Good Bits

Identifying my month for change

Started a diet on March 21. Unlike previous efforts that last, oh, a day and a half or until I come within smelling distance of baked goods, whichever comes first, this one seems to have potential. I’m using an iPhone app called “Lose It!” that lets you set a goal (you want to lose HOW many pounds a week?) without laughing, and tells you when you’ll reach your goal, how many calories you can get away with in order to get there, adds up your food log, minuses your exercises (and gives you the calorie pluses and minuses for each) and lets you chart your progress on a neat little graph.

So, two weeks in and I’ve lost seven pounds. The good news (other than losing seven pounds, of course) is that I’m still messing around with the entering the foods and measuring the ounces and tablespoons when possible, and exercising. Okay, not as much as I should…exercising that is…but more than I had been doing. And I look forward to doing the counting and logging again the next day.

Looking at the calendar, it occurred to me that when I quit smoking, finally, a couple of years ago, that happened in March, too, almost exactly the same time of the month. I’d tried to quit, and actually quit, several times over the decades, without long-term success. This time I used Chantix and found that I didn’t need more than the first scrip, didn’t want to kill myself, and really liked smelling food and tasting wine. And vice versa.

So I suppose I could go cast my horoscope, if I can get a new ephemeris, and see what’s going on that might account for there being a “best” time for me to institute, and embrace, change in my life. Is March my magical month? The best time to start new things? Maybe it’s just my best time for dropping bad habits. Hmmm. Now I’m going to find myself trying to remember what else happened in other Marches.

Just a thought.

Dinner with friends

Needing an excuse to indulge the part of me that loves to entertain, on Friday night I hosted a dinner party. We were six at table. Had I a larger kitchen we might never have made it to the dining table but remained standing around the kitchen pouring and tasting. However, I’d put a leaf in the table that had been my mother’s, and brought up the pads from the basement and covered it with a white quasi-damask linen oval, and put out the nice glassware and all, and it was way too cozy and too close to hot pots and sharp utensils, so to the table we went.

My dark plum Crate and Barrel dinner plates weren’t too out of place amid Mom’s good china, the only source of six matching salad, bread and dessert dishes. The gold-trimmed cream white china, made in Japan, has been stored in padded dish holders, thin foam sheets separating each piece and the dainty cups each in their own cubicle in a big square holder.

For the ten years since her death, my mother’s most carefully protected possessions have hidden on the highest shelves of my kitchen wall cabinets. Not my style, the gilt floral design, but unused for other reasons. First, somewhere in my mind/brain resided the idea that the pieces should be saved for formal occasions or family holidays like Rosh Hashana or Thanksgiving, which my mother always hosted but I do not. Second, there was always the fear that I’d break something and wind up forever identified as unreliable, like my aunt who was banished from participation in cleanup detail after dropping something or other after some long ago family fete. Of course I’d already received the badge of less-than-perfection while Mom was still alive so any additional ribbons of achievement in that department would now be just showing off.

I don’t have kids. I doubt that my grand-niece or -nephews will want the stuff by the time they are ready to set up house. So I’m giving myself permission to use the good china more often.

One thing about the set of china that speaks to how different things were in the old days, aside from the raised gilt-ness of the stuff, is how small the pieces are. The coffee cups are four-ouncers. Officially, or traditionally, that’s what a cup of coffee is supposed to be. In this age of the supersize and the travel mug and the sixteen-ounce grande latte, though, they seem to hold barely a few gulps. The soup bowls, too, hold only four ounces. When I was a kid and slurping matzo ball soup out of them they seemed so much larger. Then again, so did a lot of other things, like our house.

So it turns out that if I use the good china I don’t have to cook as much food to fill the plates, which means I can play with pricier ingredients. I think I’ll have more dinner parties.

Menu -

Chopped Chicken Livers (from free-range organically-fed cluckers, of course, with eggs of the same origins and…sue me…schmaltz. Conventional onions. Oh well. A gift to friend Ed.)
Bruschetta with goat cheese, tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil and optional olive tapenade.

Scottish Atlantic Salmon, organically fed (it says here) and conscientiously farmed (hey, it’s January, there’s no fresh wild salmon out there) – from Kate’s Fish at the West Side Market, just gorgeous and this is why I doubt I’ll ever go back to being a vegetarian.

Red Lentil Dhal – My first try, starting with the toasting of the whole spices and grinding them. Not knowing how much the recipe made I doubled it and had enough to feed the Indian Army (not to be confused with the British Army in India…curse you, Wikipedia! Had it been Jewish food I’d have said ” enough to feed the Russian Army.” Please don’t turn me over to the PC police.) The stuff was deeeeelish, and since I controlled how much red pepper went in, I could actually taste the flavors, me the spicy-food wuss. And the kitchen still smells heavenly.

Roasted local organic beets and celery root. Tossed in olive oil and honey first. Pretty and yum.

Organic, overcooked and undertasty green beans (oh well, can’t win ‘em all.)

And for dessert, homemade Chocolate Shards with Dried Tart Cherries, Toasted Almonds and…Lavender. UNBELIEVABLY WONDERFUL.

Icehouse

Two weeks ago my neighborhood was a collection of homes with a few inches of snow on the rooftops and clumps like whipped cream on the boughs of the evergreens. One week ago the piles of snow on top of the gas grille, deck furniture and rainbarrel started to look like hats for coneheads. Now the icicles in some places almost reach the ground.
The other day I watched an icicle grow, gravity working with water, together placing a drop at the low tip where at the right temperature the liquid becomes solid and, voila, another quarter inch of ice hangs off the gutter.
Of course I did the watching from inside. Brrr.

Feeding the birds

Orange beaks sure stand out in this white world.

We’re getting a winter whuppin’, this time its thick and wet snow. Hard on the blower, heavy on the shovel.

The birds still show up for breakfast.

Recycling day

My dog Baci

I’m not sure why I choose to walk the dog on trash mornings. It just aggravates me and that’s the wrong way to start any day.

This morning I looked down the block and saw only three homes with blue recycling bags on the curb. Three out of thirty-two, and one was mine.

I passed a curb with two…count ‘em, two…black oversized Rubbermaid trash cans overflowing with beer cans and plastic pop bottles and food containers. If the neighbor had just put them in a blue

bag and set them alongside the trash, here’s what could have been saved:
1. tax dollars, since it costs less for the city to send them to the recycler than to pay to have the trash company haul them and tip them into the landfill;
2. jobs, since those saved dollars can pay a service department employee who can do other work to keep our city clean;
3. energy, since it takes less to recycle these materials than to make new ones out of raw materials;
4. oil, since plastic food containers are made from it;
5. the environment, since the mining of bauxite for aluminum destroys whole ecosystems.

When those folks complain to me about the taxes they pay, they are going to get an earful!

PAPER is what we should be recycling most, since it weighs the most and we pay for trash disposal by the ton. Every ton that we divert from the trash truck to the recycling truck saves us money…in fact, with paper we MAKE money when we sell it to the recycler.

Why won’t you recycle? Tell me, please.

Anyway, Baci met a new friend…Keller Beaver is a rescue dog, and we’re happy to live in this dog-friendly neighborhood.

Ah, tis the sound of the snowblower in the morning

First big snow. Finding out the painful way that my broken wrist is not healed enough to do much real shoveling, I approached the snowblower cautiously so as not to startle it. Poured half a bottle of Heet into the tank, primed the pump, said a tweet-sized prayer to the god Toro and pushed the button. Yes! Power! Life is good.

Now, of course, it’s eight hours and several additional inches of snow later, dark as a dungeon and I must venture out to Council meeting. Ah, but for a while there, the world was white and beautiful. House sparrows, chickadees and juncos mobbed the birdfeeder in such numbers that at times the bushes and ground were covered with little brown twitching bodies. Kind of creepy, actually.

When I was a small child I couldn’t wait to get outside to build forts in the humongous drifts that fell in the snow belt. I resented the vacation days that were so snowy they would have warranted a day off had they fallen on a school day. As a teen and young adult, all that mattered was whether or not the roads were clear enough to get to the ski slopes. The older I get the less I get out. But I still know how to dress for winter and I still love to stand knee-deep in snow staring up at the winter stars, breathing the tangy cold air.

Later,

Jane

A New Year’s Resolution

Sometimes the creek is more beautiful in winter than at any other time.

One of my favorite aunts, may she rest in peace amid perfumed clouds of Cabochard, used to tell me that new year’s resolutions are to be made more than they are to be kept. Making them showed you had the awareness to admit there were some things that needed to be changed. Some people, she said, fearing failure, never made resolutions and therefore never challenged themselves. That’s a sure way not to disappoint, and a surer way to stay stuck in the same old life.

I resolve to try to keep this blog current.

My resolutions usually have “try” in them somewhere. They at least get me to put a mental filter on my actions, a “to do” item on the list.
Try to lose weight, try to exercise more, try to cut my chocolate use in half (that last one actually works, since I can still buy the stuff, just half as much.) Promises, on the other hand, are golden. They say “I will.”

So I may as well start this new year with reiterations of promises I have found easy to keep – I promise to be open and honest about everything I do, and everything I know about, in the operations of our city government. You ask me a question, I’ll tell you what I know and if I don’t have the answer I’ll search for it and tell you everything. No BS and no secrets. Governments don’t get to have privacy. People yes, governments no.

I resolve to listen to ALL my constituents, no matter what part of the political spectrum they represent, and faithfully to represent your interests when decisions are made. I won’t please everyone, ever. But I will listen. And if your position is well-considered I will take it into account. If it’s just a deck of reasons why you don’t want us to enforce a law that you are used to breaking, sorry, that won’t fly.

I resolve to work harder at helping to grow street clubs and block parties and things that tie neighbors together. We have a lot of community-building to do, starting with the neighborhoods. That does not, however, let city hall off the hook for taking care of our bank account and bringing businesses to town and helping to grow the ones that are here. Our problems aren’t all about vacant and foreclosed houses, they are also about vacant office space and crappy empty storefronts. This shouldn’t be a shell game where we blame our woes on the neighborhoods in hopes that people won’t notice that our commercial base is on life support.

Finally, I hope to hear some resolutions from you. And I hope that one is that you’ll get to know your neighbors better all up and down your block. That’s pretty easy.

Happy New Year!

Jane