I think I'm just too lazy to chew. When my brother had his jaw fixed-- six weeks no chewing, but not wired shut and turkey-baster-fed-- our usual dinners didn't change much. Lots of roni, macaroni and cheese, things like that. He doesn't eat chocolate pudding any more, but he didn't get sick of chewing-unnecessary food.
All the recipe talk here makes me wish I liked food better. I like reading about it, I like the playing-pretend feeling of cooking or following a recipe from here... but I'm not a food person. My advice for anything like this is usually for boxed and canned meals that work.
When I had my wisdom teeth out, hot, easy food was wonderful. Cream of chicken soup felt amazingly good, like hot tea on a talked-out throat. I'm no kind of cook, but I'd recommend that and the squooshier-inclusioned Campbell's soups (chicken noodle et al).
The heat seemed to be the important thing. After hours napping with frozen corn pressed to my face, it was amazing.
Chris Quinones at 204, I am somewhat the same way. I resent that I have to do dishes, then do them again, then there's more. Laundry? Didn't I just do laundry?
And food. I ate! I already ate! Why do I have to keep eating?
A portion of my soul denies that entropy exists.
Leechblock got me through grad school-- granted, 'through' meant 'MS rather than PhD' and I am still working on saying that rather than 'dropped out', but it counts. Any site I spent more than a couple minutes on per day was blocked. I got a minute per hour cumulative tor.com and Nature Futures-- long enough to go and click a link, not long enough to comment or really get into things.
I still spent far too much time online.
What ended up working was realizing that I had taught myself not to work at my desk during the day. I'd leave, then come back in the evening, get a coffee, and work for a while.
Caveat: I was not a good grad student. It wasn't the right place for me, and I didn't do it right. I can share blame with some others if I want, but ultimately, my nonstellar experience is my own responsibility.
Oh, and when you're done, you will never have to format that thesis again. Never. No one can make you go back and reformat it.
That stinks about your job, Xopher, though it's good that you don't have to aggressively jobhunt. I spent some months after my paychecks ended not so much jobsearching as feeling guilty about not doing it-- I had the savings for it. Now I'm down to half my savings, so I'm applying myself more.
At Alpha this year, Greg Frost did a two-part exercise in which he asked students to write a sex scene over lunch, then, before his next lecture, gave them two or three minutes to write down as many nouns and verbs pertaining to the kitchen as possible*.
He then had them swap all the nouns and verbs from the scene for nouns and verbs from the list.
Mealtimes got a little weird after that.
*I didn't write a sex scene, but my kitchen list included, "knife, knife block, big choppy knife, paring knife, bread knife, steak knife, butter knife," and, "waffle waffle waffle".
Wesley at 599, those are interesting. I'll probably stop by sometime this week.
Pendrift at 461, I am so annoyed at that. I had that book in my hand, carried it around the bookstore for a while, then put it back because the friend with me was not laughing nearly as much as I was... and not a week later, that review comes out. I still haven't gotten my own copy.
The Smart Bitches' book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, is also much to laugh about.
Romance recommendations: I second the In Death rec, with the caveat that it took me a bit to a) get over the fact that I was reading Nora Roberts and b) find the proper dosage. Then I spent a bit more than a month reading them, jumped to her mainstream/mystery romances, then worked back until her books weren't as much fun (1990).
Historical romances: I like Loretta Chase and Julia Quinn.
I also really like Patricia Briggs. Something about her writing grabs me and pulls me in. Many of her books have romance subplots. There's also Sharon Shinn; I'd say Archangel and either Heart of Gold or Mystic and Rider for her.
I have never read a Jennifer Crusie I didn't like. Not always perfect, but Agnes and the Hitman, Welcome to Temptation, Crazy for You, Anyone but You... I've recommended all of them to different people for different reasons.
Ooh, Julia Spencer-Fleming, too.
Check out Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. If you look at their reviews by grade, you'll get a good reading list. It's what I did when I wanted different books.
I kind of wish my parents had had a little more trouble getting me into the US the first time just so I'd have a good story to contrast with a few ancestors who were here before 'here' was the United States (no Native Americans, just some early Germans). As it stands, I used to get into lots of arguments over whether or not I could be President someday.
This Rovell guy had better regret his idiot words. No one presumes I'm less than perfectly American, and I have dual citizenship. Sigh.
Nick at 80, I get a competence-ping whenever I hear of the Monitor and the Virginia. Most of the time, it's the Merrimack. I don't know if it's the alliteration or that I grew up in the north.
What bothers me about faxing is that I don't actually have physical copies of what they want-- I have a copied-from-internet transcript for grad school and a scanned-in transcript for undergrad. Some jobs will take them via email, and they don't get the angry eyes.
I know I'm whining about a perfectly normal part of business, one that others deal with every day, but really. Faxing? Not useful in this context.
Rikibeth, there's no phone plug on the printer nor any scanning to it, so I'm guessing 'no'. It's a great little printer for what I need it for-- mostly nothing, some printing of text.
I think I'll just go on flipping off any job application that requires faxing. And then applying.
The alternative is to walk downtown to my old office and ask the secretaries to fax whatever I need-- hard to beat that for simplicity, but it's not convenient given that I do most of my jobsearching late at night.
I know it's not the fault of the computer or anyone associated with it. It is the fault of fax itself. I rather dislike jobs that require me to fax anything.
Another computer-help question: I am told that there is some way to fax things over the internet, so I could send my transcripts and such without bothering the secretaries at school. I've googled without much success. I have Vista. Is there a way to do faxes like email?
I got... fewer than twenty, definitely, in the neighborhood of sixteen plus two friends on their way to a party. The only older ones were shepherding around a medium kid. The really little ones were fun-- the one who froze when I opened the door, her father laughing when I asked if she knew what to say, the pirate whose mother called, "No, don't do the falling thing," when he stumbled on the steps (he had a broken arm under his coat), the two little ones who crowded in, the girl asking if she could come in my house and then, when I asked her what she was, answered, "...three."
I was raised off the beaten trick-or-treating path, the kind where if you recognize the kid, you give out a full-size candy bar. I didn't know what to expect in this house. I'm glad I gave out handfuls, though.
I dressed up last weekend for a party-- the Snow Queen, which worked better than I expected for a costume put together in forty-eight hours-- and today... well, I'm out of jeans, so a black witchy skirt it is. I don't know how many trick-or-treaters to expect but am bracing myself for more than I bought candy for and none at all.
It turns out carving pumpkins isn't as much fun without people. One of them is missing an eyebrow because I just got bored. I have pumpkin seeds, though, and have been munching on them.
I don't know if it would work with houseflies, but I'm dealing with fruit flies right now, and the most effective traps seem to be a glass or jar with a funnel set on top and a scrap of paper towel with some vinegar on it in the bottom. My next job is to make a draft dodger for under the door to the cubby where I keep my worm bin-- the flies came in when I brought it in for the winter and left it in the open too long. Hopefully, the worms will eat what I've given them quickly and the flies will leave.
When I get a job, I'm probably going to Freecycle a fair amount of furniture. There's some stuff that really isn't worth moving across a state line.
It stinks that there's a disconnect between the individuals-as-group, the groups-as-group, the groups-as-organization, and the organization-as-organization. Fruit punch czar indeed.
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