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Average Jane Completes A Quest

When I first read Neil Gaiman's American Gods, I was fascinated by his description of The House on the Rock. I had a dim memory of seeing billboards for it on road trips as a kid, but I wasn't surprised to learn that many people think it isn't a real place.

Neil Gaiman said in an interview, "A lot of people think I made it up, but I didn't. But what I did wind up doing in the book was tone it down a bit so people would believe it."

When I finally saw the episode of the American Gods TV show that took place at The House on the Rock, I knew it was time I planned a trip to see it for myself.

It worked out that my husband and I had free time over Independence Day weekend, so I booked a couple of nights at the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Spring Valley Inn, boarded the dog, and off we drove to Spring Green, Wisconsin.

It was a lovely trip in general and we also got the chance to visit Taliesin, but The House on the Rock was the true highlight of our vacation. It's almost impossible to describe how enormous and packed full of weirdness the place is.

Your visit begins with some beautiful gardens that seem pretty straightforward except that there are a lot of dragons.

But then you go in and encounter in room after room, building after building, a vast amount of artwork, antiques, collections and automata ranging from gigantic to extremely small.

There's the world's largest indoor carousel, which you can see pictured at the top of the post (and featured in a key scene of the aforementioned American Gods episode). It's absolutely breathtaking to walk through the door and see it.

Some areas have themes, like the nautical building that features a three-story-high leviathan being attacked by a proportionately large octopus.

There's one room with tables full of miniature circuses and another with seemingly endless doll houses. You'll also find entire orchestras of automata performing various songs via a combination of live percussive sounds mixed with some recorded music.

It's overwhelming to experience it all.

Deep down, it's the ultimate American tourist trap. The building of the original house began in 1945 and the exhibits have been accruing since then. Some are old and cool, but some just look dated. Not all of the moving parts still work. The artistry and craftsmanship within the collection ranges from amazing to…not so great.

Did I mention that it's not air conditioned? So maybe don't go in July.

Still, I am very glad we went. I have traveled a reasonable amount in my life, but this is the first time I can think of that I did it out of sheer curiosity. I liked planning an entire trip around seeing something I'd heard about and wanted to experience in person. In the future. I need to do that more often.

November 12, 2019
Average Jane Goes to Bed Early

I'm not a man and I'm still working on the "wealthy" part, but I think Ben Franklin was onto something with his recommendation to turn in early.

Let's start with the admission that I'm a morning person. That's not a choice, it's just how I'm hardwired.

As it turns out, Dottie is a morning dog. Depending on the season, our first trip outside every day is around 3:30 or 4:30 a.m. We both go back to bed for a while after that, but if I want to get a lot of sleep, I need a good head start the night before.

Around the time I stopped performing with my last band, it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from going to bed whenever I wanted. Tired at 8:30? It's bedtime! Feeling sleepy at 9:00? Time to put the dog in her crate and settle in for the night.

It's. Been. Wonderful.

I need a lot of sleep to function properly and going to bed well before 10:00 p.m. pretty much guarantees that I will get it. Now that I'm achieving eight or more hours of sleep per night almost every night, I feel better physically and mentally. I don't find myself canceling plans as much. I get more done every day. I think I'm even getting by on less caffeine.

I know that early bedtimes aren't for everyone, but they certainly work for me. The next time you're feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and fried, give it a try.

November 11, 2019
Average Jane Cooks Beans

Last year I became aware that a friend of mine had joined the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. It's a quarterly shipment of heirloom beans and certain other grains. I didn't think too much about it at first because although I know how to cook dried beans, I'd gradually switched to canned ones over the past couple of decades for the sake of convenience.

Then my friend began making wonderful bean dishes for our various get-togethers and eventually I decided to order a bag of Royal Corona beans to be shipped with one of her orders.

Royal Coronas are enormous, but with a delightful, creamy texture. The first time I had them, they were served with a basic vinaigrette. They were good that way, but I immediately thought of the Blue Apron recipe for Brown Butter and Thyme Gnocchi with maitake mushrooms and fresh corn. I figured that subbing the beans for gnocchi would be really good. I was 100% correct.

I wasn't quite sold on the bean club yet, but a bag of pinto beans gently tipped me over the edge. My friend gave me one of her extra bags of them and I made almost a week's worth meals including chili, refried beans and even a bowl of the just-cooked beans that I ate as soup as soon as they were finished cooking. In fact, there's still one more serving in my freezer.

The bean club is actually limited to a certain number of people, so I had to wait for notification that there was a spot available. I joined as soon as I got the chance and my first bean club shipment arrived this past Friday afternoon.

That worked out perfectly because I needed to bring a side dish for a taco dinner Saturday night. I cooked a pound of midnight black beans with veggie broth, onion, garlic and spices in the crock pot all day yesterday while I was on the Caffeine Crawl. They were a big hit. I have about half of them left and I'll be eating them for lunches next week with rice and vegetables.

The crock pot works pretty well for me when I don't want to babysit beans cooking on the stovetop for hours, but I'll be keeping an eye out for a bean pot I can use to bake them in the oven. I don't feel compelled to jump on the pressure cooker bandwagon, but of course that would be an option for making them much faster.

So here's where I ask if you have any bean recipes you love. I'm already planning on trying the Smitten Kitchen Pizza Beans recipe. Any other great ones I should try?

Note: Not a sponsored post. I just really like this company and their products!

Photo Credit: Marco Verch, CC BY-NC 2.0

November 10, 2019
Average Jane Gets Very Caffeinated

I've been going on the Caffeine Crawl almost every time it's in town since 2012, which was apparently the second one. This weekend is the 90th Caffeine Crawl, so naturally my friends and I chose a route with lots of shops we've never visited before and bought tickets.

As you might expect, the Caffeine Crawl involves visiting a series of coffee shops to sample and learn about caffeinated drinks.

Here's a glimpse of what my day was like:

Chai spiced cider and coffee-flavored vodka cocktails at 9:30 a.m.

Lattes made with oat milk.

A cool new neighborhood coffee shop in a former grocery store. They had amazing mocha milkshakes and chai lattes.

A new coffee shop that isn't even open yet, but was game enough to follow through on their agreement to participate in the Caffeine Crawl. They offered us a strawberry cold brew drink that sounds weird but was delicious.

We did six stops in all, covering about 23 miles. I didn't take very many photos because tomorrow I'm leading a Caffeine Crawl route, so I'll be posting to Instagram throughout.

My friends and I were very wired by the end, so we stopped for lunch before returning home to take caffeine naps (it's a real thing!) or prepare for our evening plans. In my case, I'd been cooking black beans in the crock pot all day to take to canasta, so I stopped at the store for tortillas and cilantro and then went home to pack up what I'll need for tonight's dinner.

I might eventually crash, but for now I'm still energized and ready to do it all again tomorrow at different coffee shops.

November 9, 2019
Average Jane’s Wordless Post of the Week: No Bull

November 8, 2019
Average Jane’s Rescue Cat Update

Despite numerous online posts and daily searches for lost kitten listings that might match up, there's no sign that anyone is searching for the kitty we captured last week.

I called the vet's office and made an appointment to get our kitten friend combo tested and vaccinated tomorrow so he has a chance at escaping the confines of the laundry room at some point.

Whenever he hears one of us coming down the basement stairs, he meets us at the door. If it turns out he's healthy, it seems unfair to keep him cooped up when he's obviously aware that there are fun activities happening elsewhere in the house without him.

The week of ample food and the leisure to groom himself has transformed him into a handsome, fluffy lad. He's cloud-soft and purrs loudly when petted.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but he's really very small. There's a lot of contrast between his little head and his big paws. I still stand by my estimate of ~6 months, but we'll get the vet's opinion tomorrow.

The dog is obsessed with him and whines on the other side of the door when I'm downstairs. The cat doesn't seem scared and he seems to enjoy batting Dottie's paws under the door. The thought that they might get along is intriguing, but Dottie is awfully rambunctious so they'd need to be closely monitored.

We don't have a comprehensive plan for the kitty right now beyond springing him from the basement and looking for a warmer part of the house where he can go. I gave away the baby gate we used to introduce Izzy to the rest of the pets several years ago, but maybe I can borrow one from someone.

I'm still resisting the idea of keeping him, so we haven't given him a name or even a nickname. As I've said all along, we'll see what happens!

November 7, 2019
Average Jane Remains on Daylight Saving Time

Time changes always wreck me. I'll think I'm fine the first day, but then it takes me a good couple of weeks to get used to the switch.

Because I now have a dog with strong feelings about schedules, I've decided that I refuse to acknowledge the switch from Daylight Saving to Standard time this year. Instead, I'm just going to move all my activities up an hour.

It actually works out very well because almost everyone I work with is on Eastern time. If I go to work at 7:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m., my whole team gets in around the same time I do and works until about the time I'm getting too tired to think straight. From a convenience standpoint, it just makes sense.

I'm very much a morning person, so I wake up around 5:30 a.m. anyway. Now that I'm no longer in a band, I don't have to worry about many activities interfering with my preferred 9:30 p.m. bedtime. (Okay, sometimes it's 9:00 p.m.)

I might be a little tired in the mornings, but that's what coffee is for.

Photo credit: Stuart Rankin, CC BY-NC 2.0

November 6, 2019
Average Jane and the Friendly Feral Kitten?

Plot twist!

When I was putting up "found" ads for the cat, I did a quick glance to check whether we were dealing with a male or a female, and my fleeting impression was "neutered male." Today, I finally took a closer look and thought, "Wait a minute."

Yes, now I think that he is NOT neutered after all. Smöl, but intact.

Obviously, that could change everything, because if there's no one out there who invested in neuter surgery for him, the likelihood that he's just an especially friendly feral kitten is much higher.

I'm going to keep the ads up (with notes about the new observation), but this piece of information means I need to give some thought to next steps that do not involve someone stepping forward to retrieve him.

I am a long-time volunteer with an animal rescue group, so there's a strong possibility that they would be willing to bring him into their program as long as I can foster him until he can be put in front of potential adopters. I'd need to get him tested for FIV/FeLV (also known as a "combo test") and cleared, which I could probably have done this weekend.

Of course, my husband and I have repeatedly sworn that we aren't going to add any more cats to the household (we're currently at "one too many," down from "three too many" early last year). However, I can see that the spouse is getting smitten by our little visitor already, so time will be of the essence in making a decision.

In the meantime, he still appears to be content hanging out in our basement. I've been bringing him some of the cat toys I can't put on the floor in the main part of the house lest they be chewed up by the dog. He seems happy with those and spends most of his time chilling out in the cat bed we gave him.

There's no need to make any quick decisions, but I'm glad he's no longer out in the cold, scavenging for every meal.

November 5, 2019
Average Jane Prepares for Community Service
Have you ever considered serving as an election worker? There's absolutely no question that the 2020 elections will have huge voter turnout and most counties in the U.S. will need nearly double the election workers they recruit for off-year elections.

A few years back, I noticed that nearly all of the election workers I encountered at the polls were retired people. Figuring that they could probably use some younger people, I signed up and began taking every election day off from my job to work at the polls instead.

After that first election, I decided to branch out a little and agree to be an assistant supervising judge. It sounds fancier than it is because all election workers are technically called "election judges" and sworn in before each election. The assistant supervising judge is the second-in-command at a polling place and in my county has some specific duties around opening and closing the polls.

For anyone thinking about stepping up, here are some pros and cons of being an election worker.

Pros:
- It's not actually volunteer work – you do get paid a small stipend, sort of like jury duty.
- The work is an important community service and a lot of the voters will express their appreciation, which is nice.
- You learn a lot about how your own county's election office operates.
Cons:
- There is a ton of training. My county pays a small amount for completing the training, but I try not to think about how much it is per hour because between regular training, hands-on training and assistant supervising judge training, I end up spending ~7 hours in class before every election. This is where you start to understand why so many election workers are retired; it's because those are the people who have that kind of free time available.
- Election days are LONG. You arrive for setup between 60 and 90 minutes before the polls open and the law requires that you stay there all day until after the polls close. The polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., so it can easily be a 15-hour day.
- You'll be standing for a lot of that day. Election workers rotate between various jobs, but not many of them are done seated. On slow election days, there are more chances to sit down. On busy ones, you'll be on your feet for many hours.
The cons look heavy, but I obviously feel it's worth it anyway. At this point, I have my routine so down pat that I have a specific kind of sandwich I always bring. (French roll with pesto, fresh mozzarella and sliced tomatoes, all drizzled with balsamic vinegar, if you're curious.)

I'm working tomorrow's election, so I'm actually glad for the time change because it will help me get to my nearby polling location by 5:30 a.m.

Wherever you live, I hope you'll consider joining the ranks of election workers next year.
November 4, 2019
Average Jane Goes to the Zoo

I got a chance to take advantage of the warmest day of the weekend (low 60s Fahrenheit) and spend the day at the Kansas City Zoo with my nephew and some friends. It was "pumpkin smash" weekend where they give the animals pumpkins to eat/play with and it's become somewhat of a social tradition for us.

The meerkats have always been my favorites because they actually love to eat the pumpkins, but they are off exhibit right now. So, we didn't actually see a lot of pumpkin interaction except among the orangutans and the baboons. But we did get to witness a baboon commotion that the African wild dogs thought was fascinating.

Some construction at the elephant exhibit meant that we did less walking than usual because trams are currently mandatory for getting back and forth to see the African animals. Still, I walked well over four miles and I was TIRED by the end. I keep threatening to start going to the gym and it really does need to happen.

And now you've seen all the photos I took today. I was trying not to take the same ones I take every year and I ended up being more restrained than I meant to be.

It was a very busy weekend, but I enjoyed myself. Now I need to catch up on actual work so I can go to bed when my body clock disagrees with the time change.

November 3, 2019