OK, just in this first week, the CSA is definitely living up to expectations. Here’s this week’s portion:

• One bunch asparagus (the source for this got left off the list somehow; I suspect either Heartland Family Farm or New Growth Gardens)
• One bag watercress from Heartland Family Farm
• One bag “spicy greens” mix from New Growth Gardens (no link available that I could find)
• One bunch spring garlic also from New Growth
• About half a pound of oyster mushrooms from Steve Spencer (I think that link’s right), but that’s not the bestest part:
• One pint of delicious fresh 100% pure maple syrup from Hanner Sugarbush

We’re already into “Iron Chef Our Kitchen” territory, because we have no idea what to do with most of that. But it all looks and smells so good, and we’ll figure it out. I already have a start on it; I’m having a CSA lunch! It’s my semi-regular beans-and-rice day, and I needed something to do with them beyond just plain old beans and rice. So I chopped up some of the mushrooms and a little bit of the garlic (which looks a lot like spring onions, but thinner and… garlickier) in some butter, and then tossed in some of the spicy greens long enough to wilt them. I also packed some watercress with a little light dressing of rice vinegar and sesame oil for my daily veg, just to see what it tasted like. We’ll see how all that comes out.

Outside of that, it sounds like Tim’s thinking of using the rest of the mushrooms in some pasta sauce and baking some maple cookies. I think the spicy greens we can cook up and freeze after cooking; they’re really hardy, stood up to the cooking really well, and actually I’m thinking they may be the sort of greens that have better texture cooked anyway. The garlic could be used in just about anything for flavor. The asparagus we might wind up with tonight as a side dish. I’ve got no clue on the watercress, though.

From the recap of last week’s Top Chef at TWoP (which, yes, I’m still reading for the moment despite earlier complaints): “Richard informs us that a fifteen-minute challenge is his biggest nightmare. Mine involves Herself the Elf and a bowl of ice cream, but that is neither here nor there.” YES! Someone else remembers Herself the Elf! There have been all kinds of vintage girls’ cartoons coming back into vogue lately (Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite, and so forth), but I’ve noticed a distinct lack of Herself the Elf. I was beginning to wonder if I’d made her up.

I went over to another building to test some code today, and while I was there it started to rain. Hard. By the time I needed to go back to my own building, it was… still raining. Hard. I waited by the door for just a couple of minutes to see if it would let up. It didn’t. So I stepped outside, and just as the door closed behind me, a brilliant, almost reddish, gigantic bolt of lightning slammed down out of the sky across the way. Then, a fraction of an eyeblink behind, just enough to notice the delay in retrospect but not enough to even register it immediately, the accompanying thunder just exploded into the air. Car alarms started sounding in the parking lot below me, and I was so startled that it took me a moment to register the fact that everything sounded a little muffled as I rushed through the downpour to my car. It’s things like this that really make you appreciate the destructive power of nature. And get you absolutely sopping wet.

The CSA starts today! Tim’s going out to pick up our produce. I can’t wait to see what we’re getting. It’s like Christmas in May. I’m sure there will be some greens. Radishes and asparagus and spring onions were starting to show up at the Farmer’s Market this week, too; maybe we’ll get some of those.

OK, I lied. Four bits, because speaking of the Farmer’s Market, I really should blog the fact that we got flour there this past week. Freshly ground whole wheat flour. It’s the first time I recall seeing such a thing at the Market, and I was quite intrigued by the idea that yes, people do grow wheat in Indiana, and yes, you can get local flour after all. (Expensive, sure. But it made some awfully good bread.)

…how can you not smile at this?

Although I consider myself fairly well-educated and somewhat well-read (somewhat), I have to admit that I’ve got huge gaps in my experience, exposure and education. This was probably not at all helped by my choice to go to a two-year tech school instead of a four-year university. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have had it any other way; but I did miss out on all those classes that, while not strictly necessary for living my life, would have given me a richer and fuller educational experience. And no, it never occurred to me to go off and read about these things on my own at the time. I had other things on my mind just then, and a reading list a mile and a half long besides. (That part, at least, hasn’t changed.)

Where am I going with this? Well, did you read the post title? I’m going to philosophy, of course. Nietzsche is one of those people whose ideas I’ve had filtered down to me through various other sources (notably Heinlein; Stranger in a Strange Land particularly makes a point of discussing Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy) over the years, but don’t have a clear firsthand understanding of. I am, in fact, so ignorant of Nietzsche’s work that it was a surprise to realize that the Xenosaga video game series takes its subtitles entirely from that source. (Der Wille zur Macht, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, and of course Also Spracht Zarathustra; I at least give myself credit for recognizing that last title, even if I know nothing about the work itself.) The understanding of which would probably, were I to learn something about those works and play the games again with them in mind, make the games much less of a total mindfrag.

Yes, I’m slowly getting to the point. If you’ll recall, one of my spring goals was to read one book per month. I’ve failed utterly in that goal in April, and I think I’m going to have to switch books because the one I’m trying to read is just not engaging me. Part of the goal, unspoken, was the desire not just to get back to reading regularly but also to expand my “known universe”, as it were, by reading things that I hadn’t read before, particularly the sort of book that I always think I would be interested in and never get around to actually reading. And things that had a little more meat to them, so as not to let my brain go totally to mush if it doesn’t have to.

Philosophy, as a broad category, is a good example of that sort of book. I know so little about it as a discipline that I hardly know where to start, and thus “because the author just popped up on my radar” is really as good a reason as any to choose a starting point. Specifically, in this case, Nietzsche, of course. So the point of all this rambling is that I’m thinking of digging into Nietzsche’s work for my May book. Which feels a little weird, because philosophy is not something I normally read… but it’s something I’m interested in, I just never get around to reading it. I’m thinking of starting with his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, simply because that’s where he gets into the whole Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, which is a concept I’m relatively familiar with already.

My main worry is that my brain just won’t put up with this kind of substantial reading right now and I’ll wind up right back where I’m at now by the end of May, grumbling about how I never really wound up reading much this month and need to find something else and how I’m not meeting my goals and all that. But I’ll never know if I don’t try, right?

(Dammit. I checked my spelling, like, ten times before posting this entry because I knew I’d get it wrong, and still discovered after publishing it that I’d gotten it wrong. How embarrassing.)

Right, so one of my spring goals has been accomplished. I have worked out a way to function on the amount of sleep I’m getting, even if it’s not an ideal amount. Without caffeine, even. It requires a lot of careful planning and vigilance, so I don’t always manage to stick to it as well as I might, but when I do I can definitely tell the difference. Here’s how it goes.

The first of the three major components of this is food. I have to eat the right things at the right times, and recognize what foods will work best to combat fatigue if it sets in unexpectedly. I eat smaller meals and space out snacks throughout the day so that I don’t get too much of an energy “rush” at once (which would inevitably bring a crash later) and make sure to get in a good mix of energy-giving snacks to maintain energy levels throughout the day. “Smaller meals” is important, too; eating too much in one go weighs me down and makes me tired. Generally, “a good mix of energy-giving snacks” means a piece of fruit and some corn chips and salsa at different points in the morning, and then some cheese, a vegetable, and some dried fruit spread out over the afternoon. Then when I get home I’ll often have a slice of Tim’s fabulous 9-grain bread with some melted cheese and jalapeno slices on it to sustain my energy to dinnertime. (Credit goes to Eyebrows for the bread-and-cheese-as-energy idea, which has turned out to be invaluable to me.) By understanding what foods give me how much energy and when I’ll need it, I can plan out a day full of tasty snacks that keeps me going despite being short on sleep.

The second thing is activity. It seems, in some ways, counterintuitive that doing more would help me be more energized, but it’s true. This cannot be an emergency measure only, though, getting up and walking around just when I feel like I’m about to fall asleep. Just like the food, I have to make an effort with this at several points throughout the day to sustain my energy. Otherwise, it’s like a healthier version of sugary snacks; it’ll fix the problem short-term but I’ll just crash harder when the effect wears off. Any time I get up from my desk, I do three exercises before I sit back down. (Which ones varies, but there are many you can do at your desk in just a minute or so with no equipment and without messing up your clothes lying on the ground or working up a sweat.) I also make a point of walking down the long central hallway in my building and back at least once each day, and when weather permits, walking around the outside of the (five-acre) building after lunch. None of it is much effort by itself, but it all adds up to keep just the right amount of energy available to me.

The final component is hydration. I know that the myth that you need eight 8-oz glasses of water each day has long ago been busted, but as far as I’m aware the fact still remains that the human body needs quite a bit of water to operate. If I don’t give my body what it needs to operate, it’ll get sluggish on me, whether it’s running short on food or water. So I start out each day with a glass of cold water, followed by a travel mug of herbal tea on the way to work, and then keep a glass of water handy as much as possible during the day. (At home, to change things up a little, I’ll add some unsweetened cranberry juice or a little lime or lemon for taste.) All that water really seems to help, in combination with the food plan and activity level, to keep me going.

So there it is. My plan for staying awake on what is probably not enough sleep. (I’m also convinced, btw, that these factors have contributed greatly to my continued success with the weight loss.) Now, my big problem is just remembering to stick to it all the time. If I can do that I’ll be golden.

Today* is a big day for Tim and me. It marks the tenth anniversary of our first date. We’ve been together for ten years now. It hasn’t always been paradise, I’ll admit that and I think Tim would too, but I think we’ve done really well at getting through the iffy parts together, and headed into our second decade of us-ness I think we’re stronger than ever. Go us!

(*OK. The honest-to-gosh truth is that we’re not totally certain of the exact date. It’s definitely within a few days of today if today isn’t the day, though, and after some reflection I do think that today is the day. Unless it was the 18th, or the 25th, and it would be just like my memory to screw up a digit like that…)

The water-retention weight is gone and took another pound with it. I’ve now lost fifteen pounds since late December.

(The rest of this is a mix of copy/pasting from my SparkPeople blog, which I really should put in the blogroll over there, and paraphrasing it.)

However, I am still discouraged by the sight of my abdomen. Overall the weight loss is working out pretty well, but I still have this unsightly bulge of fat where my baby-belly used to be. (No, I know you can’t see it, because I know how to dress around it. But it’s there, and I don’t like it.) I want to get rid of it, but I know that targeting any particular area for fat loss is a total fitness myth. I just have to keep exercising and hope my body decides to slim down where I want it to.

This is where I start to despair. Because the most effective cardio exercise is not going to be my little ten minutes at a time whenever I can fit it in plan. To be effective, I should sustain an elevated heart rate for a good 30-60 minutes several days a week. I don’t know where in the world I’m supposed to find the time or energy for that. To make matters worse, I suck at exercise. Even “easy” and “for beginners” stuff is a challenge, and the stuff I can do without working myself into a useless pile of sweat and sore muscles never seems to burn enough calories.

This is where it starts to look hopeless, and I start to be afraid that even if I lose the weight I want to lose, I’ll never lose the fat pack and I’ll never really be in shape. This is the point where I start to ask what the point IS, anyway.

This is the point where I have to remind myself that I can perservere. And this is the point where I remind myself that a couple of months ago, just having the energy to stay awake through the work day was a major achievement. And that when I started all this, there was so much more belly I couldn’t fit into the jeans that are loose on me right now. This is the point where I remind myself that I have made progress, and I can continue to make progress, even if sometimes it seems like it’s really slow going.

Recipe courtesy of Rebekah Fiedler at Fiedler Family Farms, paraphrased here because I don’t have the recipe in front of me at the moment.

Rebekah’s Fabulous Ribs

1 rack pork ribs
salt and pepper
1 bottle of the chef’s favorite beer
1 cup of the chef’s favorite sauce (BBQ or Hoisin is recommended, but be creative)

Preheat oven to 250 F.

Thaw out the pork ribs and put into a roasting pan, prettiest side up. (If you can’t decide which side is prettiest, just choose one; it doesn’t matter that much.) Liberally season both sides with salt and pepper. Pour the beer into the roasting pan. Cover the top of the roasting pan with foil. Put it in the preheated oven for 3 hours.

Take the roasting pan out of the oven, uncover, and check the ribs. At this point, the meat should be falling off the bone. If it’s not, you have two choices. You can either re-cover the pan and stick it back in for another hour before proceeding, or you can just decide it’s good enough and move on immediately.

Turn the oven up to 375. Brush the sauce over the top of the ribs. Then put the roasting pan back in the oven, uncovered, for another 20 minutes. This will help brown the ribs better and let the flavor of the sauce soak into them.

Enjoy!

I’ve barely posted anything lately, it seems. I guess because I usually post from work, and work is busy enough right now that I don’t have a lot of time for it. Then by the time I get home, I forget what I was going to say. Maybe I should start writing myself notes.

We’ve had two more successful food experiments since the sausage and apples. First there was the chuck roast, which Tim draped with bacon and then cooked for an hour or so. Mmmmmmmmm. No need to do any more to it (unless you want to leave it in longer; this came out probably medium rare), just slice and eat. Delicious. Don’t forget to eat the bacon too–no point in wasting it. The other was a recipe that was given to us for pork ribs, which I’d never eaten before, much less cooked. I’ll post it separately. I’m tapping my foot impatiently waiting for it to be May so the CSA can hurry up and start.

I feel restless today, like I want to be doing something creative. Writing fiction or poetry, maybe. (Simply recounting things from my life, as in this entry, hardly counts here.) Maybe cooking something I haven’t cooked in a while, or making up something new. Maybe web design. Taking pictures. The problem is, I’ve got this pent-up creativity but no time or inspiration to do anything about it. Or the talent, to some extent, but that doesn’t always bother me a great deal. At least, not until I get into the middle of the project and get frustrated with my inability to make the results match what I want…

The upgrade appears to have broken my MyLinkOrder plugin again, so once again the “Recently Heard” section in the left-hand sidebar is under the Blogroll. At this point I’m not sure I’m going to really worry about fixing it. I mean, I haven’t really been updating “Recently Heard” anyway.

Last week at weigh-in I was up three pounds from the previous week, which has got to be water retention. I was bad during the intervening week, but not that bad. I don’t say this out of ignorance or denial; between previous dieting runs and this one, I’ve got a pretty good idea now of how many extra calories I’m consuming when I cheat on the diet. And I did not cheat three pounds’ worth of extra calories. I’ve been trying to stay active and hydrated this week in hopes of shedding at least some of that water by weigh-in tomorrow. We’ll see.

Blah. My brain is so tapped out lately. Again. Still. Whatever. I’ll write a real entry again someday.

“A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob.”
–Frank Herbert, Dune

This morning at around 5:40, I was going through my morning routine when I heard a sound very like high winds rattling the siding on our house, except… rattlier, I guess. Louder than I would have expected from weather-related weirdness. “Huh,” I thought. “I wonder if that’s an earthquake?” Except I couldn’t feel the ground shaking beneath my feet or anything, so I wasn’t sure. Turns out my first instinct was correct.

I’m sad to say I’m growing disenchanted with Television Without Pity. While the merger with Bravo did bring some nice new things (I’m fond of djb’s “Week Without Pity” vlog, for instance), and the quality of the writing is still high… The thing is, since the buyout the site design has gone so far downhill that it’s actually beginning to be a bit of a put-off. There’s so much other stuff crowding the recaps into smaller and smaller spaces now, and it seems like an awful lot of that involves scripts that make the site slower to load. And I think the new content might have gotten a little out of hand; do we really need Movies Without Pity as well? The site hit it big because they found something they were really good at and focused on it. Is it a good idea to dilute that focus? And of course then Sars, Wing Chun and Glark left in March… Which could have been completely innocent, but struck me as a little bit ominous, the way so little was said about what was going on there. (And shortly after that, of course, was when the site design went from “OK, but a little busy” to “eeeeek”.) *sigh*

Webcomic diversions, one courtesy of Tim and one courtesy of Jen via Tim:
xkcd
Garfield Minus Garfield

I was going to blog this when it actually begins, but since I feel like rounding out the post a little more… Tim and I signed up for Core Farms CSA, which I would totally link to, but either someone’s hijacked them or their domain name expired, because I’m getting redirected to some sort of generic search engine where their site should be. Basically, we pay a lump sum up front (it works out to about $27/week) and then each week from May to October we get a basket of fresh produce from local growers. (Read about CSAs here.) Well, produce and related items; for instance, in fall we will almost certainly have lots of cider from the orchard where the CSA is based. We’re also kicking in a little extra to get a half-dozen eggs each week. We’re excited about this not just for the part where we’re supporting local agriculture, but also because it’s going to be kind of an adventure. Outside of the eggs, we won’t know what we’re getting each week until we get it, and we may not be entirely familiar with everything we get. It’s like Iron Chef in our kitchen! I’m going to try to blog interesting things that we get and what we do with them, if I think of it.

Did I blog that Natalie has teeth? Natalie has teeth! Two of them, bottom front. And a dental appointment in August. Let’s hope she has her daddy’s teeth and not her mommy’s.

It is finally light when I get to work again. I’m just that teensy bit happier for it. In other news, though, the improving weather also means it’s about time to start mowing the lawn again. I almost hate to, not just because I don’t like mowing the lawn but also because in some ways it’s so pretty right now. The grass is still struggling, just as it was last year, but the whole front yard is dotted with cheery yellow dandelions. I know they’re weeds and all, but I think they’re pretty weeds. (But not as pretty as clover. Which is coming up in our back yard, which is a good start. Now let’s see if last year’s grass comes up back there too.)

“Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and it has power.”
–Frank Herbert, Dune