Fall Recap

I have accepted George's call to arms. I, too, have been a slack blogger. I, too, will do my best to blog better in the future. To blog better, stronger, faster. Well, maybe not faster. But more frequently. And I'm gonna start right now.

We have had a whirlwhind fall so far. I thought it would be easier to recap in pictures. This is what we've been up to, that I haven't blogged about. Enjoy!

My Perfect Health Storm

Something monumental happened to me last week. I'm talking really, really monumental. I'm talking really, really, really huge-on-all-sorts-of-levels monumental.

I weighed myself. I weighed myself and for the first time in a long, long, LONG time, I was not overweight. According to the BMI calculator, I was normal. NORMAL.

Last January, according to the same BMI calculator, I was obese. OBESE. And now? I'm not. Normal. Feels good to say. Feels even better to be. I've lost 37 pounds this year. I worked my way off medication for high cholesterol, and am working my way off medication for high blood pressure (I've gotten my dosage cut in half, but I'm still working on it.)

So what happened?

Honestly, a lot of things happened at once. I had a perfect storm of sorts that motivated me to get my health back. I've been wanting to blog about it for a while, but the timing never seemed right. But last week's shift into normalcy seemed like the time to stop and reflect. Here goes - here's my perfect health storm:

Storm Front #1: I turned 38. Not your typical threshold kind of a birthday. It's not like I turned 30, or 40, or 50. Just dumb old 38. But here's the thing: I turned 38 and felt like crap. I was fat, my back hurt, my joints ached, I had no energy. And I was only 38. I started thinking about what it would feel like to turn 40 in two years, and feel worse than I already felt. I'm young. My kids are young. They don't need an old lady for a mom. It got me thinking.

Storm Front #2: I learned how to cook. This one was a couple years in the making. But in the last few years, I've learned more about food than I ever knew before. And I discovered that the more good food I cooked - really GOOD food, really GOOD ingredients - the less I could tolerate bad food. Little Debbies, chips, fast food - all of it lost it's appeal. It just stopped TASTING good. I didn't start giving up junk food because I felt like I had to, I gave it up because it didn't taste good anymore. I still have a sweet tooth, but mostly for treats I make myself. And I can now properly appreciate the taste of a good peach. Or a good apple. Or a good tomato. Or a good....well, you get it. I've learned that eating is all about balance. I've learned to eat food because of what it has, and not because of what it doesn't have. I've learned that if it doesn't taste good, it doesn't make sense to eat it. And I don't starve myself - I eat well. But with a little education, I now know what I should be eating a lot of, what I should be eating in moderation, and what I should have on rare occasions. And it's working for me.

Storm Front #3: I started walking. One of my new year's resolutions was to walk more. And I did a lousy job of walking early in the year. So when Lent rolled around this year, I decided to make a promise to walk thirty minutes every day. And I did it. But when Lent was over, I was afraid I would fall back into old habits. At exactly the same time, the company I work for issued a "Walk for Health" challenge. They issued pedometers, and challenged us all to start walking. The people logging the most fitness steps could win prizes, and everyone logging at least 100,00 steps would get a shirt. I'm a sucker for a free shirt, so I started walking. There are three sessions, two months each. For the first session, not only did I get over 100,00 steps, but I finished in the top ten overall with 260K. That got me thinking that I could actually win! So in session two, I logged 459,965 steps. And I came in second. Bummer. But wait! The winner (by 45K) was the director of the program, and was not eligible for the prize! So I won a $150 gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods. We are now deep into session three. So far, in all three sessions, I've logged over a million fitness steps. That's 500 miles. That's like walking from my house, to my parent's house in Florence, and back as far as my brother's house in Greenville. That's a lot of walking.

Storm Front #4: The Big C. Not me, but in a year's time, a lot of people that I know were diagnosed with cancer. Many of them children. Many of them in perfect health. And I got really tripped up over it. Because here I was, unhealthy because of choices I was making. And all these people were handed this disease when they didn't deserve it, when they had done nothing to bring it on themselves. It was so unfair. And I started praying about the unfairness of it. But you can't really talk to God about "unfair", because he just makes you talk to Jesus about "unfair" and, well, you're just not going to get anywhere with that one. But because I was praying, I started hearing that small voice - you know the one. The one that tells you what you already know. The one that told me that the only way for me to make it even close to fair, was to stop talking my own health for granted. Start taking care of myself. Not just for me, but for my kids and my husband.

And so here I am: eating well and exercising. I feel great, and there's a lot less of me. I don't know when the weight loss will plateau, but as of now, I'm still losing, slowly but surely. I'd like to get a little more of a buffer zone between "normal" and "overweight", but time will tell. I feel like I finally have eating and exercise habits that I won't move away from (like going off of a diet). It feels like this is me now. I hope so. I like normal me.

But Ya Gotta Have Friends

A good work friend of mine read my playlist posts and took pity on me - she sent me copies of You All Everybody, and that awesome Geronimo Jackson hit Dharma Lady. This totally made my day.

I think I'm just about ready to move back into my parents' basement.

My Big Fat Geek Playlist, Updated

So, I'm on Lostpedia this week (yes, there is a Lostpedia, proving that I am not the biggest geek on the planet) looking for some info on a potential plot hole in season four (but there were two helicopters and two helipads on the freighter, so it was a false alarm) and I found an even MORE comprehensive playlist for Lost. By more comprehensive, I mean every single freakin' song that ever thought about appearing on the show (sung or hummed or whistled by characters, played on music boxes or mobiles or Muzak- EVERY song).

And while most of them were not playlist-worthy (I mean, does it really count that Sawyer sung a Bob Marley song on the raft?), I did make three additions, all songs that I know and love. I thought I would share for those of you keeping score at home:

Stay - Dave Matthews Band (playing in Shannon's apartment)
The End of the World - Skeeter Davis (playing in Kate's mom's diner)
It's Getting Better - Cass Elliot (playing on the radio when Michael drives into the wall, ironically)

In a related story, I'm really grooving on the season one soundtrack. Beautiful melodies. And hilarious titles as well. "Booneral", "Shannonigans","Crocodile Locke". And strangely enough, the most lovely, most haunting song on the soundtrack is called "Win One for the Reaper". Go figure.

What I'm Reading Now

The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb.

I love Wally Lamb. His previous books - I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone - were excellent. Long and exhausting, but excellent.

And this one appears to be no exception. Ironically, it is a fictional account of a couple impacted by the events at Columbine High School. I had planned to put a little time between reading this, and reading Columbine, but Mark and I were stuck in the Atlanta airport coming back from Boston, and I finished my Jodi Picoult book with about five more hours to kill, and I had already ordered the new Pat Conroy book,which was the only other book I saw that I wanted, so I bought this one in the airport.

And so far, so good. I'm about a quarter of the way through it - my mom has warned me that it is really two books in one, and I really don't know what to expect in that regard. But I love a good book - two good books is even better!

P.S. - the new Jodi Picoult was good as well - Handle with Care. Not her best, by any means, but good, and very her.

Geeking Out: My Lost Playlist

The 2009 Lost re-watch is well underway. We started watching every episode with the boys in May or June, and are now well near the end of season four. It’s been quite a ride, and the boys’ commentary has added a lot of humor. (“Jacob is a chair?”)

The more we watched, the more I found myself humming many of the tunes from the show (specifically the piano melody they play when someone dies, and Downtown, Juliet’s harbinger of doom). So I decided to download a few good Lost tunes to my iPod.

I found the Giacchino soundtrack on iTunes and downloaded that, and it has all the cool melodies you hear on the show. I also downloaded Downtown and Make Your Own Kind of Music. Then I attempted to find what I thought was Shang Ri La from Three Dog Night. I now know that it is actually Shambala, but in order to figure that out, I had to look up the episode on IMDB, where I discovered the “Soundtrack” feature. Turns out, any episode that features a known song by a known artist has a Soundtrack listing on IMDB.

This led to me to search for songs I had heard on the show and grooved on, but didn’t know the name of, like Wash Away and I Shall Not Walk Alone. Since I am a bit Lost-obsessed, I ended up going through each episode on IMDB, seasons one through five, and noting the name of each and every song featured. (More often than not, episodes had no soundtrack, so this wasn’t actually as time-consuming as it sounds.)

I now have a complete Lost playlist, and it rocks. It‘s a very eclectic mix of music. Check it out:

Leavin’ on Your Mind – Patsy Cline
Wash Away – Joe Purdy
Are Your Sure – Willie Nelson
I Shall Not Walk Alone – The Blind Boys of Alabama
Delicate – Damien Rice
Make Your Own Kind of Music – Cass Elliot
Up on the Roof – The Drifters
My Conversation – Slim Smith
Outside – Staind
These Arms of Mine – Otis Redding
Downtown – Petula Clark
Slowly – Ann Margret
Wonderwall – Oasis (although actually performed by Charlie on the show)
Shambala – Three Dog Night
Walking After Midnight – Patsy Cline
Scentless Apprentice – Nirvana
Xanadu – ONJ and ELO
Everyday – Buddy Holly
Gouge Away – Pixies
Shotgun Willie – Willie Nelson
Dream Police – Cheap Trick
Ride Captain Ride – Blues Image
She’s Got You – Patsy Cline (Kate flashbacks are Patsy Cline-heavy)
It Never Rains in Southern California – Albert Hammond
Love Will Keep Us Together – Captain and Tennille

Only song missing? You All Everybody by Drive Shaft. Bummer.

Boston in Pictures

A Culinary Tour of Boston; or, Taters We Got At Home

For those who don’t know, Mark and I went to Boston last Saturday for an early anniversary trip. We decided back in January to take a trip for our 15th, and didn’t know where we wanted to go. Mark found out in late July that he would be going to Boston on business, and it worked out for him to go early and take me along!!

You know me: I was particularly excited about the food. Whenever we traveled when I was a kid, my dad used to say “Taters we got at home.” I have adopted the same philosophy when I travel, and I do my best to eat food unique to the place I’m visiting. Let’s see how we did – I’ll give you a meal-by-meal play-by-play of our culinary adventures:

First off, we didn’t rent a car. For the most part, it would have been more trouble than it was worth in the city. But we stayed outside Boston, in Newton, and there wasn’t any real public transportation in Newton. The hotel offered shuttle service to and from the nearest MTA stop, but that was about it. So for our first meal on Saturday night, we were on foot. We started out in the early evening looking for a restaurant near our hotel. There were several restaurants on a map supplied by the hotel that were not really in walking distance, but since we are young and fairly healthy, we thought we’d try. After walking a ways and realizing the map was clearly not to scale, we called Ben and had him MapQuest the address. “Two miles.” Not too bad. After walking well over two miles through a suburban area that was obviously celebrating “grill outside week”, we gave up and went back to the hotel. (We actually contemplated the appropriateness of knocking on doors and offering a hundred bucks for whatever they were grilling. Ultimately, we decided against it.) In the hotel bar, we ordered a couple of appetizers, one of which was lobster and crab cakes. They were delicious. But there were only two of them. Shaft.

On Sunday morning, we took the train into Boston and got breakfast at a Dunkin’ Donuts. Now, I know what you’re thinking. There’s Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere. Well, actually, there’s not. We don’t have a Dunkin’ here, and it seemed like such a Bostonian thing to do, we felt comfortable running on Dunkin’. We took our bagels and coffee to Boston Common, found a bench, and ate while people-watching. Then we hit the Freedom Trail.

We ate a very late lunch (about 3:00) in north Boston at Cantina Italiana on Hanover Street. Mark had the chicken parm, and I had the gnocchi. I had never had gnocchi before, and it was exactly what I expected. And very good. Mark’s food was good to. I have since found out that Cantina Italiana is the oldest Italian restaurant on Hanover Street, a street famous for Italian restaurants. And old places. So there.

We went back down the Freedom Trail to Quincy Market for dessert. Mark had a black and white cookie, and I had a canoli. Good stuff.

We had such a late lunch and were so tired Sunday night that we just went back to the hotel and crashed without eating again.

For breakfast on Monday we ate blueberry muffins purchased at Quincy Market the day before. We toured Fenway Park, and went back to Quincy Market for lunch, where I had my first ever lobster roll, and Mark had a BBQ burger. Dessert was from a gelati place – I had Nutella and Mark had tiramisu. After an afternoon excursion to Harvard, we went back to Quincy and split a Boston Cream Pie (a single serving, not a whole pie.)

Dinner Monday night was at Fenway. All the local places were crammed with Red Sox fans, so we headed several blocks out to relax and give the scalpers time to come down off their outrageous prices. We had a very relaxing meal at a steakhouse chain (Longhorn, I think?). It was a good, it was not crowded, and it was air conditioned – the exact tri fecta we were looking for. (It totally violated our Taters rule, but sometimes, if we don’t bend, we break.) In the end, we skipped the game, so no peanuts and crackerjack for us.

Tuesday morning we ate in the hotel restaurant again as Mark needed to meet up with his work folks. We both had the banana-oatmeal Brule. It was oatmeal topped with custard and bananas, caramelized just like a crème Brule. Then it was topped with strawberries. It was really, really good. I thought it would be too sweet, but the oatmeal balanced out the sweetness. Delicious!

We went our separate ways for the day. I had lunch at Figs, a restaurant on Charles Street that I found in my guidebook. I ordered the signature fig and prosciutto pizza. It was the most amazing thing!! Really tiny place, but really good food. And they had bread that I would kill a bear for. I heartily recommend it.

For dinner, I met up with Mark again, and joined the work folks for dinner at Legal Seafood. Legal started way back in the day as a local seafood joint, and is now a large chain (mostly in Massachusetts and airports around the country). I had the clam chowder, and the baked scrod, two very Boston dishes I wanted to try before we left. Neither one disappointed. “Scrod”, as I understand it, is a Bostonian term for the fresh catch of the day, breaded and baked, not fried. Mine was a delicious white fish (no clue what, exactly) topped with breading and a roasted tomato.

And that was it – we had a very early flight on Wednesday morning, so we ate at the airport. Nothing special there.

All in all, though, I ate everything I wanted to and nothing I didn’t. Except maybe more of the Boston Cream Pie.

What I Just Finished Reading

Columbine, by Dave Cullen. Not the most uplifting thing I've ever read, but very, very interesting.

Daniel was only about six weeks old when the Columbine massacre happened, and I avoided any and all news stories about it. I just didn't think I could take it. After about ten days, I sat down and read Time magazine article about all that had happened. Since then, I've had what I guess you have to call a morbid curiosity about the events, intensified by reading Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes.

After reading Cullen's book, I now know that most of what I thought I knew about what happened was incorrect. There were a lot of details that I had not heard, and many things that I had heard were in error. And he talks a lot about where those misconceptions came from. The media ran with things that were not backed up, just to get some news out there. Kids then repeated what they heard on the news, and the news in turn reported what the kids said (which actually they had not seen first hand, but heard on the news, and so believed that must have been what happened.) Bit of a vicious media cycle going on.

He provides much more info on the killers than I had heard before (Harris was a psychopath; Klebold was suicidal.) There was also a lot of detail on the legal aftermath. It was a classic case of who gets punished when the guilty parties are already dead? But there were a lot of little details that I didn't know - for example, victims' families were able to get 1.6 million dollars from the Harris and Klebold's homeowners insurance - it included coverage in the event one of their children commits murder (I found that bizarre.)

The book begins with a play-by-play of the massacre. It then breaks into two plot lines - the year in the life of the killers, leading up to the massacre, and the year(s) after the massacre in the lives of the victims and their families. Cullen alternates these two time lines chapter by chapter, which was a little choppy, but it worked.

All in all, worth reading. I took my time with it, as I found it really upsetting and didn't want to get inundated with it. But I'm glad I read it.

Happy Birthday Ben!

"And nobody

In all of Oz,

No wizard that there is or was

Is ever gonna bring you down."

- Wicked

The Fabulous Farmer's Market

I went to the farmer's market bright and early this morning, and found something I'd never seen before - A Lilac Pepper:

I was told it was a sweet pepper, but I was mostly just amazed at how cool it looked. Isn't that an AWESOME color? I have no idea what to do with it, and so far I've just set it in different spots in the kitchen and looked at it. Have any of you actually been so privileged as to eat a lilac pepper? If so, please tell me what I can expect...

Also at the farmer's market, I found some lovely tomatoes, red bell peppers, and garlic (and thirty bucks worth of other stuff, but that's for another day.) Back to the tomatoes, red bell peppers, and garlic:


Ever since I got my food mill, I have wanted to try my hand at my own tomato/marinara sauce. And today was the day!! Since I got such lovely peppers as well as lovely tomatoes, I decided to make a roasted red pepper marinara.

I roasted the peppers per instructions from Giada: put them under the broiler for twenty minutes, rotating so that each side burns and blisters. (And don't do this while any one is sleeping - your smoke alarm will go off for the entire twenty minutes.) Then put the hot peppers into a ziplock bag and let them come to room temp.

Meanwhile, I sauteed six cloves of garlic in one tablespoon of olive oil for one minute over a medium/low heat. I added two pounds of quartered tomatoes and let them cook and break down for about 15 minutes. Then I ran the results through the finest setting on the food mill. It kept all the seeds and peels! I love my food mill!!

I set that aside and peeled and de-seeded my now cooled peppers (the zip-lock bag thing worked like a charm - they were really easy to peel.) I chopped them, and added them into a pot with my pureed tomatoes. I added a half a teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon each of dried basil and oregano, and few grinds of black pepper. I let that simmer for about thirty minutes, adding a tablespoon of tomato paste about halfway through as it wasn't getting thick enough for me. Then I lightly pureed the whole thing with my stick blender (some chunks of pepper were still in there.)

And let me just say.....it is AWESOME. I can't wait to eat it on something. I'm putting it on a pizza tonight, and will try to have it over pasta some time soon.


What a way to celebrate the Fouth of July -making a classic Italian Sauce!!

Shopping

So, Dick's Sporting Goods is having a big sidewalk sale. We stopped by this week to pick up some golf shirts. Thought I would share with you what it's like to shop in a sporting goods store with Daniel:

The Mixer Is Back

Yes, as you may have surmised from my sidebar, the mixer is back. I made cookies last night. It's not what it was - the speeds are a little off, and it makes a horrible grinding sound on "stir". And then there's the trust factor: gone are the days of leaving the room while it whips away on its own. Let me down once, shame on you; let me down twice, shame on KitchenAid.

But it mixes. I haven't tried kneading pizza dough yet. I thought we'd take it slow, let the awkwardness wear off a little before trying to get back to a place that feels normal. I fear that we might never know "normal" again, but I'm willing to try. I'm willing to try.