old martial-arts freak I was in college… but I also didn’t have to worry about overdoing it and not being able to walk/function the next day back then (and I do eat a whole lot better now than I did then).

So I don’t really do the resolution thing.

I’m not the kind of person that can pick one thing and do it for an extended period of time and be happy. I “binge” on projects, for lack of a better term. I get REALLY into something, and then kinda fizzle out after a few months. If it’s going to stand the test of time, I’ll go back to it (like letter writing and pen collecting and making music and writing), but frequently I flit from project to project – and I’m usually pretty happy that way.

I could make resolutions about blogging more here (where my subject matter isn’t as limited), or about writing more – both collaborative and independently – or about keeping up with friends and finding new penpals and reading more books and not spending all my money on pens and paper, and drawing mandalas and keeping myself disciplined about spiritual and meditative things (and I think you get the idea) but… well, I don’t know that I’d keep any of them, and I don’t know that making them would do any good towards keeping them anyway.

As such, since it’s new years and apparently this is what I’m expected to do (even if I can rant about how new year’s resolutions kinda make me want to poke myself in the eye) I think I’ll make the following resolution:

I will do the things I love, focus on the people that matter, and spend my time on the things I know I will continue to be interested in.

It’s not about pens or writing or games or finding a job or writing a book or blogging or … really anything. But it works, I think, for one addled writer in Texas – or at least I hope it will.

And for everyone who reads this blog (or my other blog) I hope the following, in the words of Someone Famous, who has no idea who I am, but who has an undeniable way with words.

…I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

- Neil Gaiman

I conduct orchestras with the music on full blast.

(Nothing like a little Stravinsky to get weird looks from the car full of guys next to you at the stop light.)

I should not, however, be allowed to listen to certain pieces of music, because I get too wrapped up in them, and forget to drive.

On that list?

Respighi’s Pines of Rome
Stravinsky’s Firebird
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
Aaron Copland … anything.
Bruckner’s 4th Symphony
Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (bonus points for 4th/5th movement)
Just about anything by Beethoven

Movie soundtracks are just as, if not more susceptible, especially the good stuff – Hans Zimmer, Klaus Badelt, Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, even a little John Williams.

Today the culprit was the aforementioned Respighi, whereby I missed not one but TWO turns on the way home from the grocery store – a trip I make about once a week. Apparently where most people shouldn’t be allowed to have cell-phones in cars?

I need to un-install the speakers.

I frequently am frustrated with it, check it mostly to delete invitations to parties from friends I’ve not seen in 12 years and who live halfway across the country and to block applications from sending me junk mail. No, I don’t want to play Mafia Farm Pets with you. Sorry. But even I have to admit there are some things that Facebook does well – amazingly well, in fact.

Here, have a cookie and some tea, and let me tell you a story.

When I was a little bitty girl, about 6 years old, my parents “inherited” a piano from my grandparents, who had found it in the basement of one of my grandfather’s churches.

It wasn’t a new piano – in fact, it was a pretty old piano. But it was in good shape, and I wanted lessons, and they needed a tuner. Through some happenstance of fate, the newspaper, a phonebook, and who knows what else (the internet didn’t really exist back then, and we didn’t have a computer anyway), they found a young man who was studying piano performance at … some university nearby, and his father happened to be a piano tuner.

I don’t really remember his father (other than a few mental images of him waist-deep in our piano), but Misha (the late-teenaged kid) came to our house once a week or so for the next 4(ish) years, to give me piano lessons.

He was, by all accounts, a superb teacher.

I remember never feeling like he was talking down to me, and that he had me start composing music from the very first time I sat down at the piano (I still have some of those compositions? and to be quite honest, they’re better than some of the stuff I did in Music Theory I in college). I was too short to reach the pedals, so I played sitting on an old wooden chair with two phonebooks and an encyclopedia set on top. In the winter, he’d come in from the cold, and banish me to the kitchen to run my hands under hot water from the sink until they were warm enough to play. While he waited, he would improvise on various jazz tunes and whatever else popped into his head. I don’t know if I ever heard him play “classical” music other than what I was learning.

Thinking back, I probably did, but it was the jazz I remembered.

Around the time I was 10 or so, I decided I wanted to play the clarinet in the band at school, and was asked to choose between clarinet and piano for lessons. I chose clarinet. Then we moved to Texas, where I continued to play woodwinds, but still tinkering on the piano until High School, where I played in the Jazz Band. I wasn’t the best pianist, but I had fun, and I loved the music.

Every now and again I’d wonder how things had gone for him, considering that he’d been a pretty amazing musician and was playing in clubs even back then.  But Misha’s last name was, to a 6 year old, nearly unpronounceable thanks to the haze of fuzzy memories, and as such, I could barely remember it properly, let alone figure out how to spell it. I tried a few times to see if I could find him, but Google wasn’t that good, and… well, I was guessing wildly at a Russian last name.

Fast forward to this weekend, visiting my parents for my mom’s birthday.

Mom has a huge old box of music, inherited along with the piano, and in it are the books I used learning as a little kid. I went through them, having a happy walk down memory lane at the sight of songs like Grasshoppers Jumping and 10 Little Indians. I got to the end, and there in the back, on my little “Certificate of Merit” for completing the first book in the series, he’d signed his name as my teacher (as well as doodled all over it).

Misha Piatigorsky

I went to Google.

Turns out, our assumption that he’d make it as a musician weren’t far off. You can hear Misha Piatigorsky in a few different clubs in New York, listen to his stuff on Rhapsody, or buy his music.  But Google isn’t the theme of the post. Google let me know he really did still exist, and that he’d been successful.

The power of Facebook is in connecting people.

So thanks, Facebook, for allowing me to say thank you, 15 (or so) years later, to the guy whose fault it probably is that I’m still hanging on to the music.

Or at least, I can blame him for getting me started.

But that’s not all that different. Nor are the “buy your kids 12 billion things to show you love them” undertones anything new.

Yesterday, however, after driving 300 miles back from Dallas (I drove up there Saturday for my mom’s birthday), I flipped on the TV to veg out a little and relax. And the first commercial I saw?

Scruffy Dude: “Hand-made Gifts for Christmas?”

Dude looks at his smiling grandmother, sitting across from him at the table. Dude stands up and goes into the garage with the (rather nice) hand knit mittens she just gave him.

Scruffy Dude: “Who wants that? Why not buy your friends something they’ll really like.  Like a snowmobile. I hear you can get one cheap on E-Bay!”

<more e-bay paraphernalia, showing the Dude doing “fun things” with extremely expensive mechanical items out in the snow, Dude playing with expensive electronics. He’s wearing synthetic gloves.>

Scruffy Dude sniffs the mittens:  “Smells like church.”

<Cue E-Bay tag.>

Alright.  So E-bay takes pot-shots at Etsy. Great.

Just what I wanted to see after spending 25 hours over three and a half days frantically making some woollen winter things for my mother’s birthday (after she mentioned not having any before her move).

I’m sure every person who spends countless hours working on gifts so that they can be pushed aside in favor of shiny, “expensive” (previously owned/USED) things bought on E-Bay is just thrilled. I have enough of a time with gifts that I make for people. When you spend many hours working on something? Having that something get rejected … hurts. (Which is why some of my friends will not get knitted things. If I figure out that your reaction will be to act nice-nice and then shove it in a drawer? Nope.  No knits for you.)

Now, am I actually putting any stock in this particular commercial?

Not really, though (as I’m sure you noticed) I’m slightly peeved.

To be honest, it reads like E-bay is feeling threatened by Etsy’s handmade offerings, and the fact that the makers of said handmade items are choosing to sell them via Etsy rather than through E-Bay (which has kinda become an odd shamble of used items and then huge shiny stores selling all kinds of things at normal (or higher) prices).  Which, you know, whatever. If they’re threatened enough to take potshots at handmade items in order to shill their “Christmas Crap” campaign, they’ll just lose even more of their sellers to Etsy.

Still, though, I think the whole thing is misplaced and… well, not that funny.

Sure, I get that a new snowmobile is “more fun” than a pair of mittens. But you need mittens to ride a snowmobile without frostbite, and, quite honestly, I can afford to buy enough yarn to make some mittens (less than $20 even for REALLY NICE yarn).

TLDR version – Ebay is stupid, commercials are stupid, and having to put up with Christmas for three months every year is REALLY stupid.

Also?  What the fuck does “smells like church” mean?

Left Mitten, unblocked. Pattern is Bella’s Mittens, by Marielle Henault.
I’m just now casting on its opposite.

Yarn is Malabrigo Merino Worsted (single spun) in colorway Pearl Ten, held double. Knit on size 8 circular (yes, I know the pattern calls for a size 11 needle. I knit loosely, and my intended recipient is not a large person. These fit me, so I know they will fit her.)

These mittens are the reason I’ve not done any NaNo writing. They’re the reason we ate pizza for dinner last night. (I’ve managed to get a crock-pot dinner going for tonight.)

They are a gift. A last minute gift, and they need to be done by Saturday morning. I have two busy evenings tonight and tomorrow, and so everything else is on hold while I cram-knit to get them done. I’m really /really/ hoping I get finished.

I make no secret of my love of animals. Dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, even fish and reptiles (and amphibians!) are worthy of admiration from me. Yes, I’m the weirdo that feeds the garden toads, chases the cats away from the geckos that get in the house so I can catch them and put them outside, won’t step on spiders (and, in fact, will feed the big outside garden spiders), and chirps at the tree frogs in the yard.

I also am currently the caretaker of two (mostly) fabulous felines. Max and Charlie are a great deal of fun, and rarely a day goes by that I don’t at least smile, if not laugh at one or both of them being … well, cats. They love string. They love playing Kitty-WWF on my bed and then tearing after each other through the house like tiny furry rockets. They love playing chicken with my laptop.

Unfortunately, this time of year is rife with people doing horrible things to animals – particularly cats, especially black cats.

I get that not everyone is a cat fan (preferences, we has them), which is totally fine. Being annoyed with a cat is… well, part of living with cats, and when they do annoying things, generally it seems that the appropriate response is to shut the door, ignore them, go somewhere else, dump them off your lap, etc. Or possibly to engage in some corporal cuddling, whereby you are as annoying to the cat as it is to you.

Being annoyed with an animal does not equal maiming, mutilating, or otherwise doing horrible things to it – as TJ was noting had been happening in the news where she lives in Arizona, and which has recently been on the news from Florida. It doesn’t mean torturing an animal that is essentially helpless. (I’d rather not go into any more specifics, simply to avoid getting internet hits from creepy fuckers who want to do that kind of thing, but I’m sure a little Google-Fu will find you everything you never wanted to see, and more)

Reading about it, hearing about it… honestly makes me a little sick.

I look at Max, who was obviously someone’s pet that ended up out on his own for several months (whether through ill will or escape tactics, nobody knows), starving outside until he got picked up, and realize he was lucky. And that to live with us, he’s /really/ lucky. When we got him, he barely weighed 7 lbs and his fur was scrawny and thin.  Now he weighs 14lbs and is considered healthy – if a bit chubby – by the vet, with a gorgeous cream coat with pumpkin points.

I look at Charlie, who has taken the better part of two years to get over his fear of my husband and of anyone’s shoes and of loud noises, and see that he’s warmed up into a happy and sociable cat. And I realize he was less lucky than Max, but that he still has a happy ending that includes gooshyfood and feathers-on-a-string and a screen porch to watch birds from.

So if there’s a critter in your life that you love (or maybe just tolerate most of the time), give him/her/it a pat from me today.

I don’t know what any of us can do to keep horrible people from doing horrible things, so I settle for doing the best I can for the two I signed up to care for.

Obligatory note that if you are looking for a pet, rescue organizations that you can find through Petfinder.com are a great place to look (whether you want a young animal or an adult, and whether you want the standard cat or dog, or something a little less common).

Particularly if you are interested in a cat or kitten, adopting a black cat is often less expensive because of the superstitions commonly associated with them; you may not be able to adopt a black cat or kitten in the months of October/November, however, due to people doing horrible things to them and ending up on the news.