My first 15-hour challenge

This past Saturday, I set myself the challenge of moving constantly for 15 hours.

This is a kind of a weird preparation for the triathalon I'm hoping to do in 2015.  I figure it'll take me 15 hours to do the whole thing, and Saturday was the 15th of June . . . a bit of a pattern here.

I'm a bit of a long-distance admirer of people who take on extreme life style challenges for a while.  The "No-Spend Month"ers beguile me; the one-year "No Impact Man" experiment warmed my heart; the "No car month" folks had me rooting for them.

The closest I think I'd gotten to a semi-extreme challenge myself, though, was the year that I vowed to respond to the question, "How are you?" without saying "I'm so busy!".  It was a great experiment, all the more so because it stuck with me, just like the (almost) no-trash life stuck with this family.  (Wow).

So even though I wasn't planning to exercise hard the whole time -- even though I just (? just ?) wanted to practice moving and not sitting down for a whole day,  I figured I'd learn a lot by doing this.  And  learn a lot I did.

Like, 15 hours is a long time!  I mean, I knew that, but it didn't really sink in before that it meant that if I start moving at, say, 8:30 a.m., I'd have to keep going until almost midnight.   Also, as I started setting this up, I realized how hard it was for me to come up with interesting ways to keep myself moving, without totally wearing myself out.  With the help of a lot of really good friends, though, I count the "Motion Day" a success; the only times I sat down were to change shoes, do very private things, or paddle a canoe.

If you're interested in peeping at what my day looked like, here it is:

5:00 -- bike 6 miles  to Manheim
5:30 -- run 1 mile with my friend M,, then bike 6 miles home again
7:00 -- run 10 miles with my friend TL -- this was hard!
9:00 -- (cry, and) walk around the block eating bananas and chicken wings
            several times while the boys woke up and fed themselves
10:00 -- bike 7 miles to the  to the river with the boys,
11:00 -- go canoeing (2 miles, plus hauling the canoe on land to-and-from the water)
12:00 -- bike home
1:00 -- discover that my plan to swim 2.4 miles go awry when pool is *closed*.  Drat.
1:20 -- walk 3 miles down to County Park Pool with K-daughter and the boys, then walk 3.5 miles home
3:30 -- pull weeds to kill time (and to kill weeds)
4:00 -- bike 18-ish miles with my friend A.
5:30  -- do a few shopping* errands on the bike, probably about 6 miles
6:30 -- work in the garden: weeding, sifting compost, and adding 3 wheelbarrows of compost the garden
8:00 -- done!

Grand total: 

Running: 11 miles
Biking: 50-ish miles
Walking: 7+ miles
Swimming: Fail
Gardening and Puttering: Lots 

In addition to the exercise, I got to see many sights that make me love living in a place as diverse as Lancaster:

An Amish horsedrawn buggy
The Lancaster Gay Pride Festival
Latin music festival
A caravan of Harley Davison Motorcycles (drivers waved back at my sons)
A Model T Ford
Cows grazing in the luscious farmland
People dining al fresco at city sidewalk cafes
6-year-olds dancing in the Binns Park water fountain
And, of course, my FRIENDS!

* What does Miser Mom buy when she goes shopping?  a bag of popcorn kernels from the grocery store, and then a bottle of an unhealthy adult beverage from another store.

Pesto passion

It's mid-June, and my first ever garlic plants are coming up.  And if you pay careful attention, you can see there's a special treat available right now for all garlic growers:  Garlic Scapes.

If you look carefully at the garlic patch, you'll see these curly goose-necked creatures hidden among the leaves.  Those are the scapes.  My neighbor (who is an amazing gardener, so I'm totally trusting her on this) says that those will eventually straighten out and become tall, thick, and woody -- they'll be unsuitable for eating.  But now, while they're curly, they're really tender.  So I chopped off all my scapes.

Will this kill the garlic plants?  I don't know and I don't care, because now I have a handful of scapes and I'm ready to make this recipe I learned from my CSA several years ago.

Garlic Scape Pesto1/2 lb. organic scapes (chopped into 1" sections)
1 c. organic olive oil
2 c. grated parmesan cheese
In a blender, combine the scapes and olive oil. Pour mixture into bowl and blend the cheese in by hand.

The end result isn't at all basil-y (after all, there's no basil in it).  It's a bit creamy, like mayonaise or hummus. It's good enough to be the sole spread on a sandwich, in my G.L.O. (Garlic-Loving Opinion).  I make a lot of it at once, and then freeze the extra either in ice cube trays or in small canning jars.

In our case, the inaugural 2013 Garlic Scape Pesto batch made it into a pasta salad (with kale chips and a bit of turkey kielbasa thrown in as garnish).   And, as such, it didn't last long at all.

Summer Surprisingly Superb

Life is not a fairy tale, and people don't really live Happily Ever After (here on earth, at least).  But every once in a while, you get a glimpse of what life would be like if it were truly the Happily Ever After kind of life.

Like yesterday, for example.  Whooda thunk that the pieces could come together like this?  I woke my three at-home kids at ten minutes to six and they got up gladly, dressed and brushed their teeth, and then we zoomed our bicycles down to our local Rescue Mission to serve breakfast.  And instead of complaining about the earliness and the work and the heat, the kiddos bubbled over with happiness and declared to me, "Mom, we should do this every week."   Like, who's life is this, really?

After that, we biked over to the farmer's market where I picked up milk and kale, to general rejoicing.  (Yes, my teenage boys really did do the Kale Happy Dance.)  We biked home, and the weather turned even more glorious as the boys took themselves to tennis camp while I did math.

The afternoon swirled around through lunch, through reading time (mostly mine), parks and basketball (mostly the boys), friends (mostly K-daughter), and a vigorous round of swimming (all of us together).  After dinner with a surprise-and-very-welcome guest, the boys and I biked ebulliently to drum practice, where N-son's teacher took me aside to say earnestly, "Thank you for bringing N-son to work with me.  I get goosebumps all over when I hear him play."  (I love that drum teacher a lot, but I think he's even more hippie granola than I am).

After drums and the library, the boys chased fireflies and had the obligatory second dinner.  And then they begged to be allowed to go read their new library books.   Lovely.

A year ago, this would have been hard to imagine -- we were in the beginnings of some rough and stormy patches with C-son, and that particular story didn't end like a fairy tale.  It was a miserable time. And perhaps yesterday's golden haze shone more brightly in contrast to my memories of last year.

You know, it wasn't a Perfect day.  I did have to send N-son to his room for making "That Face" again; I left random piles of unfinished work in my wake; I missed waking up with my husband (who is at army summer training for two weeks).  And I know the whole world did not rejoice with me; somewhere in the mist of my happiness floats a bit of gloom over someone I am fond of who is facing a terrible illness, and someone whom I love fiercely who is bravely caring for him.  Not an all the way, entirely, 100% perfect day.

But even so, the day just sort of glowed.  A window into the world of glory.  A feeling to remember.  A lot, when I think about it, like what Happily Ever After might look like, if fairy tales could come true.

Capital investments, home-tool version

When my husband and I got married, I had a sewing machine and he didn't.

An eleven-year-old N-son uses
my thirty-year-old sewing machine

That's not a particularly telling fact, given our genders.  But it's possibly more telling that I had an electric drill, and he didn't.  I also owned a well-organized tool kit, including hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches, tape measure, and pliers, whereas he had  a box of miscellaneous tools.

Want to guess who owned the jig saw and the circular saw?  The plumbers' snake?  The pitchfork?  That would be me again.

We still both think it's funny that  I thought I was marrying a rich man.  Why did I think he was rich?  It was the way he spent money on things like clothes, food, and books, areas of the budget where I definitely scrimped.  Plus, I knew that he earned more money than I did.  What I hadn't quite realized at the time is that the way somebody spends (or invests) money is actually a much bigger insight into wealth than the amount that person earns.

In order to turn income into wealth, we have to make capital investments.  I've always thought of "capital" as "money".  If you'd looked at our money investments sixteen years ago, you'd have seen that my husband had a retirement account only half the size of mine, despite his having been in the workforce twenty years to my five.  He also had a small rolling amount of credit card debt but no emergency fund.  So on the "capital = money" side of things, he really wasn't a particularly wealthy guy after all.  (It's a good thing that his money wasn't the reason I married him!  And really, he's a terrific guy.  I feel more than a little yucky for sounding like I'm picking on him so much here).

A couple of books I've been reading lately have made me realize that money is only part of the building-wealth story, though.  "Capital" also means equipment and materials that can be put to productive use.  Indeed, the whole reason that Capitalism has been so influential (according to Heilbroner and Thurow) is that "the market system becomes an immense force for the accumulation of capital, mostly in the form of machinery and equipment."  A cloth manufacturer who gets investors to float some money for a new loom is going to be able to produce more cloth -- and therefore earn more money for everybody involved.   (Little plug here for lending money through Kiva -- you get to be part of "an immense force for the accumulation of capital").

And a person just starting out in life will build more long-term wealth by purchasing a good sewing machine than by buying a lot of clothes.  The former is a capital investment; the latter is just what Thorstein Veblen would call "conspicuous consumption" (a.k.a., showing off).  In the case of my husband, it wasn't even that --- it was entertainment.  Moving money out of his own pocket and into someone else's cash register --- well, that was a game that got rewarded with prizes of fun clothes, ready-made food, immediate gratification.

I'm fortunate that, for me, these tools are just as much fun as nice clothes are for my husband.  Actually, maybe they're even MORE  fun, because a sewing machine and a drill are so versatile, I can keep playing new games with them.  (Check out how I repaired some of my son's wooden train tracks with wooden beads and chopsticks!  Whoop!)

Train pieces with the knobs chewed off.  (Blame the dog?)

My drill, wooden beads, chopsticks, a bit of glue
fix everything right up.

I was thinking about the home-tool-variety of capital investments this past weekend as I purchased a $7 mower-blade sharpener for my drill.  I bought it new; I bought it full price -- not my standard op procedure.  But over the past few years I'd tried unsuccessfully to find a place that will sharpen blades cheaply, and a new blade runs $20 or more.   And so I decided that this recent purchase is like the $20 thermos that pays for itself in half a year -- buying a sharpener  that will save me $20 every couple of years is a darned good way to invest $7 of my money.

Clothes sorting day

The end of school has come and gone; the boys are home for the summer.  I've promised them lots of chores during these long, otherwise unstructured days; I figure if I keep my promise, they'll learn a lot; if I don't keep my promise, they won't mind.

Making shorts decisions.

Chores began in earnest yesterday.  Thursday was "Fashion Show Day", a day to sort clothes.  We dug through closets and storage bins and pulled out all their clothes, lugging them all into the dining room.   When I say "all their clothes", I really do mean ALL.

Then I sorted everything into piles by kind of clothing (coats, long-non-school pants, long school pants, etc.).  And then I brought in the boys to try things on and make some hard choices.

Kids' clothes have a way of multiplying; they're like the fluffy little Tribbles on Captain Kirk's ship:  they seem cute and harmless at first, but before you know it, they're everywhere.   The clothes seem to procreate in my son's closets.  Outfits in their dresser drawers start expanding, swelling to the point that drawers can't close all the way, and eventually exploding into scattered piles on the floor.  Piles of shirts and shorts seem to generate themselves spontaneously underfoot, behind the living room couch, in the corner of the dining room.  Even my own carefully tended storage closet seems to grow slowly denser and denser -- a stealth army of shorts and jackets silently occupying territory.

Two overflowing laundry baskets of clothes to give away.

So one major goal of the cleaning is culling the herd of clothing.  I set population limits and strictly enforced them.  For example, each boy got to choose his favorite seven t-shirts and five pairs of shorts to keep in his room.  They got to choose ten more t-shirts and pairs of shorts to store in the basement.  The rest, we donated.  We gave away huge amounts of clothes, some of which are too small, some of which are no longer loved, and many of which are redundant.

The mending basket, with notes to my forgetful self.

Major goal number two is knowing what I have so I can intelligently fill in the gaps during the summer while yard sale season is in full swing.  The boys have more t-shirts than they would need even if they were an entire football team.  And somehow we accidentally acquired/inherited/bred enough school shorts to last them until they are old enough to run for president.  But long-sleeved school shirts?  Those are a rarer beast.  So I'll pick up nice school shirts if I can find them cheap enough, but I'll steer clear of shorts.

For this reason, labeling boxes and bins as I go along is crucial.   Man, do I love labels!  For an absent-minded professor like me, they're like "external memory".  I keep a stack of pre-cycled paper (paper with one side blank, that is) and a dark magic marker to label piles, bins, baskets, and even individual clothes as I go along.  With so many piles, it's just too easy to forget what's what.

 I label individual clothes that need mending.  I label boxes with what's inside them.  And when everything is sorted, I go through the boxes and make counts of what's inside, so I know what kinds and sizes of clothes I need to scout around for.  And I know what NOT to shop for, too (dang, how did we wind up with so many pairs of school shorts?)

Keeping a record of what clothes we have,
and therefore what areas of the wardrobe are running thin.

This, I won't kid myself, is a lot of work.  It took us probably two or three hours, including carrying baskets, trying things on, and cajoling and threats.  We took breaks to meet a friend, and another break for some yummy homemade granola snacks.   But  the work is behind us now and the clean, well-labeled storage area is smiling out at me at last.

The boys have relatively spacious closets and dressers.  The clothes are ready to go forth and multiply once again.

Get Over Yourself (or, Liberal praise for a Conservative approach to clothes)

I don't actually think I'm a space alien.  I'm pretty sure if you saw me, you wouldn't immediately peg me as belonging some utterly unusual culture or special tradition, the way you might instantly pick out the Amish who live in my county as being unlike yourself.

But when it comes to buying and wearing clothes, I do often feel like a Martian among Earthlings.  I'm the alien observer, the visitor from some other planet.  I have a hard time following ordinary conversations about shopping and dressing.   My best friends all know this.  So when they talk about clothes, they do the important part of their talk among themselves, and they only bring me into the conversation at the end, once the business part of the conversation is out of the way.  After all, who wants to hand over urgent Earthly matters to a Martian?

Case in point: a recent conversation about wearing bathing suits.  This was a discussion between my running buddies TL and K, and I just happened to be there for the conversation because, well, because we were running together.  I was there, but mostly I wasn't talking because of two reasons: one reason is the whole "what exactly do you say?" problem  I have with normal clothes conversations, and the second is that TL and K are way better at running up hills, which is what we happened to be doing at the time (if you can call what I was doing on that hill 'running', which is another matter.)

So I got to be the alien observer.  The gist of the conversation happened to be that K had bought a swim suit that either had or didn't have a butt-skirt (I forget which way it went), and she was having a difficult time wearing it to the pool with her kids.  The difficulty she had was because of how she looks in it.  (Please remember that K is beating me up this mile-long hill as she says this; she's an incredibly fit person who is worried about how she looks in a swim suit).

TL (who is likewise bounding, gazelle-like, up this hill) commiserates.  There is much discussion of how a suit looks on us, of how we feel about how our suit looks, about our need to accept our bodies (or our swim suit styles? I forget), and of coming to terms with appearances and such.  I couldn't take notes, so I don't remember it all, but if you're an Earthling I'm sure you can fill in the details.

We got to the top of that evil Duke-Street-hill about the same time that TL and K seem to have achieved some kind of resolution.  At this point, it was okay to bring in the Martian perspective, so TL turned to me and say, "And what about you?  You always  have a different take on this kind of question.  Do you like how you look in your bathing suit?"

What does the Martian think?  The Martian thinks they're asking the wrong question.

Here's the question the Miser Mom Martian thinks about:  why am I wearing the swim suit?

Sometimes, it's to accomplish a particular task (for example, getting in a swim workout).  In that case, what I think about is how well the suit fits and how well it lets me do my workout.

The other reason to wear a swim suit -- the big cultural reason -- is to show respect for the people and the circumstances around me.  That is, when I go to the pool with my kids, I wear a swimsuit to respect the pool tradition.  In my head, it's not about me, it's about the other swimmers and sun bathers.  And if I'm wearing a suit that respects local conventions, then I don't have to worry about myself; I can think about everything else:  my kids, the people around me, swimming, conversations, etc.

Mariah Carey wore her ball gown to the pool,
but that was a special occasion (her fifth wedding anniversary).

Here's another way to think about it.  I may or may not "look good" in a swim suit; I may or may not look good in a ball gown as well.  But I wouldn't wear a swim suit to a fancy dinner, and I wouldn't wear a ball gown to the pool.  The reason for the clothes is the event, not my own body.  Said another way, it's not about me; it's about the occasion.  That's actually a very liberating way to dress.

Maybe because I read so many old novels and devoured Miss Manners etiquette columns as a kid, I tend to think in old-fashioned ways about the role of costuming.  (My clothes are funky and a bit eccentric, but my thinking about them is old and crusty).  One hundred years or so ago, we didn't talk so much about self-expression and personal freedoms.  Our language and our society in those days focused much more on the collective.  It's only very recently that we've come to think our clothes define us, rather than thinking that our clothes are a tool for binding us more closely to the social fabric.  And --- as the conversation between  TL and K shows --- I don't think that the change has necessarily made us happier.

My husband heard the first part of this post and asked me, "So, what does that mean about the swim suit?  Should she wear the suit with the butt-skirt or not?"  Bzzzt!  Wrong question again!  The clothes decision goes like this:  "I'm taking my kids to the pool so that we can have fun together and with other people at the pool.  What clothes will allow me to do that?"   The answer will depend on community standards and tradition (does this more-or-less match what other people might wear?)  and also on functionality and fit (does the suit allow me to move around on deck and in the pool?).

After that, the best way to look good in your suit is to stop caring about how you look, but instead to enjoy the pool and the people around you.  

4 hot dogs and 51 miles

This post has nothing deep, just two little tidbits of progress and happy news.

Hot dog!
The first tidbit is that we've heard updates from the orphanage in Haiti where our someday-to-be son is staying.  They say,

. . . he is a very polite, delightful, helpful young man.  We are very impressed!  And he can EAT!  Lol.  I think he had 4 hotdogs last night. ;)

Since we were worried last month about his going for days with no food, we're now relieved to hear that he's getting enough (and even that "enough" means "a lot" -- he'll fit right in with the rest of the family).


Bicycle Bragging
The second tidbit is that triathalon training is proceeding apace.  On Saturday, I did my longest ride so far in my life -- 51 miles, on an organized ride through our rolling farmlands.  And then Sunday, I went out for a jaunty little 22-mile ride.  That IronMan?  I think I'm going to be able to do it!

My friend saw me and my husband riding along, right about here (on Indiantown Road),
and she made this "commemorative" for me.  Isn't that sweet?

I could pretend that I'm totally awesome for finishing the 51-mile distance in a mere 3.5 hours.  (And in my head, I'm definitely thinking whoop! whoop! I did it!).  But full disclosure means I should admit that I was riding in the midst of total amateurs who were way faster and stronger than I was.  Even the nearly-spherical man in the floppy green t-shirt was faster than I was --- he rode up the 1-mile long hill away from me, and I couldn't have caught him even if I tried.

And in some backward sense, this gives me even more reason to think I'll be fine on the triathalon.  These guys who looked like they spent more time on a couch than on a cycle were just zoomin' along.   So if I just keep practicing on the bike, but I hammer the running again, I figure I'll be okay.  (Maybe?)