So what do I do to keep my head up when it’s cold and wet outside? Well, I’ve been off my meds for a few months now; the Prozac and the welbutrin. And I’m reluctant to go running in the wet. I’ve never been very good at indoor mechanical exercise (the elliptical or the rower), it just seems pointless. At least with running I’m “going somewhere.” So what I am doing is trying to eat more vegetables and drink more (vitamin D fortified) milk, and I’m taking the stairs at work.

I’m breaking work projects down into four hour blocks and feeling “accomplished” when I get them done. Small goals, quickly iterated over.

And I’m planning to get my bike fixed, and I’m waiting until it’s a little drier to start running again. Small goals, small successes and hope. That’s how I’m fighting depression.

How are you doing it?

The look on the boy’s face sent me back; way back to when I was cross country skiing* in Anchorage…

I went past a friend’s house. Her name was Katrina. We were freshmen in High School together. She was cute and I liked to pass notes back and forth with her in Social Studies. And, uh, math. Maybe some in english too. Bah, I liked flirting with her, and she never said “get lost.” The main problem was that I had a girlfriend at the time, Stacy. Stacy was pretty much my first “real girlfriend.” The first girl I kissed, and meant it. She went to a different school though, and Katrina was closer to home. As I passed her house, Katrina came out and waved me to a stop. She invited me into her garage where we could “talk” without her parents butting into our conversation. I took off the skiis, put them and the poles up against the wall (leaving would be more of a production now than just running off). And I went into the dark garage with Katrina, not knowing what to expect, but thinking it couldn’t be too bad.

This is where I learned that Katrina and Stacy knew each other. A sinking feeling, then some fifteen or thirty minutes of “discussion,” after which I was supposed to “choose.” And then, of course, both of them telling me to go away and not talk to either of them any more. I knew it was a foregone conclusion when I found Stacy at Katrinas. The Jig, as they say, was up.

The look on this poor kid’s face looked just like I imagine mine did when I was cornered like a dirty, lying, dog-faced, two-timing rat.

So, some advice for you, kid. Hang tough. Apologize to the women and hold your head high. Don’t make unnecessary choices. It’s not really “either x or y” — it’s more likely “neither” than “both.”

* Don’t mistake me. We didn’t get to ski a lot in Anchorage. I just happened to be tooling around on my skis.

This headache is different from the “omigod i need caffeine” headache. That one is more of a sick feeling and a dull pounding, roaring in my head kind of headache. The dagger in my eye one is the one where I put my hand over my right eye to feel better. It really does feel like something’s sticking in my head. This morning, I dosed up with ibuprofen, antihistamine and pseudopseudofed and went back to bed. After an hour’s sleep, I felt surprisingly better. My brain usually feels like mush after one of those headaches, which is why they’re so bad for me; the day before, it feels like it’s not working and the day after it feels exhausted and bruised.

To all of you who’ve suffered with me the last few days, I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better for at lest the next five or six minutes.

He persuasively argues that allowing your child the freedom to explore will help them learn bigger life lessons than ones “you can learn from Dora the Explorer.” One of his examples is fire; teach your kid to play with fire and actually let them poke around with it. Learning how to control and work with a mysterious and primal force is one of the great things that people learn. It teaches them about intake, combustion, and exhaust, the three crucial pieces of “fire” that you’ll need for a fire.

( this quote is somewhat paraphrased because I suck at typing).
when we remove every sharp object, every pokey bit from the world, then the next time the child comes into contact with something not made out of round plastic, they’ll hurt themselves with it. We rob our children of valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. And despite our best efforts and intentions, kids will always figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can in whatever environment they’re in.”

The video linked above is somewhat less than 10 minutes and is worth the time spent watching it. He’s very persuasive.

The toilet pipes ran under the trailer, and would freeze once or twice a winter, and our toilets wouldn’t flush and the shower wouldn’t run. We had a small bathroom next to my room, and in the middle of it was the washing machine. It was almost always pulled out of where it was “supposed” to be, sitting in the middle of the bathroom connected to the bathroom sink. It was difficult to get past, my clothes didn’t get cleaned, and I rarely got a shower. So I was greasy and smelled funny.

I was embarrassed by our trailer. One time in Junior High school my Science Teacher (Sandra Dexter) took several of us to a science fair. I asked to be dropped off last, basically because I didn’t want any of the kids to see the trailer. I still can’t believe that my father brought up two boys in that single wide. “At least,” he would say, “it’s paid for. We couldn’t afford the rent on a house, and we have this.”

It’s funny; I never really thought of my dad, who would crawl under the trailer with a space heater or a hair dryer to unfreeze the pipes. It was “something he did,” and so I didn’t think too deeply about it. But it would be hard to get myself to crawl under there. Dark, closed in, smelly, muddy. I can’t even crawl under my car to change the oil.

Anyway.

I routinely violate the main tenet of working from home; I stumble out of bed, pull my pants on (usually the ones from yesterday), get a cup of water, and stumble downstairs to the computer, where I stare at the Internet until my brain works enough to start working. A shower isn’t really in that plan. If I don’t have anywhere to go, taking a shower doesn’t enter the picture. For that matter, I’m frequently in the same shirt I wore to bed. In this way, I’m repeating my childhood; I’m sitting in smelly wrinkled clothes and haven’t showered in days.

Some days I’ve turned around to see Miss B “ready to go to school.”

In the same shirt she wore yesterday.

I’m hoping it’s only a role-model thing and not a “totally uncaring” thing. At any rate, I have even more reason now to shower every morning, and change my shirt.

The secret is salt. And like Alton Brown, she recommends Kosher (or sea) salt. Because when you put this much salt onto a piece of meat, you don’t want to taste the iodine. Basically, take your hunk of cow (or buffalo, or pig, or chicken) flesh, and cover it in enough un-iodized salt that you cannot see the color of the meat. Turn it over, and do it again. Let the salt sit on the meat for one hour for each inch that the meat is thick. One and a half inches thick? Let the meat rest for ninety minutes.

Rinse the meat extraordinarily well and pat very dry. Then cook.

Jaden also includes some diagrams of what she believes is happening; basically, the salt sucks the water out of the meat, creating “wet salt” on the surface of the meat. Then, because some of the salt has dissolved into the water that was sucked out of the meat, and there is no salt in the meat, osmosis takes the salt back into the meat. Her explanation of how the salt turns the proteins in the meat from “tight-assed stuck up” to “totally relaxed, fun loving” is priceless.

She even encourages you to mix some spices in with the salt, so they get pulled back into the meat like Christina Aguilera’s entourage.

It sounds absolutely nummy, but because of weight watchers, I may have to avoid her tip of topping freshly cooked beef with garlic butter.

Summery Ratatouille
Combine 6 large tomatoes, chopped; 4 medium zucchini, thinly sliced; 2 large onions, thinly sliced; 2 bell peppers, seeded and chopped; 2 garlic cloves, minced; 1 large eggplant, chopped; 2 teaspoons dried basil; 2 teaspoons dried oregano; salt; and ground pepper to taste in a slow cooker. Cover and cook on high until tender, 4-5 hours. Makes 6 servings, 1 cup each.

When I told Miss B that we were having Ratatouille for dinner, she said she didn’t want to “eat a poor little cute fuzzy rat.” I just raised my eyebrows at her. Then when Ms B asked, and I told her the same thing, she said “I’m not eating rat.”

Just what do these people think I feed them, anyway?

So, finally, I went up and put everything in the crockpot. I had an “nearing expiration” bag of spinach and tossed that in, and with it about a cup of red wine. And told them that the next person who asked what was dinner, I was sending to the kitchen to stir the “Rat Stew.” Nobody asked. When dinner was ready, everyone except Miss K had a bowl. It was “ok,” but needed salt. It went well with the grilled cheese sandwiches. I doubt I’ll make it again.

I wonder how they’ll take to this?

Pineapple BBQ Flank Steak
Peel and shred 2 medium sweet potatoes and place them in the slow cooker. Lay a 1-pound flank steak, well trimmed, on top. In a large bowl, combine 1 small onion, finely chopped; one 8-ounce can crushed pineapple in juice; 1/2 cup reduced-sodium chicken broth; 1 teaspoon ground dry ginger; 1/4 cup reduced-sodium jarred barbecue sauce; 1 tablespoon honey; 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard; salt; and ground pepper to taste. Pour this mixture over the steak. Cover and cook on high until the steak is tender enough to shred, using two large forks, about 6-7 hours. Makes 4 servings, about 1 cup each.

These recipes can be found here.

When they ran the EKG on me, they didn’t find any arrhythmia, but my heart shows evidence of high blood pressure. So I need to go back in a few weeks for another check. What the hell? I’m glad I went back in for the EKG but … hypertension? Old people get that! I’m not old, dammit! Actually I’m more upset about the aging than I am about the hypertension itself. If I’m going to live with high blood pressure, I have to make some dietary changes (which will help with that freaking fat butt too ). You know, eating more fruits and vegetables. Eating less hamburgers. It’s the DASH diet.

Not to be outdone, Mrs B started complaining last night about pain in her chest and shooting arm pains. Oh and nausea. And feeling clammy. You know, heart attack symptoms. Mrs B’s father had a massive heart attack at 32, so we’re a little sensitive. We rushed her to the hospital and let the doctors have their way. It was a crazy day at the ER and it took us about three hours to get an EKG. Her heart was “normal,” but of course they were going to admit her and run some tests. Instead (because we had the girls and we all had to work in the morning), we came home at 2AM and she made an appointment to see her doctor.

Her doctor says it’s not her heart and is treating her pain with Naproxen. I’m still a little worried but, as I usually do, I’m trusting the doctor to do their job competently.

However, there was a fascinating article on ‘braising’ recently in the newspaper. Braising, if you don’t know, is “slowly simmering some ingredients together … the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Pot roast? Braised. Which brings me to the slow-cooker I got from my in-laws. When I toss some potatoes, carrots, a slab of beef, some red wine, and some broth into the crock pot and simmer it for six hours, that’s braising, and it gets rave reviews around the dinner table.

One of the things I do with leftovers, whether it’s pot roast or turkey roast (which I’m also doing in the slow cooker), is make pot pie; it’s a trick I learned from my mother Peggy. Take the left overs, chop them up, toss them into a pie shell, pour gravy over them, toss another pie crust over the top, and bake until it looks done. Well, my pie crust sucks, so I get it out of a can (wth, it’s just flour and lard, right?) and my gravy leaves something to be desired, so that comes out of a can too. It’s tasty, but I always feel like I’m cheating by using gravy from a can (it’s not really that hard to make, but my thickness is never consistent). But four weeks in a row of roast, then sandwiches, then pot pie got a little old.

Last week I changed it up by making a beef stroganoff (more cheating: hamburger + vegetable beef soup + water + simmer + sour cream over rice) and putting in the leftover gravy, beef, potatoes and carrots. It was delicious.

So, I dunno. What I’m saying is — even if I am not the best cook in the world and rely a lot on premade ingredients, the slow cooker brings a new dimension to my cookery.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a stack of pork chops and some apples to try braising together.

This is posted in ‘shaping up’ because eating out really has done a wonder on my physique, and the slow cooker changes that dynamic.