More about food

Little Darling preschool children learning about making bread (click to enlarge)

Today when I went to get some bread and brownies that are made here at the Great Harvest Bread Company, I saw these adorable little ones (the short people in red caps) and their teacher learning about how bread is made. This wonderful store also offers free samples, and I walk by here every day on my way to the bus. I try really hard not to get too many free samples, but this is where the bread my husband and I both eat comes from. He likes something called "Dakota seed" and I like the whole wheat sourdough. The feeling of family is strong in the store; they know me and call me by name as a "regular."

I've discovered that Bellingham, my new home, and Boulder, my old home, have many things in common. Both have a reputation for being different in food consciousness from their surrounding towns. I got a cup of coffee and asked if the beans are free trade. My server assured me that they are and said that here in Bellingham almost every coffee shop (except for the chains like Starbucks) use free trade coffee. At the Food Co-op where I do the majority of my shopping, everything that is carried in the store is supposedly good for the environment. We have the ability to go to a farm a few miles away and pick our own apples right off the tree. Milk, cheese and yogurt are processed within a short distance of my town (mostly in Bow, WA).

All this is uppermost in my mind right now as I continue reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food. Right now I'm reading about how the low-fat craze actually caused people to get sicker and fatter. People followed the dietary guidelines to eat more low-fat foods, and they replaced "bad" saturated fats with polyunsaturated and trans fats. We now know that trans fats really DO make us sick. And Pollan points out that Americans didn't eat less; they just ate the same amount but added more low-fat foods. Here's a telling quote (pp. 51-52):

Play your cards right and you can even get the American Heart Association to endorse your new breakfast cereal as "heart healthy." As I write, the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system. So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food.

I'm at the end of Part I (of three), "The Age of Nutritionism," and just beginning Part II, "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization." The last part is "Getting Over Nutritionism." I'll keep you posted. But if you're interested in learning more right now, I found this very good interview on NPR with Pollan. It also has a picture of him, which interested me. He looks like he's in very good shape.

:-)

Singin' in the rain

During the recent rain, I caught a bus and (heading to Fairhaven and the bookstore) I got off early so I could walk along the bay, with my trusty umbrella and raincoat (and camera). We don't usually get downpours here in the Pacific Northwest. My husband says in North Carolina they called them "frog stranglers" and a friend from Missouri referred to them as "toad chokers" -- both of which seem to refer to rain coming down so hard and fast that the poor amphibians were unable to cope. (He says this is more like six inches in a couple of hours!) But here in Bellingham, we usually have a nice light rain, where it can rain all day and still not add a half inch to the total.

This lone duck was swimming in the bay with nobody else around him, and far away in the distance a ship was alight in the gloom. [I have been informed this is a cormorant, not a duck.] I was pretty comfortable in my gear, except I realized after awhile I should have added rain pants; I would have been a lot drier. No matter, it wasn't cold, and I hummed a little tune as I walked. Not many people out and about in the rain. After walking around and getting pretty wet, I finished the stroll in Fairhaven and went into my local bookstore, then caught the bus back home. The rain was still coming down.

After I arrived home, we had a deluge. Suddenly I heard the rain so loud on the roof it roared, and in the distance, thunder. Then lightning. We went out on the front porch and watched in amazement as we experienced a true thunderstorm here in Bellingham.

After the excitement was over, I nestled down in my favorite chair and picked up the book I bought while at the bookstore, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. This link goes to Pollan's own description of the book and what he wanted to communicate in it. He sums it all up in seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I'm just starting the book, but so far I'm enjoying it very much.

There are worse things than having a good book to read, light rain pattering outside, birds all congregating at my feeders and adding their own background sounds to my day. This beautiful little girl I captured in the rain looks like she's not having any problem enjoying life.

Resilience

Amazing that this plant found enough soil to grow in concrete!

When I left my long-time massage therapist in Boulder, she gave me a wonderful gift of some lavender oil (which she used during my massage), a CD with my favorite tape of all the ones she played over seven years of visits every other week. Best of all, she gave me a little packet of angel cards, which are small little cards with one word written on them. I keep them in a special bowl and every once in a while I draw one out and ponder the message. Yesterday, I received "Resilience."

It has caused me to wonder about what resilience means. In the top picture, I was amazed on one of our hikes to see this concrete bridge with a sprouted plant. I suppose years have passed to blow enough soil into the cracks to give this plant a place to purchase. And it seems to have done a pretty good job of it, too. My longtime boss, Mickey, used to take pictures of nature reasserting itself like this all over the world in his travels. I would see him huddled over a small crack in the concrete and knew that was what he was doing.

We humans are pretty resilient, too. As I watch my leg heal and read about the various illnesses of my blogging friends, as we limp and sniffle and ache -- and recover, I might add, I think about how we keep coming back up after we are down with life's little (and not so little) challenges. Most of the time we do make it at least part way back so we can continue to enjoy life.

Resilience is something my wild birds are needing in the coming months. I wonder if they know about winter or what their experience of life is. I seem to have an abundance of chickadees and goldfinches right now, along with the ubiquitous sparrows and now some nuthatches and woodpeckers are visiting the suet feeder I recently put out. The juncos are beginning to return, and I'm happy to see that they also like to eat the nyjer thistle that drops from the thistle sock onto the ground. I took this picture of one of my favorite chickadees, a chestnut-backed chickadee, yesterday, using the flash. At one point I had six of them all begging me to take their picture (I swear!). (Click any to enlarge.)

Then there is the resilience of our planet, in the face of the onslaught of population pressures that are beyond what I could ever have imagined when I was born 67 years ago. Walking around the Farmers' Market yesterday in the rain, I saw this sign perched against these warty pumpkins, and I realized that if we all treated the earth's resources as finite instead of infinite, we would all be so much better off. Because of the reminder by so many of my blogging friends, I am trying to lessen my footprint on the earth in every way I can. Maybe you can think of something you can do yourself. If everyone did small little things, maybe it will catch on. Probably not in my lifetime, but maybe in the lifetime of your children. Or their children. Thank God for Resilience!

Wordplay

Last night as I was going to sleep, quite without me being able to do anything about it, the poem written by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass about the Jabberwock came to mind. I found myself straining to remember what the poem was, and for some reason I could remember the whole first stanza, and then some:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Do you do strange things with your brain like that? So of course, this morning I googled "jabberwocky" and have been on quite a strange journey ever since. According to Wikipedia, this poem made of nonsense and portmanteau words is considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems ever written in the English language. In fact, two of the words he came up with have entered the language: chortle and galumph.

And of course I was fascinated by the definition of portmanteau. It is exactly what the name of my blog is, after all: a combination of my name (DJan) with the "ity" word of your choice. I actually think of it being "insanity" but it could also be "sanity" or some other word I haven't thought of yet. Some well-known examples of portmanteau words are "wordplay" (the name of this post), "chocoholic" and "wikipedia," to name a few. Each of the links takes you to the Wikipedia description, which I found to be quite entertaining.

I also remembered the whole Humpty Dumpty conversation, once I got started with this line of thought, that Alice had with Humpty. Do you remember? He discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice. Their conversation has been used to justify lines of thought in more than 250 legal cases, two of them before the Supreme Court. This link will take you to the conversation, if you have the interest.

Language is so much fun! And to find out how completely taken I was with Lewis Carroll's book, I discovered during my journey this morning that I had already made a post way back in March about another character in the Looking Glass: The Walrus. In re-reading the post all these months later, I found that it was another time that I was just beginning to fall into sleep that I thought of that poem.

I suppose this means it's time for me to re-read Through the Looking Glass, don't you think? For those who are interested in the entire poem, the first link in this post will take you there. I thought about putting it in here, but I find the posts I enjoy the most are not terribly long and leave the details to the reader to explore further.

Rainbirds

Apartment driveway in the rain

This is the time of year here in Bellingham when the rainbirds start to head south. That's what the old timers call those people who come here in the springtime and leave in the fall, when the rains begin and the days get shorter and shorter. This morning I overslept because the sun doesn't come up until 7:30am these days, and although I'm a morning person and wake up naturally, there must be some part of me that responds to the light, or lack of it.

Did you notice my new updated format? I wanted something that would allow me to change the top picture now and then. I took that picture of Mt. Baker last month and just love it, and Rae told me how to make it fit, so there you have it: my new look. I really love some of the blogs that my friends have, but I can't seem to find all the options that I want to be in one template, and fixing the html is just way too much like work. I found a new template but didn't like the spacing between the lines, so I went into the html to fix it, and boy was it a mess when I finished. This simple blogger template gives me the right spacing, so I think I'll stick with this one for awhile. If any of you have some tips of how YOU manage to create your gorgeous blogs, I'm sure wanting to hear about it.

I missed my Thursday hike. I didn't think it would be such a woeful feeling to skip one week, but when you go every week, it makes skipping one feel like you're an invalid. Invalid: what an interesting word, accent on the first syllable and you gimp around the room; accent on the second and that's what I feel like right now. Although I just got back from the gym, and today was the first time I was able to exercise enough to work up a good sweat, it just wasn't enough.

Which reminds me. The 30 Day Throw Down is now concentrating on exercise: how to get enough and how other people work it into their lives. I am sure willing to give you a tour of my gym, but there are always people working out in it, and I feel unsure about how to get pictures without making people upset at some cheeky broad taking pictures of them. I'll work on figuring out how to do that. I think Robynn (of the aforementioned blog) is temporarily without internet access in California. Doesn't this seem like it's happening a lot lately?

I took this picture looking up at the sky when the sun came out yesterday. The wind and rain are blowing all the leaves off the trees today, so I thought I'd give us a little treat to finish the blog. I'm watching it rain and listening to the wind. Not bad when one is sitting in a nice warm place with a beautiful iMac in front of her!

:-)

Fall colors

Everyone, it seems, is talking about (and posting pictures of) fall  colors. It's that time of year, when everything begins to fire up, so to speak, in flames of red and orange. I was expecting a huge storm this morning, but it looks as if it's heading to California and Oregon first, before it hits Washington on Friday. Every day the forecast changes quite a lot.

Yesterday, thinking that all the leaves will be off the trees from the windstorm and with things not looking all that good in rain, I headed out with my trusty camera and took pictures of some of the most beautiful sights I could find. And oh yes, I made two wonderful purchases at last Saturday's Farmers' Market that I haven't yet shared with my blogging friends, so I'm adding a couple pictures of them in too. These gourds were two for a dollar, and I just couldn't resist their shapes. These two look like they are dancing together, to me at least, and the fall colors through the window behind them also show a distinct change of season. (Click any picture to enlarge.)

Saturday was very cold. In fact, we set a record cold temperature for the date. It was in the 30s during the day and, although the sun was shining, it felt really frigid. I wandered over to Northstar Wool Designs, a table with wonderful hats, most of them felted. (If you don't know what this means, you make something in wool and then boil it, which makes it have a completely different texture and size.) My first experience with felting was when I knit myself a wonderful wool sweater and then took it on a cross-country ski trip. Since I was sweating quite heavily, by the time I got home my sweater was felted under the arms and on the back under my pack. Quite ruined for anything but skiing. But on Saturday, I tried on a beautiful hat and I couldn't make myself take it off. Kim Brooke, the artist, says she only uses merlino wool, which is why the hat is so soft and non-scratchy. I'll use it all through the upcoming winter.

So far, my new Snow Leopard OS is behaving, once we found out that it would freeze when getting ready to go into screen saver mode (something didn't get pushed forward), and now I'm noticing a distinctly faster iMac. Now that we've found the problem, I'm happy we decided to upgrade to this new OS. I'd love to hear what others think of it.

And then, of course, there's the "other" fall colors. I couldn't resist adding one more picture of my leg as of today, in all its glory of color from my fall last Thursday. I will not be hiking tomorrow, because my leg is still recovering, and I'm still icing and elevating, both of which are hard to do when you're on a trek. Next week, I hope.

:-)

Disgruntled

What a day. I woke up to my new OS (operating system) of Snow Leopard on my MacBook, which didn't work all that well as my husband tried to get it to stop freezing up solid. Somehow, it got a little better, because I read all my blogs and papers and it didn't freeze up.

Then I went to check on my credit card, since the balance seemed a little high. And guess what? Two bogus credit card charges!! I called my bank right away and canceled my card, but someone didn't take good care of my card, and I've had this one for almost a decade. Dang!

I get to the gym and find that my pass is missing, I lost it somewhere. It's not hard to get a replacement, but dang! Another thing to make my day less than perfect. I got the replacement card, but what did I do with the other one? Only I could have lost it in the first place, by not taking proper care of it.

So I'm disgruntled. And then, the Willow party is tonight, and I forgot to get my tux ready! I've got a date with k.d. lang, and she insisted that I dress in a tux, which I did get together, finally. We've got to get to the Willow Manor Ball before it's over!

So today has been a mixture of really tough stuff and really cool stuff. I see that most of my blogging friends have gone to the ball, and I sure didn't want to be left out!
:-)