Life of a Single Married Lady

As Lent begins, we Christians settle into about six weeks of self-reflection and penance,  echoing the time Jesus fasted and prayed in the desert for 40 days. While it's a solemn time of the year, we get to look forward to celebrating the Resurrection at Easter! Hooray! In the meantime, between our prayers, readings from the Lenten Little Black Book, work, family, and the current breath-stealing cold, people who don't normally eat fish (like yours truly) have to get creative on Fridays. Therefore, I present to you today and experiment gone right  (a happy accident!) in the world of broiled tilapia. Wil and I bought a Costco bag of frozen tilapia before Lent began, and the first tilapia recipe we tried was from the Food Network: broiled tilapia with mustard-chive sauce. This sounded just a little bit crazy (and super easy), so we decided to try it. It. Was. Amazing. Perfectly broiled fish, tangy and slightly sweet sauce...mmm-mmm-mmm. Broiled Tilapia with Mustard Chive ...

Wil's job selling ridiculous amounts of window coverings means that his "weekend" doesn't actually happen on the weekend, so I had much of Saturday and Sunday to myself. Since I like to take soup for lunch (minimal preparation necessary before my 7:26am bus), I decided I'd make up a big pot of soup using a mashup of a few recipes and just see how it turned out. Here's a summary of my process! 1. Walk to the store and buy groceries. Make sure to get the aisle with the super cute little old checkout lady. 2. Walk home. Be a bum for a while, you can always shower later. Do some laundry. Find Thor  on TV while channel-surfing. Choose Thor  over Swamp People  and decide to start cooking. 3. Dump 2 cartons (64oz) of stock into a pot (I used 1 carton beef, 1 carton chicken, but veggie stock would work too). Add some salt, pepper, oregano, parsley, and other general Italian-type seasonings, and bring to a boil. 4. Add all your veggies to the boiling stock. I u...

You may have noticed that the vast majority of my posts on this blog have something to do with food. I try to bring in travel, work, life, family, weather (I am an atmospheric scientist, after all, and we finally had a big snow here in Madison), but it really all comes down to food. It snowed here! Unfortunately, the city of Madison doesn't pull out the plows until after  the majority of snow has fallen.   On the plus side, our apartment complex looks like Narnia! I once asked a beloved family friend how to make a can of corn, and for a long time after that my specialties were sandwiches, scrambled eggs, and chicken baked in pasta sauce. Tasty, I'll grant you, but boring after a while. When Wil left for Alaska I decided to be more adventurous in my cooking, and I've been pursuing that ever since. It gave me a nice break from the stress of grad school, and now it's a fun challenge. It also important because of my newly discovered high cholesterol (thanks, Mom a...

What have Wil and I been up to since the holidays, you may ask? Have a list! 1. Selling ridiculous amounts of rugs to the nice people that visit JC Penney 2. Cooking tasty, tasty food 7-veggie minestrone = delicious 3. Burning off parts of our fingers cooking said tasty, tasty food 4. Submitting a journal article (a.k.a. Why You Should Pay Attention to the Research Into Which I Poured My Soul Over the Last Few Years) 5. Entertaining parents and grandparents and making new friends in Milwaukee We found probably the most German bar in Milwaukee 6. Kicking serious butt at Bananagrams "Existentialism" I made with my first 21 tiles! 8. Playing D&D with our friends! Since our poor Packers are out of the running, we'll be (somewhat grudgingly) cheering on the Seahawks this weekend. Happy Superbowl, everyone!

Happy belated Christmas and New Year to you all! Wil and I celebrated our first Christmas with a real tree of our very own! We also got to hang with the fantastic Santeiu/Powaser/Ellis/Cemalovic/Schaefer clan in Michigan. I love the holidays because of the family time! Left: who wouldn't be happy to see that face?? Right: our super awesome Christmas tree! Almost immediately after coming home from break I flew out to the 95th annual American Meteorological Society conference in Phoenix, where they broke their high temperature record--well played, meteorologists. The student conference, which I helped plan, went as smoothly as I've ever seen it. I also enjoyed catching up with all the truly fantastic planning committee members! If you're reading my blog and looking to hire a meteorologist when they graduate, hire those people. They won't let you down. AMS awards ceremony. The Phoenix Convention Center has the coolest ceiling of any convention center I've ...

Happy (late) Thanksgiving to you all! I hope your holidays have begun with delicious turkey and wacky but lovable family antics.  Wil, John IV, and I went down to St Joseph to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Tushauses and Duckworths this year! Wil's parents live on a river bluff with some great land and spectacular views, so we spent much of our time walking through the woods and burning brush piles. It was even in the 60s Fahrenheit our last full day there! Pretty good for the end of November. Wild turkeys pecking some Thanksgiving corn outside the house. We did not eat one of these on Thanksgiving, although we did eat a turkey that got to roam free and enjoy his life! Naturally, we made a trip to Kansas City for some culture and delicious food! We watched the Mizzou game and toured the Thomas Hart Benton house while we were there. Thomas Hart Benton was an American artist in the early- to mid-20th century, and is one of three well-known Midwestern "Regionalist" pa...

Wil and I recently moved to Madison, WI, and we are loving it! Wil has promising job leads at a few very respectable establishments, and I'm working at the University with the Space Science and Engineering Center (sounds cool, right??), studying how satellites see snowfall at Earth's surface. The view from my office! Downtown Madison has the same feel as Ann Arbor, but the whole city is much better laid out (in my opinion) and therefore has little in the way of traffic. It's absolutely glorious. We're also on the hunt for a house, which has been a challenge in compromise. Wil and I agree on almost everything we want in a house, but the housing market here doesn't agree with our budget! Even so, I think we'll find a great first home in the next year or two. Madison is the capitol of Wisconsin. From April to November a huge farmers' market surrounds the whole capitol square! The "Urban Target" here has an escalator for your carts. Incre...