Weekend Bullets

I've been cooking like a crazy woman all weekend, which is always a fulfilling and exhausting experience. As I've been cooking, I've been doing lots of thinking about many different topics. Thus my weekend bullets:

• On Friday, I went for drinks with my dean and another colleague who was also up for tenure. It was a "congratulations" drink. So even though things are not official, the process is pretty much over for both me and my colleague. And we're in. Tenured. Movin' up to associate. Which leads me to think about how things will be different for me now. Mostly I just feel a big sense of relief that I don't have to put together a packet of materials every year.
  
• Cooking this weekend:
  
• Rye bread in the bread machine. For the second time, the bread I cooked in the bread machine rose and then fell, hard. Result -- a small, hard, solid loaf of bread. No worries. Slogger has decided he likes that hard, solid bread dipped in olive oil.
  
• Rye bread in the oven. Just to see if the yeast was good.
• Roasted chicken, which we ate for dinner last night.
• No-salt chicken broth, made with the bones of the roasted chicken. The recipe called for me to roast the bones for an hour before using them to make broth. Never done that, but it made loads of chicken broth, which I'll be using to make chicken and dumplings tomorrow -- plenty left over for later use.
• Minestrone. Yummy, veggie goodness.
• I had planned to use some leftover steamed sweet potatoes to make sweet potato biscuits, but I figured that between the various loaves of rye bread I've made, we're good on breads.
• I'm heading out of town on Tuesday for an important accreditation workshop, and I'm trying to get as much cooked up for when I'll be gone, so Slogger can take it easy and just reheat.
  
• We've upped Slogger's heart muscle meds recently, which leaves him with a bit lower blood pressure, feeling kind of "punky." But he just took his evening pressure (we take it twice a day, just keeping track of how he's reacting to his meds) and it was 105/69. Decent.
• Tomorrow I have a meeting that I'm going to skip. Is this because I have tenure? Because I want to spend as much time with Slogger as I can? Both, really.
• I talked to my friend, Miss Bliss, who has quit her job as a university type and is now very happily going to massage school. She's organizing a yoga/writing retreat in the mountains next fall, which I'm going to attend. I told her I know jack about yoga, but I'm looking forward to spending time with her and writing, and learning yoga is a bonus.
• I realized at the last moment that I hadn't prepared this coming week's minilecture for my online course. This necessitated a quick trip to the office and a hurried recording (yea, Camtasia!) of the minilecture. Glad I remembered that.
• Got rid of some super-spicy stuff on Freecycle. Turns out the guy who's been taking all of my spices, etc. was my buddy the post office clerk. Funny.
• I've watched more mens and womens NCAA basketball in the last week than I had in the previous 40-odd years of my life. Addicting.

That is all.