Major Milestones and a Bulgogi Recipe

Today is the lull between two major milestones. Yesterday was Joseph's 12th birthday, and tomorrow, my daughter, Sian, who has been in Ukraine for the last 18 months serving a mission, comes home.

On Saturday last week, I was stressing about getting Sian's bedroom ready for her. Elannah had painted three of the walls a lovely periwinkle blue but ran out of steam before she managed to clean and paint the final wall. Plus, she had taken off to an amusement park with her friends for the day. I was really excited because I had finally finished all my work assignments and had a few days' break before getting more, so now I had time to sort out the room and no reason to have to sit in front of my computer all day.

I went downstairs to the basement and had a look around the crowded little room. It was overwhelming. Gabrielle had left most of her things behind when she moved out, and the bed and the dresser had been taken apart and stacked in the middle of the room so Elannah could paint. There were boxes and bags full of things everywhere. The desk, too, was covered in the detritus of Gabrielle's high school career, along with some of Sian's old things.

My  phone rang, and it was my brother, Aaron. Could he come and spend a few nights at our house? For some reason, he hasn't been able to shake this cold/congestion thing that he's been suffering from for months, and now some of his limbs are starting to swell. The doctor told him he has allergies and prescribed him a pill for it, but it's done nothing. Maybe it's something in his house, and if he sleeps better at our house, that would be a good indicator that there's something going on.

I enthusiastically told him to come right over as soon as he liked. He's so much fun to have around, and my kids adore him. Plus, though he was perfectly willing to sleep on the couch, it gave me great motivation to get Sian's room done that day so he could sleep in it for a few nights.

It took me all day, but I got it done. All of Gabrielle's old things have been boxed so she can sort through them when she comes here to stay tonight in anticipation of the whole family picking up Sian from the airport tomorrow. The final wall has been painted, the floor is scrubbed--along with the bed frame and the dresser and the desk--and the trash bags and the old carpet remnant used as an area rug have all been hauled out to the garbage cans. Sophia spent some time helping me, as well, which was a great way for us to have a little conversation about life and whatnot. By 8pm, the room was ready: sparkling clean and freshly blue.

Aaron said he had a pretty good night after the congestion finally lifted. We'll see if he continues to improve. He took off for work before I saw him this morning, so I didn't get a chance to ask him how last night went.

Yesterday, Sunday, we had my parents, grandmother, and one of my sisters over to celebrate Joseph's 12th birthday (my in-laws are currently out of town). I was sore and exhausted after getting that room finished, but I faced a long afternoon of food prep for Joseph's birthday dinner. Joseph requested his favorite food, which is bulgogi, Korean marinated beef. I didn't know if I had the budget to make enough bulgogi to serve as a main entree for 11 people, so I decided to make bibimbap. Bibimbap is a very flavorful dish. For each serving, the base is sushi rice that has been steamed and then fried so that it has a crisp coating. Small amounts of various side dishes go on top of the rice: the bulgogi, matchstick carrots cooked in a soy glaze, glazed mushrooms, green onion slaw, flavored quick-fried mung-bean sprouts, garlicky-soy spinach, wakame (seaweed), sauteed zucchini, and a fried egg. It's delicious. Here's a bibimbap recipe. (I used a different bulgogi recipe for the meat because I like it better.)

As you can imagine, it takes hours to prep and cook all the components of bibimbap, which is why it's more of a celebration dish than everyday fare. It's great for when you have tons of people to help you out in the kitchen (and the kitchen space for those people, which is not something I have, alas). It was a huge success, and Joseph loved it. That's what counts.

You could also make bulgogi and serve it with steamed or fried rice and just one of the bibimbap side dishes, which is what I usually do. I particularly love the carrots, mushrooms, and zucchini. Any of those would be an excellent single accompaniment to the meat.

Here's the bulgogi recipe that I really like. Once you have the meat sliced (you can even ask the butcher to thinly slice a roast for you to save even more time), it's mostly just letting it marinate before broiling or grilling it right before serving. If you want to spend even less money on the meat, choose chuck roast or any other tough cut on sale and tenderize it with baking soda before marinating.

Bulgogi

4 pounds London broil (top round) roast, cut into 1/8" or 1/16" slices (to ensure that the meat will be fork-tender, lightly sprinkle both sides of the slices with baking soda, let sit for 10-15 minutes, and then rinse and pat dry before continuing)
1 large onion, skinned and cut into quarters
1 head garlic, peeled
1 cup soy sauce
1 medium green pepper, seeds removed
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp red pepper
1/2 cup sesame oil

Put all the ingredients except the meat and the sesame seeds into a blender or food processor and puree.

Toast sesame seeds in a metal pan and mix them into the marinade.

Put the meat into the marinating dish and pour the marinade over it. Mix the meat and marinade with your hands so that all surfaces are completely covered. Cover dish with cling wrap and let sit in the fridge for at least 2 hours (overnight is better).

Grill marinated meat strips on BBQ or lay them on cookie sheets before broiling them in the oven. It only needs a couple minutes per side.

Chop or mince leftover bulgogi and add it to fried rice, scrambled eggs, or soup; or mix with some cornstarch before deep frying into crispy beef. Or just eat it cold for breakfast. Yum.

A Brief Review of Girls Camp

I spent most of last week camping with a large bunch of teenage girls. Why? Well, they do it every year, and this year I happened to be the ward camp director. We went up into the foothills near Evanston, Wyoming, to a Boy Scouts High Adventure camp. For four days, we worked hard, played hard, and slept in near-freezing temps while gasping for air at 8,000 feet above sea level.

On the shooting range, I proved that I need glasses. How the heck is a middle-aged woman like me supposed to spot that tiny little black dot at the center of the target from 30 feet away?? I just aimed for the white paper instead. Elannah, on the other hand, did incredibly well. I'm pleased to report that neither of us suffered PTSD after shooting rifles.

During archery, Elannah managed to get a bullseye.

I, on the other hand, was really pleased to hit the target at all. During my second round, I got four of my five arrows into some part of the target. Watch out, Katniss Everdeen!

Here are my archery injuries. Until I figured out how to slightly bend my left arm, I got thwacked by the powerful string of my compound bow once on the forearm and twice above my elbow. I did not swear, but I did make a sort of loud strangled noise through my teeth because it HURT! I put on my long-sleeved hoodie after that. Nearly a week later, I still look like I've been beaten.

I hate sleeping in tents. Hate it. I am still catching up on lost sleep.

The good part was that there was very little girl drama. It was probably the least amount of drama I've ever experienced at a Girls Camp in my life. If you've ever hung out with any number of teenage girls for days on end, you know how much of a miracle that is.

Also, no bug bites. Always a bonus.

Uff Da! I Went to Minnesota and Back, Don'tcha Know!

"Oof-da" or "uff da" is a singular expression used by Minnesotans to express surprise, amazement, genial disbelief, or true dismay. Of Norwegian origin, as the vast majority of the original white settlers in the area were Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish (thus explaining the preponderance of Sven and Ole jokes). Used in such sentences as, "Uffda! That's the 17th Lutheran church I've counted on this block alone!"

What a great trip! The whole thing went without a hitch (I did get pulled over in Montana for failing to change lanes before passing a cop car with its lights on on the side of the road; but though the officer was angry when he finally caught up to me, he kindly let me off with just a warning after I expressed deep regrets for my mistake). I enjoyed great scenery, great company, and lots of nostalgia.

Minnesota in summer is spectacular. I had forgotten how much my soul yearns for the lush and bounteous greenery of that area. I mean, the desert has its own beauty, but whenever I daydream about building my dream home, it always seems to be encircled by the kind of green you only find naturally in a place where water is abundant, where the only thing you really have to do to keep your lawn looking green and tidy is to mow it every couple weeks.

I had also forgotten just how nice people of the Northland actually are. Utahns are generally pretty pleasant to strangers, but Minnesotans take "nice" to a whole new level. I can see how Europeans or New Yorkers might think it was creepy--and possibly suspect--but once you get used to it, it's utterly charming. All kinds of strangers struck up conversations over nothing and took a genuine interest in the answers to questions they asked me. Now I remember why I'm a such an indiscriminate smiler: I learned it in Minnesota.

Yeah, I'd move back. I'd move back even though the splendor of the brief, green summer months are counterbalanced by nine months of cold and winter. I'd move to idyllic small-town Minnesota even though overnight parking lots include electric outlets so you can plug in your car's engine block heater when the temperatures drop to dozens of degrees below zero and you still have to get to work or school or the grocery store the next day, even if you could suffer frostbite on exposed skin in under three minutes.

(Wait. Maybe I'm just not strong enough to handle that kind of cold anymore. The solution is to keep a summer house in Minnesota and flee to dryer, warmer climes in winter.)

(And now I have officially become a theoretical snowbird.)

We arrived at my sister's apartment and enjoyed how happy she was to get her new, reliable car. Then she gave us a tour of the town, and we had lunch with some friends of hers at a restaurant that was crammed into the back of a tiny little Hispanic grocery store and run by a very congenial El Salvadoran woman whose chile rellenos and rice were to die for. When my mother ordered Mexican tamales, the woman insisted on also bringing us a sample of an El Salvadoran tamale, steamed to a pudding-like consistency in a banana leaf, just so we could taste the difference.

In the evening, we got to canoe on the river before dinner. The water was like glass, barely dimpled by tiny eddies in the shallows. A few men and women stood silently along the banks, fishing alone or companionably in pairs. As we pulled our paddles into the boat and just sat still for a while as the current gently moved us downstream, the only sounds we could hear were the calling of birds in the hundreds of trees around us. The sun was beginning to set, and the indirect light was golden and soft. I felt myself relax so deeply that I realized I hadn't truly felt that level of stillness and peace in myself for 20 years. It was a transcendent experience.

We wore my poor sister out despite how much we tried to alternate all our activities with down time, so it was probably a good thing we had to turn around and leave for home the next day so she could rest and regain her strength. As the three of us were now in one car, I offered to read The Fighting Littles by Booth Tarkington, one of the best books for read-alouds ever written (if you can do it without busting out laughing). Mom and my brother got so involved in the very amusing story that they insisted I start it up again after every rest stop, and I finished it entirely about eight hours later, hoarse and satisfied. I jobjam love sharing that book with others.

So now I'm home. My family survived my absence, and I'm having a very hard time wanting to return to the regular stressful routine of writing to deadlines. Such is the nature of vacations. I'm grateful I could go and satisfy some of my wanderlust. What a great way to do it.

Adding to My Road Trip Playlist

I'm going on a road trip next week with my mother and one of my brothers. We're heading to Minnesota to deliver a car my sister bought from The Big City. Long story short, she's got health problems that prevent her from coming out here and driving herself home, so, like the good family members that we are who absolutely love a long road trip, we'll head up there instead.

I won't be getting back to my old stomping grounds further north in the state. We're going to end up in a little town just across the North Dakota/Minnesota border, stay a day, and then head back home.

The week after we get back, I have to go to Girls Camp with the teen girls in our congregation. I'm still the ward camp director, so I'm kind of stuck with that--not like it's a big burden, except for the fact that I do not sleep well in the great outdoors. I have preternatural hearing, and I'm always up with the sun. Ugh. And it's been a very long time since I had to deal with the amount of girl drama that always comes up at camp. The fun part is that this is a Boy Scout high adventure camp, so we get to do the shooting range and archery and canoes and rowboats and stuff.

Husband was worried about my being gone for practically two weeks. "We'll starve!" he exclaimed. Then, after a while, he acknowledged that I probably could use a break. I'm hoping I regain some of my sense of humor during the time that I can ignore the constant stress of completing assignments from several clients while also being a full-time mom. That would be excellent.

Road trips mean you need new music. New music keeps you awake on those long stretches of highway when your driving companion(s) has fallen asleep or gone silent and the white lines on the road start to hypnotize you and tell you bizarre stories. I'm putting together a nice long playlist with some of my favorites from other playlists along with new finds.

Here's one I keep listening to:



Also this one, which is from the soundtrack to Chris Evans's movie Before You Go.



I guess I'm on a bit of an Indie Rock kick, cos there's also this one that I am always humming:



This one is pretty peppy and fun:



This guy's voice fascinates me.



What genre is this? Indie R&B? Who cares?

On, Wildfire, On!

One week ago, I was released as the ward Gospel Doctrine teacher. I admit I cried a few tears over that. I love, love, love teaching that class, and I felt very sad that I hadn't made it through all the standard works. I started when we were partly through the Old Testament, taught all the way through the New Testament, and only made it up to Mosiah in the Book of Mormon. Two years total just isn't long enough. Is it greedy to want at least two more years? Maybe three? It's not that I feel I am the best teacher in the world or anything, but I have learned so much as I've studied and pondered the scriptures in order to share the joys contained in them with the class and hear their comments and insights in turn. When I teach something, it sticks in my head better. I learn more as I study and prepare in order to try and teach it coherently, and I have learned amazing things.

So my new adventure will be in the new ward Relief Society presidency as first counselor--I've now come full circle, as that was the calling I received when we first moved here in 2009. The new president came up to me last week and told me that she knew how much I loved being the Gospel Doctrine teacher, but my name came to her at three in the morning one night and wouldn't leave no matter how much she prayed. Having been a former Gospel Doctrine teacher herself, she knew how hard it would be for me to leave it, but she knew I was supposed to be one of her counselors.

That's the way things work, and I'm fine with that. Besides, I get to work with three absolutely wonderful women as we serve and love the women of our ward.

Plus, Husband found me a brand new aluminum-frame street cruiser at the thrift store yesterday for $20. It's the little things that really give me a kick.

I'm naming this bike Wildfire II. I rode the original Wildfire (a purple Diamondback) on my mission in England over 20 years ago. And yes, that's a tribute to Rex O'Herlihan's grand steed in Rustler's Rhapsody, the 1985 cowboy parody starring Tom Berenger.

On, Wildfire, on!

In Which I Dream up an Entire Architectural Neighborhood!

I frequently have what I call Architectural Dreams, where I dream up some fantastical building and spend my time running through it for reasons that make perfect sense when I'm asleep and do not make much sense at all when I'm awake. It's the building my subconscious creates and not the storyline that I treasure when I wake up.

Last night, I dreamt a whole neighborhood. Lots of crazy stuff happened on my way to this neighborhood (including a massive traffic jam comprised of millions of people pushing shopping carts full of empty plastic containers down a highway), but suddenly I am there, walking up a hill on a sidewalk, looking around me at the beautiful homes and perfectly manicured gardens along both sides of the street. Some of the trees, for instance, were amazing--shaped somewhat like vast weeping willows, whose branches defied gravity and were covered in flowers so white they hurt my eyes to look at.

As I walked up the hill, I came to a fairly unremarkable but very neatly kept blonde brick house, and an old man in a wheelchair sat outside in his driveway. He greeted me, and I said hello back. I noticed he had a short brick column standing alongside the entrance to his driveway, and as I looked at it, the front face became transparent and I could see into the hollow interior of the column. The interior was swathed in white muslin, and I saw a mother mouse and several tiny mouse babies playing on the floor.

"We have mice," said the man, and I thought I'd be funny and respond, "And do the neighbors have mice, too?" Somewhere in my dream recollection, I drummed up a dim vision of once having a mouse infestation in my house (true). I felt alarmed.

The man said, "I didn't want them in the house, so I made them a little house outside. And they have a way to get in and out if they want."

I looked again at the transparent face of the column and noticed that there was a hole near the bottom right corner. It was like a soft membrane, with a tube of the membrane material extending into the interior of the mouse house.

As I watched, several rats suddenly appeared inside the mouse house. They were huge--as big as cats. They wriggled their way through the membrane and out to the sidewalk. The mouse family followed them, and I watched them all waddle up the sidewalk in a line: three massive rats followed by four tiny mice.

I had an alarming thought about how these rats and mice were going to infest this entire beautiful neighborhood, and I started to say something about it to the man in the wheelchair, but then I noticed that several of his neighbors across the street were gathered outside on a very green lawn and were happily socializing. They all glanced over at the line of rats and mice wandering up the sidewalk, but they continued smiling and talking as if it were perfectly normal. I was completely baffled. Then I woke up.

Perhaps there is some deep symbological meaning to that dream, though I noticed that elements of the dream were lifted from things I had seen or thought about the previous day. I was far more disappointed that I woke up before I could explore more of that neighborhood. I rarely visit the same place twice in my dreams, so I'll just have to memorialize it now so I can remember and mull it over it later.

What I Know for Sure

Question: how angry does a person get when their world view is challenged by credible evidence?

Answer: angry like The Hulk.

"Hulk SMASH!"

I went through a bit of rage not too long ago for this very reason. I was seriously angry. And I was angry for several reasons:

1. If this new evidence is correct, why have I been taught a lie for so very long?
2. Was it purposeful or accidental that I was fed a lie?
3. If this new evidence is correct and it looks like I was fed a lie purposely, who is behind the lie, and what do they gain by perpetuating the lie?
4. Now what?

I am always in search of truth. I don't care if it's painful truth or not: if it's truth, I believe it will set me free. Being free is worth all the psychological pain I might go through in being forced to change my worldview. Therefore, bring it on. But it doesn't mean I'm not still human, so I do still go through the perfectly normal psychological distress of wanting to mock and reject things that shake up my understanding of the world. If things make too much sense to ignore, I get pretty furious until I can accept it. I have been learning how to leave my ego out of it, which does help to reduce the anger.

When I was younger, I knew lots of things for sure. Now I know two things for sure.

What I know for sure:
1. God exists.
2. God cannot lie.

There are corollaries to those two things I know, and those things I also believe. If God says it, and He doesn't lie, then I can believe those things, as well. This covers the reasons why I go to church and have faith in the atoning blood of Jesus Christ and try to live those beliefs on a daily basis.

It's the stuff that humans state are absolute facts that I question. If the "science is settled," I'm not on board, especially if it contradicts what God says. If a human theory is taught as a gospel truth--no matter how diligently and no matter how widely--I'm going to ask questions. I've asked the questions about God, and I've received my answers, answers that I cannot ignore or deny. But humans have this fantastic habit of getting things wrong because we are infants in our understanding of reality. Worse, some humans purposely mess with the facts for power, money, or ego.

We are human. And we're not even that smart. How can we know anything for dead certain when we only experience such a narrow spectrum of reality? Much of what we call Science these days has become as much of a religion as a belief in a Supreme Being, and it has also become corrupted by human desire and ego. We don't even know what we don't know. How can we dismiss God and then worship ourselves as gods when what we know for certain changes so frequently? That way lies madness.

When you start jumping down the rabbit hole of wanting to know truth no matter the psychological toll, it's tempting to become so cynical that you end up believing nothing. But you have to put your faith in something or you'll go crazy, so I put my faith in the one thing that has consistently proven itself to be: God. I have no scientific instruments to measure God, and I have no evidence that is not a personal anecdote in order to prove His existence to anyone else, but it's evidence enough to me. I have far less trust in humans with all their scientific tools, no matter how well-meaning. I do believe we know stuff as humans, but when we humans start worshiping ourselves and our vast and glorious knowledge of Everything, it makes me want to laugh and laugh. Or cry and cry.

Thanks for listening. Just had to get that off my chest.