Why I Vote

It sounds glib, but I'm voting because there is absolutely no reason not to.

• It's legal. Nothing stopping me there.
• I'm registered in Massachusetts. Even that was almost frictionless. I filled out a form at a table set up directly in front of my T stop on National Voter Registration Day, and a week or two later, my confirmation arrived in the mail.
• I have time. Polling stations here are open from 7 AM to 8 PM on Tuesday. (Yes, Tuesday. Apparently there are robocalls in the area suggesting otherwise. Nope.) I start work at 9 and get out of class by 6:30. 
• I know who I'm going to vote for. None of that undecided business here. (And I care about the outcome of the two important races on the ticket.)
• My polling place is easy to get to. I walk down the street two blocks, turn the corner, and I'm there. (It is not, however, the closest I've ever lived to where I vote. When I lived in Wisconsin, I voted at the DMV branch directly across the street from my apartment. Wisconsin also had same-day registration, which was great.)

I don't deny that I tend toward laziness (see: amount of note-taking I still have to do for Tuesday's class). But -- especially compared to these people -- voting is an easy thing for me to do. So look for my "I voted" sticker.

A totally sentimental, non-bookish post

Cassie Rettger, 4/1/1997-6/20/2011

Knew this was coming. But still...

Because tonight's drive included Sylvia Poggioli's piece on Ratko Mladic...

(this one)... it seems an appropriate occasion for this piece I wrote a few years back.

Sylvia Poggioli doesn’t know it, but she helped me learn to drive.

Her voice, covering the war and peacekeeping in Kosovo, defined the spring of 1999. I was sixteen, a newly permitted driver, and NPR was the soundtrack to my driving lessons.

Although I took the more-or-less-required commercial driver’s ed class, my mother was my primary driving teacher. (My dad had given me a few lessons, but it didn’t take long for us all to decide that Mom’s temperament was better suited to the learning curve. Dad ended up with the college visits.) Initially, she decided that the radio wasn’t going to be on at all when I was behind the wheel. As I got the basics under control, NPR nudged its way into the speakers.

The UN peacekeeping mission was just getting underway as I got comfortable behind the wheel, and Sylvia was on almost every day.

Maybe that was what turned on my news junkie switch. Growing up I’d always paid attention to current events – friends like to remind me that when I was three or four years old, I explained to them that I read Newsweek “to get informed” – but not as much I did during the second half of high school. I tried not to admit that I usually listened to Morning Edition when I started driving to school – but I knew that the drive usually took 11 minutes, which generally meant that I was listening to the first story after the newscast when I pulled into the parking lot.

In my senior year, I had a free period every morning. Most days I spent the time in the library, keeping up with a news repertoire that included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yes, I was a nerd.

Sylvia Poggioli’s reports from Kosovo didn’t spark my interest in journalism, but they helped to shape it. Part of me wanted to be there with her, breaking the stories of the war and telling the world about a people’s fight to survive. (A more sensible part of me knew that I wouldn’t last long under foreign correspondent conditions, which is why I’m not writing this from Colombia.)

(Post pic: self-portrait at the wheel, many years after I learned to drive. And taken while the car was not in motion, obviously.)

In which Sarah tries something new

If you've spent any amount of time with me in person (or, for that matter, on Twitter), you may have noted that "I saw this in Cook's Illustrated" is something of a refrain for me.

Which is my way of saying I don't think I'd be subjecting my cooking skills to public scrutiny for anything less cool than this contest, from CI parent America's Test Kitchen. Visit the test kitchen? Yes, please.

The challenge: Make the Cook's Illustrated Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, and blog about it.

The bonus: This gave me an excuse to break out my brand new matryoskha doll measuring cups.¹

The recipe starts off nice and easy -- mix the dry ingredients.²

Then we get to the first interesting bit: for flavor, CI says to brown the butter.³ This was a new one for me.

As with all new adventures, there was some guesswork. What about all the foam? (It ended up mixing in.) What exactly counts as brown? (About 30 seconds longer than I gave it. I left the pan on the burner while I grabbed a bowl, and when I turned around it was for-real brown.)

For future reference, I'll be judging by smell -- CI calls it "nutty," but it's a little closer to "overly sweet toffee."

See? Brown.

That stick of butter, by the way, is a recent fabulous-for-single-people discovery. Land O'Lakes calls them half-sticks. There will be far less hacking through frozen butter with these around.

What do you add to the butter?⁴ Sugar, of course -- both brown and white for this recipe.

Except. It's reasonable, isn't it, to assume that a never-opened package of brown sugar will be fresh when you open it? Even if it was purchased six (or more) months ago?

Yeah. So much for trying to stock my cabinets in advance.

Also, note to self: acquire a terra cotta bear.⁵

Further note: There are conversions for these things. Instead of chipping away at the block of brown sugar, I could have tried a white-sugar-and-molasses combo.

So after the sugar battle, it was time for the egg-and-a-half. The recipe called for one egg and one yolk. The easiest way to separate the yolk, I assumed, would be to use (for the first time) the egg separator that came with my non-matryoshka set of measuring cups.

You know where this is going, don't you?

Maybe it would have been easier if I had been just a little gentler in opening the egg. Because once you've broken the yolk, there's not much the separator can do to keep it from spilling out.

Perhaps that's what the pointy thing on the end is for. This bears further investigation.

Moving on. The wet ingredients finally ended up in the same bowl, and I dutifully followed the recipe, which ordered me to put them through a mix-and-rest cycle. Then they joined the flour.

In the same bowl, I mean.

And then the chocolate chips appeared, and suddenly they were cookies. Really big cookies (following orders again).⁶








They disappeared into the oven, and emerged (17 minutes later, rather than the recipe's 10-14):

Yum.

Just one problem: There are, as of this writing, twelve and a half of these massive cookies remaining. And -- as per the "single people" reference above -- I live alone. Unless some friends drop by, I'm going to consume all of these myself.

By the end of the week.⁷

Next time: Make these. Eat one. Take the rest to book club. Bask in reflected glory.


¹ Yes, for real. That head, for instance, is the one-cup measure.

² Which I actually did this time. Usually my method is to dump everything into the same bowl and mix. And I don't care what anyone says; it works.

³ Of course, they say to brown it in a stainless pan so you can see the color change, but as the only stainless pot I have is a saucepan currently reposing in the dishwasher, that was a no. Not complaining, though -- it was one less thing I had to buy when I set up this kitchen!

⁴ When you're mixing ingredients properly, which we've already established is rare for me.

⁵ Which still wouldn't have helped when the sugar was in a plastic bag that hadn't been $^$&% opened.

⁶ More or less -- I ended up with 14 cookies instead of the recommended 16, so my idea of a 3-tbsp mound of dough and the real thing are in slight disagreement.

⁷ Although sooner is not out of the question.

Speaking of small hotel rooms

Justina's comment about her Norwegian room reminded me of this one I shared with two other people in London:
That's what I get for having a very tall roommate.

Blog the Vote

I actually teared up when I saw this banner in Ridgefield's 300th anniversary parade this year. The LWV held onto a ca.-1915 banner carried by suffragists in town and brought it out for the occasion.

The women who made the banner (obviously) didn't have the right to vote. Neither did these, to name just a few: Sojourner Truth, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lucretia Mott, Rose Schneiderman, and Mary Church Terrell.

Not enough? Start reading the letters, articles, and oral histories from Freedom Riders collected at Breach of Peace and remember that for many people, seeing an amendment added to the Constitution wasn't enough.

People with political power have, for hundreds of years, tried to avoid sharing that power. Now that we have it - something other people have fought to bring about - let's make it count for something.

Pay a visit to your polling place on Tuesday, and think about what it took to get you there.

Chasing Ray has a roundup of Blog the Vote posts - thanks for organizing, Colleen and Lee!

I am so there!

A Rockapella Holiday
December 18, 2008
Ridgefield Playhouse

Yes, I grew up on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, I admit it.

If anyone else thinks this might be worth a trip to Ridgefield, let me know!

The light side and the dark side

How the Washington Post headlined today's economic news: US Economy Grows at Solid Pace in 2nd Quarter

How the New York Times covered it: GDP Grows at Tepid 1.9% Despite Stimulus

On my Google page, the headlines are right on top of each other. Gotta love it.