New Page!

Hello, all.

I've added a Daily Sonnets page to the ol' blog (hit that link at the top to see it in all it's glory). As I've said before, this has been a project for some time. But I didn't want to burden my (loyal, limited, obligated) audience with poems. Poems are like children, I think, in that other people don't really want yours, but love their own with an unending fire.

I went and learned how to add a new page, so as to keep it nice and visually separate from my main posts. Since it will be daily, with a handy excuse or an obligatory sonnet, I didn't want to drown the other content.

So, enjoy if you wish. Ignore if you want. I just love to pretend that there's an audience out there, and nothing is more enjoyable than performance.

Thanks for reading.

It's Grillin' Time!

I promised food stuffs so here we go! The past week and a half has been just plain AWESOME here in Ohio. Because of this Michael and I bought a grill. There's nothing that beats grillin' and brews in the in warm weather. I threw together these puppies and they were so good the first night that I went back out the next day and bought more beef to make them again. Yes, they were just as deliciousthe second time around. I think I could eat them everyday, but Michael cut me off. Seriously. Sriracha, blue cheese and bacon! What more could you want?! Enjoy. (I'll try to remember photos next time)

Sriracha Blue Cheese Bacon Burgers (serves 4)

What you need:          

1 lb. really good, fatty ground beef (I used organic grass fed. Can’t afford  it all the time, but honestly, it really does make a BIG difference and since the beef is the focal point of the show here go for the good stuff

2 Tbls. Sriracha, separated

¼ cup crumbled blue cheese (nothing too creamy)
2 cloves garlic, minced

½ tsp. kosher salt

4 strips of bacon, cooked and split in half

½ an onion, cut into thick rings that won’t fall through the grill

¼ cup mayo

4 burger buns

Burger fixins- tomato and spinach (that’s what I used)

What you do:             

Pre-heat your gill

Crumble together the beef, 1 Tbls. Sriracha, blue cheese, garlic and salt. Just work it gently until it’s combined. You don’t want to knead the crap out of it because you’ll make your burgers tough, so just crumble and gently work everything in. Form into 4 patties and put a little indentation in the center of each with your pointer finger (helps it cook better) Set aside.

Mix together mayo and remaining Tbls. of Sriracha. Set in fridge. (add a little more if you like it spicier. I did)

Slice onion into big rings. Try to keep them all together because it’ll be easier to grill them as one unit.

Prep your fixins. I had tomato slices and spinach.

                                   

Heat pan and cook the bacon. Set aside.

Toss the onions on a not quite as hot section of the grill. Cook for 3 minutes then add the burgers. Cook burgers for about 4 minutes per side. Maybe a little shorter or a little longer depending on how rare or done you like them.

Pull the onions and burgers off the grill. Grab the Sriracha mayo from the fridge and spread it on the buns. Layer your delicious burger, bacon, onions and fixin. Grab a nice brew (Dogfish Head Aprihop?) Dig in!

A Poem for your Patience

Okay, our internets have been broken, and Time Warner has taken 1.5 weeks to fix them. So far. I'm not holding out any hope that they're actually fixed. Thus far, two different brigades of cable techs (technical term) have replaced a total of 3 junctions, replacing a splitter with a barrel (one-to-one) fitting, a splitter with a "better" splitter, and a barrel with a new barrel.

We'll see.

But I know I've promised original content, so I'll send you this one from work (it's really quite slow today). Since late January, I've decided to write a sonnet every day (with varying degrees of luck and/or persistence). The goal is twofold:

1) Follow through on something long term; and 

2) Learn to think in the sonnet form (iambic pentameter).

Like the late, great Billy S, I don't title my sonnets. Sometimes, please allow me a little bit of writerly pretension. I paid for it, after all.

Here you go:

22 March 2012, Thursday

The pop and fizz of new ideas was

An understanding past the brink of one

Belief in childish wants of past-ing fuzz

And broken bleached duress offending scum.

To take and use the broken views of some

And stake a view on someone’s use of form

Will breach and blow the violence sowed by gun

Or sleeping slow and leaving low deforms.

The time is passing hot and heavy still

As sleeping eyelids flitting up reveal

The action of the dreaming mind’s berill

And from yourself your luscious lines you steal.

    The blood of all the things that I’ve done wrong

    Will fill the riverbanks of coming dawn.

This nonsense poem is basically me leading up to plagiarizing myself from an earlier poem that was a type of sonnet that I did during my MFA studies.

Please comment in iambic pentameter or haiku.

You've met Michael now meet me

I’m 26. I went to a private university for a couple of years (waste of MUCH money) studying Latin. I took some years off. Took a couple of classes at various places here and there through the course of our travels (Pittsburgh, A; Lubbock, TX; Boston, MA; Seattle, WA, and now back to my old stomping grounds). It’s been…interesting, challenging, depressing, AMAZING, satisfying, but above all liberating. I have learned that I have it in me to just pick up and go anywhere I choose if I feel like it and that’s more than most people will realize in a lifetime. For that I am grateful.

I have also realized through all this moving that although I love to have a nice home, and I do LOVE to have a nice, inviting home (not to be confused with an expensive home. Turns out I have pretty cheap or “vintage” or “eclectic” taste with most home décor. Also, I have a love affair with Ikea. I get seduced by the Swedish meatballs and then $150 later I leave with a cart full of stuff and a stomach ache and it's terrible and I love it and I hate it and I love to hate it and then I feel a bit guilty, but mostly just irritated at all of the damn people that are in there on a weekend) in the end it’s all just stuff. Maybe I really like my stuff, but it’s just stuff and it runs its course. I don’t like to hold on to stupid shit that doesn’t really matter. Get rid of it. There’s always more super sweet other stuff out there so who cares?

I have learned that what really matters it what Michael and I have together. None of the other junk matters. He’s got my back and I’ve got his. That’s it. The other thing that I have realized it that sharing a home cooked meal with others is the greatest gift I can ask for. There’s something that’s…well, comforting and satisfying at the most basic level. I love being able to bring people together in that way.

You know, I may not have much money (would be helpful and game changing to have more. working on it.) or fancy stemware (overrated for the most part) or an expensive car (16 year old Subaru Legacy! BOOM! Freaking AWESOME by the by. I’ll say it again in case you didn’t hear, BOOM! Awesome.), but I can remember the way my Grandma’s house smelled when she was making pierogies from scratch (like a delicious caramelized onion pan of unconditional love), and really that’s worth more. The greatest gift you can give another is a home cooked meal. I try to top myself with each one.

Also, blah, blah, blah, I have worked in cafes/food service for the past 10 years of my life. I've done everything from manage coffee shop to prep cook to mop the floors  to wait tables in the diviest of dive bars (Oh! the Squirrel Cage!), but mostly I have been a barista. Moving back to Ohio though has brought on my favorite job thus far. I am a cheese monger in a gourmet market. It's freaking great! They actually pay me to learn, eat and talk about over 500 different types of both imported and domestic cheeses. It's an education. I absolutely love it. Doesn't hurt that I am sandwiched right between the amazing wine section and the extensive beer section.

Honestly, for me right now in life, there's not really much more I could ask for.

Ten Years. Minimum.

Our debt happened in the good, old fashioned, American way: We earned it. Here are some of the myths we took part in:

• College is worth the money
• Private schools are better than public school
• YOU HAVE TO HAVE [whatever]
• You absolutely MUST have the biggest goddamned wedding that you can pay for. Not afford, mind you, but pay for
• Being poor is the best way to be creative
• Hanging out in bars is fun
• Workaday life is slavery, not working is freedom

I think, in time, I'll tackle each one of these with a blog post. I'll call the series Money Myths, or something else just as hokey. Well, maybe I just won't call it anything, and just label it Personal Finance.

The point is, we bought in, and we paid up, but with other people's money. Here's some things we can't do, because the long money is too tight:

• Start a family. I know, I know, plenty of people have had families with much less money and much more debt, but our goal is to get solid before we have kids
• Buy a house. Debt to income ration = too damned high! [insert meme here]
• Work as a teacher. This one is mine, not Kim's. I'm not taking a 50% pay cut at a time when the benefits that make teaching even remotely attractive are being cut across the country
• Buy health insurance for Kim. My work covers mine, hers doesn't.

That's not going to stop us, though, from living in our own way. We've worked it out so that, while we're digging out of the 10-year hole, we've got a pretty good life. No more bullet-points, but we build furniture and other projects, I write, we work out and go for walks. It's all quite fun fun. But over it hangs this hideous dead cloud, this idea that old age will be 10 years closer by the time I'm able to even start saving a significant amount towards retirement.


What do we do? We follow the Get Rich Slowly ideal: Try to get more money, while trying to spend less of it. Still, without some kind of major change, we're looking at 10 more years. Minimum.

We're here. Let's get started.

I'm 33. Kim's only 26, which is good for her. Yeah, I've made some mistakes in my financial life, got a Master's Degree that don't add up to a hill o' beans, rolled around in too much debt. So I'm behind the eight ball, under the gun.


Not only that, but we just got married (more posts on that to follow, to be sure), and just moved 2,500 miles across the country. So it's there I'd like to start.

Seattle is a beautiful city, with a vibrant EVERYTHING. Seriously. And the climate is perfect for a guy like me. Not too much sun (almost none in the winter), but no snow to speak of, either. Apart from the occasional freak storm in the dead of winter. The people are, for the most part, great. I felt safe at virtually all times, which is not normal for me. And I started learning Kung Fu there. If you're in Seattle, check out Seattle Wing Chun, on 12th near Pike. It's the best thing that I experienced in Seattle, and I had a lot of good times over the year that I was there.

So why leave?

We looked around and decided that we just didn't need... so much of everything. It's all there, at our fingertips, and we didn't really partake. I mean, I loved the tacos at the Fremont Market and met a bunch of people at Reddit game night (and fell in love with a little game called Dominion). But in the end, we wanted a simpler life.

Seattle was good to us financially, too. Sure, we took out a 1900 dollar student loan (paid off 1 year later with our entire tax return) to put Kim through a couple of classes, but by the time we'd left we had a pretty good emergency fund, paid off the credit cards, and were rolling about 1200 bucks a month into our debt snowball. We both thought we were in a pretty good place to move back to northeast Ohio, where it would be cheaper and we'd have family within driving distance.

Of course, we were wrong. The issue wasn't the move, which cost about 1500 bucks, but the living on no income that got to us. We were no longer in a city, so Kim needed a car. We paid cash, because we'd learn to hate being in debt, but that cut down our savings even more.

We exhausted our credit cards, maxed out our line of credit, which we had just started to put a dent into, and basically spent every penny making life work.

Four months later, and we're just about where we feel comfortable. The move nearly broke us, but we're doing better. Staying afloat, paddling toward shore, but still in very, very deep water.

The future of KillOurDebt.com

In the coming weeks I'll be adding widgets and sidebars, explaining the breakdown of our debt situation. We're not soliciting donations just to help out, more like payments for cool content. Kim is an aspiring food writer and I dabble in short stories and poetry. We both enjoy hands-on projects that we get from DIY shows, blogs, and our own sense of style. We've learned a thing or two about money, our priorities, and where we'd like to be.

Basically, we'll be sharing our creative lives.

Aside from posts that examine the state of our debt, which will no doubt include some summary of the donations received, this is the only post where I'll mention donations, since that's the goal of the blog, but not the content.

If you enjoy something, we're already happy. If you donate, happier still. If you leave a comment, or link us, or tell a friend, happiest of all.

Thanks for reading.
- Michael.