Blogging Break

Fact: I am entering a genealogy writing contest.
Fact: The paper is due 31 December 2009.
Fact: The paper is mostly done because I used my paper from my capstone class at BYU.
Fact: The organization hosting the contest includes footnotes in the word count.
Fact: The text of my paper is 5,695 words.
Fact: There are 216 footnotes.
Fact: There are 4,846 words in the footnotes.

Total word count: 10,541.

And this is after significant paring. And there is no introduction and only a small conclusion. Plus there is formatting and citation checking to do. I have got to buckle down and get this baby done.

Plus, I really want to finish reading 52 books this year, and right now I have only 49.

Plus, family members are arriving this week from out of town, and I really want to hang out with them and not spend all my time in the next few weeks with my face plastered to a computer or my nose buried in a book.

It is 13 December. You can see my dilemma. I don't have enough time. I will be taking a blogging hiatus, or at least a blogging slow-down while I try to accomplish everything I want to accomplish this year.

I will tell you, though, that Eric and I went to a car auction yesterday. We bought a car. It was kind of reckless, and now we both have buyer's remorse. It was a very cheap car, and we mostly just need it for Eric to get around the time. We've named it Dudley because we have great concerns that he will, in fact, be a dud.

If you miss me while I am gone, you can go read some of these posts:
A Mini-Rant
Guess Who's Home!
Here's to You, Library Girl
Childhood Misunderstandings
Thoughts Preoccupied with High School and Frozen Chicken
An Expletive by Any Other Name
The Quiz Doesn't Lie

New Indian Restaurant

Last night Eric and I went out for Indian food. We love Indian food. Not as much as we love Thai food, but, oh, we love Indian food. In the past when we have wanted Indian food, we headed straight for the Bombay House located on University Avenue. In fact, when Eric's parents took us out to celebrate Eric's completion of his master's degree, we chose the Bombay House. But recently, a new Indian restaurant has opened up, only a few blocks from Bombay House. It's called the India Palace, and it was great. I would say that it is comparable to Bombay House in price, menu selection and quality of food. But it far surpassed Bombay House in quality of customer service. Far, far, far. I've often felt like the servers at Bombay House were a bit rude, but at India Palace, they were super friendly. They even brought us a free appetizer because the wait for our meals was going to be a little longer than usual. In actuality, the wait was no worse than I would have expected for the amount of customers in the restaurant.

I know this only matters to those of you who live in the Provo area, but I wanted to fill you in on the fact that I approve and endorse the India Palace. Go try it some time.

$20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner

I picked this up at the library on a whim. I was a little bit worried that it would be a long political diatribe either about the need to drill, baby, drill, (clearly, I hadn't paid attention to the subtitle), or else a long political diatribe about hugging trees. Fortunately, it was neither.

The book is what it says it is - a summary on how increasing gas prices will force our society to make changes that will ultimately be good for us.

The book is ordered by gas prices, starting at $4 per gallon, which is the price that gas reached in the June-August months of 2008. I hesitate to call them the summer months because while it was Summer to most everyone I know, I was actually in New Zealand. It was the dead of winter. And I calculated the cost that we were actually paying for petrol at almost $8 per gallon. That includes both the conversion of litres to gallons and the U.S. dollar to the Kiwi dollar. I kid you not. Of course, the taxes in New Zealand are higher, and the cost of living in general for that nation is higher. But, no matter where you live, $8 per gallon is substantial.

Because of the high price, we made some really positive changes to our lifestyles. The changes we made include walking to the close grocery store, even if the weather was completely lousy. Carpooling with Matthew and Makereta almost always to the large grocery store in the middle of town. Yes, really, carpooling to the grocery store. Eric often rode with Matthew to school. We even walked to the center of town a number of times, even though there was a killer hill on the way back. These were positive changes for us. We got more exercise. We contributed less pollution. We became better friends with people.

Steiner's book doesn't really focus on those tiny changes, and how could he? If gas is four times an amount that most Americans considered absurd, tiny changes like riding a bike are just that - tiny.

His book is broken into chapters of $4 per gallon (which is the introduction), $6 per gallon, $8 per gallon, on up to the final chapter about gas at $20 per gallon. For the most part, I thought this was an effective way of telling his story. Sometimes it meant that he had to leap to some pretty eyebrow-raising conclusions, and I wanted to say, "Napoleon, like anyone can even know that." But, on the whole his arguments are sound.

Two things struck me the most - we use oil for a lot of stuff. A LOT. I had no idea how much of the rubbish that fills my apartment comes from oil. That means when the price of oil goes up, the price of all my junk goes up too.

Second, when the price of oil goes up, the price of transporting all our junk everywhere also goes up. There's just no way around it. You've got to have a way to get your goods to you from their source, and that way almost always involve gasoline. When the price of gasoline goes up, the prices of goods goes up. (We witnessed this last in 2008 as well).

I don't know if all of the things that Steiner believes will happen will happen. Like I said, it's hard to make predictions on something like gasoline being $20 per gallon (and everywhere in between). Most importantly, though, is that gas prices will inevitably continue to rise (he makes a very sound case for this fact at the beginning of the book), and when they do, Americans (and people in other parts of the world) will need to adapt. Hopefully, as Steiner predicts, those adaptations will indeed be improvements to our current lifestyles.

Clean the halls, then deck them.

Today our apartment went from looking like this:

To looking like this:
The desk is still rather chaotic. Wanna come help me out, Ange?

PLUS! I made dinner. And I wrote this blog post.

And we decorated the tree. (This tree was given to us by my brother, John, and his wife the first year that we were married. When he gave us the tree we had already bought a real tree, but I figured it might come in handy to have an artificial one for some years. This was clever thinking on my part as we used this tree in 2006 when we spent our holiday in Texas, and therefore ought not to have a live tree acting as a fire hazard in our apartment. And this year, because we are moving on New Year's Eve, and we don't want the hassle of purchasing a live tree only to throw it away prematurely.)

And yes, the tree is a little crooked. We're working on it.

Australian Brownies

The other day I commented on Jenny's post about Christmas cookies and whatnot. Then we had a little exchange about Christmas cookies, wherein I mentioned that I do not have a favorite Christmas cookie, but I do have this one very important Christmas recipe. This recipe screams Christmas to me, because we always made these at Christmas time. They are Australian Brownies. They're probably not really Australian, but that's what we called them. I've had them served a handful of times, always called by different names than Australian Brownies, but never by the same name. Anyway, here's the recipe. They are best served with milk. Let me know if you like them:

Australian Brownies
1 cup shredded coconut
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 egg
1 can sweetened, condensed milk
1 cup chocolate chips

Method:
1. Mix all ingredients together.
2. Liberally grease a square pan. (8 in. x 8 in.)
3. Pour the ingredients into the pan.
4. Bake for 30 minutes at 350. (If you are using a glass pan, turn the temperature down to 325.)