About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Sometimes insomnia pricks me badly and I’m not able to sleep even after reading two or three books. I used to be really good at sleep hygiene but the combination of being tired and too tired to sleep overrides the usual tactics.
So I lay awake browsing, trying to find that last bit of something to read that will let my brain relax and say ok, sleepiness! Come in!
All the time hoping and hoping that it won’t take three, four, or five hours. A preschooler, two jobs, and two dogs have no mercy for a mom who failed at sleeping again. Who fails at sleeping?? Who wakes up with new injuries from sleeping?? Not only me, I can tell you that much.
This night I took to writing. This post, and the beginnings of ideas for some freelance work. I shake out my brain for more freelance ideas. I check on sleeping JB and give zir a quick cuddle. Pet the dogs, scratch PiC’s back gently. Finally admit that the uncertainty at our jobs that’s been gnawing away at us is getting to me. I’m worrying about pennies again. I’m worrying about bringing in some extra dollars against the lean days, worrying about wanting to grow our family when we can scarcely afford all the priorities on our plates, worrying about if we could even choose to do that if we let ourselves want it. I’m repressing even the knowledge of what I really want, again, because of money, again, and that’s telling my body it’s the bad ole times, again.
My body responds, predictably. It tightens up. It doesn’t let me sleep. It says ok, stay awake, plan your way out of this mess! (more…)
Sometimes you need to drop that thing you’re writing. Kind of like how sometimes it’s just not worth reading something you’re truly not enjoying even a little bit.
What I learned about weight loss from spending a day inside a metabolic chamber: One of science’s best tools for understanding obesity is debunking myths about metabolism…. The big theme in many of these studies: Our metabolism silently shifts under new conditions and environments in ways we’re not usually aware of.
Is tail walking a dolphin’s dancing? Why would a wild dolphin carry on doing it after learning from a peer? (Learned from dolphins in captivity)
Learned helplessness
We’ve experienced this learned helplessness in our lives. After she’d gotten very sick with no good diagnosis or treatment, and their businesses had crashed, Dad was basically useless (not working, sunk in his own ego problems), she was trying really hard to work but her health was in the crapper, Mom reverted to a mentality I’d never seen before: blaming bad luck.
I don’t believe that we can think or willpower our way through everything and anything. You can’t wish away ill health (the cosmos knows I’ve tried!) or systemic ills, but I do believe that a helplessness mentality will undermine everything you do.
(There was a video here but I realized I didn’t have time to vet the sources so I’d rather remove it until I have a chance to do that.)
I didn’t get creative this month with food, travel logistics ate my brain, but my family did. For our trip to SDCC, my beloved Mama S made me so much good food, adapting my favorites to a GF version. She’s the best.
This was a very baking month. I turned out a few versions of rolled oat and peanut butter cookies. They’re still not quite right, they come out too flat and nearly crispy. I hate crispy cookies. Chewy is the goal! Next round, I’ll sub in powdered sugar for the granulated sugar and refrigerate the dough before baking to see if that helps.
Do you suppose reducing sugar in a cookie recipe without any substitutions would be dreadful? If the recipe also has peanut butter and chocolate chips, it feels like a 25% reduction in sugar should be safe.
It was also Muffin Month. I bake like I work, I do what I feel like when I feel like it. And July felt like a muffin month so I baked as much as I could and froze the rest against a month when more cooking than baking was happening. It’s my version of making hay while the sun shines – when there’s energy and willingness to bake, roll with it.
Month 5!
Meatloaf! This was my first meatloaf since going GF and I substituted ground up rolled oats for the breadcrumbs. It was a little softer than usual, probably because I used a giant zucchini instead of a small one like usual, so I’ll double the breadcrumbs and reduce the zucchini next time.
Coconut curry (from a packet). We picked up a GF curry packet at Sprouts and combined that with my sauteed chicken thighs, cubed potatoes, and sliced carrots. We usually don’t like cooked carrots much but JB especially requested them.
Roasted pork log. I don’t remember which part of the pork this was but I slow roasted it at only 275 degrees with garlic, sadly we were out of pesto or it would have been covered in that, and we ate it for daaaaays with rice and veggies on the side. Later, the second and third pork roasts I made were slow roasted with pesto, for 3-4 hours, and it was perfection. I’m not making it any other way again!
Pork turned into enchiladas. PiC was perfectly happy eating the pork as is but I decided not to push my luck and transformed the leftovers. He was skeptical the first time I pondered this aloud but as is almost usual when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen, my idea panned out. I made red and green sauce enchiladas in the same pan because each packet only makes 4-5 enchiladas but our casserole dish holds at least 10-12. Leftovers!
Shrimp and cheesy grits. I finally perfected the water to grits ratio (3 cups water to 1.25 cups of grits) when I’m also adding lots of mozzarella cheese, and cooked it all on low. We get our large shrimp frozen on sale from Sprouts for $7/lb every so often and I grill those babies right before serving dinner. This was a hit – so much so that JB ate all the shrimp that we adults didn’t eat, and nearly all the grits as well.
Speaking of perfecting ratios and recipes, I’m not there yet with zucchini but they’re back on our dinner table and not just hidden in pasta sauces, muffins, and cake. It turns out, when done well, we all like it. The problem is the darn things go from not cooked to over-roasted in some mysterious and mystical way that has no relation to temperature, cook time, or cut size. It’s driving me up the wall but also got my attention in a way that no vegetable has since we discovered brussels sprouts and bacon are a winning combination. For the moment. Update: 7 minutes at 400 degrees seems to be doing the trick as long as the quartered slices were big enough. My store bought zucchini has also been going into several rounds of a modified lower sugar version of Erin’s chocolate cake.
Micro-income: Achievement. Another 10,000 points combined for diligently answering my chronic pain surveys and being active equals $10 in PayPal. Not bad. I do wish I had a better app to connect than Google Fit though. That earns a paltry 6 points per day of activity instead of points according to the amount of activity.
Mrs. Steward on work uniforms. I am developing a very uh … shabby chic(?) uniform? I own one pair of jeans that are showing their age, a very comfy pair of athletic type pants and three pairs of leggings in variable quality and thicknesses. Most of the time the jeans and athletic pants are rotated all week, but I started rotating the black leggings with a longer top plus my super comfy cardigan. What do you wear to work and play?
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.
If we’re just talking about the literal HOW DO YOU DO IT, these are the technical steps that I take:
First up is willpower! This is the weakest of the ways. Willpower is finite.
Depending on how challenging your days or your life feels, it can be so limited as to feel non-existent! I understand this: if you return to The Precious ten times and say no ten times, that’s 9 other times that you could have been saying no to something else or exercising better judgment.
However, it’s the most important initial set of brakes on the impulse to buy. Once I say no the first time and it pings my consciousness again, then I push it to the next step.
Sometimes I’m fresh out of willpower but I have just enough energy to pull out the credit card. Oh let’s not pretend I don’t have that card number memorized. I do.
So let’s say I don’t even have willpower or the precious little left needs to be preserved. Call in the reinforcements!
These pretty sparkly pretty (sparkly!) Star Wars flats lured me in ….
Talking to my dear mentor-friend about living spaces, I was mulling over my wish to have just a bit more.
We are usually perfectly comfortable with what we have for 2 adults, 1 child, 2 large dogs, and hosting 1-2 adult guests for a week at a time multiple times a year. But there is still a bit of me that wishes we had just a tad more.
She declared that buying too much house was just a waste. She’s absolutely right.
The “more” I want is just a bit more luxury. The ability to comfortably host 1-3 of JB’s friends at a time (at this age, a friend means the whole family with siblings) or even just our own friends and their families for birthdays and other celebrations – 300 square feet inside. The ability to have spacious grass for the dogs to play AND a food-producing garden – 200 square feet outside. The space in the garage to fit two cars without playing Tetris each time we pull in – 50 square feet. Room to plant tall and thin plants along our side walls so that our neighbors can’t just glance over and see everything we’re doing – 50 square feet.
Even if we had to pick just two, we would have been paying a whole lot more money, though. Let’s say we got a bigger place which has, on average a lower price per square foot. Not low, mind you, just lower than our current PPSF. There’s a place listed for 1.25M in our neighborhood with about 2400 square feet. It’ll sell over list price, they almost always do, so call that a 1.3M/2400 square foot = $540 per square foot.
Just skipping the garage Tetris? $27,000. Hosting space? $162,000.
Put it that way, paying $200-400 a year to rent out space a couple times a year, for the kids to play or to host a birthday party, is looking like the far more affordable option. We usually celebrate birthdays with a special home cooked dinner and a couple of friends over, so really, it’s just big milestone birthdays we’d host.
And honestly, though I get a pang of envy whenever we visit friends in the Midwest who have 3000+ square feet, I don’t want to be cleaning all that! Our hands are full with what we do have right here. If we were actually rich then we could stimulate the economy to hire a house cleaner, a gardener, and what have you. But we’re not so it’s all DIY for the daily living chores.
So in the end, my mentor-friend stays right. At a much bigger footprint, our house would own us, not the other way around. That’s no way to live.
:: How much room do you have? Is it enough, too much, or do you wish for more?
Sometimes insomnia pricks me badly and I’m not able to sleep even after reading two or three books. I used to be really good at sleep hygiene but the combination of being tired and too tired to sleep overrides the usual tactics.
Month 4!
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.