A couple of months ago, I finally went vegetarian…. I had been flirting with it for a few years. meat wasn’t a big mainstay for my diet, a couple of times a week, i’d add meat to a stew or casserole and if i was feeling rich i’d buy a whole chicken and stretch it to unreasonable lengths.
Removing the meat was easy, removing bread less easy, removing corn products wasn’t hard and probably the more dangerous of the bunch. Of the three, bread i still dream about at night, but I allow myself some flat bread off and on through the week, naan, pita, tortilla or the bottom of a tomato tart. Gluten isn’t a problem for me, but carbohydrates and starches seem to be.
Unfortunately, I have never been a huge vegetable person, to me they are all parts of a potential soup…..so it’s a brave new world for me. Too many raw foods at once can make me regretful, so I have been experimenting to find ways to get them inside of me, thus the tart.
I tried veganism once, it was extremely unsatisfying, too may things contain too many other things, and you have to start substituting things for other things…too complicated. I just want to eat good real food and not have to worry, “oh does it have xyz in it?” i can’t eat “xyz” …i don’t want to be one of those people. I just want to fill my diet with things that won’t hurt me. today I tried and liked millet go figure
I’m a big fan of Mark Bittman’s easy to remember advice “not to anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” ‘cept in my case, i’d have to say my great grandmother..the only grandmother I met personally liked convenience foods. Other bits of his advice were, not to buy things with more than 5 ingredients…. i’m afraid Cheerios breaks that rule and probably those granola bars I am partial to, but otherwise it’s a good rule of thumb for me.
Meeting my biofamily has been delightful, and they understand completely when I say this… I don’t wish to continue sharing the family figure. Until now I just thought i was being a lazy sot, eating my feelings…but I have seen my future and don’t want any part of it. All those things I wanted to do someday are not going to wait forever. So i need to get off my ass and become half the person I have been lately.
I’ve only lost 15 lbs this summer, and about 20 before that…don’t do the math..it’s not pretty… but I haven’t really been exercising for weight loss yet, just riding or hiking for my own casual amusement…..so all that loss was really just tied to DIET… removing everything currently ‘bad’ from my diet and cutting intake down to half normal, is responsible for a slow steady loss.
I hope to bring good bread back into my diet when I am finally happy with my weight, but I plan to remain a vegetarian for the rest of my life. (don’t get me wrong…I ate a strip steak last week at the company barbecue..i’ve become vegetarian, not stupid) My original target to reach my goal weight was 3 years, but I may change it to 2 years, if i get into this vegetarian thing and get off my ass.
Last year I started adding audiobooks to what I listen to at work along with the podcasts…(the day job is logistics/order tracking, i need to keep part of my mind busy so i can concentrate…go figure) I was starting to loose track of which books i hadn’t finished. There are a few that i got pretty far into but i got bored and started something more interesting. So I started making a list using the library website, my audible account, goodreads.com, and what i posted on facebook. This is what I can remember that I have read since January. I have gotten hooked on Cyperpunk and techy sci fi books, but i discovered a number that I really loved enough to add to my bookcase in print form. I just ordered an ARC of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for my collection and I’d like a nice vintage paperback copy of Forever War too.
Somewhere around February, I started knitting…again….I had learned 30 plus years ago but it didn’t take…i didn’t need it.. i couldn’t have wrapped my head around just SITTING…. these days I am knitting while i am listening or watching – things that don’t require my hands, to the detriment of many other things. I haven’t worked on anything else…blogs, manuscripts, publications..nothing that would make a profit… but i have turned out an afghan, a few dishtowels, scrub pads, a rather lovely shawl and ONE sock.
No, I am not making that up; that was the name I was born with: Barrie Elizabeth…..or so my bio-mom tells me. For long time readers of this erstwhile blog, you know that I didn’t share genetic material with my toxic parent and he-who-shall-not-be-named. And before you ask, NO, I never had an itch to track down my bio-parents; Herself sort of ruined the idea of adding MORE family into the mix. But never say never.
Took a few days and a few phone calls but I found it….I didn’t even realize I needed it.
Now any American grocery store is gonna have everything on that list..EXCEPT, Chervil and Savory..Summer Savory in fact..which I have since figured out both are annuals…and not on my perennial garden shopping list. So, I started calling around,I even had to spell them out. But I finally find a place in Falmouth who had Chervil in pots…though at an inflated price. The Savory was a bit trickier..actually it didn’t take any effort at all..i bought it by accident. I had been poking around at the feed store wasting money on end of season herbs like Pineapple Sage and Cinnamon Basil, I bought another pot of what was labeled Winter Savory for 1.49…turns out it didn’t look anything LIKE my $5 Winter Savory, so I went back and bought the rest of them…the little plastic Winter Savory label even had the Summer Savory picture ..imagine an intense tarragon with an anise backbite. 
The woman next door gave me two of these unused raised bed frames..they are enormous..more along the lines of what you are supposed to build. I couldn’t lift them so i attached casters to them and wheeled them over. Looks like I am going to be buy a shit ton of top soil and compost from the city recycling center next spring… first off I am going to rake all the leaves into the boxes… i’m lazy that way. if nature wanted them in bags, she’d put them in bags herself.
Like I said I had all kinds of fun researching this puppy. Something that occurred to me while i was doing all this crazy highway driving, that my brain seems to be WORKING these days… I confess I am getting a little hyper stimulated by straight caffeine pills in the morning, but while I am awake I can actually THINK, it’s been a long time since that was both true. In the end I decided to just hanging the chair on the newly painted wall in the kitchen. I hadn’t found anything I owned worth the space, the Transmetro poster migrated to the bedroom so the wall was just hanging out looking lonely. It took me a couple of hours to cut a rail and find the appropriate iron hooks and get everything painted so the chair would be secure and safe. I didn’t have any shaker pegs, just cast iron hooks…but i had some plastic tubing from the fish tank, so in the end the chair is quite safe and can hold apparently at least one 15 lb cat. In another home I supposed it would hold silk flowers or old books…in my house…it’s cat asses… but then this little old white pine seat has already seen 200 years of ass, what’s a few more?