Quinoa and chickpea salad

I got so cold eating with J. and B. down in the Quizno’s kvetching (really) about the intolerable revision problems with the new APA style guide. Intolerable! You send seven pages of errata and all your sample papers are wrong and you won’t just replace our copies? Also, a flow chart for DOIs? Really? Are you serious with this? It is cold outside, but I didn’t really understand why it was so cold inside until we were leaving and I put my hand down by the vent and discovered that it was blasting more cold air into the room.

 

Quinoa, chickpeas, and some cheese

Heated up a bowl of quinoa and chickpeas with some slices of cheese, watched Ed Hartwell say to Lisa for the first time that he might give up on his football dream. His knee just isn’t getting better. That’s so intense, when you realize something you always wanted just isn’t going to happen. Poor Ed.

 

Red lentil and chickpea soup

I ate the last of the soup in my cloffice with my beloved and well-secured bamboo spoon and read the opening of my next Dennis Lehane book (downloaded via Whispernet to my Kindle, which is awesome). Love this guy. So easy to read, just flip flip flip, no effort at all, great plot, cliffhangers throughout, surprises, etc., mindless genre fiction that’s well written enough that I’m not embarrassed by the sentences. (I’m looking at you, Dean Koontz.) I’m all out of balance, unreasonably anxious, sleepless, so was grateful for the teaser of a prologue–What happened to Angie that he can’t think about her? Who’s Grace? Why the beard? Will he really never detect again?

 

Lettuce, chickpea, and quinoa salad

I lost my bamboo fork. Despair. It must have bounced out when I went wrangling for my Metrocard. Maybe it’s still at home on the counter. Maybe. I don’t know. But I went and asked A. if rumors were true, that she keeps a stash of plastic forks somewhere in her cube. She looked at me. Opened the door of the cabinet above her desk. Plunged her fist into the darkness. Rustled. Wrangled. And pulled out a plastic spoon and fork set. The spoon is white with a white plastic ghost for the handle while the fork is black with, M. and I decided as we ate kvetching and catching up at a table in the courtyard, some kind of haunted witch-hat-wearing jack o’ lantern handle that would fit better in a much smaller hand. Because I know you take care of your things, said A. as she handed them to me conspiratorially. I didn’t have the heart to inform her otherwise.

 

Quinoa, chickpeas, and arugula salad

I took a break from copyediting this totally depressing article about the militarization of anthropology in the wake of the war on terror to give some undivided attention to the second quarter of the Jets game over a plate of Friday’s leftovers. Wish Sanchez’s guns had been a’blazin’ like they were in the first quarter. In other words, can’t stop thinking about war.

 

Quinoa, chickpeas, and arugula salad

You know what’s great? Little bit of lemon, squeezed over everything. Just so refreshing. I loaded up a plate, ate in front of an episode of Top Chef, so glad I wasn’t eating that deconstructed chowder flan.

 

Spicy chickpeas over rice, redux

I can’t recall the last time I ate lunch in my cloffice without loading and reloading my email at least just a little bit. It must have been back in 1998, when Out had like one computer and an AOL account and we did all our factchecking with phone books. I used to, like, call the Ugandan embassy if I had a question about the capital city. It was madness. But with the network down, that’s what I did, staring at the revision I finished during my desk shift, wondering how I would ever get a copy of it from the reference desk machine over to my cloffice computer so I could add a bibliography before hitting print. I held the paper next to the monitor. No magic. And then I remembered back when I first got here and everybody was using these new-fangled thumb driveys so I got one to be with the in crowd and was puzzled: why don’t you guys just upload it all to Google Docs? Well, I guess that’s why. S. and J. made fun of me at the desk, face full of chickpeas, garbling out where do I put this again?

 

Spicy chickpeas over rice

So the recipe for these chickpeas always suggests that I slice some jalepeno peppers over the top, or dollop on some yogurt. Like I think I’ll get credit in heaven for avoiding all things frou-frou, I usually just ignore that recommendation. We’re tough over here! Pulled up by our bootstraps! Garnishes are for pansies! (I do not feel this way about fixins, and only know the difference between those two general categories when I see it.)  But there I was gloomily standing in front of the sad, sad produce section at my sad, sad grocery store, wondering what it might be like to live somewhere where all your vegetables don’t fly in from foreign continents, and thought I might as well buy that $1 shrink-wrapped styrofoam platter of six hot peppers and try it out, what could it hurt. I sat in my cloffice doing some editing and getting some papers in order, reaping the crisp, hot rewards.

 

Chickpeas with spinach and tomato over rice

Due to unforeseen circumstances (aka, people not checking the schedule and/or finding subs when necessary, ahem), I ended up staring down three hours at the reference desk followed by a staff meeting with nary a moment for lunch. But I was saved by K., who came down from the circ department to relieve me just long enough to scarf down my chickpeas in my cloffice before heading upstairs. As I ate I heard lots of gossip (C. gave notice!) and made exciting future plans (dinner with P.!) and sorted a pile into a slightly more reasonable stack. It’s surprising how much you can fit into twenty minutes when that’s all you’ve got.

 

Quinoa and chickpea salad in lime dressing

A handful of things I can’t get enough of: popcorn since L. taught me how to pop it in a pot on the stove, scrolling through screens of L&O on my DVR and reveling in the glorious bounty, photos of my cat on my cellphone, writing with a just-sharpened pencil. And before today I would have said the marvelous tartness of fresh-squeezed limes. But that was too much lime. The recipe called for three tablespoons, I halved it in my brain, and then didn’t bother measuring, squeezing and mindlessly squeezing as I talked on the phone with A. about her terrific news. So lunch in my cloffice reading Equiano’s narrative and chattering with a colleague about minutes from the morning’s software demo struck an unappealing note of  Sour Patch Kid.