Pax Potato

There came a morning when I woke up, stepped on the scale and decided it was time to do something about that.  Like everything else there was an app for that, and I found the Livestrong Calorie Counter to be very effective and lost a nice chunk of weight.  As long as I could eat what I like, just less and less often, I coped with dieting very well.  Then I went in to see Doc and he said I really ought to be on the Low Glycemic Index Diet.
There is an app for that too.  The GI diet app helps me track the Glycemic load of all the food I eat.  It allowed me multigrain bread, sourdough bread, and reasonable quantities of pasta.  I can do that.  It's not my favorite having been raised on starch because it is tasty and affordable.  The real struggle didn't kick in until I decided to widen my research and read some books from the library.  The current book forbids potatoes, rice and bread--period.  I'm not sure I can do that.  My Irish grandfather could do things with potatoes that would make you cry.  The bowl they were served in is a hallowed family artifact. Give my mother a pound of hamburger and rice, and you'll have a feast in 30 minutes.  Bread, don't get me started on bread.  We would tease my grandmother and great-grandmother into bread wars, each trying to top the other and succeeding.  It meant fresh hot bread every day for weeks.
I feel like a snob foregoing these basic calories.  I realize it's because my doctor said so, and he's a pretty smart guy. but I can still remember the look on my soon-to-be-ex best friend's face when I failed to understand the part that Ramen noodles played in her diet.  The stupidest thing I ever saw on TV and anyone who has watched TV knows that a pretty serious insult was when Jamie Oliver tried to gross out Appalachian kids with food.  No one thought to hire a guide to local culture?  Don't get me wrong, Jamie is a pleasure to watch cook, naked or clothed, and he meant well, but  when your family has at least one living memory of hunger, you eat anything you're offered and you're trained to.  His "whazzed" up chicken nasties turned into chicken nuggets were just calories and you don't say no to calories.
I guess somehow I have to figure this out.

Running Hot

Day before yesterday it rained packages at our house.  After months of thinking, my curriculum plans were made and thanks to Rainbow Resource and Amazon they are largely fulfilled.  This coincided with the discovery of a teacher planning app that felt more natural to me than my previous planner.  It's a bit touchy, and has wiped out as much as three days of plans, but it's more open, simple style lets me record only what I need as I want.
Most of the booty was stored in the Locked Door Room (see previous post) to wait as a surprise for the school year, but the teacher books went to my newly cleaned classroom desk.  I drafted a schedule and then it began.  Planning, planning, planning.  Now that I had a schedule and the resources necessary to make decisions about what to do when all I had to do was start putting all those puzzle pieces together.  First a subject, then a full day, then a week and then...to save the world!  Once I've planned a month, no, a trimester, no, the whole year, then I can do auxiliary things like make all the photocopies and organize supplies.
And then I couldn't sleep.  It's all good, but it's too much.  Today I spent hiding from my planner and curriculum guides and the copier.  I had to do summer school, but that's different.  We went to the library.  I almost stayed out of the shelves about next year's time period, but our third wanted to know about William Penn.  Kurt brought home pizza and we watched Real Steel (great movie for MI and engineers).  My desk is calling and all my stuff awaits, but I'm hiding in Kurt's office writing up a post.
Tomorrow I'll devote to physical preparations for next year and going through my to do list before another school year burns me up.

Ice Fishing in July

I keep thinking about shutting down this blog. Almost nobody reads it, and I have so much else to do. However, it still serves it's purpose which is to help me overcome my fear of being read.  In my world growing up if you said the wrong thing, that was it, you were out, and your little dog too.  I say all kinds of things, and still almost nobody reads it.  The reassuring monotony is valuable to me.  
Perhaps someday I'll relaunch with flashy items and a site redesign, but for now it's enough to say whatever's on my mind and watch the daily visits climb to ten.  Keeps the well open.

grown up honeymoon

A few weeks before my marriage my father asked me how I felt about it, and I said, "ask me again in three years."  It wasn't because I wasn't in love, new is simply not my favorite feature for anything, much less for something as critical as marriage.  So in spite of five and a half years of on again, off again dating and seven and a half years of generally being on my radar, I still needed time to feel comfortable qualifying my marriage.  It's been eighteen years, and I can give it an unqualified excellent.  Like everybody we've had challenges both those that we signed up for and those that we didn't.  We aren't perfect, but we don't ever give up.  Our strength comes from being able to take turns carrying the burdens and maximizing each others gifts and character.
I guess it is a measure of our closeness that I started out writing a puff piece about a recent honeymoon trip, but I can't stay away from talking about my joy in the marriage, forget the hotels and meals and sightseeing.  Atlanta is awesome, but the falling in love I did there, I did with Kurt.

marriage

havepenis
fore ever
allowed

...starts to come together

I enter my second year of the forties this year, and I have to say I'm liking the forties.  All those things I daydreamed about having in the future when I was a teen, and then labored (in six cases literally) to make real in my twenties and thirties are real.  My handsome husband comes home from work and kisses me hello.  Six kids have completely overrun this house, just the way I imagined they would.  The must haves are had.
That's really great, but I'd be struggling if the forties weren't also a pivot point--a moment of transferred momentum.  Somewhere I came across a study that said a woman's career doesn't really take off until her forties, so I decided to strike while the eggs were fresh and make a family, trusting that when it was time to refocus on my career I'd be choosing a strong starting point.  This decade is not just about saying goodbye to my wonderful kids, it's also about becoming a published writer.   I have a lot to do, and I'm excited about it.
Happy Birthday to me!  I love it.

Mostly Muslim Movies

My parents were teachers in a small Christian school when I was growing up.  They signed a contract foregoing movies and they stuck to it. The same church that sponsored the school was struggling to work all this out.  I remember being properly shocked when my Sunday School teacher used ET for an illustration.  VHS put an end to all pretense.  Movies were back in swing just in time for my adolescence and I've found it a delicious naughty pleasure ever since.
But now I've gone a step further--ahh, the slippery slope.
I've gone Muslim--mostly.
I'm finding the films of our counterpoint interesting.  They make new all those old problems of life by dressing it up in what is for me a costume.  It is a pleasure to learn and grow.

Sabah is about a woman trying to work out a life between her family's traditionalism and her own need to explore.  There's a sweet love story.  It's sort of  Jane Austen in a hijab.

Arranged follows the lives of two young women, one Orthodox Jew and one traditional Muslim as they go through their respective processes of finding a husband.  I love the way they support each other, and the best moment in the movie when the Muslim is mistaken for a Sephardic Jew.

Salmon Fishing in Yemen  delighted me with a Muslim Jesus.  It was unexpected in this oddball love story.  The movie is truly beautiful both in how it was filmed and the literary frame it works in.

Children of Heaven has been mentioned before, but if you have children this film is an excellent introduction to Muslim Culture.  A boy loses his sister's shoes.  His family is too poor to pay for new, so the two share his shoes.  Charming heartbreak all around.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is mostly set in India rather than being Indian--Muslim or Hindu, but it's interesting.  All that thinking about death, which is also thinking about life.  The choices and opportunities near the end of life.  Death seems to walk in a veil until we are wearing it.  Sometimes it's good to give it a think.