What that woman said . . .

I was picking up my vegetables at the CSA drop the other day.  Another woman was there with her 3-year-old son, packing up their box.  She bent over to him and said in a voice that was meant to be overheard,

Andrew, that woman over there might not recognize me, but she taught me calculus twenty years ago!

Andrew was unimpressed, but of course I went right over to re-introduce myself, or actually, to have her remind me of who she was.  I somewhat remember the name, but there's no way I would have placed the face.  As I turned to go, she leaned over her son again and said,

And you know what, Andrew?  She taught me calculus while she was dressed in a cow costume!

Well, dang, now I'm sorry I gave that particular outfit away.

One Hot (miser) Mama!

July is supposed to be cooking us, but I feel like this summer has been more of a warming plate than an oven.  Oh, we've had a couple of toasty days, but mostly our summer here has benefited greatly from last winter's frigid temps; there's an ice sheet up in Canada that keeps sending care packages of cool air our way.

And because I live in a no-air-conditioning home, you'd think I'd be ecstatic, wouldn't you?

But this summer I've got other irons in the fire, so to speak.   In particular, all eyes are on the IronMan that comes at the end of August down in Kentucky.  It bills itself as "the hottest IronMan", and it promises race-day temps in the 80's or 90's.  That's a lot of heat to struggle through on one long day.

So instead of basking in the sun (or rather in the shade) of this miraculously tepid set of months, I'm trying to heat acclimate my body.  Temps in the high 80's?  Great day for a run!  Getting ready for bed?  Throw on a few extra blankets!  Heading for a friend's home?  Put on long pants and bring a sweater!

I've turned off the air conditioner in my campus office.  I go outside to read books.  I pretend I am a turtle, and I seek sunny spots on warm rocks.

***
There's supposed to be a point to my writing this.  Maybe the point is, after you read this you get to say, "Oh, thank goodness, I'm not her!".

But when I walk across my campus during these surprisingly moderate breezy days, wearing my long sleeves and my knee-length jeans, what other people actually say to me is, "Wow, is this heat killing me!"   And I think, "what heat?"

So maybe all my heat adaptation is really starting to kick in.  We'll know how well it really works in 7 weeks!

One flu over the Miser House

Around midnight between Friday and Saturday, the flu overtook my husband.  He spent a retch-ed night.

I prepared for the inevitable by hammering my training as well as I could over the weekend -- on Saturday, while my husband began to recover, I did a very hilly 65-mile bike ride (slow even by my standards).  Sunday before church, I upped my running milage from my usual weekend 6 miles to about 11.  By the afternoon, my guy was back on his feet and we went for a walk.

Sunday night (last night) I had my turn at feeling retch-ed.

There is something about a well-prepared-for flu that I actually enjoy.  Of course, being sick is not much fun, but the day after the awful night always amazes me.  I'm a little sore and achy, and very very tired. But the way that I get better is just . . . to lie here.  To sleep.  That's so amazing.  My body becomes this "I'll take care of you" machine.

Imagine if we could do that with other things around us:  The kitchen is a disaster?  Close the doors, let it rest, and come back 6 hours later;  the counters will be much clear and shiny.  That pile of grading overwhelming?  Put a blanket on it; give it some cool water, and have it take a nap.  Those papers will be all graded by morning.  But somehow this enforced rest actually works with recovering from the flu.  I love my body.

Today was the day I was supposed to go out for a 3-mile run with my friend June, a 15-mile bike-ride with my friend Andy, and then a solo 16-mile run through rolling Lancaster farmland.  But instead I'm snuggled up happily, glad for this little vacation my body is giving me.

Okay, back to my nap.

Gingerbread Hummus

Subtitle:  Oops!

So, I found this giant jar of beans at a yard sale last summer; and I bought it for a dollar.  The woman who sold it to me told me she'd put the beans in herself, layer by layer, and used it only "for decoration".  Me, I'd definitely use the jar to store baking supplies, and so I set about to slowly and systematically eat those beans.  The price was more than right.

Which brings us to Wednesday night:  soak a bunch of those beans.  Thursday morning: drain them, add more water, add a bit of oil and garlic, and pressure cook them for 8 minutes.  Then set the pot outside to cool off during the day.

Thursday night, I came home and drained the beans.  Half of the mixture made it into a "bean salad":  add oil, cider vinegar, salt, and a dash of lemon.  Marinate it in a jar.  That jar makes for a quick and easy, cool, filling snack.

The other half I tossed into the food processor to puree into hummus, with my usual slap-dash recipe.  (When her friends ask K-daughter what ingredients I've used in any particular dish, she laughs and says "stuff").  In this case, "stuff" means whatever spices and flavors I happen to want to put in -- usually garlic and mustard, either parsley or cilantro depending on what's sitting around in the freezer or on the counter, and salt -- a bit of oil, a bit of lemon juice, and bread crumbs.

Except that the jar of bread crumbs I grabbed from the freezer was really . . . gingerbread crumbs. Hence, oops.

(Yes, these gingerbread crumbs came from our ginger-fail house).  However, it turns out that ginger is a spice, too!  and it seems to go well in hummus.  And a touch or two of sugar doesn't seem to ruin the batch.

And when I stick the "Gingerbread Hummus" label on there, it sounds like I made it this recipe on purpose, right?

Thrifty Thursday: Paper food labels

This is just a little bit of something that makes me happy:  using pre-cycled paper as a trash-less way to label my food.

Once a week, we get a giant box of vegetables from our CSA.  This is what the pile o' veggies looked like this Tuesday when we brought it home:

 Totally beautiful.   But also, in this form, largely inedible still.  I've taken to spending an hour chopping things up the evening the veggies join our home.  First I take remove the greens from the carrots and beets.  The greens go into jars of water to keep them fresh until I cook them up:

(Yellow beets and purple carrots . . . what is this world coming to?)   Then comes some quality time with my food processor.   It's always easier to snack on veggies when they're already cut up, so chopping *everything* at once makes it much more likely that we'll grab, say, cucumbers and carrots as a snack instead of a plastic yogurt container or boxed cereal.  Some of the veggies (like the beets) I'll jar up with dressing, so they're packaged as ready-to-go salads.

But chopping is not enough, especially at the beginning of the week.  With so many people in my family home nowadays, and so many different veggies jammed into the fridge, I can't use my usual "magic memory" to make sure that we use up all the food.  Hence, the paper labels, which I attach with rubber bands or (in the case of canning jars) screwed on above the lid but below the ring.  Large, easy-to-read labels help the rest of the family know what's up for grabs!

Killer Spaghetti

Who's that broad-shouldered, shirtless young man standing at my front door?

Why, that would be my very own J-son!  Dang, he's growing up to be a darned good-looking man.  All that healthy eating and exercise is doing well by him, don't you think?

But that's not why I took this picture.  I took this picture because the door latch on the front screen door broke (the hardware cracked).  I biked to the hardware store, bought a new latch assembly, and handed the package to my older son.

"Since you can put together legos and bionicles, you can put together a new door latch.  Just call me if you need help."




J-son needed no further encouragement.  He determinedly waived aside all offers of assistance and set to work, concentrating hard.  Bionicles are indeed an appropriate practice problem for this kind of repair . . .

. . . but that's not why I took these pictures either.   I really took these pictures because I wanted to say something about killer spaghetti.

***

Let me back up a bit.  I grew up in a house with two parents who were experimental physicists, and both my mom and my dad encouraged us to learn to take care of ourselves in a bunch of different ways, crossing traditional gender lines so often I occasionally didn't know what the official roles were supposed to be. For example, when I was in Girl Scouts, my parents designed a "Plumbing Badge" (which doesn't exist except as a make-your-own at the Girl Scouts of America), and my mom and dad led a gaggle of 5th grade girls through the intricacies of shut-off valves, toilet flappers and float balls, washers, and sink traps.  Good stuff.  When we built an addition on the house, my teenage sisters and I got to help drive the rented backhoe to dig the footers.  We strung wiring in the empty, framed-out walls and installed electrical outlets and (single pole, double throw) switches.  We put up drywall and agonized over plaster patches. We also cooked, cleaned, and learned to use the sewing machine.  

I've come to realize that there's something even more counter-cultural about the way my sisters and I were raised.   It's not just what we did (construction, sewing, plumbing, cooking) that was unusual:  it was also what we didn't do.  What we didn't do was tell scary stories about how dangerous any of these activities might be.  The not-telling-stories-about-danger part matters a lot, especially when you want to empower people who might not otherwise have easy access to power.  It's standard fare to respond the way N&M recently did to my post on installing new light fixture -- that is, to respond with stories of danger ("one of his undergrad professors once said that the number one cause of death among electrical engineers is home wiring, but I'm not sure if that's true or not.")  

Is it true you can hurt yourself with home wiring?  Sure, I suppose so.  Could you burn down your home?  Yes, but it's not likely: the most likely thing that will go wrong is that you blow the circuit and the power goes out.  Annoying, but not life threatening.  

But compare that (scary, male-dominated) home wiring scenario to the (familiar, female-dominated) task of cooking dinner.  Here's N-son making spaghetti all by himself.  He's standing next to open flame.  He's boiling water.  He could burn himself; he could burn the house down.  When he grates the cheese, he could cut himself badly.  It's killer spaghetti.

Cooking is dangerous, too.  In fact, all the hospital trips and fire engine excitement that we ever had while I was growing up were the result of various forms of boiling water:  my sister went to the hospital with 3rd degree burns from a making-coffee accident, and we had to call the fire department because of a stove fire once when the water boiled away and the pan caught on fire.  But when a friend tells us she made spaghetti, my sisters and I don't jump in with stories about potential accidents and destruction.  

The stories we tell our kids shape who they want to be.  I'm thinking about that a lot right now as K-daughter tries to figure out how to finish out her education.  This last year was hard on her, academically and otherwise.  She tells me "I'm sick of being broke."  She's so good with her hands that I keep encouraging her to consider learning welding, where she could make big bucks.  But the other day, she came home and said, "I'm thinking I'd like to learn to be a hair dresser."    Uuggghhh.

I don't want welding, or fixing a latch, or cooking dinner, or replacing a simple gosh-darned ceiling lamp to be something that scares my kids so much that they avoid having a life that is financially-and-otherwise fulfilling.  

After all, doing a hard job -- and doing it well -- is a really good feeling.  It's the best way I can think of to open doors.

Latch replaced and working great.
No help at all from his mom.  Go,  J-son, go!

On being slow

Last year, when I rode my bike on the 50-mile-long Pedal to Preserve Farmland Ride, just about everybody passed me.  It wasn't simply the super-fit speedsters in full spandex who left me in the dust; oh, no, it was everyone.   Spherical old guys in floppy green t-shirts -- guys I would have blown by if I'd been running -- they just spun their pedals and rode up the hill away from me.  Gals in halter-tops who sported sandals with no toe clips, they blew by me, too.  The Amish guy on the single speed with a fully loaded milk crate strapped to the back of his bike . . . well, okay, him I passed.  But he wasn't doing the whole ride.

This past year, I did the ride again.  At the end of the ride, I bragged to my friend that no one in sandals passed me this year.  "Umm . . . " she responded, "the ride organizers banned sandals this year."

Oh.

Well, no spherical guys in floppy t-shirts passed me, either.

But I'm still pretty danged slow.  And, because I am so very very slow compared to other people who ride bikes, I have a lot of time to think about what it means to be slow.  First of all, in the battle for power between fast and slow, slow always wins.   To show what I mean by this, consider this example.

Suppose I struggle up one side of a hill at 10 miles per hour, and I zoom down the other side at 30 miles per hour.  What's my average speed?

You'd think the average speed would be 20 -- after all, 20 is right in the middle of 10 and 30; wouldn't the average speed just be the average of the speeds?  But no; I spend way more time going up the hill than I do going down the hill, and that skews the average.   In fact, I spend three times as long going up the hill as I do going down, because I do the uphill so slowly and the downhill so quickly.  So it turns out my average speed is 15 miles per hour, not 20.  Slow speeds really drag the averages down.

On the other hand, "slow" also gives the best chance for winning the "most improved award".   I'm guessing I might be able to fairly easily average 14 miles per hour for the bike portion of my triathalon.   (For those of you who want to snicker, I'll add that this includes rest stops and such . . . but yes, you're allowed to snicker.  I'm pretty pathetic still.)  At that pace, it'll take me exactly 8 hours to finish the bike leg.  But if I can manage to go just a little faster (15 or 16 miles per hour), then that'll cut my time down by as much as a whole hour.  That's HUGE!

In contrast, my speedy husband is hoping to average 19 mph.   He'll be ready to hop off the bike after a little less than 6 hours.  But for him, getting one or two miles an hour faster would only cut his riding time by a half-hour.  That is, getting better is twice as effective for me as it is for him, because he's already so good.

If you combine these two facts, you realize that for me, the best way to bump down my total IronMan time is to improve the parts I'm slowest at (that is, going up those danged hills).  July is going to see a lot more long rides, and bunch of hill workouts.  Sigh.

*****
The moral of the story:  There are much more general principals at stake; this isn't just about bike riding.  In general, improving the things we're bad at, even a little bit, helps us a lot more than improving the things we're already stellar at.