The side hustle is a common topic of conversation at my office. Having one is a point of pride. Spin instructor, bartender, weekend retail, selling designer stuff on Ebay…anything to make some money.

I believe that everyone needs a hobby. My office believes that everyone needs a side hustle. This week I found a way to make those one and the same.

I walked past this solid oak four-drawer file cabinet on the curb. Beautiful! I already have one just like it, and Read said that our house really has enough furniture and can I please not put more in it? So I brought it home and posted on Craigslist.

It came with old file folders and everything.

And just like that, a nice woman in a minivan came by yesterday and gave us $250 for the cabinet.

BAM….SIDE HUSTLE!!

The woman said she especially liked this Craigslist picture with Edith:

Remember this dress? The one that was a steal because it had half its buttons? It’s finally warm enough that I felt a bright yellow sundress was appropriate work wear.

I sewed on the buttons that I found in the L.A. Fashion District and buckled my favorite brown wedges. Then realized that my terra cotta colored Snowbird cardigan was a perfect pairing.

Check out the shirt she mailed me for my birthday.

Rachel did a full tutorial for foxflat readers in 2009, so if you’d like to try your hand at bleaching (shirts, pants, table runners) click here. Me, I’ll just keep trying to talk her into knitting-for-bleaching trades. And birthday presents!

When I was on the floor taking a picture of the shirt design I snapped one of this old pup…he’s about twelve now.

Scrolling through pictures with a friend the other day I happened upon one from Sam’s youth…camping in Kentucky with guy friends. Look how brown his face was! He looked less beagle-y without any white.

I hate packing a lunch in the morning – it seems there’s never time for it no matter how early I get up. As my mom would say, “you get that honest.” Granted my mom was trying to get ready for work with two kids around, but after a certain age that also meant we could help. I remember many mornings with her tethered to the curling iron and shouting, “Katie can you make me a sandwich for lunch?” It was always the same: raisin bagel, ham, and farmers cheese, wrapped in a paper towel. (Mom, if you’re reading, did you like eating the same thing every day?)

Repetition…I must get that honest too. I don’t eat the same thing every day, but I do eat the same thing for a week. The lunch-making solution I’ve come to is cooking up a colossal amount of something over the weekend and separating it into meal-sized pyrex dishes. Each morning I grab a container as I run out the door.

This Curried Chicken Rice Salad is one of my favorite lunches. It has a little bit of everything…sweet, spice, cilantro, carbs, veggies, and protein. It keeps well (the flavors actually get better as they sit) and is interesting enough to eat for a week. I like it with pita bread or crackers. The recipe below makes a lot, so if you’re not going to a potluck, cooking for a crowd, or wanting to eat it for a week, cut it in half.

Curried Chicken Rice Salad - adapted from Kitchen Sense by Mitchell Davis
This is a tangy curried dish best served cold.  I use supermarket rotisserie chicken because it’s quick, affordable, and (let’s be honest) delicious, but cooked chicken breast would work just as well. Once you’ve made the recipe as is, try experimenting with other veggies and proteins. It’s a great way to clean out the fridge and/or use up leftover cooked rice.

2/3 cup cider vinegar
2/3 cup golden raisins
3 tablespoons curry powder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 medium white onion, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh minced ginger
1 cooked supermarket rotisserie chicken, with the chicken removed and cubed
3-4 cups cooked rice, cooled to room temperature
4 large carrots, grated
4 scallions, chopped
1 to 2 cups of cooked corn (frozen or fresh, not canned)
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Combine vinegar and raisins in a small bowl and microwave for 2 minutes, then let sit. Mix curry powder and 3 tablespoons water to make a runny paste, set aside. In a cast-iron or frying pan, heat oil over med/high heat, add onion and chicken, and cook until the onions start to soften. Add the garlic and ginger, then cook a few minutes longer, stirring often. Stir in the curry paste and cook until the water has evaporated and you can smell the spices. Turn off the heat, then pour in the raisin/vinegar mixture and use a wooden spoon to stir it in, scraping the spices off the bottom of the pan. Let this mixture cool to room temperature.

While the chicken mixture cools, start chopping and grating! Mix the rice, carrots, scallions, corn, and cilantro in a large bowl. Once the mixture is cool, pour it into the large bowl and stir. Season with salt and pepper.

Six pillows of soft carded fiber (!!!). I jumped up and down and yelled some happy expletives. The birthday card inside said, “Bid on this at an auction for you – came from “Sunshine”. Miss you much.”

I think “Sunshine” was a sheep, but I’m still learning my fiber. Maybe an alpaca.

Teddy was very intrigued. He walked over and did that knead-bread thing with his paws, all blissed out and purring.

Now I have more than a summer’s worth of spinning lined up. I’m also working on finalizing a couple of new patterns (here’s a little pattern sneak peek):

And then I HAVE TO click on it.

One of those 7 photos this week was this, with the caption: Katie ~ 4 year old female Mountain Feist (small in size). I am a little shy, but I do enjoy the outdoors very much. There are so many wonderful smells out here!

What a lovely feist friend for Samson! With a name he already recognizes hahaha. Read says I’m just torturing myself because we can’t have two dogs and two cats in this little apartment.

So then I torture myself some more by looking up real estate in the Boston area. After about ten minutes I’ve snapped back into reality and can proceed with studying Spanish for the final exam this week.

I sewed my friend Christine a roll-up case for her double-pointed needles, and in return she’s going to let me pick out a skein from her yarn-dyeing shop, Skeinny Dipping.

When we last got together to watch trashy television she let me take a few skeins home to test the colors against my handspun. I think my favorite was this milky silver:

I’ll have to trade out this test skein for a thicker weight, and then the two can become a striped shawl, like Veera’s Different Lines or Stephen West’s Chevry.

It was a good visit. We drank champagne, watched HGTV, knit, took sunset walks, read trashy magazines…all the best stuff. We went to backbar in Union Square, which I recommend for anyone who appreciates a well-made cocktail. Very swanky in an Oregon-steampunk-hipster kind of way.

Tami also introduced us to her sister and her partner who live in this great old house in Somerville. The upstairs unit is currently available – three bedrooms, two baths, fenced backyard, awesome housemates. We trouped up the stairs for a late-night tour after backbar and I started to get all googly over the place. With so many people around me leaving to do big things (take a new job, buy a house, relocate, etc.), I am sure that part of my wish to move to Somerville was fueled by a I-want-to-have-an-adventure-too feeling. Besides, who wouldn’t get googly over this kitchen?

It’s cute, right? I know! But there’s a catch. We’d need to bring in a roommate to make rent. We met as roommates and we had a wonderful roommate in Oregon, so it’s not like that’s an instant deal-breaker. But after a lot of discussion this week we decided that with all the trouble moving would require, it wasn’t worth having to share our immediate space again. Also, there’s a large gang of feral cats on the block and it seemed likely Teddy would be getting into scuffles. Sigh…not an easy decision though. Even looking over my shoulder at these pictures Read just said, “Is that the house? Oh…it’s so pretty. It hurts to say no.”

So…faced with such a pretty kitchen, do you think you could go back to having roommates if you’d been living without them for a while?

In working through the pros and cons of moving, I played out what it would take to relocate my balcony garden. Re-using last year’s dirt by adding kitchen compost seems to be working- the radishes and peas are doing well. There’s even what appears to be a rogue potato coming up out of the compost.

I’d gotten as far as deliberating whether it’d be better to lower the pallet with an elaborate rope and pulley system…or give it the heave-ho and deal with the aftermath on the ground. Now we can delay that dilemma but at some point I’m going to have to relocate a lot of dirt from the second story balcony. I’ve built a ship-in-a-bottle up there and getting it out is going to require a ton of effort.

Ah well. Back to the Spanish homework that I ignored last week to make room for maximum Tami-time!