I left my computer for two and a half hours this afternoon to go meet with my thesis adviser one last time (got the final edits!) and go to the grocery store.  When I returned I discovered that my eBay account had been hacked and it had been used to send out a bunch of emails to people, asking them to purchase things off eBay.  This effected my Gmail account, because it’s the address associated with the account.  EBay sent me an email recommending that I change my email password, but when I logged out of my account in order to do so, I discovered that I was then locked out and couldn’t get back in.

I’ve now been locked out of my Gmail account since 4:30 pm this afternoon.  I still can’t do anything about the eBay account, as you can’t even report a problem if you can’t log in and since they’ve frozen my account, I can’t log in.  Of course, there are no phone numbers to call.  I was able to change my password on my Gmail account and it’s allowing me access to chat and my reader with the new password, so I think that after the recommended 24 hour period that apparently it takes to reset your account after something like this I should be able to get back in.  I hope.

It would not be good to not be able to get into my Gmail account for an extended period of time, because as I’ve started establishing myself as a writer, that’s become the account from which I coordinate projects, all my Slashfood stuff and everything related to Fork You.  However, there is a sort of perverse part of me that is finding it liberating.  It’s an unscheduled vacation from email that I wasn’t planning, but I’m trying to make the best of.

Tonight I attended the very last class of my grad school career.  It was sort of anticlimactic, being that I haven’t really loved this class and have been anxiously awaiting it’s end.  I still have one more paper to write for it, but then I’m home free.  The thesis is all but done, save some final editing and formatting (that also feels sort of anticlimactic.  Maybe that’s because I don’t feel like I can relax until it has the final signatures and is submitted for binding).

I do believe that this has been the quickest year and a half of my life.  In many ways it feels like I just started this program.  However, there is also lots of very real proof that it has been a labor-intensive process (the thesis for one).  Much of the evidence is intangible, like the fact that I now comfortably call myself a writer and feel really comfortable with that identity.  There is also the fact that I have learned that I can write on demand in a very coherent and readable way.

I will never, ever regret going back to school and getting this degree.  I actually rank it among the top three best decisions I’ve made in life (along with going to Whitman for undergrad and moving to Philadelphia).  It’s also nice to be at the end of it and moving on to lots of cool, new stuff.

If you’re in the Philly area and want to help me celebrate the fact that I’m graduating, come out to National Mechanics on Saturday, December 15th at 8 pm.  A good time will be had by all!

When it comes to Jewish Holidays, I celebrate mostly through the foods traditional to the festivals. When Passover rolls around I bake up a big pan of Matzo Kugel and pray that my cousin will make brisket. Purim means hamantaschen. For Rosh Hashanah I dip slices of apple into a bowl of honey and I make potato latkes for Hanukkah.

However, I do have a menorah, and tonight, on a whim, I decided to light it (as it’s the first night of Hanukkah). Like so many of my current possessions, it came with the apartment. I remember it from my childhood. It belonged to my grandfather and always sat on the bookshelf in the den. We only ever visited in the summer, so I don’t know whether he would light it during Hanukkah each year or not, although there is some wax in the candle cups, so I’m guessing he did.

Somewhere along the way, the menorah sustained some injury. It is bent, wobbly and is missing the holder for the final night’s candle. I’ll have to improvise a way to secure that last candle (if I remember to light it at all). There was something really nice, deeply satisfying even, about stumbling through what little I know of the Hanukkah prayer and lighting those candles. It makes me think that I should pay a little more attention to the parts of the Jewish Holidays that go beyond the food.

I’m having some people over for dinner tonight.  It’s mostly potluck, I’m putting together the main dish.  I settled on doing a baked pasta dish.  Then I decided to complicate my life a little by doing one bake with turkey sausage and one without.  Then I decided to do two completely different sauces instead of just making the sauce and only adding the meat to half of it (when it comes to food I often make my life more complex instead of simplifying it).

I went shopping earlier today, gathering ingredients at the Italian Market and Trader Joe’s, before heading home and pooping away the latter part of the afternoon reading blogs.  Finally, around 4:45 I realized that I needed to run out to get a birthday present for a friend and pick up a red pepper for the sausage sauce.  I popped into the produce market first and bought the pepper.  I took it without a bag, because it seemed silly to me to use a plastic bag for a single, easily carried red pepper.  Then I ran into Barnes and Noble (Joseph Fox Bookstore didn’t have a copy of said book), with the red pepper, found the book and got in line.

However, I soon realized that in getting in line with a book and a red pepper, I had just become the crazy person carrying around an item that was totally incongruous to the time and place.  No one asked me about it, although I got several strange looks.  When it was my turn at the cash register, I had to place the pepper down on the counter in order to pay.  The clerk looked at it but didn’t so much as dash an appraising eye over me before placing my book in a bag and sending me on my way.

Of course, he put the book in a plastic bag before I could say a word about it, effectively negating my environmental efforts in turning down the bag for the pepper.

I drove out to visit my Great Aunt Anne today.  She is 88 years old and is still living on her own.  For that last few years, her situation has been less than ideal, but workable.  However, these days it’s not going well.  She’s essentially stranded in a suburban ranch house with nothing around but neighbors and a private day school.  She does still have a car but can’t drive anymore because her driver’s license expired and she knows that the DMV won’t give her another one.  She’s right too, her macular degeneration has gotten so bad that she can hardly see.  It seems to be a moot point anyway, as the last time she tried to turn on the car’s engine, the battery was dead and she doesn’t have the problem-solving skills to figure out how to get it charged or replaced.

There are other signs that she is struggling more with living on her own than she used to.  In the past she was always thrilled to see me and would chat on for hours about the past, the mistakes she made in her life, her hatred for President Bush and why she doesn’t believe in god.  This time, we chatted for about half an hour before she turned the TV on because it was time for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”  It was shocking to see how much she has withdrawn into television.

The saddest moment of the visit was towards the end.  I had my coat on and was fishing in my pocket for my car keys.  As I grabbed them I said, “Okay, I’ve got my keys.”  This phrase sent Aunt Anne into a panic and she said, in a wobbly voice that sounded near to tears, “Where are my keys?”  She began patting her pockets and started walking around the house.  She said, “Honey, please help me find my keys!”

I asked her if she was planning on going anywhere and she said no, but she still wanted to have her keys.  Eventually she found them and flopped into an armchair with a thump.  I leaned over, gave her a kiss and said, “I love you Aunt Anne, I’ll talk to you soon.”  And then I left.

Apartment 2024 is smelling appealingly of cloves and orange oils right at the moment because I took a brief break this morning from the nearly-finished thesis to make a pomander ball.  There was something soothingly mindless about making rows with cloves in the skin of an orange that gave me a much-needed break from words, thoughts and my computer screen.

Last night I crawled into bed, all ready for sleep, with my computer.  It was midnight and I was tired, but I needed to do a little more work before I could rest.  I worked for about an hour, writing posts for Slashfood and Green Daily before turning my mind to some school work.  Just as I was about to settle down and read my class’s discussion board, my computer went black.  There was no warning, no messages asking if it was okay to shut down.  It was just gone.

I plugged in the charger, thinking that maybe it was a power issue, but that didn’t remedy it.  So I put it down on my dresser and went to sleep, hoping that it would magically fix itself overnight.

I woke up with a start at 7:25 this morning, far earlier than I normally rise and instantly remembered that I was having computer issues.  Staggering out of bed, I approached the computer and pressed the power button.  Nothing.

Getting back into bed, I spent the next half hour sending good thoughts to my computer.  I imagined a beam of light pouring over its pearly white case.  I told it how much I appreciated it and how I just needed it to work for a few more weeks.  I reminded it that its purpose in life was to compute and by not turning on, it was denying that which it had been born to do (I have never claimed to be normal).

However, when I checked it again at 8 am, it was still stubbornly resisted booting up.  I can’t get through the day without a computer, what with needing to stay on top of things at Slashfood and really needing to finish my thesis (which was all happily saved in my gmail account).  I made arrangements to borrow Scott’s MacBook and hopped into the shower.

When I was all dressed and ready to go, I tried one last time to turn it on.  This time, when I depressed the power button the fan whirred to life and the machine started.  I quickly texted Scott and told him it was working and that I didn’t need to bug him after all (and thanked him profusely for being willing to come to my computer rescue once again).

So my three year old iBook is working once again and I am breathing a sigh of relief that I’ll (hopefully) be able to finish out grad school on this mostly reliable computer before moving on to the refurbed MacBook I bought last Friday that is now waiting for at my parents’ house in Oregon.

Here it is, folks. The very last episode in our Thanksgiving series, in which we make a dish that I like to call Turkey Pot Shepherd’s Pie. It combines all your Thanksgiving leftovers neatly into a single dish that is easy to make, very flexible and quite tasty when reheated the next day. It’s one that would also work really well with leftover roast chicken which then turns it into something you can make more than just once a year.

I used up most of my brain power today working in the writing center at school.  We’re getting to the end of the semester and so from 4-8 pm today I sat in a chair as an array of students plopped down in the seat across from me and handed me things to read.  I read, edited, commented, corrected and advised.  As soon as one person thanked me for my work, another one would settle in the chair and hand over their paper.  I believe I read something in the neighborhood of 60 typewritten, double-spaced papers today.  It was a lot.  There was a moment, around 7 pm, when the words all started swimming together and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to continue.  But I gathered my wits (at least what was left of them) and kept on going.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take my worn out brain to bed.

Until this last July, the only time in my life I had been paid for my writing was when I ten years old and submitted an essay to the Oregonian’s Thursday children’s page. They paid a whopping $10 for the right to print the story, an amount that seemed thrilling back in 1989. My mom was so tickled by my first paycheck as a writer that she refused to let me cash it. Instead, she handed me a ten from her wallet and tucked the check into the middle of my baby book. It is still there to this day (we lost the privilege of cashing it 90 days after it was issued, so it’s been a moot check for some time now).

Then this summer, I was hired to blog at Slashfood and started to earn some money writing about food. This felt nearly too good to be true, since it brought together two of my passions and gave me an opportunity to expand a little in the world of food writing. Well, it continues to get better, because a couple of weeks ago, they asked me to move into the role of lead blogger/editor for site. This is what I hinted at briefly in this post a couple of weeks ago and now it is officially official.

There is this part of me that is continually boggled by the fact that my future is starting to shape up in a way where I can see that I will be able to make a living writing, reading, editing and possibly making some food video. I feel so fortunate that sometimes I have a hard time articulating the gratitude. It is such a joy to be in this place in my life.