Slow Fashion October OTD (outfit of the day)

 I started the day at the gym.

Shoes: ANCIENT and resoled shoes bought on sale.  Over 10 years use so far.  They are good leather and comfortable.   They got demoted to gym wear as the top is separating from the sole a bit and the glue doesn't hold as long when used outside.  

Socks:  Gift

Pants: bought for 1$ at thrift 2 or 3 years ago.  They just live in the gym bag.

Undies...old.

Foundation garment: See previous post. Same one.

Shirt: tank top purchased at thrift maybe a decade ago.  It's an eddie bauer or something and just will not wear out.

I also did yoga while there.

yoga bag: gift (actually, it was a gift bag but is a nice canvas shopping bag that now transports yoga stuff)

Blocks: bought on super sale during a 'rona closure of a local studio

Strap: I think I paid retail for this but it was like 15-20 years ago.

Mat: super cool FOLDING yoga mat bought at thrift for 2$ or so.  Used for several years now and shows no wear.  I like the flat fold better than the roll.  I can travel with it in a suitcase.  

Towel/blanket: Gramma got me this when I STARTED college so it is over 37 years into pretty well daily use.  It's thin but still soaks up liquids like water and sweat.  

I'm Baaaa_aaaack!

 The radio show is going to be IN THE STUDIO tomorrow!!!  Woot woot!

We've been zooming from 3 locations into the station where the intrepid station manager then beamed us out to the universe and the greater Moscow Idaho metropolitan area.   Since...um...like a really long time ago.  The before times.   

I looked it up:  Sunday March 29, 2020.   Re-opening to many in person shows June 21, 2020  

Peace Radio, the show I am on with friends, was the last live show other than 3 people who kept the station going and were the only ones in the station for those many months.  

Tomorrow, Peace Radio may be the first live DJ show, again, other than the three who kept the station going for many months...the first of the regular mortals...back on the air.

The official semi-reopening will be Monday but I begged for the dispensation to come in a day early and got it.

Very grateful to the station manager and others who worked through this and helped our show and others zoom in live, helped some develop and record shows remotely and send them in as sound files, and just simply kept the poop in a group.

I may miss doing the show from the shed and I know people will miss all the cocks...I mean my roosters crowing (there have been 3 over the 'rona times) in the back ground.   Today the wild roses are in full bloom and the breeze out of the south is blowing it through my windows.  That would be nice during the show, but the motorcycles and semi trucks blasting down the highway and blowing horns and blaring music won't be nice. Hence I end up shutting the windows anyway.

During 'rona I picked up an accidental side gig, got another phase of the house built, learned to combing yoga and jenga and twister (yengster?  twonga?  jisga?) in order to do yoga in the wee shed over zoom or off recorded sessions from the Moscow Yoga Center, off youtube or out of my head.   I realized again JUST HOW CRAMPED it is here for yoga with a 34" inseam and seriously long arms, when I visited an aunt and really loved the boiler room for yoga.  I could spread my arms out and not burn them on a stove or bust a knuckle of the loft ladder.  In July, I can go back to the yoga studio once a week or so.  That should be amazing too.  I wonder if I can even DO yoga while suppressing toots anymore.  When one yogas at home, one farts proudly.  The class will be simulcast to those who prefer to stay home or need to, so the toots could be broadcast.  

Things are open again here.  I am aware they are not so open elsewhere.  I hope this too shall pass for us all.

No Food-Spend February Update 2

 It's going fine.  Amazingly fine.  Like beyond fine.

Today's menu, I was "working from home" (I did do a virtual meeting so some work.  Also took comptime): 

Breakfast: Brown Rice Pancake thingies.  I like to add eggs to left overs and make them into breakfast.  I made brown rice (free, 2nd harvest) yesterday and added powdered eggs (gift so...free) because the hens are not having it right now, coffee from the free crap at work, cinnamon (1cent), nutmeg (1cent) and water (free).   Total:  2cents

Lunch:  Noodle soup with lentils.   1 onion (free 2nd harvest), a 1/4cup scoop of dried veg from the food co-op (about 5cents), spaghetti for the noodles (free, 2nd harvest), dried mushrooms (gift), vinegar (pineapple vinegar I made myself from pineapple skin and core and a bit of sugar...maybe 1cent for the sugar), black pepper (1cent), spice mix (gift, free), coconut oil (1cent), 1/4c red lentils (more expensive...like a dime).           Total: 18cents

Snack:  Rooibos Tea (gift...thanks Chris!),  Tiny cocoa pancakes (Apparently I felt like making pancakes today)  Flour (free, 2nd harvest), powdered eggs (free), baking cocoa 1T (2cents maybe...it was on sale), baking powder 1/2tsp (1cent), coconut oil (1 cent)          Total: 4cents.

Supper: Spaghetti with cracked pepper and a pinch of salt (surprisingly delicious and I'd just had my snack so it wasn't much).   Spaghetti (free, 2nd harvest), peppercorns (1cent), salt (less than 1 cent but we'll call it a penny).      Total: 2 cents

Total for the day: 26cents.   Just over 2 bits    

Yesterday I had apples as well, 2nd harvest.  I brought home enough for a couple of days but they are sweet like candy and I ate them all the first day.  Oh well.  

I shoveled snow for 2 hours or so yesterday and an hour today.   We have a total of 11 inches on the ground as of an hour ago.  NUTS.  Before the storm, no snow  Zero.  Zip . Nada  It DUMPED in 2 days.   I shoveled in 2 shifts today but can still feel it in my back.   Time for more yoga to keep that moving.   The shoulders are a bit wonky as well.  Anyway, as a result of all the shoveling, and the effort of walking through a foot of snow, I got some serious exercise and probably ate more than usual.  I've been avoiding having a snack most days, instead just lovely tea.

I meant to bring home some meat in jars or frozen elk (YUM! Thanks Rik) but forgot.  Hopefully I will remember it for the weekend along with some of the canned veggies from 2nd harvest.  The fresh onions and apples were a real treat.   

IF you haven't tried roasting onions instead of frying them, you are missing out.  I am roasting mine inside the woodstove, but an oven will work as well.   DO NOT roast them in the microwave at work.  They taste delicious but people were p.o'd at me for WEEKS.  The weeks it took for the smell to dissipate.

I'm working on a post about woodstove cookery when it's not a cookstove.   Hopefully post that later this week.   (see...I learned from the youtubers to tease a future episode).

Happy New Year!!!!

It is December 22 as I type this (yes, with ALL my fingers and my thumbs because I am old and learned to type in school....with a typing teacher...Mr...what the hell was his name?...anyway, he had a horrible case of cradle-cap and chunks of his bald pate would fall on your keyboard if he came over to tell you what you were doing wrong or to type faster. It was a great motivator...type fast and accurately and DON'T get scalp skin chunks all over the keyboard and your stuff) and Dec 21 was Solstice!  Woot woot.

I had dinner out with friends to celebrate.
All holidays should involved binge eating.  We had fantastic Thai food and candy.  Then more candy.  And more candy.

Here's a surprise, I don't feel good.  Oh well.  Maybe that whole tube of instant crescent rolls I made in a skillet on the wood stove will make me fill better especially topped off with the burnt percolator coffee. 
Or not.

For me, today is the first day of the new year.
Here are the resolutions.
But first...my resolution theory.  This is the current theory.
A FEW resolutions that I can probably keep.  I used to do a litany of resolutions that mostly reflected how much I hated myself.  That didn't seem to get me anywhere.  My first attempt, years ago, at this was swapping "lose weight" out for "change weight"...you can't lose if you decide to "change" your weight.  It's bound to change.  I actually lost weight that year.  Or so I choose to believe.

This year:
1)  Breath work.  I'm taking yoga classes on breath work and it helped the asthma and the night time teeth grinding so I intend to do some breath work each day. 
2) Drink 2 cups of water first thing in the morning.  Drinking all my water later in the day means I am up and down the ladder all night peeing.  Perhaps shifting that to the morning will help.
3) No Amazon in 2020.  I don't like their labor practices or the new enormodome of crap people don't need that opened by Spokane and will no doubt provide a few crap jobs for people who need a job.  I doubt my dropping the 5 or 6 orders I was still making each year will change much.  I think I ordered 3 things from there this holiday season and I could have gotten them elsewhere if I'd tried harder. 
4) Donate weekly to the food bank or Kiva.  I like Kiva a lot and have given kiva certificates as gifts to various folks.  It is microlending so you usually get the money back and a bit of interest. I re-invest or donate to the organization to cover their administrative costs and keep it going.  It's like simple investment training for me.  I have had 1 loan go bad.  The country fell into civil war and obviously basic survival should take precedence over paying back the loan on that cow that probably got blown up.  I've already been donating pretty much weekly to the local tiny free pantries in Moscow.  I buy 10$ of food and put it in there.  Folks who might need it take it without any administrative oversight.  You walk up, leave or take food as you like.  I personally like to put together something that makes sense...ingredients for tuna casserole, or oatmeal-sunflowerseeds-raisins.  A meal.  There are lots of random cans of outdated olives that are "food" but not terribly nutritious.  I think the whole canned chicken (5$) with noodles (2$), cream of celery soup (50cents), mixed veggies (50cents), canned pears (1$) and cobbler mix (1$) is my favorite.  It's a meal I wouldn't mind eating.   Chicken noodle casserole with veggies and pear cobbler.  Anyway, I get my grocers and drop and extra 10$.  I can usually shave my own grocery budget by 10$ so it's not an extra expense.  Last weekend I took some dry white beans in a ziplock out of the free pantry as I dropped in my food.  It had been there for WEEKS and clearly no one wanted those nasty beans.  I'm going to plant them and see if they grow.  Maybe they will give the gophers gas when they eat the shoots. 

There it is.  Minimal resolutions that are easy to keep.

Happy New Year.

New Year's Resolutions...and Early Failure

OK, not failure but not exactly success either.
At the end you get a quick summary of our special day at the Bowling Alley last night that was fricking awesome.

Resolutions:
1) Outside a minimum of 20minutes (in one lump) per day until the Spring Equinox (at which time the time will be maintained or increased). This sounds lame since my job sounds, and sometimes is, outdoorsy. Of late and especially in the dark of winter I find that I walk to work, walk to the post office and walk home. That is my outdoor time and it is not enough. My eyes are turning white. Even the pupils. On Sundays when there is no radio show I've been known to not put on pants much less leave the trailer. Being outside an hour a day (we'll work up to that) no matter the weather is known to decrease respiratory infections, increase health, and blah blah blah. That will also be 20 minutes when I'm away from the delicious loaf of sourdough bread that is always on my counter since I started making my own sourdough again and gained noticeable weight.

2) Yoga everyday, even 1 move. I've gotten out of the yoga habit and do it just now-n-then. The goal here is to get back in the routine and usually once I start, I'll keep going for more than 1 move. Requiring just 1 move keeps it very doable and makes one resolution a super easy success.

3) 8oz of water with every meal. I drink buckets of tea and some coffee, the occasional bottle of kombucha (look it up), and so on. Time to quit being dependent on the flavored waters and get back to water water. Nothing "wrong" with tea but I think having the habit of water with meals helps me drink through out the day rather than 8 cups of tea when I'm chilled and then up all night peeing. That much water with meals may also take up valuable sourdough bread space and hopefully get my thighs back down where they fit in the remaining non-spandex jeans in my wardrobe.

4) Plan a visit with Angela (Hi Angela!). I'm still visiting friends in Denver and Angela unfortunately had to leave a day earlier than me. We hadn't gotten together in 5 years! That's awful. One of Angela's wishes is to travel more and I love to plan travel so here we are. I figured that "travel with Angela" would obligate Angela to meet MY resolution and that's neither fair nor under my control, but I can plan. WARNING TO BREE AND Y-N-FRANK: your part of the country is our first target so we can try to see folks we haven't seen in more than 5 years. WARNING TO Mike-n-Todd: if this goes well, you could be next. There are many unknowns like available time, scheduling issues, finances, and what if we're incompatible travelers...so the goal is the plan.

I managed the yoga yesterday. Sure, it was mountain pose which is basically standing for a few seconds with good posture, but that meets the goal. Being outside...not so much. The water...well, today is another day (DOH! Forgot water with breakfast! Had coffee and juice. Damn and blast. Here's hoping for lunch.)
The visit planning doesn't have to be everyday, but on the way to the airport to drop Ange this morning, we did talk about locations and how I need specific information about her ideal accommodations to start planning. I'm a high maintenance travel agent.

Hope one and all have had as good a start on 2011 as I have.


Now for the update on Denver-Fun-'10-'11.
Yesterday there was a great deal of napping going on. We had breakfast and then several people not named "Jill" read and took naps. Someone kept Jonny out until the wee hours on new years eve so he was exhausted and groggy. Much better after having his 5 hour lie-down. I blogged and read and relaxed around Jonny's 1950s enclave.

THEN: at 6:15 we headed out into the cold and gloom to meet Jonny's boyfriend Gino (Hi Gino and Jonny) at a bowling alley reviewed on the interwebs as "like stepping back to the 1970s". We all love the kitch. Gino was the one who kept Jonny out until the wee hours but was rested and cheery when he got there at about 7pm. I believe the high score for our 2 games of bowling was 102. I set a new personal best with a score in the high double digits. I'm hoping to break 100 some day. The bowling alley was awesome. The website is most excellent

http://paramountbowl.biz/
Surf on over to their "bar and grill" and read the menu. CLEARLY it is a bad cut and paste job from another web site with the names of things served at the bowling alley typed in but the descriptions not corrected from the previous website (which we haven't found yet).
Here are the breakfast options:

Toast & Jelly $.95
wedge of iceberg lettuce with scallions & blue cheese dressing

Muff Yum$3.99
flash fried & served with a tomato vinaigrette

Breakfast Burrito$4.75
made fresh daily

Bacon or Sausage & Eggs$4.25
cocnut crusted with carribean flavors makes this dish an automatic classic

Eggs & Toast$3.25
chili & cumin seasoned chicken with muenster cheese, rolled in a corn tortilla

There is a startling similarity in preparation styles between the Breakfast and Burger options:

Hamburger$3.50
wedge of iceberg lettuce with scallions & blue cheese dressing

Double Hamburger$4.25
flash fried & served with a tomato vinaigrette

Cheeseburger$4.00
made fresh daily

Double Cheeseburger$4.99
cocnut crusted with carribean flavors makes this dish an automatic classic

Patty Melt$4.90
chili & cumin seasoned chicken with muenster cheese, rolled in a corn tortilla

Does this mean that only the Cheeseburger is made fresh daily? And why are both the Double Cheeseburger and the Bacon, Sausage, and Egg featuring "cocnut" crusting with "carribean flavors" while the Toast and Jam as well as the Hamburger come with a wedge of iceberg lettuce? I know it's just a lack of cut-n-paste skill, but the result is quite evocative reading. There is quite a bit more on offer.

We had sodas and some of the best fries I've ever had. The grease in that vat is lard and it is HOT. The fries were about 1/2inch thick and were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. That only happens with super hot grease.

The decor at the Paramount Bowl has not been updated since construction so it's quite nice. Hopefully Jonny will send photos for me to post. We were heavily photographed by him during the session. We were in lane 12, the last lane against the wall with the airbrushed logo on the cinder blocks. The ball return is straight from 1972 or so. And the whole lot is underneath a grocery store. It was not crowded, only 3 or 4 lanes in use while we were there. None of this "cosmic bowling" BS where they use flashy lights and strobes and LOUD MUSIC to enhance/ruin the bowling experience. It's just bowling and chatting and snacking. Since we all sucked approximately equally it was fun. We are all lame so three of us were using the lightest ball we could find...a 12 pounder. I could have gone to the desk and asked for a kiddie-ball but that seemed beneath even my skills. Jonny showed off with a 16 pound ball (heh heh). He won. The rest of us competed for "not last" or "not as bad as I've done in the past."

Then it was back to Jonny's '50s Dream House for flaming desserts. Everyone but me had cheese cake. I got toast and jam. The "flaming" part for all of us was a sugar cube soaked in orange extract and lit on fire. It does make an impressive dessert even out of toast and jam (the bread was artisan and the jam very good...I'm not sure any number of flaming sugar cubes could enhance wonder bread and cheap jam but it's worth a shot).

OK, we're having home-made dim sum tonight and I'm supposed to be surfing the web for dip recipes so must sign off now.

Owwwww.........

Well, I thought since the meditation class was so good. How about taking the 90 minute yoga class before then. I need it (tense and what not) and it would be a better warm up to meditating than just walking on the treadmill.

Yeah. Um. This was the toughest yoga class I've ever had. NOT because of the difficulty of the poses. I'm good at the poses and quite bendy for a fat girl.
BUT have you ever gone to sit in a chair, but stopped say 4 inches above the chair? Then held that pose for say 90 seconds?

Go try it now. Really...I'll wait.

Here's something to watch while you do that:


That was 15 seconds too long, but you know you couldn't do it anyway.
I do get a kick out of that group, The Zimmers. They are old.

After that yoga class I felt old enough to join the group. The other woman in the class (yes, I said the other woman...not that there was just one other WOMAN, there was just one other PERSON in the class), was about 20 years older than me and that sucked because she could do everything. My form is better, but she can hold a pose forever. I apparently have a very heavy ass. I cannot stay in Plank Pose (like the "up" part of a push-up) for 90 seconds without putting my knees on the floor (fortunately the boobs are pretty well already down on the floor already in that pose so there's a couple of pounds I didn't have to hold up). I'm pretty sore today. But eventually I will get better or be humiliated out of class. I did have more success on handstand than the other student, but I think form is more important than strength on that one.

Fortunately today at work the plan was to screw around so being sore and tired worked out OK.