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Average Jane Wears Herself Right On Out

I'm notorious for cramming activities into my weekend days, but yesterday may take the prize in perpetuity.

I slept a little extra in the morning because A Librarian and I talked ourselves out of our usual 3.4 mile morning walk. However, I more than made up the distance later in the morning when @ThatSusan and I met up and registered for the Urban Photo Safari.

We had three hours to wander around downtown and midtown Kansas City in a fairly wide corridor and take as many photos as we wanted. Some people drove around for the event, but we chose to remain on foot and explore wherever our whims took us.

I took more than 90 shots of anything and everything that caught my attention. I think this one may have been my favorite:

Our boundaries ended up being Crown Center to the south, Oak to the east, 18th Street to the north and Wyandotte to the west. Our perambulations took us to the Freight House district, inside Union Station, all over the Crossroads, and through the beginnings of the Chalk & Walk Festival outside Crown Center.

I even bought my husband a Science City t-shirt at the gift shop in Union Station. We also took a nice break around the 2-hour mark to have mimosas made with sparkling hard cider at Grinders West.

If you'd like to see the whole photo set, they're here.

The event wrapped up at noon and we grabbed lunch at Hamburger Mary's with fellow event participant XO. After that, I went home to take a quick nap that ended up lasting longer than I expected.

When I woke up and realized the time, I quickly changed shirts and went to Petco to help another volunteer deep-clean the cat area for the next two-and-a-half hours. I can still smell bleach on my hands…and I was wearing gloves.

Speaking of the animal rescue organization for which I volunteer, they are desperately trying to raise money to move to a new facility. They've been renting kennel space but that facility was cited by inspectors for various violations. They're trying to get funds to move and also find homes for all of the dogs that had been staying at the kennels (as opposed to living in foster homes). If you can possibly donate, please visit The Animal Rescue Alliance (T.A.R.A.). Thanks!

My final activity of the day was very low-key: a nice dinner with a group of friends. I mixed up a pitcher of my new favorite summer cocktail: 1 can of frozen lemonade, 1 can of lime-flavored gin, about 1/3 can of water, and top off the pitcher with the lemon-lime soda of your choice. Very light and refreshing.

We all sat on the hostess' back deck and enjoyed the summer evening. Unfortunately I couldn't hang around particularly late because I was so tired, but it was a great way to finish out the day.

I managed to sleep until almost 9:00 a.m. this morning, which is a record for me these days. Today I'll be doing a bit of grocery shopping, making a lasagna for dinner and otherwise relaxing between laundry loads the rest of the day. I've never been so happy to see an empty calendar square!

June 19, 2011
Average Jane Tries for Curls

If you haven't met me in real life, you're probably thinking, "What do you mean? You obviously have very curly hair in your little scribbly avatar."

Actually, that cartoon was drawn in the the mid-1990s when I had a perm. Everyone had a perm then. I believe it was the law at the time.

Mostly I've spent my life with fairly straight hair. Even in the 1980s when I had my ferocious blonde mullet, I couldn't really get very much texture with scrunching, no matter how much hairspray and gel I used.

However, that's been changing over the past several years. I suspect it has something to do with the texture evolving as my hair gets more and more grey, ahem, underneath all the color I use on it. The upshot is that my hair has become downright curly, especially the finer hair underneath.

So as the summer heat and humidity moved in prematurely this year, I decided I would stop straightening my hair and see if I could make my curly hair presentable. This decision was reinforced by the fact that my straightening iron had developed a worn patch and needed to be replaced anyway.

I'm loosely following the Curly Girl routines, particularly the no 'poo protocols, which I learned about from reading Miss Zoot (whose hair is considerably curlier than mine).

It hasn't been easy. Some days my hair looks pretty decent at first and then turns into a ball of frizz later in the day. Other days it's overly heavy and icky from the get-go. It got really bad last weekend, but I restored some equilibrium by scrubbing with a paste of baking soda and then rinsing with water followed by diluted apple cider vinegar.

My go-to product aside from the various conditioners I use in the shower is Marrakesh Oil. It smells good, keeps the frizz down and seems to make my hair dry more quickly. I got a sample of a jasmine-scented hair oil in my June Birchbox shipment and used it today, but I think I like the Marrakesh Oil better (and it's cheaper).

Tonight I'm going to try the recipe for making hair gel from flaxseed that I found here. I'll give it a try on my hair tomorrow and see what I think.

The whole thing is still an experiment and I might at any time just give up, buy myself a new straightening iron and drag my shampoo out of storage. However, I am kind of enjoying doing something different, so I'll probably stick it out through the end of the summer.

June 9, 2011
Average Jane: Passport and Reality

I ran across a mention of the Passport and Reality gallery, which shows people's photos from their valid passports side-by-side with what they look like now.

I have a particularly unrepresentative passport photo from 2001 (my passport expires this summer), so I knew I had to do my own comparison.

As with most of the photos in the gallery, it doesn't even look like the same person. Of course, no one looks good with Serious Face.

Funny thing is I've already changed my hair since the "recent" photo shown above. Now my hair is medium brown with chunky blonde highlights and I've been wearing it curly. So I guess you you don't need ten years to change your look; you can do it pretty thoroughly in less than a year.

Sadly, there's only one pair of stamps in my passport, from a trip to Jamaica in 2006. When I renew it, I'm going to promise myself that I'll do more international travel in the following ten years. There are lots of places I want to go!

June 5, 2011
Let’s See What Average Jane Has Been Up To

We won't even talk about Tuesday morning through Friday afternoon. Work, work, work, work, work. However, I decided to attend First Friday after work and it's been pretty much non-stop fun since then.

As soon as I stepped out of my building on Friday, I was approached by a guy who identified himself as a poet who did spoken word performances. Would I like to hear a poem? Well, sure! He did a somewhat dramatic recitation of a poem about U.S. consumer culture. I thanked him, shook his hand and moved on. Later on I ran into him again and, having realized I should have tipped him earlier, gave him a couple of bucks after he recited a poem about the healthcare bill to one of my colleagues.

I met up with a friend and we took in the whole experience, criss-crossing the Crossroads, visiting galleries, listening to music, eating from food trucks, dodging zombies, etc. Here's some of what we saw.

A gigantic salad.

Delicious street tacos from Port Fonda. I also bought a cupcake from Ms. Nene, but I ate it before it occurred to me to take a picture. You have my word that it was both beautiful and delectable.

While we ate our tacos, a zombie flash mob shuffled by. The guy on the left had the best costume by far. You can see him near the end of this video I took a little later in the evening.

It was too dark to get a really clear shot, but this guy was juggling and balancing on a ball. I saw him as I was heading back to my car to go home.

The next day started out pretty low-key, but I did manage to introduce my husband to the Philly cheesesteaks at Grinders. He was very impressed by their stage and performance venue out back and couldn't believe he hadn't known about it before. I told him it was because they somehow manage to only book bands that neither of us could care less about. A perusal of the flyers on the window confirmed that theory.

In the evening, I went to Knuckleheads to see Dread Zeppelin. I'd always wanted to see them and the tickets were pretty reasonable, so it worked out well. It was a warm evening, but there was a decent breeze and ample access to cold beer and soft drinks.

I have to hand it to Dread Zeppelin for committing to a schtick and running with it. When it comes to Elvis-impersonator-fronted, reggae, Led Zeppelin cover bands, well, they're it. The show was great, though.

I woke up this morning with the bar stamp still emblazoned on my hand and also transferred onto my opposite elbow. Good times.

I've been mostly taking it easy today, but I did stop by my garden plot to water the plants. They're looking pretty good.

I finally figured out a non-splashy way to transport water from my house to the garden: a huge cat litter bucket with a tight-fitting lid. Next time I need to bring a cup or pitcher to transfer the water from the bucket to the plants until it gets empty enough to pour. I did the two-hand method today, but it wasn't that efficient.

So that's where I leave off for now. How have you been spending your weekend so far?

June 5, 2011
Average Jane vs. Wallpaper

I had to check my Twitter timeline to see how long it took and it turns out I spent about four straight hours yesterday removing the wallpaper from my bedroom walls.

Here's what it looked like before I started, and please note that this photo somehow fails to show any of the many terrible wallpaper hanging flaws that were very evident throughout the room.

Of course, what this photo does show is one of a pair of cool (antique?) cobra-shaped wall sconces I have. I don't think they'll fit into the new decor scheme, but I need to find a place for them somewhere in the house because I love them.

So anyway, I started by peeling off the green part of the wallpaper. Naturally all of the backing remained.

You may be able to tell from the photos that this is a very small room. We had two bedroom options when we moved in and we chose this one for sleeping and eventually turned the somewhat larger one into a TV room. We have a queen-sized bed, a dresser, two small nightstands and a clothes hamper, and that's about all you can cram into the room and still be able to walk around without bumping your shins.

I didn't want to take all the furniture out for the de-wallpapering, so I settled for moving the nightstands out and pushing the dresser and bed into the middle of the room.

It turned out that the dresser and my husband's nightstand had both suffered the same fate over time: the nails that held on their thin wooden backer boards had worked their way almost completely out. I hammered them all back in so maybe we'll have gained another few years from our cheap Scandinavian bedroom set.

I filled the steamer and just as it was heated all the way up and starting to steam, I realized I couldn't find the scraper I'd been using. I looked and looked and looked and finally found it in my trash sack with the discarded wallpaper. Sheesh.

The steaming and scraping took more than three hours but I did it all without stopping because my rented wallpaper steamer had such a high capacity that it never ran out of water that entire time.

When I was finished, the room was restored to a plaster-patched robin's egg blue, which was the last color that had been painted on the walls before the former owners began wallpapering and then painting over the wallpaper. I'd already steamed off those many layers of paint and wallpaper back in 1995 when we moved in.

From the chips in the paint, it was evident that the room had also been painted a coral color in the past. As far as I can tell, every room in my house had once been coral and robin's egg blue in turn.

Did I mention that removing wallpaper is messy?

The cats seemed to think the entire process was riveting and each of them spent large amounts of time in the room watching me. It turned out that they were really just acting as lookouts.

When I finished with the steamer I discovered that they'd found their Nulo treats on top of the fridge and savaged the bag in the living room. (I don't know why my hand is magenta in the photo. I'm sure it was a little red from hours of holding a scraper, but still…)

By the time I was done, I was exhausted and covered in wallpaper paste and paper fragments, so I was happy to hold off on the cleanup until after I'd had a lovely Mexican dinner and split a pitcher of margaritas with A Librarian.

Once I got home, I finished shoveling the detritus of my project into a trash bag, put the furniture back where it belonged, changed the sheets, showered and promptly fell asleep.

Now I just need to figure out what exactly I'm going to do with the room and when. I need to have someone else give the ceiling a new texture and caulk all the way around where the walls meet the ceiling. I also need to hire someone to refinish the hardwood floors because that is not the kind of project I'm willing to tackle.

However, I'm fine with refining my earlier plaster fixes on the walls and making any other repairs that are needed. I love to paint and I may recruit my sister to help me add a faux finish to help hide the bad parts of the walls. Once I've gotten the hired work out of the way, I guess I just need to settle on a decor scheme, choose the colors and jump on in.

But that will be later. For now, I'm just glad to have gotten this far.

May 30, 2011
Average Jane’s Progress So Far

Well, I'm on the third day (really third? yes, it's already Sunday) of my four-day weekend and I've been keeping pretty busy.

Yesterday my nerd friends and I played a single game of Dune that lasted more than five hours.

The spice must flow!

I perpetrated a great deal of backstabbing and treachery…and yet I still didn't win. Darn it.

Since the weekend began, I have taken a total of three volunteer shifts at two different pet stores caring for the adoptable cats (almost four if you count stopping by one store to take photos of one of the cats). That's the kind of thing that happens when you spend a long weekend at home and everyone else leaves town.

This is Tori. She's very cute but kind of stressed out about living at the pet store, so you should make her your cat.

I also decided it was time I did something with an aging carton of eggs in my fridge so I hard-boiled them all and I've already had two large helpings of tuna noodle salad today.

I predict deviled eggs and egg salad in my immediate future as well.

My only big project for the weekend will be steaming the wallpaper off my bedroom walls. I located a wallpaper steamer for rent at Home Depot and it's currently sitting in my living room waiting for my husband to wake up so I can get to work.

I don't really have plans for this evening, but it might be a good opportunity to get together with friends (read: invite myself over to someone else's house). On the other hand, I have some work (work work) that needs to be done, so maybe I should just get that out of the way.

How's your weekend going?

May 29, 2011
How Average Jane Intends To Spend Her Memorial Day Weekend

I have a lot of plans for this weekend, which will either be three or four days long depending on my workload. Here's some of what I have in mind:

Renting and subsequently using a wallpaper steamer to start undoing the egregious decorating faux pas I committed on my bedroom walls in 1995.

Photo credit: imspence

Playing Dune at the home of friends who are moving away soon.

Photo credit: Kanga

Taking care of adoptable kittehs (twice).

Photo of Peter, Popoki and Emma by Cathy Prather

Accompanying my husband to the cemetery at Ft. Leavenworth to put flowers on his mother's grave.

Photo credit: Juliett-Foxtrot

Yoga on the lawn at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

And finally, a deep-tissue massage.

Photo: Indigo Wild

That should keep me pretty busy and still allow for reading, naps, playing with my cats, going on walks, cooking, gardening, etc. Of course, that assumes that I'll be out and about rather than hunkering down in various basements trying to stay safe from tornadoes.

What do you have planned?

May 26, 2011
Average Jane vs. 3D

Yesterday a friend happened to mention Cave of Forgotten Dreams on Facebook, which reminded me that I'd really wanted to see it. I had a free afternoon and there was a 12:10 showing nearby, so I was all set. When I put on my jeans, I found $17 in the pocket, which was exactly the cost of a movie ticket, a small popcorn and a bottle of water. It was fate.

The movie is an amazing look at the cave drawings and paintings at Chauvet, some of which date back 32,000 years. It also includes some commentary by scientists and visuals of the surrounding area. I can definitely understand why Werner Herzog chose to present the movie in 3D because the contours of the rocks on which the artwork was drawn are a big part of the viewing experience and the 3D adds significantly to the feeling that you are there in the cave.

However… This is where I'd like to point out that I have been completely out of the loop on the latest 3D trend. I didn't even see Avatar in 3D, much less any of the other movies that quickly jumped on that bandwagon. I can't even say that I was avoiding them deliberately, other than a general unwillingness to pay extra to see a movie that is playing in 2D elsewhere in the theater. But I'd missed the whole modern 3D experience so far.

So I got my 3D glasses and sat down. The movie started and the artwork was breathtaking, the things the scientists were learning from the depictions of prehistoric animals were really interesting, the cave bear bones covered in thousands of years of mineral accretions were fascinating, etc. It was all very cool.

Unfortunately, the longer I watched the movie, the more nauseated I felt. I'd been eating popcorn, but I could tell it wasn't the food that was the problem. The feeling subsided when the documentary focused mainly on the cave artwork itself, but it got worse on exterior shots and interview segments. I found I had to turn away from the screen during those sections of the movie. Toward the end I was even wondering if I might have to just get up and leave.

I am not generally prone to motion sickness, but it was obvious that the 3D and I were not compatible. It took at least an hour after the movie ended for my stomach to feel completely normal again.

It turns out that 3D sickness is not uncommon. From what I've read, I probably made it worse for myself by sitting too close.

I was actually quite grateful that I'd seen a sedate documentary rather than some kind of action movie. It would have been embarrassing to have barfed in front of a whole theater full of strangers.

It's easy to see that 3D is not going away, so now I'm left with the quandary of whether or not to ever attempt to see another movie in that format. It's possible that sitting further back in the theater would help, but what if it doesn't?

Have you had any bad reactions to 3D or do you consider it a wonderful frontier in movie watching?

Photo credit: Hisakazu Watanabe

May 22, 2011
Average Jane Cooks With Lemon
Tonight I'm invited to a party that will feature homemade limoncello, and all of the guests have been asked to bring lemon-y foods. I was going to go for some kind of obvious dessert, but then I remembered a casserole recipe that I was pretty sure was buried in my recipe box.

The card is in my handwriting, so there's no telling where it originated (although the presence of Miracle Whip as an ingredient suggests that it may have come from Kraft). It was intended to be served as individual portions in bowls made from deep-fried egg roll wrappers.

For practical reasons, I'm not going to spend my afternoon making a dozen little fried bowls and then attempt to keep them intact on a 30-minute car trip, so I've modified the recipe to sidestep that requirement.

Lemon Chicken Casserole
- 2 tsp. minced onion
- 1 cup minced celery
- 1 cup sliced almonds
- 1 cup Miracle Whip
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 2 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
- 2 tbsp. grated lemon peel
- 2 3/4 cups cooked chicken, cubed
- 1 cup grated sharp cheddar
- 1 cup chow mein noodles or other crispy fried noodles
1. Mix together the onion, celery, almonds, Miracle Whip, salt, lemon juice, lemon peel and chicken.
2. Place in a standard casserole dish and top with cheese followed by fried noodles.
3. Bake at 400°F for 15-20 minutes or until heated through and lightly browned on top.
If you want to go the individual portion route, form each egg roll wrapper into a bowl around an empty 1-pound metal can, deep fry (removing the can before the wrapper hardens too thoroughly) and drain on paper towels. Fill each with a scoop of the hot casserole (sans chow mein noodles) and serve.

I haven't had this dish in years but I remember it being quite tangy from the lemon, Miracle Whip and sharp cheddar. I'm looking forward to trying it again this evening.

Post-Cooking Update: I found a big container of fried wontons at my grocery store in the deli/bakery section. I crunched some up to make about a cup of crumbs for the top of the casserole and it was delicious.

Also, I'd like to give a shout-out to my Pampered Chef microplane grater. It was the best tool for zesting a lemon that I have ever used. I'm not being compensated in any way for that opinion, but it had to be said.

Photo credit: Moyan Brenn
May 21, 2011
Average Jane Celebrates

Today marks the four-year anniversary of our cat, Velvet, joining the household.

She's a lovely cat with a great personality and I'm glad every day that we were able to take her from the shelter and give her a happy life with us.

Oh, and if you recall her quarterly staff review from last year, you'll be heartened to know that she has made improvements in several key areas.

May 20, 2011