Thursday, October 31, 2013

Floor To The Ceiling

p: so, chillin.

m: uh huh.

p: is different than chillaxing.

m: okay.

m: what is the difference?

p: chillaxing takes longer.

m: haha.

p: i was just chillin.

ETA @ 3:15 PM: Okay NOW I'm chillaxing.

State of the Blog
 fall 2013

o.t.

Happy Halloween!

When last I spoke about the state of the blog, I finally decided for sure that I'm not going to be blogging for a living, and I may not have said it in so many words, but the main effect of that was that reclassified blogging from PLAY to PASTIME, and boy, that has made all the difference. The whole work/play paradigm is about what, balancing my life, which is to say balancing my time. A life is just time, is what. I feel like our life projects are time projects. Changing how I feel about blogging from something that is done as an end in itself that is a means to an end to something that is done as an end itself that is an end in itself has changed how I feel about my blog, and also about my time, and also about my life. I suppose this is just to say that PLAY feels different than PASTIME, obviously it does, that's why they're different things. I also guess this is to say that I needed something more like pastime in my life, and that this time I didn't need anything new in my life: I just needed to look at something that was already in my life in a new way.

You know what life is to me? Time and feelings.

Blogging feels different because now I only blog when I'm feeling it. I mean, right? It's something that's done as an end in itself that's an end in itself, the only reason to do it is if you feel like doing it itself. And circumspicere, I feel like it a lot. So just to get back to the actual state of the blog for a sec, I needed an enormous number of hits at the end of September to exceed my highest month so I thought I wouldn't, but then I did get enormous hits right at the end of the month and I exceeded my highest month by three, and then it kept rolling into October and was looking like I might be good for 10,000 hits for the first time ever, and then in the middle of the month I just ran out. And the new deal is when I'm out, I'm out. Hits have stayed pretty strong regardless of the dark, so hey. My racerback dress does the rounds on Pinterest now and again, and it looks maybe like people are getting some use out of my muscles and movement series, but who knows. I don't know how much of all of this is just robots, I don't really know how stats work.

But pastime, also, feels different, because now blogging is, you know, an option for pastime. It doesn't feel like, argh, I'm using my downtime to keep up my bloggg, no rest for the wickeddddd. Blogging is downtime. I can watch a little television, and then I get a little idea and work it out on my laptop, and it's fun, more fun a lot of times than second guessing Horatio Caine depending on how many minutes we're into this episode.

This is counter to advice that you sometimes get about Being A Writer, discipline and whether or not you feel like it or not and so forth. But that is almost as specifically as you can get for writing that is a means to an end, which is not the only kind of writing, that's what I'm saying, there's like three other kinds. So there's no reason to get stuck on just one kind, you can switch it up and see what happen. And this applies to ::waves:: everything.

So blogging is more fun, pastime is more fun, life is more fun. That is a win.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Early Fall Food Chart
 things fall apart

things fall apart

POPPY. What. Is That.

Haha, welp. It's an abstract version of my SNIKT! chart, where I track my sleep quantity and quality, weight, words, diet, and workouts. I mean, the actual chart has things written in bigger boxes. This is a zoomed-out version that just shows the color-coding.

The darker gray columns and rows are just table structure, the dark gray columns are sleep, weight, and words. I keep saying and someday will write about how I do sleep. I do, actually, track my weight, weigh myself every day in fact, as an exercise in teaching myself how unimportant weight is; if you want to know, I've been keeping this SNIKT! chart since February and in eight months my weight has gone from centering around 136 pounds to centering around 133 pounds. Which means in the beginning I might have weighed anywhere between 138 and 134 pounds and at the moment I might weigh anywhere between 135 and 131 pounds in a given week. Haha, how popular do you think an I LOST THREE POUNDS IN EIGHT MONTHS pin would be on Pinterest. And I'm not saying that eight months of pretty clean eating hasn't made big changes in my body, I will talk more about that in a little bit—just least of all my weight. Words are what I do for meditation, which is for stress relief. Just ...headspace. More about that later.

The green, yellow, red, and grey boxes are diet. Not trying to lose weight diet, what I eat diet. If you must know, I call it diet and not nutrition because diet matches workout—nevermind that, I like my words to match. ANYWAY. Green is protein and vegetables, which I have as much as I want; yellow is grains, beans, and potatoes, my starches, which I have once a day; red is alcohol, sugar, and flour i.e., processed starch, which I have one of each once a week, or trade them for each other; oh and, gray is when I didn't eat. I feel like I have definitely told you before that between charts I fall apart pretty spectacularly and have not been not giving you the impression that I'm smoothly traveling hand over hand up the rope. Here is what it more typically looks like: five weeks of an effortless, perfect diet, and then cooking practice interrupted for two weeks in a row, and I've told you, it's not that I have such great eating habits, it's about having a good cooking habit. I mean, for me. If you're not about to cook, it's not the end of the line; you just have to think about something else. Or well, you don't have to do anything, you are the arbiter of your own health etc.

Let's talk a bit about why my cooking habit fell apart: an uptick in how busy I am at work, an uptick in how busy I am as a trainer, keeping up a decently aggressive practice schedule. Which hasn't been like being crushed by a boulder, more like a lot of small stones placed one by one on your sternum and gradually you start to have a little trouble breathing. I think the first cooking practice I missed, I just needed the time to catch up on something else I'd fallen behind on, and the second practice I was minding my niece and nephew in the suburbs.

So anyway, you can see a pretty good pileup of red in the last week and a half there. I've actually been eating bread: buttered toast in bed, bagels for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch. And drinking Cokes. And here's the other datum, I feel pretty awful. Floaty, sort of. Actually I had some leftover pork lo mein for lunch the other day and I was like, dang it, I think I'm coming down with a cold, and then I realized it was something more akin to an allergic reaction, idk to what, maybe the processed starch, maybe the MSG, but I flushed it out with plenty of water and it went away. So that's interesting, or as Alanis Morrisette might say, ironic. Don't think about that too hard, it doesn't actually have anything to do with Alanis Morrisette.

So eight months of pretty clean eating, I can finally actually feel the difference between good, solid energy and the floaty, nervous energy that I'm getting right now from the past week and a half of caffeine, sugar, and starch. Mahhh, I feel yucky. Also sort of itchy. I'm looking forward to getting back to vegetables, do I know how to party or what. And here's where I mention that I'm only down three pounds, but I look noticeably leaner. And looking lean isn't even the most important thing to me, you know what I've really noticed about myself this summer, I can pick up my feet pretty good. Though I'm not gonna lie, I haven't not noticed that my belly is flat. Like maybe I take a minute to notice it in the mirror every day when I get out of bed, and march out to show the sweetie man, um, every day.

Have you ever read Remains of the Day? It's about this butler, his life is falling apart and all he can think is, he needs a new staff plan. I am that butler. I mean, my life isn't falling apart. My life is pretty okay. I'm just saying, I need a new food plan, it seems like the weather's finally turned and it's fall, so I can eat fall things now, TK.

Oh and, the orange, blue, and gray boxes in the second-to-last column are my evening workouts. I expanded this section to also include morning and afternoon activity, for some whole day perspective, in the extra-demented SNIKT! chart that I set up for fall.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Early Fall Fitness Chart

SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT
SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP
morning morning morning morning morning morning morning
HOME
Systems
WORK
 
HOME
Cooking
WORK
 
HOME
Cleaning
WORK
 
HOME
Laundry
Grocery
PLAY
practice
WORK
 
PASTIME
 
WORK
 
PASTIME
 
WORK
 
PLAY^
 
PLAY
referee
PLAY
practice
PLAY^
 
PLAY^
volume
PLAY^
practice
PASTIME
 
PASTIME
 
evening evening evening evening evening evening evening
SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP

So you know to look at this from a whole day perspective, yeah? It's basically the same as my late summer chart, just with Tuesday dropping from high to low intensity. I made all the blues the same blue.

I have to think this over a little bit more, I want morning and afternoon to be very low intensity but I'm okay with those three no activity blocks for now because they're balanced with low or on Sunday high intensity blocks?

I'd like to do the high-low for evening, independent of what's going on morning and afternoon. I mean, I'm not freaking out that one of my orange blocks is in the afternoon and of course it counts. This is going to be solved in the post-Hydra postseason, I won't have HT practice in the afternoon and so Sunday morning and afternoon can be gray and blue and then in the evening before ref practice I can do something orange, maybe during ref open skate I can hit that heavy bag, something like that.

I'm not being a very good example of being in the moment, my head's not really in early fall. I want it to be mid fall.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Fried Eggs with Avocado Asparagus Hash

fried eggs with avocado asparagus onion hash

Still don't have peppers, so asparagus gets the onion treatment and it's very good.

Really there are as many variations of this hash as vegetables that can be roasted, and I haven't even gone beyond salt and pepper yet. Also I just looked at my chart and hash is supposed to be my winter breakfast, it's supposed to be zoodles and squoodles for fall, oops.

a bunch of asparagus
an onion
olive oil
salt
an avocado

Heat oven to 500 degrees.

Trim and chop the asparagus, and dice the onion. Toss them in a baking pan with a little olive oil and salt, and put them in the oven for fifteen minutes. Stir and roast for another ten minutes or so.

Cut up the avocado into hash-size pieces and stir them into the roasted vegetables.

For the rest of this breakfast

Fry some eggs in a bit of olive oil or butter in a skillet over medium high heat. Lately I've been pretty lush with my butter and olive oil, enough to swirl the eggs around in and cook the tops without adding water to steam them.

Plate the eggs with the hash.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Early Fall Chart

SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT
SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP
morning morning morning morning morning morning morning
HOME
Systems
WORK
 
HOME
Cooking
WORK
 
HOME
Cleaning
WORK
 
HOME
Laundry
Grocery
PLAY
practice
WORK
 
PASTIME
 
WORK
 
PASTIME
 
WORK
 
PLAY^
 
PLAY
referee
PLAY
practice
PLAY^
 
PLAY^
volume
PLAY
practice
PASTIME
 
PASTIME
 
evening evening evening evening evening evening evening
SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP

Third Coast has ended, that was so much fun. Sigh. Now for four weeks of pre-Hydra preseason, which means HTs still have weekend and transition soon to weeknight practices, and we start league practice but not scrimmage yet. I'm freed up from Tuesday night practice, but boop! one of my Saturday clients moved to Tuesday so that filled right back up; it's less strenuous, though, and less time consuming so still a bit of a rest. But of course that has me thinking I could do two clients on Tuesday and two clients on Saturday, and then the state of my business would be looking pretty good.

What I'm sort of dying for, not gonna lie, is for these weekend HT practices to be done and to get my Sundays back. Because summer is a lot less food prep and I can swing it with just one cooking practice, but fall through spring is a lot more food, and warm i.e. cooked food at that. Once I have Sunday morning and afternoon back, I can clean Sunday and cook Tuesday and Thursday, something like that.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Egressions #89-92

I am auditioning shakshukas for my fall work eggs. I mean, right? You make the sauce and bring that to work, crack in a couple eggs and cook them in the microwave?

89. Tomato, chickpeas, and spinach. Via Frites and Fries.
90. Greens and cream. Via Food Wanderings.
91. Tomato, feta, and parsley. Via Smitten Kitchen.
92. Peppers, tomato, and olives. Via Chocolate and Zucchini.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

As Deep As Any Ocean

m: the blankets have migrated.

p: well, they fell off the bed.

p: so i pulled them up.

m: very humanitarian of you.

p: and you know, you can't push a blanket.

p: think about that.

m: ...

p: you can steal a pillow, though!

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Fried Eggs with Avocodo Broccoli Hash

fried eggs with avocado broccoli onion hash

My normal avocado vegetable hash formula is avocado + whatever vegetable + a pepper, hot or sweet, but can I tell you, Tuesday nights off have been my keystone for four or five years, and I haven't had them all summer, I haven't collapsed but I've been sort of sagging, which manifests in misplacing and forgetting things, so this week I completely forgot to order peppers for hash.

I glumly contemplated just avocado and broccoli. I thought about pepperoncini but that didn't seem right, chipotle could have worked but shockingly I was out. Then onions occurred to me, good old onions always doing the work and never getting the attention.

And I did have an onion, I always have an onion. And then I made this. It was very good, that's what this hash needs: a little lively note (that's the pepper or onion), a hearty vegetal note, and a lush note.

a crown of broccoli
an onion
olive oil
salt
an avocado

Heat oven to 500 degrees.

Trim and chop the broccoli, and dice the onion. Toss them in a baking pan with a little olive oil and salt, and put them in the oven for fifteen minutes. Stir and roast for another ten minutes or so.

Cut up the avocado into hash-size pieces and stir them into the roasted vegetables.

For the rest of this breakfast

Fry some eggs in a bit of olive oil or butter in a skillet over medium high heat. Lately I've been pretty lush with my butter and olive oil, enough to swirl the eggs around in and cook the tops without adding water to steam them.

Plate the eggs with the hash.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Eat A Protein, A Green, And A Grain
 For Pre-Workout Dinner
 four times a week

eat a protein, a green, and a grain for pre-workout dinner

Doodly doo, don't mind me, just closing the loop here. This is my main—a.k.a. spacefood—dinner actually, four times a week before I work out in the evening. I'm still working on eat fish and vegetables for dinner three times a week for when I don't have an evening workout. I did come up with my own fish taco recipe, it's very good! TK!

The Cue

The cue for my spacefood dinner is getting home from work or finishing up my work at home and having to fuel up for my evening workout.

The Routine

Blah blah blah you've seen this, korean ground beef or chinese ground pork with kale or turnip greens with Trader Joe's microwaveable rice, I borrowed Matt Fitzgerald's rhyme "a grain, a green, and a bean" but I count beans as starch and I eat meat, and happily protein still rhymes, so. I changed the order because I prioritize protein. Like for most of what I eat, the key habit is in my cooking practice so that all I have to do when I want to eat is grab some jar. Or in this case, I keep my meat and greens in takealong containers. Actually for spacefood, I sort of flop on the couch and bellow I'M HUNGRY and the sweetie man fixes my bowl for me. Yeah I know, that's gross, but ...true. Sorry! (Not at all sorry!)

The Reward

Another perfect example of a how a habit loop is formed: it took a few iterations to get the bowl right, and it seems like little bit of meat, a little bit of greens, and a little bit of rice is the right balance so that I do decently at practice, and that ensures I will do it again and again. Achievement unlocked.

Status: ACTIVE

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Bout Day Breakfast
 Third Coast vs Ann Arbor Derby Dimes

fried eggs with fried zucchini and red bell rice, water, coffee

Fried eggs with fried zucchini and red bell rice, water, coffee

More bout day breakfasts!

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Truly This Is Our Blackest Hour

p: man, five weeks of an effortless, perfect diet.

m: and then?

p: this week.

m: eh.

m: it happens.

p: ::mouth full::

See I think the fun of my cryptic titles would be if you actually put it all together and figured it out, just because that would be one in a million. But this is worth sharing and I agree: Hellboy: Pancakes by Mike Mignola. Has to be one of the greatest 2 page comic stories ever made.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Chicken, Artichoke Heart, and Red Bell Salad
 over sliced pear and avocado

chicken, artichoke heart, and red bell salad with pear and avocado

I got this pear-avocado idea from Biggie when she had a pear, avocado, and arugula sandwich. A little arugula in this wouldn't hurt at all, hm.

A whole pear and a whole avocado is a lot of food, so I divided the pear and avocado between two bowls for me and the sweetie man.

a can of artichoke hearts
a red bell pepper
three-quarters of 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/3 cup olive oil
kosher salt
black pepper
a rotisserie chicken

For two salads:
a pear
an avocado

Slice the artichokes hearts and pepper, and divide between four jars.

Eyeball three-quarters of a third cup vinegar and then measure a third cup olive oil into the cup of a rocket blender, add a pinch of salt and some grinds of black pepper, and whirr it all together. Divide the vinaigrette between the jars.

Divide the breast and thigh meat of the chicken between the jars, saving the rest for snacks and soup.

To serve, slice a pear and an avocado and divide between two plates. Divide a chicken jar, or two jars if you're both hungry, over the sliced pear and avocado.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Summer Squash and Yellow Bell Scrambled Eggs

squash and yellow bell scrambled eggs

Second verse, more or less the same as the first!

a pat of butter
a swirl of olive oil
a yellow bell pepper
a summer squash, two if they're very small
3 eggs
a couple tablespoons grated parmesan

Melt the butter with the olive oil in a skillet over low heat while you dice the yellow bell. Toss the diced pepper in the butter, turn up the heat to medium low, and let that soften while you dice the summer squash. Toss the diced summer squash into the pepper, turn up the heat to medium, push it around a bit with a heatproof rubber spatula but otherwise leave them alone until they're tender.

Beat the eggs and pour them over the softened veggies, and shake a little grated parmesan over the eggs. Push everything around with your rubber spatula until the eggs are scrambled and cooked, maybe a little longer so the scramble isn't watery but still moist.

Scrape onto a plate and eat.