Is it Dinnertime Yet?

........a variation on the ever-popular Caitie statement "Is it naptime yet?"


Basically, I'm hungry.

*stomach growls*

During the week, I wake up and eat breakfast somewhere between 10:30am and 11am.  Because I'm boring and still half asleep, it's usually cereal

After breakfast, it's out the door and off to work.  Where I work for a solid five hours before lunch/dinner rolls around.  That's right.  I am STARVING by the time I get my dinner break.  Which means a measly sandwich will not cut it.  No, not even TWO sandwiches would cut it.  So I'm left with a dilemma.  I need a dinner food for work, but since there's only a microwave, I need something that reheats well.  Oh, and it has to fit into my bag to make it to work.


Talk about a pain in the neck.


I don't know about you, but when I get home from work, all I wanna do is sit down and have some food (in my case, usually it's a sandwich at 9:30pm).  Maybe watch some TV.  But most importantly, to relax.

Free at last

However, since I need to have dinner prepared in advance for work, a chunk of my relax-after-work time is eaten up by me making something that can be nuked later.  And/or that can be made in bulk now.


This means I inevitably default with pasta.  Most pastas are easily heated back up and taste pretty much the same.  Or maybe I'll make stir fry, or fried rice.  Both can be made in large quantities and last me several days.  Or, if I'm in a good cooking mood, jambalaya is pretty quick to throw together and lasts me longer since the spices keep me from eating a lot (I'm really REALLY bad with spicy anything).  But that's not too many things to make.


So tell me, for those of you who actually read my blog (if you actually exist, that is).  What should I make for my lunch-dinners?  Suggestions are much appreciated.

Update

Sometimes there's a ton of things to do at work and I'm scrambling to get things done.


Sometimes there's some downtime.


Please enjoy this fleet of cranes I made at work while waiting for videos to record.

**UPDATE** There is a sailboat now.

Ahoy there!

**UPDATE**UPDATE** There is an explosion of origami across my screens.  Thanks to my cousin Sophie for sending me a desk kit!!

MORE CRANES and a flower

Swan meets duckling

My penguin has a battle helmet.  Deal with it

**UPDATE**UPDATE**UPDATE** I have reached origami desk master status.  Behold! someone brought in Russian chocolates and I made a crane outta the foil wrapper.  Truly it is a sight to see.

The Day the Apartments Broke

I am in-between leases right now here in DC.  I have my current apartment that I've been living in for roughly 2 years as I finish up college, and I have a new (and cheaper!) lease that just started and I will be transitioning to in the coming weeks.

Today both complexes called me at work to tell me they needed to enter my apartments for a "maintenance emergency".

I can only assume......

Well, I shouldn't assume things.  Literally every time, one of my parents says the following phrase "You know what it means when you assume.  It makes an ass out of you and me."  You can almost hear the family sass.

That being said, let us examine the crises

Situation A

Where: Old Complex

Call time: Early afternoon

Location: Kitchen

Voicemail gist: We need to enter your kitchen

Why: The person in the unit above you is having problems

Problems, you say? Really now......  

I see.  Sounds like something either broke in the kitchen above us, or they're just really terrible cooks.  Since all the stoves are shitty electric instead of gas, the only thing I can think of is if they tried to tip the fridge to get at the back of the shelf because they were too lazy to just crouch down and reach in there like a normal human.

Situation B

Where: New Complex

Call time: Mid-afternoon

Location: Master bedroom

Voicemail gist: We are entering your unit momentarily, we just wanted to see if you were home

Why: The unit downstairs is reporting a leakage and we think it's your radiator

They must be drowning down there

Well, crap.  We just signed that lease and the radiator is leaking.  Possibly among other things.  And this comes after the fiasco of trying to burn off the residue in the oven from "cleaning", which resulted in whiteout conditions from all the smoke.

*cough, cough*

Also fun fact.  In both situations, I was the only one of my apartments that was notified.  I have 3 other roommates on the lease in the Old Complex apartment, and 2 other roommates on the New Complex apartment.  But nope.  Only me.  I feel like I should be flattered, but actually I'm just kinda annoyed.  Not like I can do much about maintenance emergencies at work.  My roommates know now, so perhaps they will know how to take care of it/ignore it.

As of now, it is

The news is calling.  Caitie, out!

That DC summer life

It gets hot here.  And by hot, I mean there was a week where it was exclusively in the 90s with super high humidity.  I could feel myself melting into a little puddle of Caitie.  My roommate calls me a "delicate flower" because I wilt in the heat so fast.


Well this snowdrop is wishing she was back home.  I'm meant to live in an igloo, not a Dutch oven, thank you very much.  And it's too damn hot here already.

Bye guys.  Too hot out

The heat has scrambled my brain.  You can have more stories some other time.  Sometime when I'm not melting.  Whenever that is.

WHO'S GOT TWO THUMBS AND HAS A JOB?

THIS GIRL RIGHT HERE

That's right.  Yours truly managed to land a job.  I work now at RT America.  For those of you who are staring at the screen thinking "What the hell is that?  Never heard of it.....", RT America (also known as Russia Today) is a news station that broadcasts three newscasts a day.  It's got four offices in the US and is headquartered in Moscow.  Oh, and we broadcast in English, Spanish, and Arabic.

Wait......come again??

Yeah.  No Russian broadcasts.  Sorry.


Thanks to playing catchup with my posts here, I didn't post this right away.  That being said, I've been working at RT for about 3 weeks now.  I have my own desk, my own phone, and three screens - a dual monitor system and a TV that shows me what we're currently recording.


What's my job here, you ask?  Well.  I run the video.

Like in the control room?

No, not in the control room.  And before you ask, not online either.  I don't manage the video content.

How does that equal a job with videos then?!!

Let me clarify.  I run video here, which is not as fancy as it may seem.  We already established that I have a desk, which means I don't work in the control room.  My job is essentially request-retrieve.  Someone emails me or posts on a specific website to tell me they want a video.  Maybe there was an attack overseas, maybe there is new footage of Greece's debt crisis, or maybe someone wants to see yet another Republican announce his candidacy.


Either way, someone sends me a request.  On my snazzy TV screen monitor thingy, I can see 8 recorders.  I use them to locate the videos in question, save them to the editing software we use, and let the person know I found their video.  Many times the videos I locate are the ones in the newscast, which you then see from your couch or your phone or wherever you get your news from.


The same goes for the news.  Are we running a package?  Better save it.  How about a guest, do we have one of those?  Better save it, and save the video of them by themselves for good measure.


So yeah.  That's my life now.  I am a real person at last.

Job Hunt Mondays

Job Hunt Mondays was a brainchild of mine, as a way to make sure I applied to jobs and actually put in the effort.  For as my dad likes to remind me, I sometimes shy away from things that have an uncertain or possibly an unfavorable outcome (such as the possibility of NOT landing a job).

It is so daunting to have something like this looming over your head.  In six months the government will start knocking on my door, asking for their money back.  I can see it now......"Hello there, former student!  I hope you made good use of those college days.  Remember those?  Ha ha haaaaaaaa give us all your money we need it back."

Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank you

And all us former college students have the same reaction.

Can't deal.  Still broke

Yeah.  SO HELPFUL GUYS.

Anyway.  To make sure I actually went through with things, I decided to do Job Hunt Mondays.  What that meant was on Monday mornings I'd sleep in, make myself a nice breakfast, hug the cat, and sit down with my laptop.  The goal was to send out 5 job applications every Monday.  If I hit that mark and then failed to get even a single application out for the rest of the week, I'd still have applied to 5 jobs that week.  Which was pretty decent.

The first Job Hunt Monday, I sat on my floor with my brand new Dunkin Donuts t-shirt.

Love love love this shirt

I turned my room into a mini indoor picnic area.  My laptop was placed on the humidifier box, the charger cord snaking across the room back under my bed.  I took my purple monster/fuzzy backrest thing off my bed and propped it against my dresser.  I put a bowl of water out to tempt the cat to stay and filled my own water bottle so there would be no excuse to get up.

No excuse.

None.

Nope. Can't deal with that, must keep typing

And so I got to work.

I got into a rhythm, pumping out cover letters and tailoring resumes to my applications one after another after another.

That first day, I pumped out 12 applications.  Twelve.  Granted, four of them were to the same company, but still.  Twelve job applications in one day.

**

**

**

FYI -- Out of those 12 applications, 3 got back to me; one of those was just a courtesy email saying "Sorry, but no thanks".

The Traveling Fork

By far, one of the best projects I've ever done at college was "The Traveling Fork".  It was a part of my intro to TV studio production class, which was basically my professor beefing up everyone's resumes and teaching us how to work on the floor and in the control room.


In short, it was a fun class.


Basically, we had to pitch an idea to NBC4 Washington for a web series.

The class would need to produce 18 on-location episodes (one per person) on a set topic - in our case, the topic was immigrant families who own and operate restaurants in the greater DC area.

Help

The good thing was that everyone got to choose where they wanted to go, and essentially when they wanted to shoot/edit.  We just needed to deliver a finished video to the class by the end of the semester.  I went on three shoots, including my own.  The place I chose was a little restaurant just outside of DC, across from the Ballston metro station, called Rus Uz.

I had heard of the place from a friend in another class.  It was small, but supposedly really good.  I got to sit down and talk to the owner, Bakhtiyor, and his son, Ibrokhim.  It was an interesting interview.  We were required to ask about the owners' families reasons for coming to the US and for opening their restaurant.  As the smart girl *cough* over achiever *cough* that I am, I went to Rus Uz two weeks before my shoot to check it out.  Thus, when I started asking the interview questions, I modified them to seem a little more natural and to make my two guests feel a little more at ease.


Their story is really cool.  Ibrokhim answered all the questions for his father, who doesn't speak English. Bakhtiyor originally came over to the US to be the head chef for the Embassy of Uzbekistan.  After 10 years there, he decided to open up a catering company in the US with his sons, making authentic Uzbeki and Russian food.  When people kept asking for a place to taste their food, the decided to open a restaurant. And thus, Rus Uz was born.

Now I am totally biased on this because I lived in Russia for 4ish months last year, but I love that their menu is dual written in Russian and English.  Maybe it's because it seems familiar to me.  Maybe it's that menu items make more sense when written in Cyrillic - at the very least, you don't get the flowery ingredient pseudo prep list that some menus here in DC have (this food, lightly sprinkled with that herb, and tossed in this very specific wine to achieve that exact texture).



Just look at their food though!

 

Hungry? I am.  I keep going back there especially for the plov (one of the Uzbeki national dishes), which is superb.  I'm pretty sure I told Ibrokhim at one point that I come there so often one of these days they're gonna open up and find a tent pitched in the corner of the restaurant with me in it.

Memorial Day Weekend

After graduation, I had a few things to get done.  Pretty near the top was this mythical thing called a "job".  I'd heard of it, heard people talk of it.  College students revere it while working people revile it.  It's this state of being where you sit at a desk all day for money that the government and your apartment complex have already called dibs on.

"Son of a bitch......" said every college student ever

Even higher were two things.  First, my little brother was going in for minor surgery.  I wanted to go home for a visit and help out a little before he became couch bound.  And secondly, my two best friends had graduated college.  Since they are practically my sisters, it was time to go home and celebrate with them.  One of them had already planned a graduation party for Memorial Day weekend and invited me there, though she thought I'd miss it because I was still living in DC.

I didn't tell her I bought flights home.

Shhhhh

I told my other sister-friend though.  Together we schemed for over a week how I was gonna show up at the party unannounced without giving myself away.  I even called her WHILE SHE WAS OUT WITH THE UNKNOWING ONE and held a conversation that sounded like graphic design Q&A but was actually sneaky scheming.

There was the burglar-style idea, where I would lurk around the side of the house until the coast was clear, jump the fence, and make a run for the back porch.

There was the distraction idea, where someone would lure the graduation girl away so I could sneak in and place myself like I was there all along.

There was the idiotic idea that I should just walk up to the front door and ring the bell.

What actually happened:

Ultimate Badass level achieved

My co-conspirator and I decided just to chance it.  I borrowed a car from my family and drove up to her house, parking out front on the street.  I walked the length of her driveway and around the garage and let myself in by the back gate.  I ran into an aunt (who I shushed), her father (who was also shushed), and TWO CORGIS

Helloooooooooooo Shorty!  Hello my little Lily!

Who were petted and scratched and properly shushed.

I was in the back.  I was not in danger of being given away.  So I snuck up the back steps, crossed the little porch, and entered the house like I had been there the whole time.

I was greeted with this face.

The shock. The confusion. The need to headslap and hug this person before me

She had no idea.  There was a spluttering of "What" and "How did you" and "What" again.  And I was just like 

*innocent angel face*

I gave both my sister-friends the biggest of hugs, and enjoyed celebrating and hanging out with them for the first time in months.  I was so sad to head out again.

But that mythical job.  It beckons to me.  And so I must once again take my leave of friends and family to seek it.

Graduation

Approximately

Fast forward from that last post to something a little less gross and grim.  It's now May.  The sun is shining, the trees are green, the heat is merciless for no reason.  And I'm wearing a cool looking dress with a heap of bright blue fabric draped over me.

That's right. I graduated from college.  Cue the applause.

Thank you, thank you.  It only took four years

Now the real adventure has begun.  It's been a month since I crossed that stage in my overly blue cap and gown.  There've been several emails sent, many resumes sent out, and lots of phone calls home asking how the hell I craft a good cover letter.  My future rode on my ability to get a job.

In America, that's no easy feat.  College graduates fight for good jobs in a market that's still holding onto its older members who won't - or can't - retire.  Out of all of my friends, half are pursuing graduate degrees, and only four of the rest have landed jobs.  Most people hold out hope that the search will last less than 6 months - the time when the government comes knocking to start collecting the money most Americans have to borrow to afford the outrageous costs of a college education.  Because seriously, why does a little slip of paper that says I busted my brains for four years cost over $200,000?  Makes no sense, but now I'm paying for part of that.  Good thing I had scholarships.  I don't have that kinda money to blow.  Do you?

But I got lucky.  They say it's who you know now, is what gets you ahead.  And indeed, a professor of mine gave me a name, who became a voice on the end of a phone, who called her former boss, who emailed me, who had me come in, who took me to meet his boss, who called me back in, and who eventually offered me my first job.

So now begins the adventures in news, as a real adult job-holding person.

Let's go!