Some Things I've Been Doing

I'm knitting myself an orange sweater. Three years ago I found a little rust-colored cardigan at the Goodwill store on the South Side. It was shetland wool and had adorable embroidered flowers on it. It was exactly the sort of thing no one would ever expect me to wear, and I loved it. Sadly, it got attacked by moths, and I was only a size 4 for about six months anyway, so I had to throw it out. In memory of that sweater I'm knitting myself a new one, in paprika-colored merino. It's almost done.

I made chicken soup from scratch for the first time. It takes a very long time and proportionately little work. You have to simmer the chicken carcass with aromatics for hours, then strain the soup and set aside the chicken meat and let the stock cook over low heat for another hour or so while you periodically skim off the gelatin that's rendered from the chicken bones. Then you chill it so you can lift the fat off. And then you heat it up again, season the heck out of it and add the meat back in along with whatever else you want in there, which in my case is egg noodles, lima beans and corn. I've decided that making soup from scratch is a lot like knitting sweaters. It takes a long time, but it's mostly fun (though occasionally tedious), and while you can buy something cheaper and more quickly, it's just not going to be as good as homemade.

I went and saw Jamie and Emily get married out in Iowa last month. It's the first time I've been in a wedding other than my own (I was the maid of honor). I had a lot of pre-wedding anxiety about such things as being surrounded by the bride's and groom's huge families primarily made up of people I'd never met, flying on little bitty jets between small-town airports, giving a toast, and getting in the way while staying in the bride and groom's guest room, but it turned out that none of that stuff was actually problematic and I had a great time. It was also exciting to be introduced to a whole new region of the country, as this is the first time I've been west of Indiana and east of Arizona. Iowa was not as boring as I'd been led to believe.

This only makes me more inclined to go on a big American road trip when I graduate law school, rather than absconding for Europe as I've heard many people do after taking the bar.

I've been teaching yet more of my friends to play bridge. I played poker for the first time, and while I lost quickly, it was only $5 and I'm willing to go back for more. I've been studying, shopping, working on my first cite check for the Tax Review, and generally getting enough sleep. There were Christmas carols playing at the mall in Short Pump yesterday. The semester is winding down.