Friday Quote Day

There are no shortcuts
to any place worth going.
~ Unknown

Well, I live in West Virginia, and I can tell you truthfully there are no shortcuts anywhere, worth going to or not! I saw Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) on television yesterday say that just four percent of West Virginia is flat land. When you add the curves that go around the mountains, you get long distances to nowhere.

Today is another one of those travel days. I've had far too many of them this summer. This weekend I'll be going from the Middle of Nowhere, WV, to the Middle of Nowhere, KY, for a retreat. This is the tenth year my husband and I have gone, and while I'm not particularly enthusiastic this year, I know I'll enjoy myself and return home renewed and relaxed.

Except for the driving.

The retreat is held at a beautiful state park with easy walking on the roads within the park and harder walking on the woodland trails. I plan to take advantage of both while I'm there. I feel good about getting back on the horse (the five-mile daily walk), and I don't want to lose my momentum, especially at a place that affords beautiful walking opportunities.

I'm taking some simple knitting with me, a wool bag that will eventually be fulled and donated to a charity event my daughter-in-law is helping coordinate. Only 10 more rows to go on the shawl collar of my sweater, but those are very long rows and the piece is warm and bulky and too big to take to a retreat.

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. Will we ever forget where we were, who we were with, how we heard the news when it happened? My older granddaughter was just four years old and even she has a faint memory of planes flying into buildings, although my daughter tried to shield her from the news. My son and his wife were less than a month from their wedding date, and considered postponing the party. Somehow it just didn't seem right. Baseball and football games were cancelled, malls closed, we glued ourselves to the couch and watched news and more news. There wasn't much sleeping at my house.

Airplanes quit flying. That was the eeriest thing for me, to be outside and not see or hear airplanes overhead.

The fabric of America changed forever that day. We were knitted together for a while, united in sorrow and patriotism. And then … we weren't.

We are more divided now than at any time since the late '60s. I'm not sure the terrorists could have counted on this dividend of their attack. They succeeded in crippling our economy, but how could they have hoped to cripple our soul?

And what are we to do about it? How can we again become one nation, indivisible? Where is our respect for each others' viewpoints? What has happened to civility? I do believe in free speech, I do, I do, I do.

But not at the expense of good manners.

Grrr.

I HATE DIAL-UP!

Well, it rained last night – a lot – so I can't connect to the
internet for more than 5 seconds at a time, apparently. And I have so
much to say this morning!

I did end up watching the President's speech, and was happy I did so.
I applauded several times, just like most of the people in the
audience. Some of those Republicans, though, had some motor
coordination problems. Not only could they not clap their hands, they
couldn't get out of their chairs, either. But that Rep. Wilson (R-SC)
represented his party well, doncha think? His shout of "You lie!"
shocked everyone in the chamber.

His website is "down for maintenance" this morning. Heh.

I'm still a single-payer supporter, and I always will be. It's the
right thing to do, morally and economically. I will continue to work
toward that end. But Rome wasn't built in a day. Nor was Medicare. Or
Social Security. Or civil rights.

Baby steps.

Should I or shouldn't I?

I'm so tempted to watch some kind of trash TV or maybe a baseball game at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight. The hype surrounding President Obama's address to Congress, in case you've been under a rock this week, has been unbearable.

Which Obama will show up? He needs to do this. Or that. Or the other.

Sometimes I think Americans would fare better if our news cycle was two weeks old, instead of two seconds. The cable news programs have to fill up all those hours with something, and rumors and opinions are just as good as facts.

So. Two days in a row of healthful eating. Still doing my five-mile walk every day. And a miracle, of sorts, appeared last night.

I have had a doctor's appointment for this morning. Canceled it yesterday afternoon after talking with the PA, who suggested that my preference to "wait and see" wouldn't hurt.

I've had some kind of a growth – cyst, tumor, whatever – on my right ankle all summer. I showed it to my gynecologist last month, who suggested my family doctor probably ought to take a look at it.

I'm not one of those obsessive-compulsives who keeps a close eye on every little flaw on my body. (The big flaws are omnipresent; why should I worry about the little ones?) But I did check the status of the whatever yesterday and discovered that it is no longer firm, well-defined or tender.

I'm healed!

Well, maybe not healed, but it appears that the whatever is going away on its own. At least I hope so. My health insurance plan doesn't cover office visits, so I'm very happy not to have to fork over a hundred bucks (or more, probably) to be told my whatever is nothing to worry about.

Gives me more time to worry about which President Obama is going to show up tonight.

Stuff

As I was walking from the house to our second-story garage/office, I thought about what I would write today.

Unless I'm away or exhausted – both of which have happened frequently in the recent past – I like to throw a post up every weekday. Sometimes I sit down and the words flow; most of the time I have to compose (in my head) ahead of time. I'm sure some bloggers work in a word-processing program first and then cut-and-paste; I'm too lazy to launch two programs to write a few paragraphs that two people are going to read (you and me).

Anyway, the topic I came up with today is "stuff," and it looks like Laurie has written my post for me. Thanks, Laurie!

I've not watched the television show she refers to, but I really don't think I qualify for an episode. I'm more like Laurie – sometimes overwhelmed and sometimes comforted by the things I own.

I'm very comforted by my yarn. I've sold some of it over the past year, and am down to the point where I would have a hard time letting any more of it go. I'm not sure why, exactly, since most of what's left is good wool and I live in a climate where wearing wool sweaters happens only a few times a year. Three of my grandchildren live farther south than I do, so they're not good candidates for knitted gifts. The triplets live in Ohio, and they'll get sweaters and hats and mittens, oh my, for Christmas, but not wooly sweaters and hats and mittens. Mothers of triplets don't have time for hand laundering.

I enjoy knitting with wool and wool fulls into a thick, impenetrable fabric good for bags and decorative bowls and … stuff.

I'm very overwhelmed by dishes. I had a complete set of china when I moved from Ohio to West Virginia. I moved into a furnished house (owned by my husband), complete with – you guessed it – a set of china. We added a set of handthrown, beautifully glazed dinnerware to the kitchen cupboards a few years ago.

One couple doesn't need three sets of plates. I'm ready to get rid of the stuff I brought with me.

There is a theory floating around out there that decluttering can lead to weight loss. I'm not sure if it's true or not; theories tend to come and go depending on who's funding them. What I do know is that the time spent cleaning the kitchen cupboards and pantry is time spent not snacking.

To follow up on yesterday's post about eating more healthful meals – we had stir-fried chicken with lots o' veggies for dinner yesterday. The spring onions and Chinese cabbage came from the garden. The chicken provided enough protein, so I left the little cabbage worm in the dirt. But with the way the economy's going, it's nice to know that I can grow protein along with greens!

Happy Labor Day!

What we do is a measure of who we are.
If we imagine our work as labor, we become laborers.
If we imagine our work as art, we become artists.
~ Jeffrey Patnaude

A bonus quote this week, in honor of working. Especially apt, since both my husband and I are retired. Heh.

I did a lot of work yesterday, most of it in the kitchen. I've come to the realization that if I'm not going to lose weight on a "diet," then I might as well prepare and eat food that is somewhat entertaining. For instance, after years of eating an annual slice of pizza (if that), we're now making dough and preparing toppings for homemade pizza every Friday night, a la Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. We've had some wonderful concoctions and we really look forward to Friday dinners.

I made pork chops – in a skillet, with breading – Saturday, along with baked potatoes and mixed vegetables. Yesterday we had an old-fashioned Southern-fried feast: biscuits with sausage gravy, fried green tomatoes, eggs (I didn't have eggs, but my husband had three!) and apple pie for dessert. (Again, my husband had pie, but I was too full to eat any. I thought I might have a slice for breakfast, but I'm still too full to eat anything!)

Because I'm turning into a food snob (oh, yes, I am), nearly everything we had for dinner this weekend was made from scratch. Doing that, my friends, is a lot of work. I'm sure the calories expended don't come close to equaling the calories eaten, but there is some effort involved that makes the meal much more satisfying.

Eating is eating, of course, and it takes about as much labor to prepare "diet" meals as it does to prepare the kinds of feasts we've enjoyed this weekend. (Although I haven't figured out how to make healthful biscuits.) Eating from the garden, as we've done all summer, is more work all the way around – you not only have to clean and prepare the vegetables after you pick them, you have to work pretty hard to get them to grow.

Last night after my husband rinsed his dessert plate, he suggested that perhaps we should go back to our old, more healthful, meal plans. It's not about weight loss for him – he's the one who retired, started taking a daily walk and lost 30 pounds, remember? It's about cholesterol and triglycerides and fat, oh my!

I'll humor him, of course, because he was nice and polite and not critical with his request. And maybe because he's right. But I gotta say that this Labor Day weekend was full of some pretty darned fun food.

P.S. I'm back to walking five miles a day, and it wasn't hard at all to start over. I ended up taking a week off, started back this past Wednesday and haven't missed a day since. Yeah, me!

Friday Quote Day

My hopes are not always realized,
but I always hope.
~ Ovid

Without hope, we'd never have elected Barack Obama as our President. I have to say though, right now I'm a little nervous about my hope for health insurance reform.

I guess if the public option doesn't make it to a final bill, I'll just move to scary old Great Britain, or evil old France, or – horrors! – Taiwan, fercryinoutloud, all of whom have excellent universal health coverage, as long as you're not listening to Faux News. (Next time you meet a Canadian, Brit, Aussie, Finn, Swede – you get my drift – ask them if they'd trade their health plan for what we have here in the U.S.)

But enough of that. I try to keep my political rants away from my blog. That's what Facebook is for! Heh. (Wanna friend me? djmcneer AT citynet DOT net)

Those of us working to improve our health, and particularly those of us who are doing so by trying to lose weight, have lots of hope. For a while. We're doing the right thing, following the plan, sweating to the oldies, running, walking, lifting – we're gittin' 'er done.

Except some of us aren't.

As I trudged up the first hill of my route yesterday, I happened upon a guy sitting on a bench in his front yard. We usually wave and say hi when we meet, but rarely have a conversation. I was astonished when he asked me, "Are you losing any weight?"

Of course I answered, "No," because I'm an honest kind of person. And then I said, "Maybe I'm not supposed to."

I think of my friend Nancy, who died last year at Christmastime. She and I "met" on an e-mail list for those following an Atkins diet plan. During all the years of our friendship, weight loss (and knitting) glued us together. When she got sick she lost massive amounts of weight. She looked elegant and serene and lovely. But she was ill and couldn't eat more than a bite or two of real food at a sitting. Her food had to be ground in a blender. She was nourished by a feeding tube the majority of the time, and only when she had a real hankering for the taste of something would she ask for coffee ice cream, or Jell-O, or ground-up chicken fried rice.

I keep telling myself that I used to be thin and I can get there again. Hope springs eternal, I guess. But I surely hope I don't lose weight like Nancy eventually did.

My former husband also lost massive amounts of weight during his illness, although he never really needed to do so. I'm sure you've heard the expression that the cure is worse than the disease. That, unfortunately, was his experience. (Thank you all for your kind thoughts while I was gone, by the way. I appreciate all of you so very much.)

Maybe my extra pounds are keeping me healthy. (Wouldn't that be ironic, considering that my health insurance premium is higher because I'm overweight?) Maybe I'm supposed to learn acceptance, or patience, or tolerance of my own too-large body from this challenging journey of daily exercise and healthful meals. Maybe I'm stubborn. Maybe I'm an optimist.

Maybe I'll just keep on keepin' on, and see what happens. There's that old hope thing. Again.

P.S. To contact your Senator and urge him or her to fight for the public option, go here. The drop-down menu to find your state is in the upper right-hand corner of the page. To find your Representative, go here. The contact information is in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Do it today. We can't wait any longer.

ExHAUSTed

Since we last got together, I have:

• Spent three days in another state caring for a two-year-old
• Spent two days at home, one of which included a visit by three 15-month-olds (and their parents)
• Spent one day recovering from a visit by three 15-month-olds
• Spent two days driving to and from another state to attend a funeral
• Attended yet another health care reform town hall meeting

And another town hall is on this afternoon's agenda.

I've had to cancel and/or reschedule three appointments during that time, as well. I haven't walked more than to and from a building to a car in the last week. And the garden has been – obviously – more neglected than ever. (But I picked three ripe, unblighted tomatoes when I got home last night! Anne, you were so right about the blight! Yuk!)

The funeral was for my first husband, my children's father. They gave the eulogy, which was wonderful and sad and funny and heartfelt. I couldn't be prouder of our children. He was, too.

That's all for today …