Real Life, Virtual World

I am a big fan of irony, have been for ages. I couldn’t tell you how or when it started, but small things like the fact that I have to use a vacuum to get my broom clean make me grin even while they annoy me. I can even appreciate the fact that tomorrow I’m going to have to pay for parking in order to go to the parking office to buy a parking pass. It’s frustrating but deliciously funny at the same time.

The one exception I have found to this concept of delicious irony is canned soup. I’m not even talking the not-good for you condensed stuff. This is premium, don’t add water, healthy select style soup. Gourmet stuff even. You buy it thinking it’s a smart choice. Sure it’s a little high in sodium, you know this going in. But it’s quick, and easy, and costs less than cruddy drive-thru fast food. There’s even nutrition in there, it says so right on the label.

So you buy it and you take it to work (or in my case, eat it on your work at home lunch break). You pour the can into a soup mug and realize that you’re actually going to wind up eating two servings of soup, not one. So it’s even higher in sodium… Well, at least it still has nutrition and won’t break the bank, right? You heat it up, relish in the savory aroma, and take your first bite.

It’s at this point you’re hit square in the face with the only known example of non-delicious irony in the world:  something that has 60% of your sodium for the day is bland and could use a little salt.

Not cool, canned soup makers. Not cool at all.

What most of us forget is that sodium doesn’t always come from sodium chloride aka the crystal stuff that tastes salty. Sodium is a naturally occuring mineral that is in most of the food you consume. More to the point, though, is the fact that sodium is used in a large number of preservatives and flavor enhancers. Sodium nitrate, monosodium glutamate, the list goes on. Each one of these ingredients adds to the sodium content of your can of soup without adding much to that savory, salty taste.

It’s maddening, really, enough to make you pull your hair out. But luckily, there is a solution: make your own soup.

Before you protest, let me assure you: if you can boil water, you can make your own soup. Find a decent recipe and run it through a site like NutritionData.com, which will give you a nutritional analysis based on the serving size you specify. No more looking at the serving size and wondering which child they were thinking of when they designated a 1/4 cup serving. No more paperless mathematics to determine what 38% times 2.5 servings per can works out to be.

Below is the NutritionData.com nutritional analysis for a basic chicken noodle soup recipe using homemade chicken stock. Before you start protesting about the fat content, know that the values are for the raw ingredients as they are given. When you make chicken stock you skim the fat off the top, so the overall calories and fat are lower. Notice the sodium value, a very manageable 23% per serving. And that means a real, soup mug sized serving, not some tiny child’s fist size serving.

When you make homemade soup, you can portion it out into freezer safe zip top bags and lie them flat to freeze. Put one in the fridge to thaw at night, take it to work and heat up the next day. You can even wash and re-use the bags if you want to be super frugal (and environmental) about it.

There’s a meme flying around FriendFeed right now to post twenty five things about yourself. In the interest of participation, community, and of course blog promotion, I think I’ve finally come up with twenty five post-worthy items. Good or bad, they’re all things that have made me who I am. And yes, I’m aware my items are told in story fashion; it flowed more easily when I wrote it that way.

1. I was born in Tennessee and, with the exception of two months as an infant, I have lived in the southeastern US my entire life. Three decades later, people here still ask where my accent is.
2. I got into my first car accident at the age of two. My father left me in the car while he stopped to use the pay phone. I threw the automatic transmission into either neutral or reverse and proceeded to take out a gas pump, cigarette sign, and someone’s truck.
3. We moved at least eleven times by the time I turned six. I think it might have been more, but I’m not certain. The bulk of my childhood was spent in northern Pickens County in the western tip of South Carolina. I was about one mile from Table Rock Mountain, picture above (Photo Credit: turbojoe).
4. I grew up  first exceptionally poor, and then at the very bottom rung of lower middle class by American standards. I can remember being about four and having to buy toilet paper one roll at a time because that’s all we had the money for when we ran out. I very clearly remember my father’s excitement the first time he grossed $30k in a year, and the guilt I felt when I surpassed him ten years later.
5. For several years my sister and I spent the summer at my maternal grandparents’ home in Tennessee. We would traipse through their fields and woods carrying a sharpened javelin as protection against snakes. One of those summers, my sister, cousin, and I built a two room, 100 square foot shack. We put in a sleeper sofa and a tin roof, so we could camp out there. We called it The Mansion.
6. My grandfather was a bee keeper, so running around several active bee hives and screaming like a banshee while playing football or tag never seemed odd to me. I was in my twenties the first time I had my first exceptionally disappointing taste of store bought honey. Grandpa lost his hives a few years ago to bee blight.
7. I was supposed to skip the second grade, but the principal refused to sign off on it because my of my poor penmanship. I hate to tell him, but my handwriting has only gone downhill since then.
8. I read at a college level at the age of eleven.
9. In sixth grade students in the county’s “gifted and talented” program participated in the regional National History Day competition. No one wanted to be on a team with me, so I wrote a play, borrowed a camera, and created a video about the impact of humanity on the environment. I wound up traveling to Washington DC to represent the state in the national competition. I have no idea how I finished, because the judges put someone else’s project tag on my scoresheets. I was absolutely heartbroken. I still have the video.
10. The next year I was asked to speak at the county courthouse on Earth Day. They were starting a recycling program, but the only open center was the next town over and was only open to city residents. After the speech, I convinced my mother to start illegally recycling.
11. My father is a recovering alcoholic, sober for almost twenty years now. It was one of the hardest and most important things my family has ever done together. When I was five he laid on his bed and swore to never drink again. Confused, I asked him why, because he’d certainly get thirsty. Very true words, it turns out. The videos we have of the road trip to DC are, in retrospect, terrifying because as an adult I realize just how much my father was drinking (and driving).  A few months after that he brought a hitchhiker home to sleep on our couch, scaring my sister and I enough to fall asleep in one bed with kitchen knives under our pillows. My mother packed us up in the middle of the night to go to a hotel, and my father checked into detox that week.
12. My parents have been married and divorced twice. To each other.
13. During elementary school and junior high I was in the chorus (alto), the orchestra (violin), and took several hours of dance each week (ballet, tap, jazz, and modern). I was moderately good at all of them, though not exceptional. I danced en pointe for a few years and have the jacked up feet to prove it. I also had the joy and privilege to teach ballet to three year olds.
14. I have intentionally punched three people in my life. One was a boy in my class who said girls only kicked and pinched during fights. One was a 13 year old boy who would harrass the girls on the playground. The last was my first boyfriend when he tried to sexually assault me. That one also got a thumb between the ribs and a few elbows to boot.
15. I quit dance in ninth grade to play soccer. I played on the boys varsity team since there was no girls’ team at my school. At 15 I was 5 ft 4 in and 110 pounds: the 6 ft 2 in 200 pound guys on the team were terrifying.  I prided myself on being able to tackle them.
16. At 16 I moved from home to attend the Governor’s School for Science and Math almost 200 miles away. I suddenly found myself a much smaller fish in a smaller but much deeper pond. I had to do homework and study for the first time in my life. Out of the 63 prople in my graduating class, 23 were National Merit Scholars and were awarded almost $7 mil in scholarships. As a service to its students, the Governor’s School does not announce a valadictorian. Every class that graduates is thankful for this fact (including my sister’s class, she graduated from the same school two years after me).
17. I chose to attend Emory University because I’d received a full tuition scholarship and it was closer to my boyfriend at Auburn. In hindsight, it was the wrong decision. My major was psychology (with a self imposed focus on adult abnormal behavior) and my minor was Violence Studies. I fancied myself a young Clarice and entertained the idea of a joint PhD and JD program. While in college I volunteered at the crisis line and helped run a grief and loss support group for people who’d lost parents to death or divorce.
18. I worked either part or full time the entire time I was in school. My jobs included working with autistic children, working in the media services office, and working in the computer lab. In the summer of 1999 I started working for an internet startup company in addition to the two jobs I had with IT department. I went from data entry to customer service to marketing and PR. At the beginning of 2000 we were in the middle of a buy-out and had to begin preparations for a move to a new office in Virginia. I withdrew from school the second semester of my senior year to be able to make the move. The buy-out fell through and never resurfaced. We were a competitor to Amazon, so I don’t have to tell you how that worked out.I was two classes short of meeting graduation requirements, but lost my scholarship by withdrawing. I couldn’t afford the $10k it would take to finish my last semester.
19. I moved back to South Carolina in January of 2001 at my sister’s request: my family needed help in the cafe they had started. 2001-2002 was a very hard time in my life: the cafe didn’t pay and jobs were scarce. I was told I was under or over qualified for every job I applied for. Once I finally got a contract  job, I would work from 8a to 5p and then work in the cafe from 5:30 to 11 or so. I moved in and out of my parents’ house twice during those two years.
20. In August 2002 I started working as a customer service agent at the MCI call center in Greenville. I met a guy named Dave who had just left his wife for cheating on him, and we hit it off pretty well for two people who didn’t want to get into a relationship. I told him something I’d never told anyone else, that everyone I’d slept with had asked me to marry them. He laughed and said he had no intention of getting married again. A month after we started working together, Dave was fired for not doing his job properly (he wasn’t, and freely admits it).
21. I remained at MCI and became a trainer intern in January 2005. I enjoyed my job, but more importantly I was good at it. I became the center’s point of contact for system enhancements, third party verification issues, and was asked to help re-write the entire company’s training program before I was officially promoted to trainer. As it turned out, I was the only remaining trainer in the entire company that had any experience teaching the coursework for installing new local service, so I was asked to help setup the training in a call center in Argentina.
22. Dave and I were married in a park here in Greenville on April 28th, 2005. I tried to warn him… His sister, a notary, performed the service. No one else knew we were getting married. The next day, I flew (alone) to work in Argentina for a month.
23. I was happy at MCI and was on track to join the corporate CS program management group. Verizon bought MCI in January of 2006. Dave and I went to Myrtle Beach in April 2006 for our first anniversary. When we got back, I got the voicemail message that our center was being closed. The call center I had trained in Argentina was remaining open. I had in a sense worked myself out of a job.
24. We bought our house one week before the call center was slotted to close because we could still qualify with my income. It may sound irresponsible, but the house payment plus taxes and insurance were less than what we were paying in rent.
25. I started work at my current company the week my MCI severance stopped. I was supposed to be the technical support administrator, making sure the developer’s were keeping up with trouble tickets and bug fixes. Due to a mixture of need and aptitude, that morphed into being a developer and server admin. Two company sales and one intellectual property suit later (we won) and I find myself at a small but comfortable company, just Boss and myself.

And there you have it: my not-so-brief biography broken out into twenty five not-so-short items.