Where oh where

So, have I totally abandoned this blog? No. At least not in my heart ... I still think all the time about things I want to write about, and will write about them someday – I hope in the not too distant future.

For right now I'm way over-extended at work, both in my day job and with a couple of freelance projects that arrived at the same time and which, the economy being what it is these days, I felt compelled to say "yes" to even though what I want more than anything else at this time of year is to curl up in a warm little ball of blankets and pillows and nap my way to spring.

However. I can sleep when I'm dead, I suppose. I've heard people say that, and always thought it was a pretty stupid thing to say ... Not least of all because in my opinion lack of sleep is one of the top four or five conditions that cause people to die before their time – and also because I find the process of falling asleep and waking up one of the most pleasurable activities I know. Especially lately, since I'm such a terrible sleeper to begin with and all this crazed and frantic activity (relatively speaking – it might not appear so to others more accustomed to a speedier pace of life) makes it even harder for me to fall into dreamland, and the resulting exhaustion makes it even more tempting than ever to stay there in the morning despite all the work I've committed to ....

In any case. I just got back from a meeting about one more little project that looks like it could actually end up being kind of fun, and I know my brain is just going to be spinning and twirling all night long with ideas about where I want to go with it. Plus, I have a couple of books I've been reading, plus all the trees are busting out in blossoms, plus it's almost time (in less than 48 hours!) to begin my annual spring practice period (formerly observed as a weird non-Catholic form of Lent, sort of) and I still haven't totally decided what I'm going to do.

Restricting my carbohydrate intake to less than 80 grams a day would be good for me, and hard and unpleasant, so it would qualify as an appropriate discipline to undertake ... Other possibilities I've considered include not riding in or driving a car, increasing my daily exercise from 50 minutes to 90 minutes, establishing various other food and exercise related habits I won't bother to detail, brushing the dog every day (not as easy as it sounds, since he doesn't really like to be brushed – but it decreases the dog hair quotient around here by a factor of at least ten thousand hairs a day and would be a good habit to instill in him, too), and finally, the one that I really want to do but am unsure I'm capable of – not wearing black for the entire 40 days plus weekends from midnight tomorrow until Easter Sunday.

I know I don't look good in black. When I look in the mirror I always think I look okay, but when I see pictures of myself wearing black it's clear to me that I don't. With my hair and skin I mostly just look pasty and overwhelmed in black. The main reason I wear it so often is because it's easy – it always matches, and it hides dirt and stains, and as long as both of your dogs are black it doesn't show dog hair either. The trouble is that, were I to take this on starting on Wednesday, I'm not sure I actually have enough non-black winter apparel to keep myself clothed warmly without doing some major layering and/or shopping, which I don't have the time or inclination to do right now ....

Still, I've been thinking about it for several weeks now and it still seems like a good idea. Maybe the difficulty would make it an even better idea. The whole point is to stretch myself, right? To form at least one positive new habit a year, even though it's hard? So I might try it despite my limited wardrobe and see what happens.

P.S. I just realized too that I really hate this winter header. Look for a new one soon, probably this weekend.

A very bikey Christmas

Bike to Work Pants from Cordarounds on Vimeo.

I ought to also mention that Mr. A and I created the Yule-timate Celebration of the Bike this Christmas by giving each other mostly bike-related gifts. The product in the video above was not one of them, but it's a cool idea, no? Work-ready pants with built-in reflective technology! Maybe next year.

It feels good to be all stocked up on lights, tubes, lube, chain, tools and other various bike-related gear. The best thing, or at least the most immediately useful thing, was a pair of warm wind-resistant cycling gloves, to replace the pair I lost one of sometime over the summer. The coldest weather I've ridden in here was only in the low 40s, but that's still pretty cold – and the regular gloves I wear the rest of the time (for example, while working in my freezing cold office) just don't cut it when the wind is blowing freezing rain onto my hands.

We've also been planning ahead for next summer's garden, first and foremost by reading this book titled, most appropriately, "Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times." The book's main point is that the high-fertility, high-intensity small-space gardening that has become so popular over the last few decades is only really possible when both water and soil amendments are cheap and abundant, which they are fast on their way to not being anymore, what with peak oil, climate change, and the global economic crisis. For people who are not hobbyists but hungry folks in need of real food, he recommends a return to climate-specific plants grown by older methods that require much less water and fussing with soil, and much more room – the idea being that when plants have plenty of space to develop the root systems they need, they can more consistently withstand a wider range of stresses and yield vastly more nutritious food.

His ideas mostly make a lot of sense to me, and we'll be adapting them as best we can on our hard-scrabble scrap of a garden, which is basically a 3-foot-deep box backhoed out of the boulder-choked alluvium that is our lot, and filled with soil and compost from the building materials yard. The sad fact is that even though we have plenty of space (about three acres), we have very little actual soil, and we'll probably never be able to have the kind of garden here that we both would like to grow. I was thinking today that rather than growing vegetables we might be better off fencing off part of the back field and putting a few goats back there, or sheep ... but meat is still relatively cheap, and livestock are more work than I really want to commit to right now. At most I'm still thinking about getting a few chickens again, sometime this spring.

I'm also starting to casually peruse the offerings of the various colleges and universities within a reasonable distance of home, with the half-formed thought that this might be a good year to finally get back to school and finish my master's, or start a new one, or complete some kind of certification for something. What that might be I still don't know. Living in this very small town, and feeling more or less committed to staying here, and to trying to make a living here rather than commuting – this has severely limited my options, to say the least. To the point where I'm sort of starting to think maybe I ought to at least consider changing my mind about one or more of those prerequisites.

Because really, what am I gonna do for a living in a town like this? Especially given the additional requirements that I must work for a company that offers health insurance (since I am excluded from being able to buy my own as a self-employed person, even if I could afford to), AND that I must also avoid at all costs any endeavor that requires networking or work-related socializing of any kind? That last requirement, I suppose, I will need to ease up on, though it throws me into a sweat just to think of it.

Maybe all I need is a good girdle, or a really beautiful suit. Some kind of business-person disguise that I can put on and pretend to be the kind of person who loves to mix & mingle & talk shop with aftershave-scented acquaintances.

But back to the idea of school. There must be something I could do in this town that would be more interesting and satisfying than what I'm doing right now. Something that would allow the use of my mind, and that would not require that I become a totally different person – though I'm willing to work outside my comfort zone, within reason, understanding that the zone will tend to expand as I spend more time at its edges.

I could also consider working outside the valley again, though that would require me to buy and maintain a car, which means the new job would have to offer more than just a little bit more money than I'm making now. Public transit is not really an option; I looked up the route to a job I was considering in a town just ten miles from here, and found it would take me two hours and a four-mile bike ride each way just to get from my house to the office – a trip that takes about 20 minutes in a car. No wonder nobody uses the bus around here.

Nobody's said anything about hours being cut again at my main job, but the first few months after Christmas are historically the slowest of the whole year, and this has already been the worst year in the 130-year life of the company. I'm thinking I need to be ready to hit the ground running if necessary, or at least have the beginnings of some kind of plan.

One of these days I also need to figure out if there's any way to keep what's left of my investments from disappearing down the drain along with the rest of the sinking economy. Must call broker ....

Just rambling now.

An enormous beret

Well, I've kept my eyes peeled all week and have not seen anyone to inspire a fashion photo this week, so instead I offer this: the biggest beret I've ever seen, perched atop a big hairdo I suspect is pretty fancy once she takes the hat off.

Soon it will be chilly and cold again – beret weather – and I am so ready. I had a meeting halfway up the mountain this morning, followed by work, followed by shopping and a party on the opposite side of the valley and finally a long ride back to the base of the mountain (home) in the dark – a good 20 miles by the end of the day, and most of it was hot as hell. I actually set a personal record for most sponge baths taken in public restrooms in a single day. There's definitely an art to getting clean in one of those places without actually touching anything – a critical skill because who knows who's been in there, you know, Touching Things.

Except the restroom at my office, in which case I know exactly who's been in there. Not that that makes me feel any better.

Anyway – I had a good time at the party and even allowed myself to have one bite of an exceptionally fudgy brownie, knowing I would work off at least a few of the carbs during my half-hour ride home. I also had six 1.5" square crackers with pâté, a big plate of salad and about a half a glass of white wine. I'll be curious to see what my blood sugar is like in the morning.

Fishy fishy:a half-hearted attempt at food blogging

I'm watching Julia again. This photo is from the last round, which I started back in April when I was having major anxiety attacks and looking for any way to think about something Else. Look at the size of the fish head lying on the counter!

Here she is handling an eel. Julia maintains that eels are not only wonderful to eat, they are absolutely required for a true bouillabaise. I like them as sushi but haven't ever cooked one at home.


And finally, here's a picture of that giant cleaver I mentioned last time. If I could post a movie, I would love to show you how she looked as she hacked that thing to pieces. Not graceful, I can tell you. Not precise. She just kept chopping and sawing away with her big mannish hands until the head separated from the body. I love that woman.


Kind of makes you want to eat some fish, doesn't it?

We had lunch today at one of our favorite restaurants and were surprised that the Caesar salad, which we always get and which is big enough to share – all thick with pine nuts and fat shavings of Parmesan and so much anchovy and raw garlic it makes your mouth burn – was delicious as always but today, suddenly and inexplicably, only about two-thirds its usual size. Hrm. We also shared a half of a roasted chicken and a glass of the house red.

Tonight for dinner I've just been grazing ... I made my famous low-carb bagel & lox substitute (one Kavli crispy thin cracker with cream cheese, capers, red onions and a thin slice of Ducktrap River smoked salmon: approximately 5 grams of carbohydrate), followed by some cold steamed cauliflower left over from last night, followed by four salted cashews, follwed by a Hansen's diet ginger ale ... and that's as far as I've gotten so far.

There is a pint of green tea ice cream in the freezer that I will probably break into later. Or maybe right now. One spoonful (15 grams) = approximately 3 grams of carbohydrate.

Then it's back to the task I promised myself I'd finish this weekend: sorting through the three boxes of crap mail I've been collecting for the last several months, separating the stuff that can be thrown in the recycling from the stuff that needs to be shredded. I actually got in a little bit of trouble at the post office the other day – they left me a note saying I need to either pick up my mail more often, rent a bigger box, or sign up for call service (a mere four hundred bucks a month, according to the taciturn gentleman at the counter).

I told him (in the nicest possible way, of course) that I didn't think I should be expected to pay even more for a bigger box, just so they can stuff it even more full of junk I never asked for, from people I understand are "postal customers" but who I deeply deplore for wasting not only the perfectly good trees it takes to produce their stupid "products," but MY TIME in having to sort through it all week after week, looking for the one or two items I actually asked to have delivered.

"If you don't like it, you can call the companies that are sending the mail and ask them to take you off their list," I was informed.

Yeah right. Like I have time to do that! I've just spent three good hours going through the latest set of boxes, and I'm still not quite done.

There really should be some way to deter people from abusing direct mail like this. Or at least, a way for unwilling recipients to more easily and instantaneously opt out. I wonder if it gets delivered to private mail boxes, like those ones you can rent at the mall? I need to look into that.

Pearls before swine(not that I'm calling them swine)

One thing I haven't been doing much of lately is visiting any kind of establishment where bread is made. I just can't take it; I love fresh bread so much, and there are so many wonderful bakeries in this town, that now that I can no longer eat bread (at all, it seems – though maybe someday I can have a little of it again, I hope I hope) I'm just finding it easier to avoid those places altogether.

But last night I was riding home and the smell of the world's most drool-inducing (in a good way) cinnamon morning buns wafting toward me on the evening air finally got to me. All night long I obsessed about this place, which also makes utterly killer pear-ginger tea cakes and delicious fresh mozzarella, romaine and roma tomato sandwiches and the best seeded sourdough baguette in town, not to mention my favorite round purpley loaves of walnut wheat bread that is just divine with a little lemon-infused olive oil and goat cheese ... All things I must not eat right now ... but they also make a damn good latte, so this morning I decided to revisit the place and see how hard it would really be to go in, order something that is in my "food plan," and leave without caving in to temptation.

Because I can do that. All these years of playing Lent have taught me that it really isn't that hard to say no to things I've decided not to have. It's like with broccoli, which I also love but which unfortunately gives me terrible stomach cramps every time I have even just the tiniest little bite of it. You can tell me how healthy it is until you're blue in the face, but I know that for me, eating broccoli is never a good idea. So I just Don't.

Anyway, all this is just to provide a little context for the dismay I felt when I walked up to the building and saw three bakery employees sitting at the little picnic table in their outdoor break area, eagerly digging into a ginormous bag full of breakfast food from ... MCDONALD'S!!!!!

Perhaps to them fast food is still a fun-filled part of their American dream, but I actually died a little when I saw that. They have intimate access to some of the freshest, most delicious, highest quality baked goods on the entire planet – they're the ones who make them! And they eat McMuffins.

The latte was good though.

P.S. If I really want to make myself cry, I look at this. Ironically, I can actually eat every single thing on this page except the one thing I want more than any of the others ... the toast itself. Maybe someday ... or in my next life.