Hanging On

Well, I am dangerously close to missing the posting deadline for today, but I think I’ll squeak in under the wire.  Just trying to keep you on your toes, you know; mix it up a bit.  Whatever.

So yesterday I brilliantly suggested some additions (or subtractions) to my routine that might do me some good, things like reducing my caffeine intake and getting up at a more “normal” hour, etcetera.  I would like to happily report that I have made progress on all fronts.

First of all, I did not have ANY coffee today.  You heard me: not a single drop.  And now I have a raging headache from the caffeine withdrawal, but it’s all good.  Drinking some green tea has helped.  Slightly.  The important thing to note here is that I was able to go an entire 24 or some-such hours without coffee.  I mention this first, because to my way of thinking, all of the following accomplishments are instantly like 1000% more amazing when you consider that I did them all decaffeinated.

1.  I took my vitamin first thing this morning (instead of making/drinking coffee, and instead of checking email.)

2. It did not rain a drop last night, but I checked the rain gauge dutifully nonetheless.  And I also recorded my Zero Rainfall on CoCoRahs.  Rah, rah, rah.

3.  Not only did I do some stretches last night, but I did more already tonight.  Hey, it was that, or make a pot of half-caff.

4.  Oh, boy, did I move around tonight.  I went to a coaches’ clinic for our community soccer program.  S5, now that she is 5, is eligible to play soccer, so we signed her up.  Somehow, in the signing up process, I got talked into being an assistant coach.  They assured me it was nothing too physical, nothing that I really had to know how to play soccer for (which I don’t)- that was the head coach’s job.  Boy, did I get snowed.  Something should have clued me in when they said “wear shorts and bring water to the clinic”.  For THREE HOURS we ran around, kicking and passing and receiving and shooting and learning how to stop the ball without your hands, such as with your thigh (hard to get that part up in the air) or your chest (I only quit nursing a few months ago, can you give me a break already?) or your HEAD (omg does that hurt with a full-on caffeine-withdrawal headache).  Yeah.  So I think I’ve done all the moving around I need to do until perhaps August.  Of 2015.

5.  Eat better went well – except for the half-ounce of chocolate taken to ease the caffeine headache.  I had cereal and tea for breakfast, a lovely salad and some leftover boiled potatoes for lunch, and another lovely salad for dinner.  And even though I felt perfectly justified in eating a snack after the grueling soccer torture session, I refrained.  Had tea instead, (and that’s when I took my dose of chocolate, but shhhhh) and now I am going to bed, so that this remains a good day.

Tomorrow: garden updates.

Cheers!

On The Bright Side

Alright, so I’ve spent the first week of NaBloPoMo groaning about schedules, snarking about my lack thereof, and generally being ridiculous with regards to the subject of routine. If I’m going to expend energy on this writing exercise, I might as well try to make some good come out of it. Therefore, I going to focus on the positive things I’m [slowly, painfully] incorporating into to my every-day.

1. Take a vitamin. Since pregnancy, I have had a B-vitamin deficiency, particularly B-12; this is interesting because I’m not a real vegetarian, and B-12 is rampant in animal-based foods. Unfortunately, cheese does not count as a source of B vitamins, however. So I’m sunk.

2. Check the rain gauge. I joined CoCoRahs a few months ago and we finally set up our rain gauge this weekend. I’m supposed to check it every morning around 7:00 AM. That is going to be really, really funny.

3. Do stretches at night. My body feels old. My neck hurts, my back has a little bit of arthritis in it, my knees are starting to feel like they’re made of broken glass, and my joints sound like bubble wrap when I move. So before bed, I do some stretches. And I have to admit that, while remembering to do them is sometimes a problem, they feel very, very good, and I sleep better afterwards. Why is it that things that make us feel better (like exercise, for example) are so hard to stick to?

4. Move around more. My mom gave me one of those pedometers and tried telling me about some 10,000 steps a day bullshit that she’s been following . Okay, fine. So I wore the pedometer for a couple of days and realized that I took approximately 2,000 steps each day (and that was after going for a walk). I was very depressed and put the pedometer on a shelf. But it looks at me every time I walk by (which is obviously not very often). So I really need to find a new battery for it and at least make an effort to increase my step count. To be fair, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen doing cooking/cleaning sorts of things, so I am on my feet–but not actually taking steps. But it certainly couldn’t hurt matters to walk more.

5. Eat better. I actually eat fairly well compared to some. I don’t drink soda, we don’t keep candy or donuts or chips in the house, I avoid things like french fries and breaded fish sticks and tempura with no difficulty. My problems have more to do with quantity and timing. I tend to eat most of my calories late, late, late at night (in front of the computer). This is probably a result of not eating any/many calories during the day, and drinking too much coffee, and not moving around very much. It’s scary how interrelated all these issues seem to be.

6. Drink less coffee. I almost didn’t write this down. What would my life be without coffee?? (It would be very decaffeinated, sluggish and dull, that’s what it would be.) But I have to face facts, and one of them is that coffee, caffeine, and the accompanying buttload (I mean that literally) of sugar I stir into my cups are causing some problems. Like, oh, I don’t know, a vitamin B deficiency. Sleep problems. Sluggishness around 2 o’clock. Etcetera.

And now I am thoroughly morose about the prospect of giving up (or at least cutting back on) coffee while trying to get up at 7:00 to check the damn rain gauge AND shuffle my feet 10,000 times a day. Fortunately, it’s already July 6 so I don’t have to worry about keeping up pretenses terribly much longer.

My Life Will Never Be The Same

I recently ordered a French press coffee maker.  It came in the mail today.  Of course, even though I had already enjoyed two three four cups earlier this morning, I tore open the package and immediately brewed a pot.  And now, as I sit here sipping, with cold, winter rain slopping drearily on my purportedly-insulated, condensation-caked windowpanes, I breathe in the deep, musky aroma of a true cup of coffee. It is like a dream; the groggy fog lifts, the bone-chilling cold dissapates, the sun feels warm on the skin again, and – faintly – I hear birds singing a cheery little melody from a fragrantly flowered branch.

If I had known it would be this good, I’d have bought a French press long ago.

Coffee Heresy

My mother and her husband are coffee heretics.  While they both drink it, the stuff that they put into their mugs each morning has only a resemblance to real coffee.  As in, it’s brown.

Now, I am not a true coffee snob.  Not really.  I add cream and sugar to my cup.  I use a drip pot.  I even use paper filters.  My coffee grinder isn’t a burr mill, and I don’t roast my own beans.  But for crying out loud…. what is with these people?!?

First of all, my mother buys ground coffee. And then, she stores it in the refrigerator, right next to the cabbage.  She uses tap water that has so much chlorine in it that I can smell bleach on the dishcloth.  Warmish tap water.  She has a PUR filter right on the tap, so this is why I include her water sourcing in the long list of coffee transgressions.

Along with poor selection and improper brewing, these percolator pagans use about a teaspoon of grounds per cup, instead of a tablespoon.  The result is a weak, cardboardy taste.  It’s truly awful.

I knew this coming in, so packed deep in my carryon bag was our coffee grinder and a bag of beans.  It has come in very useful.  I tried explaining to my mom that you don’t even need to buy expensive or fancy beans; Eight O’Clock Coffee (basic store brand) in whole-bean is far, far, far superior to even my happy Dunkin Donuts in a pre-ground bag.  She says that she hand-ground coffee for my dad every single morning for years, and she didn’t even drink the stuff then, so she’s just not interested in grinding it herself anymore.  Whatever.  My step-dad was excited about the fresh-ground stuff, but when he got up before me this morning and made a pot of coffee, he used the stale nasty stuff in the refrigerator.  Eww.

I often think about what is wrong with our society today, and it all seems to come down to an acceptance of cheap, bad coffee.

Happy Mother’s Day

Why, yes, it is.

DEEtroit.

We’ve been gone for a few days, traveling with my husband again. Last time we went on a “business trip”, it was to Yucky-In-Tucky. At least, that’s what O2, our resident Geographer, calls it. This time, it was a three-day trip to Detroit, Michigan, with a brief stop in Canada.

As we neared Detroit, I noticed that the locals think themselves to be rather smart.

It’s constantly in your face.

Well, let’s just see how smart they REALLY are around here.

Hm. This is promising.

Well, then. Let the border-crossing commence.

From Detroit, it’s just a stone’s throw (plus an excruciating border-crossing-customs-interrogation, but that’s not important here) to Windsor, Canada. You can get there via the Ambassador Bridge

or a tunnel, which we always seem to miss going TO Canada. I know it must be here somewhere, because we came BACK that way.

I like the bridge, however.

The view from the bridge is really breathtaking.

Once we crossed the bridge, it was time for customs. I didn’t take any pictures of customs. It seemed like a bad idea. If I were a customs agent, and some weird girl was sitting in traffic snapping photos of my booth and the security gates and the general customs-scene, I would probably ask to search her car. I might not even want her in my country. Using my great powers of Empathy (much like Deanna Troi, only with saggier boobs), I felt it much wiser to cap the camera lens until we were safely ensconsed in our dear northern neighbor’s borders. Once there, however, the snapping re-commenced.

I love Canada. They celebrate the great things of life here. For example, they have entire stores devoted just to beer.

Sorry about that pole in the way, but we were going really fast. Like, at least 100. That’s what they do in Canada. But it’s okay, because gas is really cheap here.

Ha. Gotcha. That’s PER LITRE. For those poor, ignorant few among us who are still on the barley-corn system, let me rephrase that:

1 Gallon = 3.783 litres
3.783 litres x $1.208 / litre = $4.57 / Gallon

Ouch.

Well, anyway, whatever. It’s not my gas, right? Besides, we can still drive really fast here.

My children were also very impressed with Canada.

That border-crossing must have worn them out.

We did see the ubiquitous Tim Hortons, which DH and I have sneaking suspicions about.

In our dating days, DH and I went to Toronto every December. It seemed like, each visit, there were more and more Tim Hortons. They were on every corner. And then we started seeing them in Buffalo. So we have decided that they are attempting to take over the world, and they only way to stop them is to boycott them and visit Coffee Time instead. Sadly, Coffee Time makes an unfortunate cup of coffee. So we drank hot chocolate there instead. But at least we were doing our best to encourage competition. Go, capitalism!! Meanwhile, Beware of Tim Hortons.

We had a lovely couple of hours in Windsor. There’s not much to tell about that part. We ate lunch, the kids napped, I knitted, and then we drove at breakneck speed

back to the USA. This time, we found the tunnel.

I even managed to catch a lucky snap in the tunnel.

Sorry about cutting off most of “Canada”, but that’s how things are when you’re travelling at breakneck speed.

Again, I avoided the urge to snap pictures at the border. US customs-persons are even less jovial than Canadian customs-persons, and I figured they’d probably have no qualms about sending me back over the bridge to float in citizenship-limbo for such an infraction. I also had to suppress an urge to stand at attention and salute upon my return home, it was that serious. Fortunately, we were allowed to re-enter our own country. Good thing, because they make you pay the $4 toll BEFORE you go thru the tunnel, and I would have been pretty pissed off about having to pay and then not getting to come in.

Back in Michigan, it was just a short jaunt to the northwest side of Detroit and our hotel. We found a comfortable place to stay.

The next day, while hubby was at his meeting, I took the kids to the Detroit Zoo. No camera here, either, but that had less to do with an irrational fear of hungry hippos snapping it out of my hands and more to do with the fact that hubby needed it to take pictures of the project he was working on. So, boo. I can’t show you the gorgeous peacocks that were meandering around, or the looks on my kids’ faces after they woke up from stroller-naps to a giant rhinocerous staring at them, or the lovely fountain with two bears hugging. Nope. Can’t. Just take my word for it: we had a nice time there.

Yesterday was rainy. It was VERY rainy. In fact, it was so rainy that many of my driving-around shots didn’t come out well. Like this picture of something-or-other:

Oh- now I remember. That’s one of the Ford plants. This is Motor City, after all. All the auto-makers have a Presence here. (And most everyone drives a car that’s less than five years old, but that’s another story.)

They have everything for motors here in Motor City.

They also have the famous Michigan Left.

I am very proud to say that I am Mistress of the Michigan Left. As in, I did it at least seven times and never had anyone honk at me.

They also have this great place, just a few blocks from our hotel.

I’m so disappointed that this picture’s a little blurry, because I really think “Ham Center” is a great name for a restaurant.

NOT.

This, however, has GOT to be my favorite picture from this whole entire trip:

I pulled into a parking lot a block away and used the zoom to take this picture from behind another sign. It seemed very appropriate.

Anyway, our trip was over all too soon. Time to go home. One more thing to do before we leave, however:

I like Detroit.