Camping Report, part 2

I am pleased to report that the second night of camping was a success! It rained again, but we didn’t have to flee the campground, and our new tent kept us all dry. It didn’t start raining until we went to bed for the night. In fact, it started almost immediately after we made the last trip the bathroom, checked to make sure nothing was left outside, and stepped into the tent and zipped up the door. Perfect timing! There was a period between midnight and 2 AM when I kept checking the radar to see if the storm would get worse, then making sure it was going away for the night, but once I pried myself away from the phone, it was a good night’s sleep.

Although I have been taking my kids camping for many years now, since the boy was not quite one (he’ll be 9 next month), I am getting organized all over again. There was a time, before I bought the house, when I had my camping stuff fairly organized, but it all got scattered in the move. Plus, there is the whole ADHD medication issue, so I am better at this sort of thing in general now.

I started a bin of camping dedicated supplies for this trip. My goal is to have just about everything we need in that bin so that we can come home from one trip, refill anything that needs refilling (like paper towels, spices, cooking oil, batteries, and the like), and set it aside, ready to go for the next trip. We didn’t have everything we needed for this trip, so I had to borrow some things from the regular kitchen, but I am planning ahead now, so that we can build up the camping kit. Every time I wished I had something that wasn’t in the bin this weekend, I whipped out my phone and made a note, so that there is a good chance I will actually bring these things next time.

Stuff we have in the kit already (the big bin, plus bigger things just stored next to it, on the shelf:

• Tent
• Air mattresses
• Air mattress pump
• Tabletop grill
• Lanterns and a flashlight
• Paper towels
• Tissues
• Hand sanitizer
• Spices: salt, pepper, garlic salt, everyday seasoning
• Plastic cups
• Can opener
• Wine bottle opener
• Extra batteries
• Deck of cards
• Bug spray

Things I want to get to add to the kit:

• Serving platter
• Reusable plates, bowls, silverware
• Plastic wine glasses (or maybe stainless steel)
• Cutting board
• Overhead fan for tent (battery operated)
• Dish tub
• Pots
• Aluminum foil
• Set of BBQ tools
• Serving bowls
• Moist towelettes
• Water bottles
• Cots for sleeping
• Sheets dedicated to camping trips
• Notebooks, sketchpad, notepads
• Pens, pencils
• Sunscreen
• Plastic baggies

Things we will continue to pack from home:

• Pillows
• Clothes
• Food
• Books
• Games

Lessons learned in this trip:

• At 13, almost 14, the girl is finally a useful camping partner; she helped a lot with the packing and unpacking
• Simpler is better when it comes to meal times; if I must do an elaborate meal, I should have most of the prep work done already
• I have got to prepare these kiddoes better for the idea that camping involves *actual exercise* like hiking, not just sitting around at the campsite
• I really want to find a way to buy myself a new bike and get a bike rack for the car before the weeklong trip in July; stupid need to eat every single day
• Planning ahead is key! But once I have a good camping kit, I won’t need as much planning time
• Don’t let the girl pack the car--she did put the tent on top for easy retrieval when we got to the campsite, but the rest of the stuff was kind of random, and it was hard to keep organized.

All in all, it was a good trip. I think we could even manage a weekend with just me and the kids sometime, which would be fun.

Update on Writing goals

Since this is the first week I have tried to set a real goal for writing, rather than a nebulous “write more,” it is time to see how I did. The original goals (slightly rearranged in order):

• 1 Pulp Angels post every week
• 3 posts on my personal blog per week
• 1000 words of fiction per week

What I did this past week:

• 1 Pulp Angels post
• So far I have done two blog posts, but if you count this one, then three (I think it makes sense to make my writing week go from Monday to Sunday, since I do a lot of my writing on the weekend, so it is totally not cheating)
• 371 words of fiction

That last seems kind of pathetic, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about plot while I was camping this weekend, so I feel somewhat good about that still. And, since I am considering Sunday part of the current week, I might still be able to pull that one out, too, as I plan to do some more writing tonight. All that thinking about plot has left me with a direction, in addition to the setting and characters I had already started to flesh out. I will at least attempt to do some outlining to see how my plot works, and I may get more story on paper.

I have another project I am working on that I think I will be adding on top of these goals: taking a deeper look at statistics of women vs. men in the SF field, as writers, editors, reviewers, etc., for Broad Universe, updating what they currently have. I am working with a couple of other people, and we have a lot of work to do before we start posting, I think. I am very excited about it, though!

So, all in all, not a bad week. The goals definitely helped, I did more writing than I did without them. I don’t intend to turn this blog into all writing goals all the time, but it is helping me focus for now. After this first week getting used to sitting down at the keyboard, I think I am refining my goal there to be three posts that are about something else--something that happened to me, something that I read that I want to comment on, etc, and not just a writing update post, because this is starting to seem a bit circular to me. I don't want to get to the point where I am posting every week "See, here is my third post, I made the goal!"

Misadventures in camping

Wednesday afternoon: Decide to go on a short weekend camping trip. There's not much time to plan, but it's only a couple of days, so it should be fine. There is a chance of rain, but the forecast could change. My friend and I decide to make a final decision based on the weather forecast Friday morning. She and her daughter are already at the campsite, because she is a teacher and has the summer off.

Wednesday evening: After work, I head for my parents’ house, where the kids have been hanging out all day. The boy has his summer mohawk, and he is suitably smugly pleased about that. Both children are ridiculously excited about camping, because my daughter and my friend’s daughter have been texting about the possiblility. I decide not to point out that we are not sure to go because of rain, instead telling them that they have a lot of cleaning to do before we can think of leaving for the weekend. After dinner, we head to Target and purchase a new tent, air mattresses, a tabletop grill, bug spray and smores forks.

Thursday: I am working from home, so I am able to do a lot of laundry and shop for food over lunch. I make a couple of things ahead: tuna salad, marinate onions for avocado salad. We can do this, right? Even though I am heading out for a pre-scheduled Mom’s night out that will take me out of the work all evening? The children will work on this while I am gone, right?

Thursday, 10:00 PM: Wrong. So wrong. As far as I can tell, the children watched TV, played on the computer, and ate granola bars while I was gone, shedding wrappers throughout the house (and when I say throughout the house, I definitely do NOT mean into the various trashcans placed in nearly all rooms in the house) as they went. I lose my mind, threaten the children with no trip unless they work like fiends the next day, send them around to pick up granola wrappers and make gazpacho. Upstairs before bed, I do most of my clothes packing. I don’t need much, it is only two days. Maybe this will work out fine.

Friday morning: This is an office day. I wake up the girl before I go, so that she can get right to work. I pick many mint leaves from the garden while I take the dog out, so that we can have mojitos with the Cuban themed BBQ I have planned for Saturday. Before I leave, I start to make the marinade for the cuban roasted pork and realize I forgot to get lime juice. No problem, there is a store a block away from my office, and I need to get rum anyway--all of my rum is being used to make homemade mint liqueur.

Friday work day: Throughout the day, I text the girl to keep her on track. She seems to be moving along, cleaning the kitchen, getting a lot of packing done. This won’t take long, right? All I have to do is get out of work a little early, finish the pork marinade and trim the roast, pack the food, finish my stuff and we can head out.

Friday, 3:00: Damn! I finished my financials, due today, but I only did half of the financials for the guy on vacation I am covering. No problem, I will dive in now.

Friday, 3:50: Wait, what is this? I have no idea what he is doing on this screen, and I don’t want to mess it up. I want to leave at 4:00, but I call my team lead for help anyway. I can’t get someone else in trouble. We get it straightened out, and I doublecheck everything, only to find that some things have gone out of whack in the hour since I balanced them. I re-fix them, knowing my detailed notes for the regular guy are screwed, but figure we can get this ironed out when he returns. By the time I wrap everything up and head out the door, it is 4:39, approximately 21 minutes earlier than I would normally leave, and I still have to go to the store. Well, we can make it up, right?

6:00: I make it home with all stuff, ready to swoop in, approve the kids’ cleaning activities and finish up. The kitchen does look a lot better, but the kitchen floor is still sticky.

Me: "The floor is still sticky."

The girl, surprised: "I mopped!"

Me, starting to lose my mind: "But it is still sticky! It isn’t enough to just run the mop over it, you have to check and see if it worked!"

7:10: After much arguing and reminders, we make it out the door. We need to stop for gas and ice, then pick up some fast food and we will be on our way. Sun down is 8:28, so I point out that we need to put the tent up right away when we get to the camping site, before it gets dark. Overall, though, I feel pretty good. We are going camping!

8:15: We arrive at the camp site, and take out the tent right away. The girl announces that she needs to go to the bathroom. I suggest we put the tent up first, but she threatens to have an accident, so I tell her to hurry, it is starting to get dark.

8:45: It is really getting dark. Where is that girl? My friend, who is much more experienced with tent installations than I am, has been helping me, but the girl was supposed to hurry back. I text her: “Get back here now.” She replies: “we r on r way bak” I reply: “Run”

She returns, and we only have the rain flap left to install. I show her the directions and head for the bathroom myself. I ask my friend if there is a closer bathroom than the main one the girl went to, but she says the one two camping sites down was damaged in a recent storm and has been closed. Oh well, more exercise, right?

The rest of evening goes pretty well. We play travel Pictionary, the kids have smores, and we get a little bit of reading done. The pump for the air mattresses runs out before my mattress is fully inflated, but the girl spends some time inflating it with her lung power, too. Surely it will be fine.

11:00: The girl and I head to the bathroom for a last trip before bed. She tries to convince me to just let her use the trees, but I say we should walk up. I am so tired that I try to convince her to carry me back, but we make it back without incident. The boy proclaims he is not tired, and I decide to let him play on his DSi for a bit while I read. The mattress really isn’t inflated enough, but it will probably be fine for one night.

12:00: Okay, boy, close the DSi, it is time for sleeping.

Boy: “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Ugh, I am so close to sleep now. Me: “How about you just go behind a tree?”

Boy: “I’d really rather go to the bathroom.” Why didn’t I make him go with us at 11:00?

Me: “You are lucky I love you.”

We make it up and back, with only a little bit of dramatic pretending to fall asleep while standing up on my part. This is good anyway, because he is sharing my air mattress and we don’t want any accidents.

12:30 AM: I hate those people at the end of the street. This is not the time for throwing things at your friends so that they will yell at you, and talking loudly. God, will they ever SHUT UP?!?

2:30 AM: The trip to the bathroom was not enough. He is off the edge, and there is a huge wet spot on the sheet. Fortunately, it doesn’t come all the way over to me. I go back to sleep.

3:30 AM: The girl: “What? What? I don’t know!” She has done this before, so I know not to compound the problem by talk ing to her. She is asleep throughout, but I am awake. It passes quickly, though, and I go back to sleep.

5:00 AM: The girl wakes me up. “Are those tornado sirens?” Me, sleepily: “Hmmf? Yeah, but we are fine. We can still sleep.”

5:02 AM: My friend, outside the tent: “Do you hear that? What does the radar look like on your phone?” Damn, I have to get up. I check the radar, and there is a giant line of storms headed our way. We start loading our stuff back into the car, trying to decide whether to abandon the whole trip or just leave during the storm. My decision making skills are seriously hampered by the lack of sleep, but we decide to empty the tent, but leave it for later, go for breakfast, and reavaluate later in the day.

7:00: Several cups of coffee are keeping me awake now, but it won’t last. We decide to head home and nap before the final decision.

7:30: Driving home down the corridor of concrete that is Highway 40/61. I understand why the people in the surrounding houses want the sound buffering, but 8 lanes of highway hemmed in by 10 foot high concrete walls? My god, that is bleak.

8:00: Stagger in the house, give kids directions to put the food in the fridge, wash my sheet, and charge the air mattress pump then head up to bed. Sleep, glorious sleep!

8:38: “Girl! Stop singing!”

After a couple of hours of sleep, I feel much better. We are getting ready to head back out, despite a 60% chance it will rain again tonight. We can always hang out and then leave before bed if the radar looks menacing. Wish us luck.

Menu, week of 6/12/11

Menu for this week:
Sunday: Gazpacho, salmon burgers, sweet potato fries
I made the gazpacho and the girl did the rest; nice and quick.

Monday: Rosemary Chicken with White Beans, broccoli, Quick Flatbread
I made this last week, and the girl loved it so much that she wanted to cook it for her grandmother tonight. I added onion and carrot last week, and I am going to try to get the girl to do that plus zucchini tonight, because I forgot about the zucchini, and it needs to be used. I made a big pot of navy beans to use in this and other recipes this week this morning.The flatbread batter, made with chickpea flour, is already sitting in the kitchen, waiting for baking time.

Tuesday: French lentils with walnuts and goat cheese, frittata, more flatbread
I didn’t end up making this last week, because I had about 10 minutes for dinner last Tuesday due to a late night at work combined with the need to go to a jewelry party. I love it, though, so I am trying again. The frittata will likely be mostly greens from the garden, because I have a lot of those.

Wednesday: Salmon noodle casserole, peas, unless we go to my dad's house for dinner
The kids’ favorite. Basically a white sauce with curry powder, Mrs. Dash, canned salmon, soy cheese and egg noodles. They eat the heck out of this dish.

Thursday: Beef barley and leek soup
I will probably add a bunch more veggies to this, depending on what I have on hand, including garden greens.

Today I am going to make Cassoulet with a lot of Vegetables for lunch, probably without meat, since I am just throwing this together with the beans I made this morning, and I don’t think I have any meat on hand for this. I feel so healthy!

Professional vs. Amateur writer

I have wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember. I have vague memories of scribbling curlicue lines across a page, in ordered rows, when I was too young to think of an actual story with actual words. If you held it at arm’s length and squinted, it looked like prose. As I got older, I wrote real stories and went through a few years of angsty teen poetry writing, which mostly just made my friends roll their eyes. I took a creative writing course in college, but most of writing shifted to research papers and essays. As I moved into motherhood and professional work, my personal writing subsided even more. I did a lot of online writing, but it was emails and bulletin board posts, nothing formal. I blogged, but only sporadically.

I missed writing, but I had two major problems: lack of focus and lack of confidence. There was a time when I would have said lack of time, but that is just an excuse. If you are motivated and focused, time can be found in all but the busiest schedules--I mean, I am sure heads of state don’t have time to devote to writing, but I could have easily cut out tv watching, for instance. (Or drinking. My god, in my 20’s, I could have gained a lot of time by not going to bars--not that I spent all my time there drinking, I did a lot of dancing and socializing, too, but still. How much socializing do you need to do in bars? Less than I did, I assure you.)

For a long time, I thought lack of confidence was my problem. I could not sit down and write because I didn’t have anything interesting to say. I would write three sentences, become convinced they were the worst examples of uninspired dreck ever written and give it up for the day, or the week, or the month or the year. Why sit down to write at all when it would just be awful? Reading good literature made it even worse. I would be so inspired to write something of my own, but convinced that everyone had already used up all the good ideas. When there is already an Ursula K. Le Guin or a Chris Moriarty or a Rachel Swirsky or a Charles Stross in the world writing, why should I bother?

(Imagine a break here where I write down the name of many, many writers that I admire, then erase them all in a fit of depression, plus the realization the list isn’t actually that interesting to read....)

But then, I went to the doctor and got some magic pills effective medication to treat my lifelong issues with attention, and I discovered that focus was really the biggest problem. When I sit down at the computer and write anything at all, it gets easier. The blank page is the hardest part. I also let go of the thought that anything I write will be any good at first, and realized that is not a problem. That is what revision is for!

I began to get more serious about writing. I followed authors that I like on twitter and started reading blogs directed at writers, to get in the right frame of mind. I realized that writers write, and I just needed to write something down, anything at all. I started writing more on my blog, just to get myself going. I began writing at www.gamingangels.com, just to have a weekly goal. When I would have random ideas of things I would like to write about during the day, I made a note for later, and I went back and read those notes. I picked a character and wrote two random sentences to start my fiction writing going.

I discovered something powerful through all of this. Once I started writing, it got easier. Not that writing itself is easy, but my mindset changed, and it became easier to actually sit down and write. Now, when I read interesting news articles, I think about how the story might affect my fictional world, or how to express my reaction coherently in a blog post, rather than just passively taking in the information. I discovered that having a writing habit feeds itself. I miss writing when I am doing other things, and I do *something* writing related every day, even if it is just making a list of questions I want to answer.

In the traditional sense, I am by no means a professional writer. No one pays me for my writing (unless you count emails at work, which I don’t really). I did find this article interesting, though. By the definition that Kirkland sets out, I am getting close to being a professional, even though there is no pay on the horizon. I write every day, and I am getting closer to a real writing schedule. I am not yet at the point where I have a regular routing to my writing, or a word count goal, but I am getting closer.

To that end, I am coming up with some goals for myself:

• 3 posts on my personal blog per week
• 1 Pulp Angels post every week
• 1000 words of fiction per week

I know, that last goal is a bit wimpy. That one is the hardest for me, though, and I don’t want to intimidate myself too much. I anticpate that it will go up soon.

Quick menu

I have been working on a blog post about cooking and menu planning with past menus as illustrations, but it is taking me forever. I keep not wanting to hunt down the links, and then I don’t want to put up newer menus, because I should catch up first. Today, I just decided to start where I am, so here is a quick menu for this week:

Last night: Grilled goat cheese, arugula, and kalamata olive mayo sandwiches, salad, butternut squash soup
I need to use up the arugula and lettuce in my garden, as we are getting past the spring stage now. The kids will had plain grilled cheese, by my mother and I had the full flavor sandwich, based on this idea I got from Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn blog.

Tonight Rosemary chicken with white beans
I will be adding sauteed zucchini and carrots to this, and possibly some onion and garlic, because everything seems to be better with onions and garlic

Wednesday: French lentils with walnuts and goat cheese, broccoli and carrot frittata, sliced peaches or apples

Thursday: Meatballs in applesauce with rice and broccoli
We will use about half the amount of beef, but maybe the same amount of sauce; I like the sauce over the rice. We will also probably mix rice and quinoa for the base.

Friday: pizza
I am going to use the Easy Whole grain flat bread recipe from Food Matters as the base, and make a couple of different kinds of pizza--maybe one pepperoni and one goat cheese with veggies.

Nothing too exciting, but it should get us through the week...

Doesn't it just figure?

Why does it not surprise me to find that the takeaway message from an article on how overweight women earn less than their average weight counterparts is that women should try harder to lose weight? Of course, there is also a need to throw in some condescending advice that implies that overweight women just don’t know how to lose weight, and of course, that they are lazy. God, will nothing stop the hordes of women that force us to look at their disgusting fat?

I suppose this is somewhat to be expected when the reporting is in the fitness section of the website, but I don’t really understand why that is the place for this article, especially given that the studies referenced report that men suffer no such disadvantage--in fact, men may earn more when they are overweight. I would think this would be more appropriately the start of a conversation on how to avoid this bias, but bias against fat people, especially fat women, is so totally accepted, this sort of thing is automatically viewed as just another hammer to try to force women to conform to societal ideals. Ugh.

Tips for lowering cholesterol

The other day, a friend found that her cholesterol had gone through the roof in just a year’s time. She doesn’t want to go on medication, but she needs to get it down soon, or her doctor wants her to do the meds. I told her I would send on some information that we researched online, and I thought I would go ahead and post it here. I am not a doctor, and I am not a dietician, but this is mostly a summary of information I have found elsewhere, coupled with some recommendations on how I try to implement some of these suggestions in the midst of a busy life.

General recommendations

• Eat oatmeal. Whole grains in general are good, but oats are particularly helpful because of the soluble fiber beta-glucan, which absorbs cholesterol very effectively.  I like to add dried fruit, cinnamon and just a small amount of brown sugar as it cooks. To eat, I top with vanilla soy milk and sometimes pure maple syrup.
• Flax seeds have the good kind of fat, omega 3 fatty acids, which help fight cholesterol and plaque buildup in the arteries. For the most benefits, you want to use whole flaxseeds, not the oil, which loses its potency quickly. The seeds have a nutty flavor, and you can sprinkle them on oatmeal, cereal or salads. You can also substitute 1 TBSP milled flaxseed mixed with 3 TBSP water for one egg in baked goods.
• Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. They have two aspects that interfere with the absorption of cholesterol--plant sterols and soluble fiber. I am a little crazy on this one, according to my kids. I look at every recipe or eating opportunity to see where the fruits and veggies can be added. We make fruit smoothies a lot in the mornings, and we often make them green with spinach or kale. In fact, there aren’t many dishes to which I won’t add a little spinach at the end. I add it to soups, pasta sauces, salads, casseroles, risotto, and whatever else I can think of. I always have bell peppers, onions, garlic, carrots, mushrooms and spinach on hand to add to whatever I am making.
• Some particularly good fruits and veggies: garlic, apples, beans, soy proteins.
• Get some exercise everyday. A daily walk is important, but staying active in other ways is important, too. Don’t sit for long periods. If you work in an office, try to stand up and move for just a few minutes at least once per hour. Try to do as many chores while standing as you can (standing at a counter to chop veggies, vs. sitting at a table, for instance). Park far away from the door at the store. Run errands on foot if possible. Get a good pedometer, and try to work up to 10,000 steps per day. 
• Avoid saturated fat, especially partially hydrogenated oils and trans fats. Limit red meat, and when you do eat it, trim the fat or get leaner cuts.
• Avoid processed grains. Whole grains are higher in fiber, which helps to lower cholesterol absorption in the body.
• Eat a lower carbohydrate diet. I am not a fan of the super low carb, Atkins type diets, but limiting the amount of carbs that you eat is helpful, and getting most of your carbs from whole foods is ideal. Recent studies show a correlation between a diet high in simple carbs and LDL cholesterol levels (LDL is the bad kind of cholesterol). The fiber in whole grains, fruits and vegetables are beneficial in lowering LDL levels.
• Eat fish regularly, especially salmon. 
• Red wine and dark chocolate seem to be good for cholesterol levels, too, in moderation. I heard on the radio the other day that drinking a glass of red wine with a meal that follows the Mediterranean diet (whole grains, high vegetable content, moderate meats and eggs, nuts and beans, low saturated fat) actually results in your stomach creating antioxidants--a case of one plus one equaling three.

Fitting these things into a busy life

• Plan. I try to make a menu plan every week. This does take some time, but the more I do it, the faster I get. If I know what I am going to cook for dinner when I walk in the door from work, I get right to cooking. Also, making the menu plan and then a grocery list means that I rarely find myself with a bunch of meal ideas with missing ingredients at dinner time.
• Prepare foods ahead. This can mean spending an hour or two on Sunday making up some oatmeal and a veggie soup or slaw, or it can just mean doing a little extra prep work while you are making your regular dinner. If I have a recipe that calls for a chopped onion, I might chop another while I am at it and put it in the fridge for the next night. Chopped bell pepper leads to a sliced pepper for after school snacks. Or, I might make a double batch of dinner, and freeze half of it for a night when we are busy.
• To get more veggies in, I like to have a vegetable soup or a salad as often as possible. We have a lot of slaw, because that is much easier to make ahead--cabbage doesn't wilt in dressing like lettuce does--but a nice tossed salad can be thrown together pretty quickly.  For the lettuce salads, I like to use this Jamie Oliver recipe as a base, and this is my favorite slaw recipe lately. I have my eye on this carrot slaw to try soon, though. This cream of baby carrot soup is easy to make while doing the rest of dinner, and is a big hit with my family.
• Bring healthy snacks to work. It is so easy to head for the vending machine when you are feeling hungry, or stop in the cafeteria for an order of fries. If you already have a healthy choice you can grab, it is easier to avoid this. I usually bring leftover for my lunches, but I also try to bring something for when the munchies hit. Almonds are a good choice for this, and I like to get ready made dried fruit and nut trail mixes. A piece of fruit is always good, or a bowl of fruit salad. I have had soup or slaw for a mid-afternoon snack, too, so I can get in more of those veggies.
• For the exercise, I basically trick myself into getting more movement in my day. Like I said before, I park far away from where I am going, but I also do things like drink a lot of coffee or water, which makes me get up more often to run to the bathroom. I got a dog partly to make me walk more, but I know that is a bit drastic. I have also arranged with friends to be walking buddies to make sure I head out the door on a regular basis, which is certainly less expensive than a dog. For the gym, I like to sign up for a class rather than just rely on myself to head to the gym, because I am more likely to go that way. Also, I signed up for the Y and took to the kids to the branch with the awesome indoor pool, which means they are often asking me to take them. I exercise for a bit, then join them in the pool.

Avoiding stress as much as you can is important, too. In my experience, this mostly means controlling your reaction to stressful occurrences, as there are so many stressful things that you cannot avoid entirely. Very few of us can afford to just quit a job if the boss is a jerk. When I have had bad bosses in the past (thankfully, my current supervisor is wonderful--it makes a huge difference in enjoying my job), I worked very hard at not allowing that to affect me. I did the best job I could, and worked hard at not worrying about work when I was away from work. It is hard to do, but I would interrupt my thoughts when I found myself dwelling on it, and reminded myself I was doing the best I could, and I cannot control the boss’s reaction. There is no use worrying over what you cannot change.  I apply this to all stressors that are out of my control--my ex-husband, my teenage daughter’s hormones, politics, etc. It takes practice and work, but I have been able to let a lot of this roll off my back, not letting it upset me.

All of these tips should be good for avoiding almost any health problem.

Garden Page...

...has been updated!

Hey, look what I did!

I convinced someone somewhere else to publish something I wrote! They even said I could come back and write more stuff, so I may be spending a bunch of time over there talking about science fiction, which you know I love to do. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

OMG! Girls read scifi?!?!?

Look, it is yet another article expressing great surprise that the ladies like anything other than insipid romantic comedies!

First, this quote cracks me up:

Traditionally, networks — especially broadcast networks — have attempted to grab young women viewers with romantic comedies, keeping the mindset that fantasy is for boys and romance is for girls.

Reworded: The mindset is that fantasy is for boys, and fantasy is for girls (but only if it is as bland as we can possibly make it).

Another telling quote:

The anecdotal evidence is everywhere. There was "Xena: Warrior Princess," Dana Scully on "The X-Files," Claire Bennett on "Heroes," and many others. More recently, “True Blood,” which features heroine Sookie Stackhouse and vampires Pam and Jessica, has become one of HBO’s hottest properties….Still, it’s an uphill battle for geek girls to get recognized as a consumer force to be reckoned with — even when it comes to HBO.

Reworded: Even though we have plenty of evidence that women like this stuff, we still can’t believe it doesn’t offend their delicate sensibilities, and besides, we know what they want better than they do.

It is laughably easy to find women who love science fiction. You don’t have to be an inspired researcher to find them. You can go to one of the many blogs for female geeks. You can hang out on the Feminist SF board at LibraryThing. You can go to a convention. You can go to your local bookstore and hang out in the sf section (just try not to look too creepy).

Another great resource is the blogs of female sf writers. A few awesome ones:

N.K. Jemisin
Chris Moriarty
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Rachel Swirsky

The problem about writing about this is that there are so many interesting things out on the internet, research degenerates into a long bout of reading interesting things that other people have to say on the topic. I had to stop at 4 examples of author blogs because I couldn't afford to spend 30 - 60 minutes apiece reading on any more of them. I have been writing this post for two days now, ;). (Hey, did you know that female fandom began organizing isn the 1970s? Wikipedia has more information, as usual.) Plus, thinking everything I have already thought about this and trying to distill it into a coherent blog post is nearly impossible. I am all “What about Tiptree? What about all those women who loved Buffy? And Joss Whedon is amazing! And all my cool friends love sf! And what the &^$% is wrong with these people?!?”

I have been talking about sf here and elsewhere for decades now, and I have never had any real trouble finding other women who share my interest. I get so tired of finding that people are surprised that it is possible to have two X chromosomes and be interested in stories about ideas at the same time.

A new menu pannning challenge

I am officially done with vegetarianism.

As you may know, I decided not too long ago that the whole vegan thing is not for me. That led me to read about Tasha over at what used to be Voracious Vegan and is now Voracious Eats, and that led me out to a whole world of ex-vegans on the internet. I have been on the internet regularly for over 14 years now, so I shouldn't be surprised that there is an online community for practically anything you can think of, but I hadn't even thought to look for this before.

I have been looking at reducing the amount of carbs that I eat for a while now. I am not looking to be super low-carb, but it seems clear to me that grains are not the best foods for health and weight maintenance--even when they are whole grains. I can't even point to everything I have seen to lead me in this direction, it's just something I gradually seemed to see everywhere. I am not interested in policing the carb level of all my foods, but I have been trying to eat less grains, getting rid of as much refined grain food as possible, and limiting whole grains to smaller portions. This is somewhat hard to do on a vegetarian diet, even if you do eat eggs and fish, but I was trying to avoid that. I wasn't interested in eating meat.

Then I started reading through the interviews with ex-vegans over on Let Them Eat Meat. I was astonished to find how many of them referred to dental problems associated with veganism! I have all the dental problems I was seeing mentioned, from brown spots at my gums to soft, easily broken teeth. In fact, one of my front teeth has completely broken off, and now I have to go to the dentist to get an implant to replace it, something I am not looking forward to doing at all. Now, I am the first to admit I am not a particularly good flosser, but I have always had good strong teeth, so I did not understand the problem. I had read all about the evils of calcium-leaching animal proteins over at Not Milk, so I could not figure out what was going on. Reading these interviews, seeing how many of them mentioned dental problems was really all I needed.

I wasn't really excited about it, though. I had a lot of my self-image tied up in being vegetarian, which seems kind of silly when I think about it. As I kept reading, I began to be more worried about my overall health. For a couple of months now, I have been feeling more sluggish and even dizzy, which was kind of frightening. I was so careful to eat healthy, I thought. But I was becoming more and more convinced that I have been wrong about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet all along.

Even when I ate meat as an adult, I still thought it would be healthier to be a vegetarian, but I am now thinking I was a victim of extreme thinking. I thought you either ate a high meat diet or a high fruit and veggie diet. I mean, I obviously know that it is possible to combine these ways of eating, and even that many people do it successfully, but it wasn't something I did very often. Although, as I thought about it, I realized I did do that one time in my life--eat meat, but also eat lots of healthy fruits and vegetables. That was back when I lost a lot of weight a few years ago--something like 40 or 50 pounds over the course of a year or so, without really trying that hard.

So, the evidence was becoming clear. I was wrong about meat eating, and my health was suffering because of it. It is time to be done with it.

My children are thrilled. Fortunately, they never completely stopped eating meat. They ate it with their father, and at my parents' house, and when we would eat out at restaurants. They are glad that they will be able to eat it here now, too.

It took a long time to make a menu today, though! I had to find some new recipes, and get back into the habit of including meat in the plan. I am a little bit nervous about my grocery store bill coming up, but surely it won't be too bad since I am doing the list and trying not to overbuy. Here is what I came up with:

Saturday: Amazing chicken stew on rice (The Healthy Family, p. 114)--this has a lot of veggies in it, and the boy says he is very excited about it, so I am sure this will be a winner

Sunday: Salmon patties, creamed corn, steamed green beans--this is the recipe I learned from my mother as a teenager, so it is comfort food for me

Monday: Pork tenderloin with artichokes and capers, mashed red potatoes, steamed broccoli--as I started thinking about eating meat again, this recipe popped to mind, because it is so delicious; I didn't even know I missed it

Tuesday: Chicken and Biscuit (Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book, p. 210)--from the cooking for one section, again with lots of veggies, and quick and easy in one pot

Wednesday: Gnocchi with fresh chicken sausage and broccoli rabe (Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book, p. 179)--the kids love gnocchi, so I am hoping this will help them to reconcile themselves to combined foods and flavor and all that (by which I really mean the girl--they boy likes flavor)

Thursday: Hurried goulash with egg noodles and peas (The Healthy Family, p. 106)--the girl is cooking this, even though it has a sauce!

Friday I have belly dancing, and I am thinking there may still be some leftovers, so I am not planning a meal. I hope this goes well!

Not wasting food

After purging my refrigerator this weekend, I came across this article on Planet Green. I do hate wasting food, and I was really feeling the need to plan ahead better after tossing so many leftovers and condiments, so I was ripe for the ideas on this page.

I have a very bad habit of buying all kinds of produce with no plan in mind, then throwing a bunch of it out at the end of the week. I have been working on this for a while now with menu planning, and trying to get better about substituting what I have on hand in recipes to make sure that things get used, but I definitely could use some improvement in this area.

Here are some things I have done to lower my food waste:

1) Composting.

Yes, this is still food waste, but at least it will be used for something and it isn’t going into a landfill. I have two compost bins in my back yard. For the first year and a half or so that I lived in the house, I used one bin almost exclusively to dispose of my food waste, then I switched over to the other one. I haven’t done any turning of the compost to help the breakdown, although I did occasionally add extra brown matter when the compost looked particularly wet, and my gardeners tell me we can now use the compost in that first bin when we are setting up my garden this year. I am hoping we can speed up the process going forward, so that we always have a bin ready to go in the summer. We are better about composting everything now, since I had a friend give me a big plastic kitty litter bucket with a hinged lid to use in the house each time we have something to compost, so that we don’t have to choose between multiple trips a day to the bin and leaving rotting food on the counters. That will help to increase the amount of compost available, but I may have to start thinking about getting a compost turning fork or shovel and mixing it up to hurry the decomposition process along.

2) Menu planning

I have gotten a lot better about menu planning in general, and consulting the fridge and pantry before writing the plan in particular. A quick look at what we have on hand really helps to make sure I don’t buy veggies that we already have waiting to be used. Having a definite plan also means I am more likely to actually cook dinner each night, because I don’t need to stand in the kitchen, looking in the fridge, then looking in the pantry, then looking in the freezer, then back to the fridge, etc., just to decide I don’t have everything to make anything, and so we might as well just eat peanut butter sandwiches or go out. I just come home, go in the kitchen, and start making dinner. The area I really need to work on here is breakfasts and lunches. I often end up buying a bunch of random foods to make sure we have something to eat, and we end up with too much of some things and not enough of others. I do not yet have very detailed breakfast and lunch plans, but at least I am thinking about it more before I get to the store. Some key learnings in this area:

• When I have bell peppers or cantaloupe for healthy snacks, I need to actually cut them up and have them ready to eat if we are actually going to snack on them
• I need to start looking at the entire menu for the week to see what I can prep ahead on the weekend, or when I can work ahead throughout the week (slicing peppers when I am chopping another one for a recipe, for instance)
• When I go to the grocery store, the list isn’t quite enough—I need the menu, too, so that I can make suitable substitutions if I see something on sale, or cannot find something on my list

3) Using leftovers

 

I hate it when I make something really good, and forget to eat the leftovers. Or, I make too much, and have more leftovers than I really want to eat. I like having some leftovers, because it makes lunch the next day easy, but most of the time, I don’t want to eat a meal more than twice. One dinner, one lunch, and I am good. I am also guilty of planning a bit too well for my cooking, and not accounting for leftovers, but I am getting better. The last few weeks, I have had lima bean and Brussels sprouts curry on my menu for Tuesday nights, when the kids are at their dad’s. This works well because the kids hate lima beans and Brussels sprouts, while I love them, and the girl isn’t too fond of curry. However, it also works well because my veggies are frozen and my sauce comes in a jar, so I can put it off if I need to, like this week, when I looked at all the leftovers in my fridge and decided to eat some of those instead. I still need to do some tweaking, though. Some lessons I learned on this topic this week:

• If I make a sloppy joe pizza, I should freeze half of the joes; I don’t need leftover pizza and sandwiches
• Combining the third tip to eat reasonable serving sizes and the fourth tip to eat the leftovers can be problematic at times; I need to get better at estimating how much of a certain food to make
• The girl doesn’t like fried rice/quinoa/whatever grain, so it isn’t always an ideal way to be creative with leftovers
• I really should consider writing down all that we eat in a week to help with more accurate planning sometime
• Clearing out the fridge really does help me to see what is in there and available so that things get used up; I need to be careful not to let it get cluttered

4) Not eating out

I decided to conduct an experiment in the month of April—no eating out for the whole month. I saw a chart somewhere recently—probably one of those USA Today snapshots—that compared the average number of times that people in various countries eat out per year. Japan was the highest, but the US was right behind them, at 100 meals out per year. I thought about how I have really cut back on eating out in the past few years since I bought the house and thought, “Wow, that is a lot of eating out!” Then I thought a bit more deeply and realized that is just under twice per week, and I totally still do that, if not more. We go out with friends on the weekend, or I don’t plan ahead for lunches and have to head out to a restaurant, or I buy some eggs down at the cafeteria when I get to work. This puts me in a position where I am spending money at restaurants at the same time I am throwing out food at home, which is just crazy. So, I decided to just say no to eating out for April, and see how that goes (one exception: if I go shopping on a Saturday with my mom and aunt and grandmother, and my grandmother wants to buy me lunch like she always does, of course I will go). So far, it has been a lot easier than I thought it would be. I made a big batch of cole slaw at the beginning of the week to make sure I had a veggie side every day, and I only spend a few minutes in the evening making sure there is something to take for lunch the next day. It has really helped to get the leftovers eaten, too.

 

I know I am still going to throw out some foods this week. This morning when I was packing my lunch, I saw a container of leftover spaghetti that I can’t remember exactly when it was new, but I do know I have already eaten from more than once. I suspect there are a few other things I won’t get to as well. But, I am paying closer attention now, and it will be getting better. Progress not perfection, right?

On mothers and children and disadvantages

Reading this article on msnbc.com, I couldn’t help thinking that someone skipped math or logic or something in college. Read this opening:


     "One in five of all American moms have kids who have different birth fathers, a new study shows. And when researchers look only at moms with two or more kids, that figure is even higher: 28 percent have kids with at least two different men."

Really? When you eliminate all the women who couldn’t possibly have children by more than one man, the proportion of the remaining women who have children with more than one man is higher than when you include all women? Say it ain’t so! Basic logic: it is the same number of women, just a smaller pool that is calculated to make the proportion higher. It’s like saying that if you have 3 apples, 3 oranges, 3 lemons, and 3 plums, 25% of the fruits are oranges, but if you remove all non-citrus fruits, the proportion is even higher: now 50% of the fruits are oranges! There are 3 oranges both times, you haven’t added any new information.

I don’t really understand the purpose of this study, entirely. From the article, it seems to be looking at why women with multiple fathers for their kids are disadvantaged, but it is hard to tell. It seems to me to be pretty out of touch with reality all around, although that may be the reporting, not the study. Take this quote: “An important message that doesn’t appear to be getting through is just how hard it is to raise a child as a single parent.” I think most women know single parenthood isn’t easy, even when they don’t have a college education. There are lots of reasons women may end up a young single parent, and they are not all due to poor choices on the mother’s part, especially since the researcher does say that 43% of women in this situation were married when their first babies were born.

I find it interesting that there is absolutely no mention of men with children with different mothers in this article. The obvious inference from this lack of focus is that these men do not suffer the same disadvantages that the mothers do. If so, seems to be a much more interesting line of research. Why don’t they? What can we do as a culture that evens out this disparity, if it is there? And, how do the children of the fathers in this situation do? Are they disadvantaged in the same ways that children of mothers with multiple mates are? And, are all of the children of the fathers with multiple mates similarly disadvantaged, if the disadvantage exists? I suspect that it is often the case that the children in the men’s current relationship do not suffer as much as their children from a previous relationship. Obviously, this would not always be true; I know many divorced dads that are good fathers, even if they remarry and have more children. However, there is a reason why the unhappy child from dad’s first marriage is a stock character in books, tv, and movies.

But, even if we stay within the limits of the current study, I wonder what impacts the fathers of these children have. The only reference to this is in the article talks about the stress that the mothers feel trying to meet the needs and demands of more than one father, which is just odd to me. Why is it the mom's problem entirely? Why aren't the mothers and the fathers trying to meet the demands and needs of the children involved? It is the same problem with cultural attitudes to fatherhood I talked about earlier--the mother is set up at the person responsible for meeting all needs, those of her children, and also all fathers involved. She has to make sure everyone is happy and has their needs met. Of course that is stressful!

I would love to see a study on how to limit the disadvantages that children and parents experience when parental relationships don’t work out, and their parents dare to try again to have a fulfilling relationship, one that may include additional children. It seems like too many studies are about bad outcomes—this many people suffer because of whatever social situation—rather than looking at good outcomes—here is what people who don’t suffer have in common. We already know what the problem is. Let’s look at what we can do to fix the problem instead.

What I got done this weekend

• Blog redesign (technically, I started this Thursday, but it was something I have been meaning to do for a while now, and I did more work on it this weekend, so I want it on my accomplishment list)
• Wrote a blog post on cultural attitudes toward fathering
• Massive refrigerator purge—I could not believe how old some of those condiments were! Or, how much room I had to put my groceries away
• Wiped down fridge shelves
• Made a menu ( I only went through Thursday, because the weekend will be a daddy weekend, and I expect I will have leftovers to get me through Friday)
• Saturday: Cheese pizza, Italian sausage pizza, sloppy joes pizza, baby carrots, sliced red bell peppers, mini cucumbers, sugar snap peas (S had two friends over for a sleepover, hence the three pizzas)
• Sunday: Stir-fried quinoa, pan seared cod (cooked with some of the Island teriyaki sauce I used in the quinoa), steamed sweet potatoes
• Monday: The girl is making Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I will probably make a salad for my mother and me
• Tuesday: Lima Bean and Brussels sprouts curry, with either brown rice or quinoa, depending on my mood
• Wednesday: Chickpea Cutlets, a frozen potato/green bean/mushroom mix I got from Trader Joe’s, steamed broccoli
• Thursday: Scallop Risotto, salad
• Lunch stuff: Muffalletta sandwich (from Veganomicon again), light and sassy slaw with maple sesame tempeh
• Bought all the groceries, except the scallops, which I will get closer to the actual day I use them, and eggplant, which was inexplicably absent from both grocery stores where I went to shop
• Put away all the groceries—easy in my cleared out fridge, a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in my freezer, which needs its own clearing session
• Cleared out the area behind my couch in the living room; in theory, this is a launching pad for things that need to go to the car, or that will be donated when someone calls up and offers to take stuff off my hands, and even come to my house to do it, in practice, it is that plus whatever the kids dump there, and stuff rarely makes it out to the car
• Attacked the bathtub, got a lot of caulk stripped, thought I was done, but I will be doing a bit more stripping today before recaulking
• 4 loads of laundry
• The girl trimmed the ornamental grasses, and we all helped bag up the resulting straw, or take it to the compost pile out back—about half went into bags, and half on the compost pile—I am not convinced this straw actually breaks down in a timely manner, but I didn’t have enough bags to put it all at the curb 
• Both the girl and I did dishes, but there are somehow still lots of dirty dishes; stupid entropy
• Made cappuccino chip muffins from Vegan Brunch; they were very popular, and are almost all gone now
• The boy cleared sections of the family room floor underneath the couch and the chaise; his normal cleaning style is to shove things under furniture in the hopes that I won’t see them, so there was some corrective action needed
• The girl spent a lot of time re-cleaning the family room after the sleepover; the girls stayed in there because of the fold out couch, the tv, and the ability to stay up far too late by not being in the room right next to mine
• Cleaned the downstairs half bath
• Finished a book (Unnatural Causes, by P.D. James)

Looking over this list, it looks like a lot, but not as much as I thought it would be. I feel compelled to add that last weekend, I finally got new batteries for my cordless phones, a task I had been needing to do for literally months, just to convey the sort of catching up on responsibilities I have been doing lately. But really, I was busy all weekend, and so was the girl. The boy is only 8, he can only tolerate so much busy-ness, but he did work, too. The girl owed me extra chores, thanks to her habit of putting away only some food when she is sent into the kitchen to clean up (as I tell her, when we eat it, it is food, when I throw it away, it is money), and I feel like she delivered. It just kills me how much time it takes just to stay standing still in house cleaning, much less get ahead.