Appetizer -My Sister's Awesome Dip

I made this layered dip for the New House Party and it was a huge hit. I made sure to give my sis all the credit by referring to it exclusively as "My sister's awesome dip" throughout the evening. She gave me this recipe in the family cookbook, so it's special to me.

My Sister's Awesome Dip

8 oz soft cream cheese
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise

Mix well and spread into a pie plate or casserole dish

1 medium jar of salsa (spiciness of your choice)
1 medium green pepper, chopped
2 green onions, chopped
1 large tomato, chopped
2 cups shredded cheese (mozzarella, monterey jack, whatever you like)

Spread salsa over cream cheese mix, then add chopped veggies and cover with shredded cheese. I used a pre-shredded "Mexican blend" to make my life easier.
Serve with scoopy chips. For scooping.

Note the "Pi" plate I served it in. That was a Christmas present from my Dad, and I love it. My sister-in-law reminded me that Pi Day is approaching faster than we realize, and that I will have to bake a pie for the occasion, especially now that I have the absolutely most perfect pie plate to bake it in. So, I'll need to master pie crust by March 14th. Wish me luck.

New House Party

After living here for six months, we finally got our act together and invited friends and family over for a New Year/New House party. We had a great turnout and much more food than we could possibly have needed for that many people, and it was absolutely wonderful to see these people who I hadn't seen in a while (my aunt and uncle among them) and catch up. We got a lot of compliments on the house while we were giving folks the tour, with "it's got character" and "OMG it's huge" being the general theme of the day. It's bigger than it looks from the outside and it always surprises people, and since it's an old house with a split-level floorplan and there's a large addition stuck onto the back, you're not sure what room you're going to come to next. It's quirky, and that's why we love it.

I'm looking forward to having folks over more often - we don't get a chance to be very social because we're always so busy, and this party reminded me how many awesome people we have around us and how much we need to make more time to see them.

The hidden bonus to doing something like this is the incredibly clean house we have because we were embarrassed to show off our usual clutter and cat hair. Honestly, this place has not looked so good since the day we started bringing boxes over in the moving truck. It was a ton of work but completely worth it - I just hope we can maintain it for a while before it reverts to its natural chaotic state, which it most definitely will if we aren't vigilant! I plan on making a conscious effort to keep everything tidy for at least a week. At the end of that week I will pledge to try for another week. And we'll see where I end up.

Immigration Interview - The Interview!

Anticlimactic, really. We left incredibly early, just in case we hit any traffic, because we were told that the worst sin you can commit in the green card process is showing up late to the interview. Much like bringing an umbrella to work guarantees clear skies, waking up at 6am guaranteed that of course we'd have the smoothest time ever getting there, which meant that we spent over 20 minutes sitting in the car in a parking garage because we were too early and weren't sure what time the building opened.

After the airport-style security checkpoint at the door to the federal building (except that we got to keep our shoes on), we headed to Room 103 to wait for my name to be called. There were two immigration-related waiting rooms, with applicants split pretty evenly between the two. I must say, as nervous as I was, I was very glad they didn't direct me to Room 101. Extra points to anyone who gets the reference.

The woman who did our interview was young and friendly and in a cheerful mood, and it was all much easier than I thought it would be. A few questions about our families, where we met, that sort of thing, and then she went through the photos, asking about them, and commenting on how awesome it was that we'd traveled so much. She also exclaimed over the quality of our photo books and asked where we got them made (Snapfish), and asked where we got married because the place was so pretty. We also got a "Oooh, was that at the Ren Fest?" out of her as she flipped through the albums. Not that she wasn't totally professional through the whole thing - she just made us feel a lot less nervous and I'm very grateful that she was the one who picked up our file today.

At the end of the interview, she said that as far as she was concerned, everything was in order and they shouldn't need anything else to approve me, but someone else needed to look over the file first before anything can be done. So I have to wait, again. If any documentation is missing, I'll get a letter within a couple of days asking me to bring it in, and if everything is fine, I'll get a letter in a few weeks saying my green card is on its way.

Almost there. Almost permanent.

Immigration Interview - Photo Printing Attempts

We needed photos for the big interview, so I loaded up the best of the best, a photographic retrospective of our long romantic history, and stuck them on a USB memory key, ready to print them out for scrutiny at the eyes of an immigration officer. Only, we got to Target too late and their photo area was closed. They had a self-serve kiosk with some sort of printer attached to it, so I approached for a look, only to read that it, too, was closed at 9pm when the employees abandon the photo lab. Apparently they have a different concept of self-serve than I do, because I'm fairly sure no member of the Target team is my "self".

No worries, I thought, I'll just leave early Monday and stop at the Target near the hospital before I go to work. Sadly, their photo lab was unmanned at 10:30am. Their self-serve kiosk was flashing a "need software update" message, but I figured I could use the regular kiosk and upload the photos from my drive, let Target print them at some point, and I could come back after work to pick them up. Except that the woman from the customer service desk said I shouldn't do that. She said that the machines are shut down until someone shows up at noon, so I shouldn't "send them now", because I might lose my pictures. I took a moment to try and explain to her how memory works, and how photos sent over the internet in the middle of the night are waiting patiently somewhere until the photo printers warm up, but she was terrified that I would lose my pictures and wouldn't let me use the kiosk. She told me to try Walgreens.

On to Walgreens!

Their kiosks were antiques, but they looked functional, and there was en employee sitting nearby, which was encouraging. No losing photos while the machines warm up at Walgreens! It was one of those kiosks with the various slots for you to stuff in a memory card, a CD, etc, so I poked around looking for a USB port. "You plug in!" "You plug in and touch screen!" This was the very helpful employee, for whom English was not a friend. I showed him my USB key, and indicated that there seemed to be no place to "plug in". He rolled his eyes, walked over, took hold of a cable laying by the side of the keyboard, and waggled it at me. "You plug in!" And then he walked away in disgust at how stupid I was. Well, it was a USB cable. So... unless my USB key was looking for a male-on-male hot gay USB escapade, it was completely useless. In the end I remembered that my memory stick contained an SD card, and just used it that way, and I got my pictures.

Bonus story:

When I went to pick up the photos after work, I shuffled through them to make sure they were all there, and the young girl at the register was watching me and looking at them. "Oh, wow, did you go on... vacation?" Surely confused, as there were pictures from Rome, Paris, Vancouver, DC, New York, and Philadelphia, and some wedding and engagement photos, with some Christmas thrown in for good measure. When I told her it was all for an immigration interview so I could get my green card, her puzzlement grew. Lily-white girl with unaccented (mostly, eh?) English? Immigration? I explained I'm from Canada and married an American, and she said "Wow, I thought they only did that for... you know... foreign countries. Canada's, like, right there."

Fun day.

Immigration Interview

After the paperwork, the background check, and the fingerprints, comes the interrogation.

My green card interview is this week and I'm a nervous wreck despite reading several encouraging posts about others' experiences and having a reassuring chat with the lawyer who's helping us through it. I don't deal well with this sort of situation and I'm very very nervous about forgetting something important, or giving the wrong answer and having everything delayed because of a stupid mistake. And the appointment is at 8:30am in Baltimore, adding traffic to my list of terrors - what if we're late? The lawyer said that no matter what else happens, do not be late, so I guess I'll be sitting in the car at 5am to be sure.

I've got piles and piles of paperwork to bring with me. They want originals and copies of our birth certificates, passports, and marriage certificate. They want proof that my husband can support me financially - never mind that I lived on my own for a year when I moved here and was perfectly successful in supporting myself thankyouverymuch. He's got tax returns and pay stubs and letters from his employers saying he's working there. I'm bringing the same information for myself, just in case. I have every single document USCIS has sent me since the beginning of the process, from the "we got your application" letter to my work permit and my appointment notice for this interview. And then we have the evidence that we're in a legitimate good-faith marriage.

Because, you know, so many Canadians are rushing across the border and entering into sham marriages with Americans so they can live here and escape from universal health care and hockey.

So we've got a wedding album, several pictures of us from the last few years, including many of us with various members of both our families. We've got the mortgage documents with both our names on it, the joint accounts at the bank, the title to the car, even the paperwork from the last vet visit because the vet gave my little Horton my husband's last name. I've got a Christmas card and a birthday card from a few years ago (I'm sentimental, I save things). I have some emails with travel plans from when we were long-distance and racking up the miles on USAirways.

I hope it's enough. I hope they don't deport me. Or waterboard me.

Jen's Library: You Were Always Mom's Favorite!

You Were Always Mom's Favorite! Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives
by Deborah Tannen

This book intrigued me, since I have a sister and our conversations don't always go very well since we're very different people. We love each other to death, no doubt, but we clash a lot, and I thought maybe this book would give me some insight.

Yes and no. The author interviewed hundreds of sisters for this book, and explored the different types of sisterly relationships and how they start, grow, and change. She's a professor of linguistics, so conversational dynamics are her strong point and her main focus in most of her books. Because women are talkers by nature, sister relationships are based in conversation much more than other types of relationships, so she's really in her element as she details her interviews.

What I found fascinating is the near-universal tendency of sisters worldwide to separate or group themselves by extremes. The pretty one and the smart one. Mom's girl and Dad's girl. The athlete and the nerd. Once one sister has taken on a role, it's almost required for the next sister to take the opposite track since that niche has been filled. Psychologically speaking, it can be a conflict-avoidance technique. So if she's the pretty one, I'm not going to try and be prettier because it'll cause friction. I'll just excel at sports instead. It doesn't always work that way, but it's extremely common.

The book explores a lot of other aspects of sisterhood, from birth order to closeness to adoption, and while the author stacks up example after example to prove a point, she then provides enough counterexamples to make you wonder what's true. I think that's done on purpose to illustrate that each relationship is different and you can't make huge sweeping statements about sisters.

More than anything, what I took away from this book is that people use different conversational styles, and if your style clashes with your sister's, you're screwed. Directness vs indirectness, and involvement vs independence are the main differences, making one person's heartfelt offer of advice another person's insulting allusion to incompetence. One of her other books goes into this topic much more deeply and is a fascinating read for anyone who ever finds themselves misunderstood in conversations. Pick up That's not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships for more insight on conversational style. Then let's chat about it.

What's for Dinner - Easiest Slow Cooker Pot Roast

At my bridal shower in Montreal almost a year ago, I received the most beautiful and touching gift from everyone - a book of special recipes from friends and family, lovingly put together like a scrapbook by my mother. It's got my aunt's "best chicken recipe", my sister's favorite party dip, my grandmother's tomato-and-cheese macaroni dish, and a whole bunch more that I'm looking forward to trying. People get together over food, and having my family's best and favorite recipes makes me feel closer to all of them, and I'm so grateful for the gift.

Today I attempted my Mom's Pot Roast in the crockpot. And, because I've never met a recipe I didn't tweak, I tweaked it. Partly because I had a smaller piece of meat, and because I love onions more than Mom does. So here's my tweaked version (sorry, Mom)!

Easiest Slow Cooker Pot Roast

3 lb beef roast
1 medium onion, quartered
1 can cream of mushroom soup
3 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp thyme
1 tbsp flour
1 envelope dry onion soup mix
1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup red wine

Cook 8 hours on LOW or 4 hours on HIGH.

Mom's version was for a 5-6lb roast, and so it had an extra can of soup and 1/2 cup more water. It also doesn't include a chopped-up onion, but I don't think Mom would be opposed to the idea. I should have tossed in some carrots too, now that I think about it.

I mixed the dry onion soup with the thyme and flour and the squished-through-the-press garlic cloves, and then rubbed it all over the roast. I put that in the crockpot with onions around it, then added the liquids, mixing with a fork so the mushroom soup didn't stay in one big glob. I rolled the roast around to coat all sides, then it was time to cook it. Here's what it looked like before cooking:


I leave first for work, so I asked Dave to start it up before he left, so it wouldn't cook to death. Our crockpot has a timer and it goes to "warm" mode after it's done cooking, but I still hate having it on longer than necessary. Unfortunately the message got confused along the way because it was put on high for 8 hours, instead of the low that it should have been. Luckily, though, everything turned out fine. It was a little dried out, but not too bad, since the crockpot retains all the liquid as it cooks, and besides, we had a bucket of gravy in there to help us choke it down. :) It was really, really good. Really good. Like, I wish I had a bigger stomach so I could eat more good. Like, wanting to set the alarm for a 3am snack good.

Trip to Montreal

Of course the day we planned to drive up to Montreal (no airport porno-scanners for us, thankyouverymuch) was the day the big Nor'Easter was supposed to hit, dumping a ton of snow from the Carolinas to the Maritimes. We left early enough to miss all but a few flakes, and the storm stayed more coastal, so we were spared the horror of a dark blizzard drive through the mountains. Hooray! I think Dave may have been a little disappointed that we couldn't test out the new snow tires, but a safe drive was the main point. And then I forgot to call my dad and grandma when I got there safely, resulting in some minor panic attacks for which I sincerely apologize!

I learned some things on the drive.

First, always check if you have your iPod and iPod charger/FM transmitter before you leave the house. Luckily we had a few CDs and were near cities enough to pick up some radio stations, because a silent 10-hour drive would have been hard.

Frozen waterfalls are the most gorgeous thing ever. Every time we drove through a spot where rock was blasted away for the road, I saw these pretty frozen shapes on the rock surface, and I was mesmerized. I tried to take a picture but things get blurry at 65mph, so this is the best I could do:They're much more gorgeous in reality; you'll just have to trust me, or go for a drive somewhere cold and see for yourself. Some of them were blue like icebergs or glaciers! Actually, now I want to go see some icebergs and glaciers. Which is bizarre, because I hate being cold. Are there any warm glaciers I can visit?

I also learned that some graffiti can be inspirational. Thanks to whoever wrote "It can always get better" on an overpass, because it made me smile. I hope you didn't get charged with vandalism for your contribution to the world's well-being.

We also passed my favorite road sign ever. I giggle every time we pass it.Delicious irony!

After a long day of driving, with only a couple of food stops and a stretch break or two, we got to Mom's place and were welcomed by a second Christmas.

And by this wonderful ball of fluff.

And by my Mom and my wonderful dork of a brother.
All so completely worth it.

Jen's Library: Obsolete

Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By
by Anna Jane Grossman


Warning: this book will make you feel old. It's a look back at many things and concepts that were taken for granted in the 80s and 90s, but are fading from use and from memory now.

Think about it: it's extremely likely that our kids will not use encyclopedias. They won't use payphones or check the time on their watches. They'll never write a check or take a picture with a friend in a photo booth. They'll never know a mixtape.

Things become obsolete all the time. But these are our things. I kept quarters in my purse so I could always call home. Counting Crows' Mr Jones will always be followed by the opening bars of Big Mountain's reggae version of Baby I Love Your Way. Seriously, every time I get to the end of Mr Jones, I sing "Ooooh, baby I love your wayyy" under my breath. Watch me sometime, you'll see my lips moving.

Some things are totally unnecessary now, because they've been replaced by better things, and I'm not one to stand against progress. I can do without manual car windows and short-shorts on basketball players, for example, but I do mourn the death of the encyclopedia and the newspaper.

I liked the trip down memory lane, but it left me feeling old and possibly approaching obsolescence myself!

30 in 30

My good friend Tasha (link goes to her awesome cooking blog) embarked on a meaningful personal quest on the eve of her 30th birthday. She has made a list of 30 things she wants to accomplish in her 30th year*, and I think it's a great idea and I'll be cheering her on the whole way. I want to try setting some of my own goals for the year, even though I've already had three months of "30" go by... do you think it would be cheating if I use some things I did in those months and count them as already crossed off? I could transform it into a New Years resolutions list, but given my history with those, I feel that giving a project such a label is dooming it to failure.

What are my 30 goals? I've never been good at goal-setting, so this is very hard. What's realistic? Do I want to be unrealistic and list some crazy stuff?

1. Learn to hem pants and sew on buttons.
2. Figure out how to French braid my hair.
3. Make homemade pasta from scratch.
4. Bake homemade bread from scratch. The real stuff. With yeast!
5. Start my retirement savings.
6. Paint the red room yellow.
7. Plant a tree in the yard.
8. Drive on 95.
9. Get my body into good enough shape to start growing a baby in it. This includes the loss of 20 pounds, but is mostly about feeling healthier.
10. Related to #9 - Find a GYN and stop stalling about it!
    
11. Blog at least once a week - and blog about everything I accomplish off the list!
12. Get a filing system set up so I stop having to hunt for all my important paperwork.
13. Speak up for myself at my annual review at work and tell them I'm awesome.
14. Read 50 books, or about one a week, this year.
15. Participate in Thing-a-day in February.
16. Take a yoga class.
17. Go through all our STUFF and have a yard sale to get rid of what we don't need (or give it to charity). I want to keep what we need, and what matters.
18. Learn how to identify different trees by their leaves/needles/bark/whatever. I used to know this and forgot everything, so I'm going to read up on it and put it back in my head.
19. Learn to change a tire.
20. See the night sky from somewhere dark enough that I can see the stripe of the Milky Way.
21. Find out how to get tuition reimbursement from work, and then apply for an online class.
22. Go on a wonderful anniversary trip with my husband.
23. Drink 8 cups of water EVERY DAY.
24. Do one of the FlyLady challenges weekly.
25. Try to relax and be less critical of myself (and others).
26. Celebrate getting my green card with a party or fancy night out.
27. Visit the Museum of American History and see every part of it (and read as much as I can handle of the info posted beside everything). I've been but the visit was so hurried and I need to go back.
    
28. Wear my face moisturizer with SPF so I don't get wrinkly.
29. Cook things from the family cookbook Mom gave me.
30. Write. More than just blogs. Start a writing notebook, fill it up, get another.
    

Looking at my list now, I guess it's a blend of resolutions and dreams and a to-do list, and that's ok. As long as I manage to accomplish some from each category, it'll balance out in the end. And I think balance is probably what I need most.

*Yes, I realize that this is actually her 31st year, but that doesn't matter and stop being picky.