The moving sidewalk ends here . . . for now

Taking a sabbatical isn't the same as taking a vacation.  I just have to say that.  There are ways I do humongous amounts of work; it's just not committee/classroom work.  

But it's also true that having a sabbatical is a luxury.  It's a luxury of space and structure.  I spent the end of August trying to clear out the cobwebs and rug dust of my life, making room so that I could have an open path toward my math research.  Just about the time that I despaired of ever making headway in getting started on my paper, the locomotive of logical thinking barreled down upon my brain, and I got to spend all my waking hours obsessing over geometry.  Food and dinner was a mere distraction; my marriage was a mosquito buzzing around my head; my children were just a speed-bump on the beautiful paved highway toward my mathematical work.  There was nary a committee meeting or a student to get in my way or turn me aside from the thoughts racing around in my head and spinning themselves into theorems on my laptop.  This week, after a month of obsessing over theorems, lemmas, corollaries, axioms -- after a month of intense intimacy with geometry -- I submitted my paper to a kick-butt journal, and I was sort of sad to see it go.  I had loved spending time in the arms of my research, and now my research has packed its bags and boarded the airplane.  Cross fingers that it'll get accepted.

What I do when I'm doing math

And so what have I been doing with myself since I submitted the paper?  Well, aside from recovering from a fatal disease that I don't actually have, I've been giving my brain a bit of "margin".  Working hard, but not on math, so I can get ready for the next big math push.

I've done some sewing, making myself a new planner bag:

(I'm sure I'll write more about this bag in another post).   And I've been moving the sidewalk behind our house.

Doesn't everyone move sidewalks? Well, maybe not.  But it seemed like a good brawn-vs-brain task for celebrating the completion of a paper.  Here's the current extent of our new section of sidewalk . . .

 . . . ending right at a grove of giant okra.  The okra plants have grown taller than I am; in fact, they're up to the roof of the garage now.  It feels heartless to pull them out to make way for my new road, right?

I've been moving the sidewalk one paving stone at a time; this week I've been moving more and more of them.  For about two or three years, I've had my garden sandwiched between the sidewalk and the garage.  I've been thinking that next summer, it would make more sense to switch these: to have the sidewalk sandwiched between the garden and the garage.   Moving the garden out would give the plants more sun; moving the sidewalk in would give walkers more shelter from the elements; plus the new arrangement would make it easier to reach all the plants.  In theory.  We'll see how this goes.

For now, I'm happy and very dirty, with a sidewalk that leads visitors right up to a grove of stately okra, and then stops.  And then jumps out three feet to another, older sidewalk, that continues on.

But the okra, it's going to go. Soon.  And the sidewalk will plow through.  And once the sidewalk is all in the right place (and my muscles are all sore, and the dirt has coated my clothing and then gotten washed away), I'll be ready to go back to my next big math project.

Sabbatical Yay.

Leftovers from a soup kitchen

So, how frugal am I?  I'm so frugal . . . that I feed my kids discards from the local soup kitchen!  How's that for cheap?

Now that my sabbatical has been well underway, I've been volunteering one morning a week at the breakfast line at our local rescue shelter.  It's been a super-fun thing to do, for a whole bunch of different reasons.  I'm downtown that morning anyway because it's my usual market day; I like feeling that I'm helping out our community; and I've really, really come to like the folks who work and eat there.  

I've taken to bringing kids' books along with me and reading them to the kids who are getting ready to go to school. (Yay for "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!")   I have bike conversations with the guys who are getting ready to bike off to their own jobs. I talk about boxing with one of the chefs, and I compare grandchild stories with my fellow food server.  But mostly, I just hand out bowls of fruit, bowls of oatmeal, servings of bacon, and groove to the way-too-loud (but awesome) Praise Music that is playing in the kitchen.  It's good times.

Two weeks or so ago, as I was helping clean up after breakfast was over, I heard my co-workers clucking over wasted food.  Bagels, scrambled eggs, all going into the trash.  What a pity!  Of course, I joined in with questions of "can't you save it?"  Well, they're not allowed to let the guests take the food out of the mission (liability reasons, not to mention that few people who eat here have place to store/reheat food anyway).  They offered me some, but the only containers they had were styrofoam clam shell containers.  Even if I could have overlooked the styrofoam, though, I'd biked downtown with my market backpack; the food would have spilled all over.

And I'd never thought about this before, but it is a funny question to think about:  what happens to the food when food pantries get rid of food?  Answer:  trash!

Since that week, though, I've come prepared. This week, a sturdy tea towel wrapped up a pile of pancakes (still warm when I got home) that became a breakfast for me and my husband . . . 

. . . and two canning jars (but of course) held a bunch of scrambled eggs (some plain, some "cheesy ham").

So dinner that night became "Scrounge Soufflé":  scrounged scrambled eggs mixed in with beet greens (leftover from making grilled beets), diced swiss chard stems (leftover from making a swiss chard salad), orphan tomatoes from the fading garden, and a bunch of overlooked shallots.

Too funny.  I already give money once a year to this particular place; if I'm going to start using their food to feed my family then I guess I ought to up the contribution. 

My Brain is Formidable (or, Apparently I'm not actually fatally ill)

So, last Wednesday a week ago, I popped into my doctor's office.  She looked over my chart and said in a chirpy voice, "your lab results look great!"  That's the takeaway: I'm officially and certifiably in excellent shape, confirmed not only by those lab tests, but also by a subsequent abdominal ultrasound.  I'm fine, really.

But the reason that I had that ultrasound is that when my doctor chirped, "your lab results look great!",  I responded with "are you kidding?!?"  And then I proceeded to grill her.

I should back up.  Way back in June, I had my annual physical that comes with a side order of blood test stuff. I have always been an insanely healthy person, so much so that about thirteen years ago, when a co-worker needed a kidney, I figured "what the heck?  Let her have one of mine!  I have more than enough health to go around!"  Since then, I've given blood regularly, adopted kids, run marathons, finished an IronMan, and done other rah-rah uber-healthy things.  My annual exams always make my doctor wistful, wishing she had more patients like me.  And so it was very gingerly that my doctor suggested, back in at my exam in June, that one of my blood test results could bear a bit more watching:  I ought to get re-tested in three months.  And since the watch-able result had something to do with kidney function, I agreed (but in my head did that "hah, hah; no way there could be anything wrong with me" thing that I do).

Zoom forward to mid-September, and I went in for another blood test.  The doctor tsk-tsked that I rode my bike a whole two or three miles to get to the blood test, because that could throw off the results, but at least I did ride slowly and leisurely.  These days, I've been biking more than 40 miles each week, plus running 13 miles each week, so a little 2-mile bike ride isn't really a workout.  I did my blood test, patted myself on the back, and biked on home.

And then on Friday, I got the results via computer, in this newfangled electronic records system that my physician's office has set up for me.  Ugh, what a horrid mistake!  Because this is where my formidable brain took over.  What follows is partly understandable, and mostly just really embarrassing.

So, the result my doctor was looking at back in June was my KFC -- my Kidney Filtration Category.  Okay, it's not really called a "KFC", but since what follows in this story is the result of my own brain instead of actual doctor advice, I'm going to call it "KFC" so nobody is even tempted to try to get medical advice from this post (other than, "trust your doctor", which I didn't have the opportunity to do).  On Friday afternoon, my email binged with the news that my test results were in, so I looked them up on the newfangled computer system, and it said, "Your KFC is 52%".

Okay, what the heck does that mean?  I looked around on various reputable -- I swear! -- web sites, and every single one of them said, "Dude.  Your KFC is supposed to be close to 100%. If it's below 60% for more than a quarter of a year, your kidneys are probably dying on you.  Get some good meds to keep them from getting worse too quickly".  I quick called my doctor's office, made an appointment for the first available date -- next Wednesday, and settled in.

From Friday to Wednesday, in the absence of actual doctor feedback, my formidable brain took over.  I already mentioned that I did research in reasonable places to do research, all of which shook their heads sadly at me and said that it's merely a matter of time before I go on a transplant list.  It wasn't long before the symptoms set in on me.  The fact that I'd been completely symptomless up to this very point was easily explained by those same reputable web sites, which said, "Most people with Chronic Kidney Disease exhibit no symptoms."  Oooh!  That's me!  But then, the tell-tale signs of true kidney failure started setting in:  thirstiness.  nausea.  chills.

By Monday, it had become increasingly clear that the problem was not merely that I had a weak kidney; no.   The pain that had started infecting my stomach meant that the kidney loss was a secondary cause of pancreatitis.  Or stomach tumors.  Or both.  Or maybe something having to do with my lungs.  My husband did his best to stay calm, as did I.  He said, "If it were anybody else but you, I'd have thought you were over-reacting.  But you are always so calm, I know this must be serious."  We went out for our anniversary dinner, and I watched him eat his food. I couldn't even touch mine.

And then Wednesday, I finally got to see my doctor, and she smiled cheerfully and said, "your lab results look great!"  And I asked "Are you kidding?  What about my KFC?"  She said, "Oh, people only use that for dosing purposes!  We really care about THIS number (some acronym) and THAT number (another acronym), and yours are both GREAT!"   And I asked, "Well, what about my chills?  My pains?  The pancreatitis?"  And so my doctor offered me anxiety medicine.

The doctor said, "By the way, you've lost weight!  That's great!  What have you been doing?"  And I said, "NOT EATING!!".  Losing weight is not the sign of health that it's cracked up to be.

I haven't taken the anxiety meds, but I did agree to take some heartburn medications.  And even though I felt perfect two weeks ago and I totally knew that it was my brain that had stressed me out, I was still stressed enough that eventually I whined my way into a total abdominal ultrasound.  And that's how I know that I'm fine, because apparently I'm beautiful on the inside.  But dang, my brain is powerful -- I'm still  having minor random stomachaches, and I know I've spent a bunch of money on meds and tests just because my brain led my body into scary new territory.  Not wasted money, exactly, but certainly money and anxiety that wouldn't have happened if I'd gotten the test results from the doctor instead of getting them on the computer with a 5-day head start on a proper interpretation.

How embarrassing.  It truly is nice to know for sure that my body is okay, just like I had always thought it was . . . and in an odd way, I'm even glad that I got to have the humbling and very educational experience of not being able to rely 100% on my health.  But I thought I'd had more control over the stuff between my ears.

The White Flour Happy Dance

So, about two weeks ago, we were having soup and bread for dinner at my house.  There were six of us there: me, my husband, and the two boys, of course (the four of us still all live at home) -- plus two of my daughters who come back weekly for what we call "Girl's Night", even though we're all adults.

At any rate, the conversation around the dinner table went like this:

"Yumm, this bread is delicious."
"Yes, it's really poofy!"
"Yeah, the bread seems different. Did you do something different?"
[me] "Actually,  I think I accidentally bought white flour."
"You bought white flour?"
"Mom bought white flour!!!"
"Wow, this is great!  White flour bread!"

And then my four kids actually started dancing in their chairs.  Happy dance! Especially the grown-ups.  My husband was in stitches: here was our family, rejoicing and celebrating over bread that I made with white flour.  Not whole wheat, but fluffy stuff.

I buy 50 pounds of flour at a time from our local Amish store.  I've been trying to keep up the healthfulness of food in our family, and so a year or more ago, I switched us to whole wheat.  Because I buy so much flour at a time, my baking supplies are a bit like an aircraft carrier:  I can't change direction quickly.  So my family has had a long time to get used to more . . . um . . . substantial bread, waffles, and even (yes) birthday cakes.  Can I say, I think that chocolate cake with whole wheat flour is really yummy?

But my family, even if they submit reluctantly to the yumminess of chocolate whole wheat cakes, still seems to prefer white flour.  "Prefer" in the sense of doing happy dances at the dinner table.

This blog post, I need not mention, is brought to you because my kids all said, "You need to write a post about this."

For what it's worth, here's a recipe for bread that makes kids dance at the dinner table:

• 1 and 1/3 cups water
• 1 Tbsp or so of vegetable oil
• 4 cups flour (whole wheat for long-term health, or white for dancing)
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1 Tbsp dry milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp yeast

Toss all of this, in this order, into a bread machine.   Use the "quick loaf" (1-hour) option, not the regular option, because this seems to make bread with a MUCH better texture.  Seriously.

Enjoy.

Frugal food thoughts

According to Mint, we've spent a lot on groceries recently.  Back in the beginning of September, the program sent me this dire warning:

Now, this $760 (or $437, if you want our "usually") monthly grocery bill is for a household of four hungry people, who almost never eat at restaurants.  And we're not particularly bird-like eaters, either:  when our family cooks potatoes, we cook five pounds at a time, and there's seldom any leftovers hanging around the next morning.  Ah, the joys of teenage-boy appetites!

Mint misses some of our expenses, so the number above is artificially low.  (It doesn't include school-purchased lunches, and it doesn't capture anything I purchase with cash or check, which probably averages out to an additional $100-150 per month).   Still, I think our grocery expenses are low enough to count as "frugal".  Certainly we're down there with what the USDA would call a "thrifty plan".

But although the number of dollars my family spends is one way to measure frugality (the easiest way to measure, and also the most obvious), it's not actually my own personal way of thinking about frugal food shopping.  I've been thinking about this a bunch, lately, in fact.

I've seen four main approaches to frugalling the food budget.

1. Coupons.  This is the most visible way of pinching food dollars, but I've always avoided it.  I started avoiding it because it was a suck on my own time and energy, but increasingly the reason has become more communitarian:  coupons are a suck on the time and energy of the entire system, because it requires that someone is there to create, promote, process, redeem, monitor, etc. coupons.  Relying on coupons as a regular strategy strikes me as one of those things that looks like it would bring food costs down, but long term drives them up by adding bureaucracy and inefficiency into the works.
2. Using the efficiencies of the system.  Several of my favorite frugality bloggers love Costco; some even groove to Walmart.  I don't (not that I'm arguing with my favorite bloggers, mind you).   There are a lot of ways that the efficiencies of the system map onto the frugalities I care about, but there are also ways that it doesn't:  here, I'm thinking about how these stores use more packaging than I do, and care less about building up local community than I do. 
3. Using the inefficiencies of the system.  My husband has become a big fan of this approach; he has taken to dropping into our local salvage store and buying whatever meat is just about to expire, now down to half or 25% of its original price. It's sort of a modern-day, corporate version of gleaning.  As a result, the boys are all reveling in lots more sausages, pork chops, hot dogs, etc than whatever they'd get from me.   (Yuck)
4. Focus on the food; move out of the system.  Back in mid-August, I spent $60 at a local farmer's market on 44 lbs of peaches ($44), 52 ears of corn ($10), and 18 bell peppers ($6).  The food was in season, locally grown, and went straight from the farmer's wagon into my own buckets and bins.   Later, I spent another $260 at our local Amish market on about 150 pounds of dry goods (flour, oats, nuts, etc.)  The food is now safely put up, and it ought last me through the winter, stored in my own glass jars and (for the flour and oats) old cat liter buckets.  All the packaging and trash I have to show for those big expenditures is a small pile of compostable/recyclable paper bags, a smaller pile of clear plastic bags (sigh), plus one receipt that I think is hilarious in its non-specificity (every item I bought is listed as "grocery").
   

   

   $259.33 worth of "grocery", next to the entire amount of packaging from the food.

   I like that my purchases bring me closer to the people who grow my food.  I like that I'm not spending money on advertising campaigns, newspaper inserts, package design, excessive packaging, air conditioning, shopping carts, cross-continental transportation, giant asphalt parking lots, and other things that come with "normal" store-bought foods.   It might not be the most frugal way to buy food measured in dollars alone, but it feels increasingly right to me.

Apple-y ever after

I've mentioned the cherry tree (yay), the peach tree (more yay), and the pear tree (oh, sigh).  Did I mention the apple trees?   Planted a few years ago in our front yard, and this year all of a sudden hanging heavy with apples.

My stepdaughters were back in town right about the time I realized that -- even though it was early September -- the apples were getting ripe and it was either the bugs or me that was going to get them. I Tom-Sawyered my step-daughters and their girl friends:  You know how much fun it is to go apple picking?   "Oh, YEAH!", they responded.  "I remember when we did that once.  That was fun!"  Wanna do it again right now?

It was a selfie-kind of apple picking spree, with lots of posing amidst the picking, but fifteen minutes and ten gallons of apples later, the trees were bare and the apples had been safely removed from the threat of evil flying worms.

More Tom Sawyer-ing ensued; I called a gal who had just moved into the neighborhood.  You know how you said you wanted to learn to can applesauce?  Are you free . . . tomorrow?  She was.

Applesauce is one of the most delightfully easy (and, if you like, sociable) foods to make.

• Put about a half-inch of water in the bottom of a pan or crockpot -- not a lot, just enough to keep the apples from sticking.  
• Cut up the apples, possibly removing the seeds and core.  Leaving the skins on is perfectly okay in my book.
• Play a game with Miser-Dog:  try to drop the apple cores on the floor, while he tries to catch them and wolf them down before they land.  (Shhhh! Don't tell him that dogs don't like apples!) 
• Heat the apples until they're mushy, and then mush them.  

If it takes a whole village to make the applesauce -- family to pick them, dogs to clean up the scraps, friends to help cut and can them -- well, it makes sense that the whole village gets to eat the applesauce, too.  We've had fun sharing the apples around.  And we're all eating apple-y ever after.

Q&A with love

We interrupt our regularly scheduled frugality to bring you a "Liebster* Award", which I got from Cheyanne at Tangerine Wallpaper. Awww, thanks.

* (from the German, "lover")

Who's Cheyanne? Well, the first time I saw her blog name I read it as "Tangerine Wallflower" -- a person beautifully and boldly ("tangerine") overcoming shyness or introversion.  That's not actually a perfect description, but I don't think she'd hate that interpretation. I love her strong and courageous advocacy for people who just need a few extra voices on their side.  Plus, she's funny.

Along with the Liebster award comes a bunch of questions that Cheyanne has for me and her other awardees.  I've rearranged the questions a bit for some reason, probably because my answers go from short & boring to long and . . . well, maybe still boring.

What’s your most embarrassing email/AIM username?  Do kids still use AIM?  Or even know what it is?  Probably not. I haven’t used it in about 8 years.

No idea what AIM is.  I've had only two email addresses in my entire life.  The first one was assigned to me in grad school (ST402521@[gradschool].edu).  I got the second one from my job, which I've now been at for 23 years; it's my name at my school's name.  Boring.

What’s your favorite seasonal food?  You know, pumpkin, peppermint, etc.

Food preferences aren't linear.  (That is, picking a favorite doesn't compute in my brain.)  And I really love all kinds of foods, all kinds.  

What’s the last GREAT book you read?

Kristi Andersen's Springer-Verlag book on Brook Taylor's Linear Perspective.  Not exactly the kind of thing everyone wants to go around reading, but she's an amazing scholar of mathematics, perspective, and history, and I'm milking her book for a research project of my own.

I've also been reading Make it Stick (a book about how students learn) and How Colleges Work, two other books that will be useful to me when I go back to teaching.   

I guess that says that sabbaticals really aren't vacations -- I haven't been doing what other people would call "pleasure reading" (although, really, I loved those books).

Who was your celebrity crush when you were in high school?

Ariana Grande.   Actually, that's J-son's current celeb crush.  I don't even want to say "Sean Cassidy" . . . soooo embarrassing.

Your middle name — embarrassing or AWESOME?

It used to be "Katherine", but I dropped it because my first and last name are already pretty long.  Neither embarrassing nor awesome . . . just clutter.

What song have you had on repeat lately?

Oh man, does "repeat" have anything to do with AIM?  I'm guessing this question has something to do with modern technology.

Here are some of the songs I'll hit the "back" button on my CD player for.  I just realized in putting this together that to listen to something twice in a row, it's probably soothing, but I listen to a lot of hoppin' music, too:

• Cat Stevens, How can I tell you
• Tracy Chapman, The Promise
• Bizet's Humming Chorus, from Carmen
• Reba McEntire, You lie
• Blues Traveler, Hook 
• Elvis, Love me tender
• Cheryl Wheeler, Piper, or Arrow
• Probably others, but that's what I can think of now

Are you a collector?  What do you collect?

Mostly, I'm an anti-collector.  For example, when I finished my IronMan, I gave away everything (shirt to a friend, swim cap to another friend, medal to my pastor, etc). 

My daughter says I collect children.  I also have more than my share of canning jars. 

What did you want to be when you grew up (at 5 years old)?

An actress.  Then a Xeroxer (my mom had those at her office at NASA -- they were new and so cool). Then a cafeteria worker (the only fun thing for a kid to do except for xeroxing at NASA; the NASA cafeteria was awesome).  Later, I wanted to be a Washington, D.C. tour guide, then an English teacher. Somehow, I morphed into math.

If you could give a million dollars to charity, which charity/charities would you choose?

This is not an idle question for us -- my whole frugality is aimed at being able to give sizable chunks of money to places where it can make the world better.   I don't think we'll hit a million dollars, but over the course of our lifetime we'll probably donate a large fraction of that amount. 

We have a list of about twenty places we donate to each year, split between international, national, and local.  I have a huge soft spot for medicine, for economic development, for sponsoring children (so, the basic human needs areas), but we do a "bread-and-roses" approach: we also give some money to our local theater.  And our church.  And my alma mater.

What are five things you KICK ASS at?

1. Theoretical Math.
2. Frugality.  Natch.
3. Swimming (I don't do it much anymore, but I can if I want.  I didn't even train for the swimming part of the IronMan I did, and I was still one of faster people in the water).
4. Memorizing stuff.  Anybody wanna hear the Gettysburg Address?  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening?  A couple of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay?  I'm ready!
5. Mentoring.  When it comes to advice, I'm full of it!

What’s something that really gets you fired up?

Theoretical math.  Finding free stuff on the sidewalk.  Keeping things out of the landfill.  Running with my friends.  Silly family dinners.  

Not to mention, getting Liebsters from awesome bloggers! 

Now it's my turn to nominate (tag?) others.  Problem is, a lot of the blogs I'd nominate are from people who rarely, if ever, blog anymore because Real Life has taken over.  Totally appropriate.  For example, 

• Waste Less, Grad Student, who is working on her PhD.  Yay!
• Dogs or Dollars, who is urban homesteading with young kids and (of course) dogs.  More yay!
• PFC Mom, working with her church, getting her kids on their feet, traveling the world, and taking care of health issues (phew!)
• Poor to Rich a Day at a Time, whose rather amazingly insanely cheerful writer is battling cancer AND homelessness.

And a bunch of the people I want to Liebster-ize would be on my list not because of their own blogs, but because of their great comments (on my blog and on others).  This includes Debbie M., Leah/Penn, Tess, the frugal ecologist, plus of course Rozy and Nicole-and-Maggie (whose blog I love even though they're actually still blogging--go Grumpies!!)

And here are my questions [for anyone who wants to answer, really].  There are only four of them:

1. Is there something that you accomplished last year that you can now look back at and say, "Phew!  I'm glad THAT's done with!"  If so, what is it?
2. How do you keep track of your appointments and to-do lists?  (I'm really curious about how other people manage time and tasks).
3. What do you normally eat for breakfast?
4. What is the goofiest little thing, that other people don't necessarily notice, that makes you happy?