small change

is the unmeasured life worth living?

I don’t know how I got myself so fully armed and loaded with all these gadgets just to go for a walk around the block, however long that block may be. Not that it should come as a complete surprise, considering that as far back as some 10 years ago I kept a database I designed that tracked my walks, routes, weather conditions, and other standard as well as oddly notables along the way. I’d come back from my perambulations in the hills and then sit on my behind for hours entering the data and then tweaking the database and the kind of reports I could generate from it.

I guess I always liked information, maybe with a special soft spot reserved for the kind that could easily be quantified. As if the measure of things would somehow be the magical key to the very sense of those same things.

So what do we have here?

First (over to the left on my and the right of the icture), there is the Fitbit, a nifty little clip based on Wii technology that measures steps you take as well as the number of floors (or altitude of sorts) you climb, calories you burn, how active you are, and then transmits all this info to a USB base station for upload to the web site where you can track all sorts of other health info, from the foods you consume, to the hours you sleep, to your glucose levels and blood pressure readings, as well as the fleeting impressions you have of your mood and which you want to record for posterity, or for as long as this fad for being your own better self in numbers lasts.

Next up we have the Polar Heart Rate Monitor setup, with the watch visible on my arm and the strap with the unit that measures the heartbeats tucked under the shirt. Moving on to the other hip, there is the old-fashioned pedometer, also counting steps and calories. And yes, the pedometer and the Fitbit do not agree on the number of steps taken or miles covered during a given stretch of a walk. Nor does in any way Endomondo the app on my phone that also tracks routes via GPS. All very disconcerting to a numbers freak, but very revealing to a psychologist (I would think) in the choice of the final results I take for the record. (And yes, for the record, I always err on the low side of the numbers, that is, I take the lowest ones, the ones that show me as the underachiever).

So what’s the point of chasing all these numbers, you ask -- that is, if you are not too busy laughing by now? On the face of it, this numbers game  should be a constant incentive and an occasional reward. An incentive to keep moving and a reward when all that movement shows a positive upswing in trends.

And yet… here is the rub. My “trainer” on the Fitbit site is an algorithm. It knows something about my given numbers (such as I supplied them), but nothing much more about what makes me tick. Nor does it care for the kinds of days I am having, or if my hip is bothering me more today than yesterday.  Not that I can't share this info with more than just the fields in a database, because there is a very active community of users of this gadget who want to share with each other the miraculous ways this gadget has helped them transform themselves and also the many obstacles they encounter along their step-counted journeys to better health and fitness. It’s been documented that weight loss and general health improvements are much easier to achieve when they are undertaken in the company of others.

There was quite an influx of those “others” with the New Year, people who received their Fitbit as a gift over the holidays, or whose companies perhaps gave them a health care incentive if they used it. This was exciting at first, hearing from so many set on the same path and sharing my interest in the power of numbers and delights in tracking.

The day my aha moment came when someone posted on the forum asking if anyone could beat the numbers said “poster” got in one day: more than 60k steps & over 38 miles, and phenomenal "activity" numbers, not to mention seemingly enough calories burned to cover the nutritional energy needs of a small country for a week. All this in ONE day. At first I turned slightly green, then, a little later red from laughter as I read through the responses, all praising the poster, and some of them also flexing their own big daily numbers in between the praise and admiration.

My response was a “wow” and an admission that no, I can’t beat those numbers. And then, almost as an afterthought, I added “nor do I want to.” Because I am doing this to get healthier, and that includes working on the healthier parts of competition. Only one person in the thread “heard” me, and the rest ignored me. That’s not exactly true, because I got some new “friend” requests on the site, which when I accepted them, immediately knocked me down the “leaderboard,” giving me the first opportunity to test my health resolutions around competition.

My new challenge then is to find strength in company, in its greater numbers as people go, but more importantly, in the lesser numbers of performance I put forth in this company. Because sometimes less is not only more, but the absolute maximum in a healthy life that is not only worth measuring, but, in fact, worth living!

flummoxed in flux

At the start of a new year fresh doubts about old enterprises sprout as naturally as the impulses to make those lists of resolutions to become one’s better self. But this doubt over what small change is has been in the making for the better part of a few years now.

Originally, when I still had my old alembic blog where I wrote about poetry, place, and whatever fell into the flame of my dwindling attention span, small change was going to be a blog about women and money. Originally, I was inspired to launch it after attending a BlogHer conference, but as things turned out, I soon realized I knew very little about money, except how little I was making of it. Then, when my old alembic blog was pulled by the hosting company that went commercial, I fell back into the old habit of writing posts on whatever life threw at me, figuring it all passes for small change in the big scheme of things anyway.

Pt. Reyes, CA

This has worked well, I am not complaining. Too well, in fact. The lack of focus has permeated all my writing projects, while at the same time provided me with a sense of great accomplishment on a given day.

As the last year drew to a close, something changed for me, even if in a small way – to keep in the trajectory of small changes. I actually found myself drawing up outlines for writing projects, some around topics that I would have blogged about. Had I done that, those topics would have been done for, instead of still percolating as they for and re-form in the quieter regions of my mind. To put it another way: had I blogged them, my muse would have figured her job is done, then taken the lot of ideas to be filed and stored, if not sent the lot of them to a reputable shredding company. There is something to be said for that old adage, “discretion is the better part of valor,” or creative production in this instance.

Blogging for nearly a decade, in one form or another, is not something I can halt abruptly – especially since I do have multiple blogs. Yep, I do, even if some of them are not listed on my blogroll here or elsewhere. One of these blogs is barely two weeks old, but it’s a daily commitment for the next year, that is for sure. Unlike this blog, it has a single purpose: to feature a photo a day of Mt. Tamalpais, the most iconic ridge of Marin County in California. Plain and simple – and with an end in mind.

Another blog is a repository of links related to health, nutrition, and fitness – interests of mine, that are also plain and simple, and should I keep blogging about them here, would only get more complicated than they need to be. Not to mention confuse the people who come here hoping to read about poetry, or Marin, or random walks, or recipes, or dogs, or social media, or… well, you get the collage, so to speak.

Then, there is the issue of the blogging platform itself: TypePad. I was an early adopter of it, but these days, it seems like I am walking among the ruins. As I contemplate a switch of platforms, I am also contemplating that shift in focus too. All this comes down to the possibility that this blog might end up as a casualty on the road to if not to better, at least to other things.

Meyer Rd., San Rafael, CA

Not that I am closing shop overnight. I realized too late that my plan with TypePad is a yearly one, so whether I post or not, the blog can live on for the most part of 2012.

All this just to say that there may be big turns in the future for small change.

Bret Harte Rd., San Rafael, CA

 

 

sweet stew

The year's not even a week old, and already I have cooked more meals at home than in all of the last month of 2011, probably. Tonight I went for the Sweet Potato Stew, one of the dishes Mark Bittman listed in his semi-vegan recipes in the January 1, 2012 edition of The New York Times Magazine. Wisely, he gives no amounts for the ingredients, except for the amount of the sweet potatoes, as a guide.

I say wisely, because without getting hung up on exact measures for the ingredients, we are free to bring our appetite to the dish – that is, add ingredients in the measure of our likes and so make the recipe our own. Which is what I did…

Took two very big organic sweet potatoes and peeled and cubed them. I also cubed two apples (organic Honey Crisps), but did not peel them, unlike the recipe suggested. I chopped up an organic sweet onion. Sliced very thinly half a fresh jalapeno pepper, and minced up some ginger. I opened up a can of organic coconut milk, the light version.

I heated up about a tablespoon of organic coconut oil in a big pot. When it was hot, I dropped in curry powder, more than the pinch suggested by Bittman’s recipe. I also added lots of freshly ground black pepper. Stirred the mixture for less than a minute, and then added the jalapeno and ginger, stirred that for a few more seconds, then dropped in the chopped onion. I let this mixture cook for about a minute, then added the sweet potato and apple cubes. As per Bittman’s instructions I sautéed the mixture for 5 or 6 minutes, then added the coconut milk with some extra water. I didn’t need to thin the coconut milk, because the light version was liquid enough already.

I covered the pot and let time and a low flame work on it for about 30 minutes or so. I then served it topped with pistachios and sunflowers and a sprig of Italian parsley.

Sure, we ate well tonight. A simple meal with rich flavors and plenty texture. As I write this, the aroma of sweet curry is still in the air, like a breath of sunshine in the chilling night.

dishing, a little

Lots of people list losing weight as one of their top resolutions, especially when their willpower is battered and limping badly in the middle of the party season in December. I am not one of those people. I mean the people who put losing weight on their New Year’s resolutions list. I used to be, but learned over the years (or should I say decades) that resolving to lose weight some time in the future only made things worse in the present. Invariably, with thoughts of future deprivation in January, I overindulged at every opportunity in December, and so only ended up with more weight on my body and more guilt in my soul.

This was the first year of a holiday season of my life that I didn’t gain weight. Nope. In fact, I lost a few pounds. And I didn’t feel deprived at all – and I attended more parties, too, than I can remember having been to in years.How I did it requires another post and involves boring stuff about tracking all the calories that go in and that go out, most of which is quite easy to do these days with the wealth of fitness and health apps out there for just about every platform and gadget.

All this is just a preamble to share with you all my dinner tonight, the first course of which disappeared too fast for me to capture with my camera. But I can still give you a sense of what it was like, because it was based on a recipe by Mark Bittman, who in the January 1, 2012 issue of The New York Times Magazine presented a few deliciously tempting semi-vegan dishes to get us to eat “better.” For tonight, my choice was the roasted squash with kale, but I left out the vinaigrette, opting to drizzle the finished dish with choice balsamic vinegar instead. Next up, I will try the bean burgers or the sweet-potato stew.

Then came time for dessert, which turned out to serve also as my major source of protein with the dinner, considering how its components are egg whites & non-fat Greek yogurt, along with raspberries, cooked up into a soufflé. This recipe came from Dr. Dean Ornish’s “The Spectrum.” One serving is approximately 90 calories, but I had two… So I don’t feel like I am deprived at all. Variations on this soufflé are bound to become part of my repertoire for menus this year.

Soufflés fresh out of the oven, with one already "plated."

Though the Greek yogurt had body and density, the soufflé was light and fluffy - pleasing as much to the eye as to the palate.

 

bar none

Last night I dragged out my dehydrator, starting on my 2012 resolutions a few days early, as if to stagger them, since I have quite a few on my list this time around. Besides, by the time the bars are finished -- that is, "cooked" in the raw -- it may well be January 1, 2012.

But it's more than health concerns that had me whip up this batch. These bars are also a response to the pain in the wallet I am noticing these days. I couldn't believe that a bar made of flax seeds and pumpkin seeds mostly should cost $3.19 at the health food store. But it does. And people shell out the money to buy them still -- obviously.

So, I decided to experiment a little. Not that I haven't already done my share of mixing up strange things to cook up in the dehydrator, but this time I meant business, hoping a little that I could make it a business -- eventually.

To start with, I bought the bar to set the "bar."

Then, after perusing the list of ingredients, I bought pumpkin seeds ($6.20 for 1.05 lbs), flax seeds ($2.48 for 1.25 lbs), dates ($6.29 for 1 lb), all organic, of course. I used all the pumpkin seeds I bought, less than half of the flax seeds, and about one third of the dates. To this mix I added my mix of spices and a touch of local organic honey from the hardworking bees of Tamara Holland, the multi-talented artist of Bean Up the Nose Art.

In no time -- at least after the hours it took to soak the seeds for proper raw food" prep -- I had the "dough" shaped into 24 bars about the same size as the "bar" bar, more or less. With that, last night's task was done. After that, it was up to the dehydrator.

Since we generate a lot of our own electricity -- in fact more than we use -- thanks to our solar panels, the cost of energy to run the dehydrator for days at the required temperature of around 108 degrees is taken care by the sun. Which leaves the cost of labor to factor into this experiment. Take my love of cooking and my passion for health and fitness, and I would almost pay you for me too make something good and useful.... So that takes care of that.

Still, if I were to attach a price tag to this bar, it would come to maybe 50 cents per bar for production costs, excluding labor.

But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.

So how do my bars measure up to the bar-setting bar?

Had to wait a bit to get the pudding to the proofing stage, but I am happy to report that after 24 hours of working the dehydrator non-stop my bars taste almost exactly the same as the one I bought, except that they are not as sweet.

Both bars, mine and the one from the store, taste a bit too flaxy for my taste, but I suppose that's the mark of a healthy nosh for the raw-food crowd.

I left out the agave that was listed prominently as an ingredient on the package of store-bought bar, and I also probably didn't put enough dates into the mix to make for a sweet difference in my agave-less version. In addition, my bars have more ragged edges, giving them a more homemade look. Though they have a slightly different shape, both bars weigh about the same. The one on the left, is the bar I made, and the one on the right, is the one I bought.

Next up?

Well, for the next batch, I think I'll include sesame seeds, going for that seedy punch all the way... 

Something new might just sprout its way into being in 2012 through these experiments!

a partial reading list

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about the Internet is that the wider I explore it, the deeper it brings me into the smaller, and warmer, world in which, if I don’t exactly feel completely at home, at least I can relax in the comforts of the familiar. I realize that was a sentence packed with the weight of questionable grammar and cheap ambiguity, so let’s start unpacking some of that load:

More than 10 years ago I started my forays online as I went in search of intelligent conversations, the kinds that were not readily available to me back then when I was the consummate soccer mom in the suburbs, sans the actual soccer thing, mind you, but driving the kids around just as much. In between the jaunts I jotted down poetry, having already given up on a couple of novels, as well as short stories, since I never seemed to have had the time it took to get into the flow such writing required. A stanza here and there, and then working each word to fit the creative template I had in mind for it, all that was manageable with raising the kids and living in the place I chose for this enterprise.

Eventually I even managed to make it to a couple of writing workshops during those pre-Internet years, and miracle of miracles, I even got myself into a low-residency MFA program that took me out of the suburbs, even if only virtually through a lot of correspondence between the the too-brief actual residences.

It was during this first early “virtual” experience at making my world bigger while staying within the boundaries of the familiar that my library started to grow. The books of my new friends -- of poets and novelists I met in the MFA program and workshops -- which I accumulated had me shopping for new shelves as well. I’d like to think that one consequence of our interactions was a small boost to the paper & pulp industry, the furniture manufacturers, the cafes, and not just better days for bookstores and publishers.

After I got my MFA, which I now realized trained me for an ease with “virtual” communities, I eventually discovered blogging, where I met another group of writers, all stuck in a way in their own version of suburbia and looking for sings of intelligent life elsewhere. That, and some fun, too, I suppose. And though we shared our writings freely with each other, on blogs and forums, some of us went ahead and made books. Yep, real books with pages we could thumb through and mark with our favorite passages.

And then came Twitter, which threw the world wide open, while at the same time honed in on home and brought into focus the fun of a life I though I could only have in the virtual realms. Oddly enough, as I said before, Twitter has made my local world larger and deeper in ways I haven’t experienced, well, since graduate school, I would say. Not surprisingly though, as I went full circle from my early local writers groups to the Internet and now back home through Twitter, I count quite a few writers in my growing twittering flock too.

All that preamble just to set up the books I want to list here as part of last year’s reading. It’s a partial list, of course. Partial, because it excludes many other books I have read. And partial, because, well, these are the books my friends and tweeps wrote. And here it goes, in no particular order, except the one that separates ebooks from the paper kind:

 

70 Faces, by Rachel Barenblat
Odes to Tools, by Dave Bonta
Open City, by Teju Cole
Opening the World, by Dale Favier

Ebooks:

The Bee-Loud Glade, by Steve Himmer
The Liar's Diary, by Patry Francis
Dead.com, by Sarah Browne
Meant To Be, by Beverly Butler and Sue Warhaftig
Hamlet's Blackberry, by William Powers
How to Start Making Your Art Your Business: 100 DIY Tips, by Tamara Holland
Celebrating Children - Conversations with Kids - The Funny, Poignant & Clever Things They Say, by Marilyn LoRusso
And, by Suzanna Stinnett: The Sugar Divorce, The 4-Hour Publisher, Five Five One One, Sister Island

 

 

near year's end

The shortest day today ... not that I really notice it. We have had plenty of light this December that is proving to be one of the driest on record. With each new sun-filled day, however short these days might have been measured in daylight hours, the haze thickens over the ridges of the hills.

I've been walking the hills and at times the paths by the creek. It feels good to be moving, to be looking farther and further than the screen of my laptop. It also feels good to be in the company of random thoughts, faintly outlined plans, ideas and dreams as hazy at times as the ridges in the distance.

If my words have been as rare here lately as the rain has been this December in Marin, it's because I have been delighting in walking thing out, rather than talking them out. I think I understand, on a new level, the way a pilgrimage worked through the body on the soul. My suburban route is unholy in sites, but that is not a deterrent, since I am not seeking for a miracle.

There's plenty of stuff already about this Solstice on the 'net, so the only thing I am adding is a glimpse of the afternoon sun from where I stood briefly, but long enough to mark the passing of another season:

 

december afternoon

Been walking lots lately. Up hills, by the creek, around the house ... all to keep up with the 10,000 steps a day I set for myself as a goal. Some days it's a chore, and others, it's still a chore, but there are rewards. Like yesterday afternoon, when the December sun painted the world in soft greys and blues and pinks through the smog and smoke from chimneys.

I took these pictures of Mt. Tam and the views of the Corte Madera Creek with my phone's camera, not the best equipment, but a handy one.

my twitterized life

These days the posts I write tend to come in bursts of 140 characters. Not because I discovered the benefits of brevity by any means. It’s just that with the season in which we resort to an orgy of lights to keep those long, long dark nights at bay, my interactions in what is called Real Life have picked up a mighty pace, leaving little room for reflections of the long kind. All thanks to Twitter.

Nearly 10 years ago when I first started to blog and eventually found myself part of a community spread across the world it seemed to me that I had the best of both worlds for an introvert with sudden flare-ups of extroverted periods: plenty of communication, but all of it well within my control. Not just the flow of words as such, but the actual physical, sensory input that get-togethers generate. All of which can create a lot of noise, or buzzing in the brain. But talking by writing, that was convenient and promised to be without the mess of nonverbal communication signals to distort things. Right… In to time at all, that group had get-togethers, but since we were scattered not just across the country, but also on continents, our face-to-face interactions were few and far between.

Back then, about 10 years ago, my actual social life in my neighborhood was circumscribed by my kids’ activities, so the people I hung out with were other parents, mostly my age and living similar lives. I was going to say that we could have made our own Stepford Wives movie, but I don't think I need to be that obvious... As soon as my younger son headed off to college, it was a very big shock to me to find that group of "friends" I thought I had disappear from my social horizon. Like my kids who went off and found themselves looking for new friends, I too was suddenly at loose ends for like-minded company. Slowly, I built up one community locally, mostly through the yoga classes I attended. But again, we in the group were a lot more similar than different.

It wasn’t until I became active on Twitter that things changed. I had a Twitter account since 2007, but never had much use for it. Then, one day I decided to tweet something mentioning a local organic farm. To my surprise, the person tweeting for them followed me. Soon enough, because this person had a large local following, I found myself in a group of locals, who not only carried on delightful (and informative) conversation online, but also met up regularly in local spots … and so my twitterized life took off.

If I’ve been writing less here, it’s because I’ve been talking more IRL (in real life). And because I’ve been talking more locally, I’ve also been covering a lot more local ground these days. Literally. Getting to know new neighborhoods, new local businesses, local artists, and the kinds of secrets about a place that only those who haunt it at all seasons and all times of the day get to know…

And because of Twitter, I found myself on a boat last night, with a magical moon rising over Belvedere as dozens of lit-up boats made their way through the darkly glistening bay, sometimes flanked by people draped in lights as well in canoes and kayaks, and on paddle boards. It all ended with fireworks aimed at showering the moon with light, as if it needed any more light….

Moon path leading to Sausalito Harbor

Santa's got a yacht

O, the zen of gliding on the water on the path of moonlight

fitted

I came across this house in Larkspur on a long walk I took yesterday looking for some quality time with my thoughts, hoping they'd set some hurt feelings straight. I set out wanting to run, more likely to run away, but I am no runner, so I had to keep on ambling to cover a lot of ground as I tried to put the distance between those long-held dreams of domestic bliss and the accumulated history of what I wrought over the years into the shape of the family I do have.

Toward the end of my 4-mile walk and past a path filled with a sun-infused mist that obscured Mt. Tam and rendered it appealingly exotic at the same time, I found myself on a street I vaguely remembered having walked before. And there it was, this house gleaming in the late November sun and in my imagination.  Castled dreams shrunk to fit a tiny suburban lot.