2017 New Year's Resolutions Update

It occurs to me that I never gave the 2017 resolutions recap. Here it is!

Diet
If you'll recall, my plan was to track what I eat in order to figure out how much I eat in a year so I would know what I need to plant to grow it myself. I made a really good start with this, but with multiple moves and food sharing with housemates it was too hard to keep track. I might re-start this plan in 2018 but we'll see.

Exercise
My exercise goals were to be able to do a handstand, a cartwheel, a split, 25 pull ups, 50 pushups, 200 situps, and 200 squats. I still can't do the handstand, splits, or pull-ups, but I've reached all the other goals.

I debated and ultimately wound up deciding against doing a 5K color run because as exciting as crossing the finish line sounds to me, it turns out that running just isn't my thing.

I was curious about the circus classes , rock climbing, kickboxing, and Krav Maga. I wound up taking "Survey of Circus" at Esh Circus Arts in Somerville. I'd love to take another circus class at some point, but now I don't live near there anymore. After I moved here, I started taking kickboxing and Krav Maga at a local studio and I'm really enjoying both.

Finances
I am proud to announce that I'm credit card debt free, my car is paid off, and I'm on my way towards paying off my current student loans before I need to take out loans for nursing school. I have not managed to put money into retirement because I've been throwing anything extra into debt. I fizzled out on using Digit for no particular reason. I did, however, keep up with my charity donations. I should really start posting about the charities I pick again.

Focus More on Spirituality
I did a really good job with this goal overall. I continued to do my daily gratitudes and finally got into the habit of saying grace before meals. Although I did pray more frequently, I wasn't successful at the morning and bedtime prayers. I finally found a new local church and I need to get into a more regular routine with going.

One thing I'm really proud of myself for this year is following through with both my "Become Love" motto and the "Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?" criteria regarding my speech. I've been in several extremely difficult interpersonal situations this past year and I'm overall satisfied with how I conducted myself. I behaved well, even in the face of lies and slander directed at me by people I'd trusted.

This Year's To-Do List
If you'll recall, these were the smaller things that didn't seem large enough to be proper resolutions.

Here are the ones I managed to do:
* Get a professional massage.
* Go on a date.
* Swim in the ocean.
* Make video recordings of me reading kids' books and send them to Wolfie.
* Go dancing.
* Fly a kite.
* Take the kid housemates sledding.
* Take my grandmother out to lunch.

And here are the ones I started but didn't finish:
* Make a will - I have this written up but need to make it official.
* Self-publish my kids' book - I've switched who is illustrating this for me.
* Make a junk statue with Tea.
* Go camping and roast s'mores - I set up MULTIPLE camping trips, all of which failed to happen. I did, however, roast s'mores around a friend's backyard firepit.
* Play a violin duet with Primo - we picked a song but I wound up moving out so this didn't happen.
* Bike around Martha's Vineyard - this was a planned trip with Cupcake that they canceled.

And here are the ones I didn't do:
* Make a junk statue with Tea.
* Organize all of my photos.
* Go sailing.
* Take my dad kayaking.
* Become an ambassador for the Boston Children's Museum.
* Go apple picking and then make a pie.
* Go on a whale watch.

My Other Blog

Well, the best way to get back into blogging is to start posting, right? So here we go...

Drawing of a white woman in vintage attire holding a cooking pot.
The quote on it says "My cooking is so fabulous... even the smoke alarm cheers me on!"

In addition to all the new stuff I mentioned in my last post, I have been working on a cooking blog! The main idea behind it is that I've been posting a picture and the recipe for my dinner every weeknight (in English and French). I don't always manage to do it - sometimes all I get out on time is the name of the recipe I ate so I have to go back and edit it later to add the pictures and recipe - but I've done a fairly decent job of it so far and I like that it keeps me cooking good dinners for myself.

The most recent thing I've added is a sidebar with an index of all of my recipes for easy searching. I'm eventually planning to add in some non-dinner recipes, food sustainability related posts, and posts about food growing and composting.

Anyway, you can find the new blog HERE if you're interested.

April Fools' Day Party!

April Fools cake with mashed potato frosting, cherry tomato garnishes, and vegan meatloaf interior.

Today Aquafabulous and I hosted an April Fools' Day Party at her house. The initial idea came from her daughter, who learned about desserts that look like savory foods and asked to have a party where we eat savory-looking desserts. Aquafabulous mentioned this to me, I suggested April Fools' Day as our date, and a party was born. Here's the invite text:

April Fools! This party is actually on April 2nd :)

Join Aquafabulous, Tony, and Daughter-of-Aquafabulous for a potluck feast of mysterious wonders. Bring your best "food impostors" to share - anything goes! Here are some examples:

* Desserts that look like savory food
* Savory foods that looks like desserts
* Vegan foods that look like meat, eggs, etc.
* Any food that looks like something it's not.

See how realistic you can get, and whether you can fool the other attendees.

Aquafabulous' daughter with fake burritos. Aka crepes filled with
crumbled brownies, chopped strawberries, and green-colored coconut. 

It turns out we're a pretty creative bunch! We had a small but friendly group of people there and while the adults gorged ourselves on tasty food and played cards, the kids ran around the backyard. Here are some more pictures of the food:

Vegan deviled eggs by Aquafabulous. 

Falafel cupcakes with hummus frosting and olives on top. 

Bruno with his fake bird in a nest made with seaweed, cherry tomatoes, and squash.

Savory sandwich cake with sour cream frosting and vegetable garnish.

Cake with a rainbow interior.

Another picture of the meatloaf cake with Aquafabulous showing it off.

Cupcake made fake hamburgers using brownies for burgers, cupcakes for buns, and frosting for condiments but I didn't get a photograph of them because the kids devoured them very quickly. The two of us teamed up to make candy sushi, but it was so tiresome to do that we didn't make much of it. The rice is rice krispie treats, the nori is fruit roll-ups, and the fillings are candy:

Cupcake's and my fake sushi.

I also made a savory cake with cornbread for the cake layers, vegetarian chili for the filling, and a hot sauce and honey cream cheese frosting. I decorated it with limes and cilantro:

My savory cake.

A slice of my savory cake so you can see the filling.

I realized I also don't have a photograph of the sweet sandwiches made of pound cake, frosting, and jam. Oh well.

Overall, I thought this was a great theme for an April Fool's party! I would happily do it again. It was really neat to see the creative ideas people had for their potluck dishes and I was pleased that we had a good balance of sweet and savory foods.

Pi Day!

Today there was a snow storm! In honor of the snow, I decided to wear a white skirt, white t-shirt, white nail polish, white earrings, and my snowflake necklace.

Head shot of me showing off my nail polish.

Body shot sitting on the floor.

Today is also Pi Day! The day that geeky people celebrate the irrational number pi aka the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter aka 3.141592 (pi is actually a much longer number but that's all I have memorized). How do we celebrate? By eating pie on 3/14 because the date looks like the number pi. 

Einstein in a pi shirt holding a pie.

It turns out that wearing white may not have been the best choice of my life since I also decided to bake banana tarts for pi day. Good thing I have an awesome apron!

Me pointing at my tarts while wearing my white outfit
and a brown apron that says "They see me rollin' they hatin'."

Finished tart close-up.

And just because I liked this cartoon, I'm adding it into my post.

International Women's Day and Cake!

Today is International Women's Day so I wore red to show my support as an ally.

Me in a red shirt, denim jacket, and black cap. 

My red combat boots and grey pants.

I also discovered this neat mural that looks like a patchwork quilt under the overpass near my house:

Colorful mural.

Not too much else is new. I'm still unpacking. When I'm not unpacking or working I'm crashing on the couch. In an attempt to hang out despite my lack of energy, Cupcake and I have been binge watching The Great British Bake Off on Netflix.

Picture of a chocolate cake with raspberries on top.
The text "The Great British Bake Off" is overlaid on it in white.

All the TV baking got me craving cake, so I made some. It was kind of ridiculous because I'm not done unpacking and the kitchen is in disarray so I didn't have mixing bowls, measuring cups, measuring spoons, or a cake tin. I wound up mixing in a pot, eyeballing the measurements, and baking in disposable pie pans. But the resulting Chocolate Grand Marnier cakes were delicious! I made a big one to share and a tiny one for Cupcake because they were having a bad day.

Big cake.

Small cake.

New Years Resolutions Update

Diet and Exercise

Diet is going smoothly and on Sunday Bone and I start our class at Esh Circus Arts!

Picture of a green dumbbell and two pieces of broccoli arranged in the shape of a dumbbell.

Finances

I'm still diligently sticking to my financial plan. I paid off a credit card! Only two credit cards to go and the total is under $5,000. Lest you think I'm flagrantly irresponsible, I feel I should let you know that one of those cards is composed entirely of medical debt and the other is composed entirely of divorce debt. Life lessons? Be careful who you marry and live somewhere with cheap universal health care.

What else? I just filed my taxes and I've also donated to two more places in keeping with my every other week donation schedule.

February's first charity was the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. This project is really amazing. I learned about it because I have a friend in the tribe who works for them as a teacher trainee.

Map of Martha's Vineyard with Wôpanâak language place names.

Story time: When I was a kid my family visited the Wompanoag tribe of Aquinnah on a family vacation to Martha's Vineyard. Before that I'd been your typical clueless white kid who dressed as an "Indian" for Halloween and assumed the cowboys killed them all off long ago. I remember being surprised when I met and played with a group of Wompanoag kids my age who weren't at all like the stereotypes. After that I read everything I could about their tribe and was really upset to learn I was being lied to in my history classes at school. Fast forward to 2006. I worked at a community-based acute psychiatric treatment facility for kids and this friend was one of my coworkers. We stayed Facebook friends after I left and eventually she got a job with this project.

Ok. So what exactly does the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project do? Their goal is to return fluency to the Wompanoag nation so they teach people the language. They have adult classes, kids classes, an immersion program for grades K-6, and a 3-week summer program for kids ages 5-15. Their classes are only open to tribal members and their families and they're completely free.

Howling wolves.

My other donation this month is to a place I've already talked about on here - Wolf Hollow aka the North American Wolf Foundation. You can read more about them on their website and you can see my visit to them in this blog post.

Spirituality

I'm keeping up with my prayers, gratitudes, and church attendance. I've also gotten a bit better at shutting down negative gossip around me and resisting the urge to do it myself. It's an ongoing struggle, though. Frankly Jesus' idea of loving your neighbor is harder than it seems because not all of our neighbors are easy to love! I'm sure there are plenty of people who think that about me as well, though, and I'm trying which I suppose counts for something.

To-Do List

This month I made a will. I just have to get enough money to make it official.

Picture of a pair of glasses sitting on top of a last will and testament.

Lent!

Picture from The Sound of Music with caption "For Lent, I'm Giving Up All My Fucks."

Ok, joking aside, today is Ash Wednesday aka the first day of Lent. For Christians, Lent is a 40-day liturgical season of fasting, prayer, and alms-giving that represents the time Jesus spent in the desert. Lent is supposed to prepare you for Holy Week, which represents the events linked to the Passion of Christ (when Jesus died and was resurrected). It's also the time when new converts are first baptized and others renew their baptismal vows. The whole thing culminates on Easter Sunday, the day Jesus was resurrected.

One Lenten tradition that I like to follow is that of working extra-hard to make positive changes in my life. During Lent people typically give up a vice, volunteer or donate to charity, and focus on connecting with God. I've decided to focus on food and my ecological footprint by becoming vegan for Lent and by eating only seasonal, locally grown foods.

Picture of Jesus. 

Why am I doing this?

I know that what I eat matters. I don't have much disposable income, and food is the biggest thing I spend money on other than rent, transportation, and house bills. Because I get to make a choice with my money every time I buy groceries, it's one of the easiest ways to put my ethics into action and put my money to work for what I believe in. When I buy groceries, I'm choosing which foods I put into my body and which practices I deem acceptable for the production of those foods. Since a big part of Lent is working for the good of people everywhere, and another big part is fasting and reflecting on your privileges and the state of others, it seems fitting to think about my culinary choices and how those choices impact others.

I'm choosing local and seasonal foods because the resources wasted to ship food from far away are ridiculous. We're burning fossil fuels to fly out-of-season foods to us from other places so that we can eat them whenever we want rather than just eating seasonally. I can live without strawberries in winter. Also, there are plenty of local farms around me to buy from so there's no need for me to contribute to the overuse of fuel by purchasing food from other places. Local kale is just as good as kale from another state.

Tomatoes and lettuce in a woven basket with a sign that says "buy local."

In terms of veganism, I'm going to focus only on the environment here. Livestock are costly to raise in terms of resources. Raising enough livestock to feed 10 people for a year will use up more land than growing vegetables to feed those same 10 people. Much of the feed for livestock is grown in monocultures which are not good for the environment. When you grow things in a monoculture instead of a polyculture, you cause the local wildlife and landscape to deteriorate. The soil gets tired because the same nutrients are being used all the time which means you will need to add more and more fertilizers to it, further damaging the earth. Also important - large farming operations often use artificial hormones and overuse antibiotics which contributes to the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria, something that is dangerous to everyone.

A woman in a garden holding a basket of produce. 

These are the reasons why I'm a vegetarian. And they're the reasons I'm taking it one step further for Lent. But I don't think everyone needs to copy me. What do I think? I think that everyone should eat closer to the bottom of the food chain by reducing their consumption of meat and animal products. Nobody needs meat with every meal of the day. I also think that everyone should buy from small local farmers who use organic techniques and who are conscientious about the humane treatment of their animals. If everyone did this, we'd make a huge positive impact on the environment. Besides, factory farming is disgusting and cruel. Killing animals for food absolutely should not mean making those animals suffer for their entire lives. Not when we have ethical alternatives available to us.

Bless O Lord, this food to our use,
And us to thy loving service;
And make us ever mindful of the needs of others,
For Jesus' sake. Amen.

Cooking Blog!

So I used to have a cooking blog. My brilliant idea of the week is that I'd like to re-start that.

Picture of spices in wooden spoons.

Aquafabulous has promised that it's easily doable to save my old blog so I'm going to save and delete it to make way for the new cooking blog. Why delete it instead of continuing it? A few reasons.

* I'm a better photographer now so I could probably take pictures of food that are actually appetizing whereas before the photos were of variable quality.
* I was less secure with people's names on my old blog and I'd like to switch to my current pseudonym system.
* My old blog was cooking focused but a bit more all-purpose than that because I didn't have this blog. Now I've got an all-purpose blog so I can reserve the cooking blog for recipes and just link back and forth to this blog as needed.
* I worked out a lot of kinks along the way about blog organization and I think I could come up with a better set-up now than I had before.
* I wrote that blog while I was dating/engaged/married to my ex husband so frankly, looking at it makes me sad. I'd like to take off all that content and start fresh.

Drag baking.

So there you have it. New cooking blog will hopefully be operational by the end of the month. It will be bilingual in French/English like my old blog. Also like my old blog I will continue to use both US and metric measurement systems so my friends in other countries can cook the recipes too!

Resolutions - One Month In

Well it's February second. Today I accompanied Cupcake to divorce court. Here's a picture of our accidentally coordinated outfits:

Me and cupcake. I'm wearing a light purple button down with a grey sweater over it.
My outfit coordinates with Cupcake's eye makeup. 

That's not what I want to post about, however. Instead, because we're one month in, I figure now is a great time to update about my New Years Resolutions. Here we go…

Diet

Tracking my food has been easy and really interesting so far. I'm saving the list for the end of the year reveal, but I'll say that I've added a category titled "Laziness" for food I could and should have made myself and that "Chocolate" is its own category. One problem I failed to anticipate was how often I feed other people. Adding this in means that the totals for what I eat will probably be slightly inflated but I'm keeping it in there because I'm looking less for how much I consume and more for an accurate gauge of how much food I would actually need to plant for the year and that will include feeding house guests. In this same spirit, I'm not including food I eat while visiting friends because I wouldn't be planting food for that.

Exercise

I'm signing up for one of this session's classes at Esh Circus Arts with Bone. Registration opens on Valentine's Day. I've also been working out sporadically at the gym at my work since it's free and exercising outside is too cold.

Picture of a fat white woman doing circus tricks.

Finances

Things are going swimmingly. My most recent charity donation was to CAIR Massachusetts aka the MA chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. They're America's largest Muslim civil rights organization. I decided to donate to them because I feel sickened by the anti-Muslim sentiments of my government and I wanted to do something to help Muslim Americans.

Photograph of a woman using an american flag as a head scarf.

The charity I donated to before that was to United We Dream, which is the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation. Their mission is "to organize and advocate for the dignity and fair treatment immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status." This donation was in response to the anti-immigrant policies the government has started rolling out.

Spirituality

I've restarted my daily gratitude sharing with Feather. I've also gotten back in the habit of regular prayer and church attendance. 

Blue text on a yellow background that says "Become Love."

I'm working hard on my "become love" motto. It's harder than you would think to stop judging other people. For me the judging isn't about how other people look but about how they act. The biggest problem for me are that I get incredibly frustrated by people who I feel aren't working hard enough to improve themselves and their life situations. The problem is that a lot of the time these people aren't just "lazy" they're struggling with mental illness or some other problem that is impeding their ability to do better than they are doing. Given that other people's lives are really none of my business anyway, I think I could be a lot kinder than I am about this. 

Also, as I've been working my speech with the true/kind/necessary rule, I've noticed that I have a couple of friends in particular who seem to bond by complaining about people they dislike and it's hard for me to redirect the conversation and avoid getting sucked in. I need to figure out what to do about this.

To-Do List

So far I've knocked one off my to-do list: get a professional massage. 

More Canadian Adventures!

Ok. I'm going to continue with Monday's Canadian adventures. When we left off, I'd given you a tour of my lovely vacation rental. After I took those photos I decided to visit Mont-Tremblant - a lovely little town (and national park) in the Laurentian mountains. It got it's name from the Algonquins who called it the "trembling mountain" (mont = mountain; trembling = trembling).  It's best known for its ski resort and its race track.

So basically, in the winter Mont-Tremblant is probably most relevant to people who like to ski or snowboard. I do neither. I've snowboarded exactly once, when I was much younger and much stupider. Long story short, I was on a date and attempting to be impressive. I'd never snowboarded before but I'd skateboarded so I figured my skills would transfer. Nope. I went flying most impressively over a jump but I didn't land it. Instead I managed to discover an iced-over pond with my face, breaking my nose and my dignity in the process. I then had to slither back to land on my stomach inch by inch to avoid cracking the ice and drowning myself in freezing cold pond water. The snore that began with my broken nose is still with me today as a souvenir of my own stupidity.

Anyway. Back to my trip. I started out by wandering about the village. Here we go. The first thing I saw was this gorgeous church:

Pretty church.

Seriously isn't this pretty?!

Next to the church was this weird tree sculpture.

Me in front of weird tree sculpture.

Actually, they really like their weird tree sculptures here…

Another weird tree sculpture in metal.

Me in front of a neat little birch Christmas tree.

They also like evergreen decorations.

Me in a gazebo of with evergreen boughs.

Across the street and down the road a bit I found a mural near an antipasto stop.

Mural.

But when I stopped to look at the mural, I noticed something even cooler! An ice sculpture of a train that you can actually go inside! This is also the first time I used my new Christmas present selfie stick.

Really cool ice train.

Another picture of the really cool ice train.

Me in the ice train.

Me in the train from the front.

I wandered about some more, noticing the cute carvings on the porches and tops of many buildings.

Blue house with white trimming that is pretty.

Eventually I wandered over to some friendly people who told me how to find the top of the mountain with a free ski lift so I could get an aerial view of everything. So I went back to my car. On the way I found a mural of the founding family. Erm… By which they obviously mean the first white people who moved here since the area was already settled. Ugh. Racism.

First white family in the area.

Moving on. I found another ice sculpture! This one is a seal.

Seal Ice Sculpture. 

Me kissing the seal ice sculpture.

So I hopped back in my car and drove most of the way up the mountain, parked in the free parking lot, walked the rest of the way up, and looked around. The ski resort is basically its own tiny town. It was pretty cute. I particularly enjoyed the tiny ice slide.

Pretty buildings.

Me in front of a street.

Random alleyway.

Tiny ice slide that was fun to use!

Chair made out of skis!

Random courtyard with menorah.

I was pleasantly surprised to find an inuksuk in the area. I learned about them a few years ago from a woman from Nunavik who was in Montréal for school. At the time I'd assumed we'd never see each other again but now that I'm considering a move to Canada I wish that we'd thought to swap contact information so I could get back in touch with her. Oh well.

Inuksuk.

After wandering about for a bit, I rode the lift up, checked out the skiing area, and rode the lift back down again:

Me looking confident before going on the lift.
Have I mentioned I'm scared of heights?

View from the lift is gorgeous.

View from the lift again.

Lift view.

Me on the lift trying not to look nervous.

See my shadow on the roof?

Snowy rooftops.

Sunset beginning and rooftops.

Me on the lift finally relaxing a bit because I'm still alive.

Sunset in between the trees.

Sunset starting.

Sun setting on the side.

Sun is setting.

Phew. I made it. Once I got off the lift, I decided to reward my bravery with something I'd never tried before. Tire-d'érable. It's delicious. All you do is take heated up maple syrup and pour it over clean snow in a line. Put a stick in it, wait a little under a minute so it hardens a bit to the texture of taffy, and roll it up. I'm totally trying this next time it snows back home. Assuming I can find clean snow in the city, that is.

Me waiting.

Rolling it up.

Ready to eat.

Yum!

Yup. Good stuff.

The last interesting thing that happened to me on Monday is that I took an accidental detour near the national park on my way back and I saw a deer in the parking lot where I pulled in to make a U-turn.

Deer looking at me.

Deer turning away.

Deer running away.

Deer running away up some stairs.