420 tacos and other food math

Hey it’s raining! I’m at my dad’s place which is sort of mine and my sister’s place (the last part of estate settling is figuring out the mortgage takeover part) solving little problems like “Where did all these mosquitoes come from?” and “Has this heater always made this funny noise?” It’s been a decent time. It’s school vacation this week in Randolph so I figured I’d come down and do the Fortress of Solitude routine which suits me pretty well. Since the last trip I made one more short trip to Indiana [like 37 hours short] which went pretty well and was fun and had me driving another one of those cute little Fiat 500s. It’s been a while since I’ve had a car that got 35MPG, I sort of miss it.

But the last few weeks have been “not much to report” for a whole ‘nother reason. It’s been nice to be home in Randolph, but with spring coming and the one year anniversary of my dad’s death has come the “Okay now, we gave you a lot of slack and now you need to start picking it up” pep talk to myself in the mirror. I tried to be kind to myself and not be really rigid in terms of things like making sure I went to the gym and making sure I was always eating healthy. So I put on some weight, not much but enough that I wasn’t totally happy about it. Now I’m getting back to more-like-normal and this is on the “to be resolved” list. And just wishing for it to happen and thinking “I am eating less. I am exercising more. Aren’t I?” wasn’t doing it.

So, since I am nerdy and I like math and numbers and charts and routines, I signed up with MyFitnessPal (terrible name, great site) and I just count what I eat, write down my exercise, stick to a limit, make sure I’m getting enough nutrition, and basically set it and forget it. And I’ve never really done this before. I guess you could call it a diet, but I think of it more as big math equation where I’m restricting some of the variables. And since I’m a person who really likes food a lot, this has meant that I’ve had to get creative with cooking and/or allotting a lot of time in the day for some sort of exercise. Or both. I like to cook and have a decent amount of free time to do this, so it’s going well. And I finally suddenly understood all those photos of food I see all over the internet. At least for me. In the past I’ve felt that the food photos thing was more “Hey check me out, I’m eating and taking care of myself.” (as opposed to “Look at this awesome thing” which I am often confused by in that “Who cares about your breakfast?” way) but now I’ve gotten to where I am looking at something I’ve made and saying to myself “Can you believe these are only 420 calories?”

So all this cooking and walking and biking and eating and calculating is interesting to me but not that interesting to outsiders (though if you care, here is what I’ve been eating) and it’s been taking up a lot of my discretionary time.

Two other things worth noting along the same lines.

1. I am participating in an eight mile, eight a.m. fundraising walk for the Randolph Area Food Shelf. If you’d like to sponsor me (and I’d appreciate it if you can spare it but I understand that everyone has their own priorities) wander over and click the “donate” link and just toss my name in the comment box.
2. The other thing that I’ve been up to is practicing ukulele. It’s going well. I am decent at it but I’m having a hard time learning to strum properly. However last week was Kelly’s birthday and we couldn’t make time to get together so I made her this video. She likes John Denver.

Next month has me heading to Montreal and Maine and New York, I think. A lot of travel but no airplanes. June is Massachusetts and North Carolina and New Hampshire then I’ve got nothing for work travel until October. We’ll see if that lasts. I suspect it won’t.

cold and cool, my trip out and back

So I got home after being on the road on some fashion since March 7th. I had a good set of trips. I realized it’s been a really long time since I was away from home on a “do a lot of stuff” trip as opposed to a “go to a place and give a talk/have a vacation and come back” trip. So this is the reporting of that. Also I got home to Vermont and it’s totally chilly here which is GREAT. It snowed last night, not a lot of snow but a dusting and it’s pretty. I was unnerved by the early flowering of all the plants in various southern locations. Actually, since I started writing this I left to give one more talk in MA and then came back but the details are the same. Snowing when I got back. Yay.

So the loose outline of the trip was: go to SXSW and then come back to Westport before flying down to Missouri to talk to some library school students and then give the closing keynote speech at the Tennessee Library Association conference. All the ways to make this work by flying were suboptimal and I don’t love flying that much anyhow, so I decided to rent a car to get between MO and TN. The trip wound up looking like this

– Drove down to Westport on Wednesday the 7th, missing the “We won!” celebratory party because the guys my friends and I had supported for selectboard had all won.
– Flew out of Providence to Austin TX on the 8th. Providence is a nice small airport like Burlington but unlike Burlington is only 35 minutes away from where I was staying. On the way out I stopped at the Jefferson Diner where they had recently gotten written up for their grape nut pudding and the place was a madhouse. Also the pudding was great.
– SXSW was a blur made more exciting by the fact that there were a ton of librarians there doing neat stuff. My panel on Saturday morning went well. I saw some great stuff. I stayed with a friend and colleague and we played hooky one day to go hiking out by Barton Springs which was a really good choice for battery recharging activities.
– Flew to Providence and had a few days of R&R where I tried to get out and do some serious walking every day. I’ve been using MapMyWalk for this and you can see a few of the places I went. Did some hanging out with Jim and then flew out to Missouri on Sunday morning.
– Through an odd happenstance it turns out a friend of a friend lived in Columbia, MO and so instead of staying in a faceless hotel (sometimes what I enjoy, other times not so much) I got to stay in a real guestroom with real people. I enjoyed meeting Hilary Niles and her husband who are new transplants to the area from New England.
– I forgot to mention that when I arrived at the St. Louis airport to pick up my rental car and they said “Pick any car on the lot in the compact section” there was a Fiat 500 sitting there! It was a small fun car that was a little tough to learn to drive–it had two “drive” settings and one of them is more like a standard shift car but has a paddle shifter and I couldn’t figure it out–but fun once I figured it out. Also got great mileage which was perfect for my 850 mile road trip.
– Gave a talk and hung out with library students for pizza. Very good time and also felt like a “get back on that horse” marker after a webinar that went bad [according to me, people were fine with it] thanks to technical problems [not mine] and made me frazzled.
– Drove to Nashville. Had plans to see a friend in St. Louis which fell through so I stopped at Brad’s Bench and then remembered New England pals who had moved down South and who, luck would have it, were free with a guestroom! Got Mexican food in Nashville and saw the gorgeous public library downtown then scooted off to Knoxville.
– In Knoxville I got to actually go to programs at TLA, visit with Tennessee librarians and also hang out with a MeFite I hadn’t previously known who lives up in the hills near the Great Smoky Mountains. We had a good time catching the sunset in the mountains and also walking around Marysville TN and looking at birds.
– I flew home, saw the nose doctor, and was here for two days before heading down for a short trip to MA where I got to see my mom, sister & her boyfriend, my boyfriend and go to a MetaFilter meetup before scooting back home last night.

Now I am home playing zombie-in-pajamas and catching up on mail and taxes and correspondence and bird feeder repair and bill paying. I have a short trip to Indiana in a few weeks and then that’s it until May. While there’s no snow on the ground, it’s still pretty nice here. I’m glad that I’ll be around for the budding of the plants, again. Here are a few more photos of the longer trip.

town meeting day

breakfast on a sunny day

Sort of dumbly excited about Town Meeting day. I spaced the date last year and had work plans by the time I remembered what the date was. For someone of my political bent, the only sort of democracy I really like is direct democracy and town meeting is IT. This year has been lively in town. The town manager was removed from his position amidst a lot of rumors that can’t be confirmed or denied because everyone can’t legally disclose what happened. That same town manager (who maybe is an okay person but I didn’t like him much as a town manager) is running for selectboard which is sort of crazy. There’s a schism in town between the no-new-or-higher-taxes crowd who I consider more conservative and the “Our town is awesome let’s keep it that way” crowd which I’m more aligned with. I even became the “social media manager” of the Randolph We Love page on facebook which is about as far as I go in getting politically involved outside of my library activism. As a renter I don’t even pay taxes in this town directly, but I’d be happy to chip in a bit more to keep the library functioning as well as it does and keep the opera house open. This is a great little town.

So I’m at home the night before the meeting making cookies for the “meet the town” social hour before the meeting begins at 10 am. There are a few places online to follow the statewide happenings including VPRs page of updates and a site they link to TMDVT which is a simple tagged content aggregator. I have the day off of work and a hot dog party to go to in the evening so tomorrow will be a big day which I’m sure will be in interestingly marked contrast to SXSW which is coming up at the end of the week in Austin Texas.

your sixth favorite slippers

So my house in Topsham is officially for sale meaning there was an ad in the paper and everything. Of course, like writing the book this “for sale” process will take forever so I’m not getting all antsy but if you know someone who wants to buy a barn and some acreage nearly in the Northeast Kingdom, please let me or my excellent realtor know. I went up to the house this week because there was some concern that none of the keys worked. I got to break in to my own house which was exciting and then be further amazed that the place wasn’t as much of a mess as the Giant Disaster Area that it’s become in my mind. Winter’s tough all around, but I was certain I’d go there and see that a family of rabid racoons had taken up residence and eaten all the books and attracted bears and hill people and I’d have to evict a wandering band of hippies and meth addicts before I could make my way in through the barn. But really it was just a somewhat empty looking and cold little house that has looked better but also looked worse. I’ll be excited to sell it.

The combination of getting rid of that house and working with Kate to make plans for my dad’s house [current plan “stay the course” future plans may vary] has meant that I’m doing some more deaccessioning of my things and offloading ambient stuff generally. At the point at which you live in a house with, say, five wireless routers and you’re only using one of them, you should maybe let a few of them go. I’m all for having backups of things, but I can’t imagine a situation where I’d need to have a fourth backup router, or a third iPhone or, as the title mentions a sixth pair of slippers. And as much as I like to play the “I love you all in different ways” game with my things, I am just not going to get around to wearing my eleventh favorite t-shirt, ever. And the second favorite “dress in case I go to Burning Man again”? probably not necessary for my future happiness. Don’t get me wrong, I keep pretty much every piece of mail I’ve ever gotten [digital and acoustic] and make a distinction between unique personal possessions and mass-produced plastic-and-metal.

Of course extrapolated out there is some thinking to be done about your ninth favorite relatives and your seventh favorite vacation spot and your tenth best friend. Of course the joy of friends is that you could invite your ten best friends to some event, but I’d have a tough time wearing my eleven favorite t-shirts, though I’m sure a younger me would love to try.

grey skies and happiness

some tater tots that I made with bacon and cheese

So this weekend I had some friends down to my dad’s place to watch the Superbowl. I have always been ambivalent about sports but I am very much pro-socializing, especially in wintertime, even if wintertime is a little mild like this one is. Growing up as a somewhat alternakid, I didn’t do the normal sports stuff and going to an alternacollege just continued this trend, though I was on the volleyball team briefly which was positively jockish for Hampshire.

Anyhow, I decided to have some people over and then was like “Oh shit am I hosting a Superbowl party?” One of the things that is great about being an adult person is that all of your friends bring stuff to parties and if one or two of them doesn’t for some odd reason everyone else has brought enough to cover them. So Jim and I did some shopping and cooking because once in a blue moon I find that sort of thing really fun. I whipped up some turkey bacon tater tots [with cheddar cheese] along with some sausages, some nilla wafer and peanut butter sandwiches, and some really good oatmeal coconut chocolate chip cookies. We also had the usual assortment of chips and dips and sodas and juices. Andrea and Corey came with vegetables of various stripes. A guy I’d known only by his MetaFilter nickname [slap happy] arrived with beers and my friend Brian showed up with soft pretzels which turned out to be just the thing the whole event was missing.

And I guess we watched the game on a big tv and ate tasty food and hung out in a warm room in a cold state during a mild winter in a house that is only partly mine. And it was a good time.

Everything else has been steady state. The doctor said “It’s fine, keep waiting.” The car is still working. Work is going well. I’m still reading books at night. And the big news, if there can be said to be any big news, is that I can sort of plinka plinka out something that sounds familiar on the ukulele now. An action that resulted from a combination of going to a few lessons and actually practicing in-between them. I’ve always liked You Are My Sunshine, so I don’t care if it’s simple. It makes me happy when skies are grey, and except for a brief stint with the recorder in third grade, I’ve never really been able to do anything with musical instruments, so this is good news.

[not] the snot slideshow

Not a lot to say here because it’s mostly “I hear squeaky noises when I blow my nose and it makes my eye hurt a little.” I am sorry that some of this is a little gross. I have spared you the Snot Slideshow. You are welcome. Part of healing from this sinus surgery is blowing out the chunks of leftover stuff, scabs and mucus, that are in your sinuses. I seem to be having trouble with this for whatever reason. So, after spending probably too long thinking “Should I call the doc back or just Try Harder?” I decided to make a phone call and I have an appointment to have my nose peeked at tomorrow. I get along well with most authority figures, even most policemen, but for whatever reason I am not great with the gauntlet of people whose job it is to keep you from pestering the doctor. Not that I don’t understand why the doctor needs to not be pestered, but I have a difficult time with the “These are my bona fides!” discussion convincing them that I have very sincerely done all the things that they suggested [sinus rinsing, vaseline, hot showers, staying hydrated, taking all the medicines] and it’s not doing the trick.

I know this tendency too. When someone’s explaining something they did to their computer, something that really should not be possible, and the two options are user error or something really broken, I find it easier to blame the user. Uncharitable perhaps, but true in my experience. However this has different ramifications with tech than with health, at least that’s what I tell myself.

Anyhow, my car was also weirdly broken last week–the transmission cable snapped, how weird is that?–and so I was home typing and reading and listening to music and rinsing my nose and there’s not that much to tell. Resolutions are going well. Car is now fixed, a cheaper and faster repair than I was expecting. The night before last a few of us headed out to go aurora hunting and that was a lot of fun. We saw a pink shimmer on the horizon, in the direction where there isn’t usually a town and were pretty sure that was it and hustled back to the warmth of the car. It’s been beastly cold out in a sort of “stay inside” way the past week or so. I made some ice candle holders. For some reason that’s more fun to do when it’s -10° outside than just doing it at home in the freezer. This photo is one of them. I’m teaching a class called How to use iPhoto and needed to start the class off with some pictures that weren’t the Snot Slideshow. So far okay.

resolved

jessmayn and jim go hiking in the snow

Spent some time hanging out with the usual neighbor friends talking about resolutions. While in the past I’ve made more specific resolutions (2009, a while ago), lately the things I resolve are sort of short term things to keep doing better and not so much big changes. January is a terrible time for big changes. I find that my resolve is at an all-time low. But I’m home a lot. I have big stretches of time. My friends are around. So there are some pieces in place, pieces you can make things out of.

My resolutions are to try to finish more books, to take care of my health, to keep writing letters and postcards, to be creative and to nurture relationships with family and friends. To go outside more. To cook my own meals more. To help people solve problems. To not make anyone’s problems worse. I have one “don’t” type of resolution and it’s to not let fear keep me from doing stuff that I otherwise enjoy. Some of these ideas are hand-wavey and some are pretty targeted and specific. This past weekend Jim came up and we attacked the various little eddies of mess in my small apartment; took down some shelving that was not working, tossed out the old shoes I never wear that were too ratty to donate (I have trash phobia from growing up in the seventies and sometimes feel I’d rather store broken shit than put it in a landfill), got stuff out to the redemption center and cleaned and swept places that haven’t been cleaned and swept in longer than I’d like to mention.

That night we went out to dinner with local friends (on me, yay for getting paid in gift certificates to local restaurants) which involved driving over a snowy mountain together in the dark, had a great meal and then headed back to Randolph to eat gingerbread and listen to a CD together. Rachel had never heard Mitch Hedberg before and so we hung out at Forrest and Kelly’s and listened to a comedy album straight through, just sitting and laughing together in a warm, comfy room. And I’m no mind reader but I got the feeling that everyone there, in some way or another, was thinking some variation of “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” and my resolution, more of a story than a sentence, is: more of this.