My new favorite plant

February 1: Planted wheatgrass in these little pots. Covered them with
plastic wrap, put them in a sunny spot.

February 4: Surprise! The center pot is doing really well. Not much
growth in the other two.

February 6: You've already seen this, but I wanted you to see it again,
next to today's shot below this one.

February 8: Almost ready for a haircut! 

Arghhh ...

I just read Anne's lovely comment on yesterday's post, in which she said I was in a good place in so many ways. She should know; Anne's been reading my drivel for years, and has been through many of my ups and downs both at the Shrinking Knitter and here.

Isn't she pretty? And she used to work!

I'm actually not in a good place rightnowthisminute, but it's a technical glitch between my laptop and a wireless mouse that USED TO WORK, before the most recent OS update. I've been trying to fix the problem for, oh, more than an hour now.

I don't need the mouse to do the work I have to do this morning, but working in Excel is easier when I can click-and-drag with a device rather than with my index finger.

Thus the "arghhh" and head-banging and other frustration noises you've been hearing from the Middle of Nowhere.

If you happen to have a MacBook Air and a Logitech M305 Bluetooth mouse that do work together, could you please share the magic words with me?

As both of you know, I love me some technology. But it's times like these that try women's souls.

Other things that try my soul:

• When my husband goes into one of his moody, broody places, especially when I don't know what's wrong.
• When Hershey won't come when she's called, especially when I need her to come in because I'm going somewhere. (I don't leave her outdoors when no one is home, not even for a little bit.)
• When the brew pause feature on the coffeemaker suddenly and inexplicably fails.
• When the oven won't heat up. (The heating element sometimes needs to be jiggled back in place. Jiggling has saved me lots o'cashmoneybucks in repair or replacement costs.)
• Fruit flies. I guess if you have indoor fruit trees, you stand a chance of having fruit flies, no matter what the temperature is outside. I killed half a dozen of them last night in a 10-minute span. I hope there's no such think as fruit-fly karma.

Looking at that list, there's absolutely nothing on it about poor health or financial distress. So, really, I should just delete the whole shebang. But writing it down typing it out actually helped me come to a place where I can share things that soothe my soul:

• Text messages or phone calls from any of my grandchildren.
• Seeing a picture of my dad. I sure miss him, but it comforts me to know he's no longer in pain.
• Home-cooked meals.
• The women I serve at the AA meeting at Alderson FPC.
• This.

Feel free to add to either of these lists! And have a tech problem-free, soul-soothing day, won't you?

Oh, the weather outside is …

beautiful! In an ethereal, dreamy, foggy kind of way.

Yesterday morning we woke up to low clouds and thick frost. See?

Today it's clear and crisp with frost covering everything on the northeast side of the house, but barely coating the stuff on the southwest side. Not sure how to explain that. And it's not nearly as picture-worthy as yesterday's icy morning greeting.

Looks like we're in for some cold, cold nights, with daytime highs gradually cooling as the week wears on. High today of 53° and sunny, so an outdoor walk is on the agenda. The rest of the week we descend into winter. Finally. I hope the daffs survive.

I've now been South Beaching for four weeks. My weight stayed the same this week, but the trend since January 1 has been two weeks of losses and one week of staying the same. Jen noted recently that she experiences a similar pattern. Not that I'm Jen, but it was instructive to read that and it helped me be not quite as bummed as I would have been in the past. Jen also is using a scale that tracks body fat. I have a scale that does that, but I'm not using it. Maybe it's time. (My body fat percentage was so scary-high I put the scale away and haven't looked at it in more than a year. Seriously!)

My old thinking would have had me jumping off the wagon at this point. I've been really good about this plan that promises big losses the first two weeks and a steady two-pounds-a-week after that. I can stay the same weight eating all kinds of crap. I maintained the same [too-high] weight for several months last year, eating pretty much whatever I wanted.

Rather than ditch it, I plan to stick with South Beach. Nothing about eating protein and vegetables is going to hurt me, and avoiding sugar and refined flour has already helped. I feel much better emotionally.

There's also the gym factor. I've been faithfully showing up there thrice-weekly for two weeks, spending at least half an hour on full-body weight-training and another 45 minutes watching Glee on the treadmill. I am a sweaty mess when I get done. On the days I'm not in the gym I try to walk outside or do the elliptical here at home, although I have missed either three or four days of intentional activity.

The interesting thing about skipping a day is that in the old days I could easily justify skipping another and another and then just falling back into the not-working-out habit. Now I just tell myself that because of circumstances, I need to take a day off. ONE day. Not a week.

Consistent healthful eating plus consistent workouts will theoretically yield results. There's a poster on Pinterest (naturally I can't find it now, sigh) that says (regarding weight loss) it takes 4 weeks for you to notice, 8 weeks for friends and family and 12 weeks for everyone else.

I guess I've still got time. Heh.

One more wheatgrass photo

Taken just now, aren't those little drops of water cool? 

You, too, can have a green thumb

Five days ago, I planted wheatgrass seeds in this cute little planter I bought last weekend in Asheville. Look at it now!

These sprouts are already twice as tall as they were yesterday when
I took this photo! What is it 'they' say about watching grass grow?
I should charge admission!

Wheatgrass – live or plastic – is all over the place. I first saw some displayed in a restaurant at the North Carolina Zoo two or three years ago, and I've been on a mission ever since to find the perfect container in which to grow my own. My plant is purely decorative, but I could make juice from it if I wanted to. Which I don't. Cats like to eat wheatgrass (it's also called catgrass), something to keep in mind if you want your centerpiece to remain intact. I don't have cats, just one adorable little dog who doesn't eat from the table. Much.

I used an organic seed-starting medium for soil, but any kind of potting soil would work. I made sure the dirt was moist, sprinkled the seeds on top and added a little more soil to cover them. Then I put some plastic wrap on top and put it in a sunny spot. The plastic wrap acts as a mini-greenhouse; you shouldn't need to add more water until you see growth.

Once the seeds sprout, you can remove the plastic wrap. My experience with vegetable seeds is that sprouting can sometimes take a couple weeks. You can imagine how surprised I was to see this much growth in five days.

When the sprouts are about three inches tall I'm going to snip them straight across the top. For someone who never much cared for houseplants, I'm turning into quite the indoor gardener. The green onions are doing fairly well, as is the celery. My Meyer lemon tree is loaded with baby fruit and the lime tree has plenty of babies and mature limes. I'll have enough spider plants to totally rock whatever container planting I do this summer.

And speaking of rocking, how about those Giants? It was way too exciting! And Madonna totally killed the halftime show. No wardrobe malfunctions this year (in fact, Madonna was pretty buttoned-up), but M.I.A. got a little out of line, prompting apologies from the NFL and NBC. The middle-finger salute looked inadvertent to me; I didn't even notice it until I'd watched the video twice.

Speaking of not rocking, I thought the commercials were only so-so. (The standout was Chrysler, very bold and I hope we see it again.) Super Bowl advertisers must think we like to drink a lot of beer and buy a lot of cars. They should have thrown a DIY Network ad in there, cuz girls watch football, too! Heh.

Apologies

I just reread yesterday's post, which totally sounds like food porn. So sorry!

I went on a foodie blog kick late last year and had to quit because the pictures and recipes were beginning to make me want more. I began adding writers from their blogrolls to mine and eventually got to the point where reading about food became the gateway drug to cooking and eating more of it.

I haven't gone completely cold turkey, but I've unsubscribed from the major dealers' RSS feeds. Gotta clean up my blogroll before I'm charged with conspiracy. [ETA: Done!]

So anyway … it's Super Bowl Sunday and we're going to have some snacks. Heh.

One thing the food bloggers did was inspire me to be more creative with photography. I, in fact, dedicated my Project 365 blog to food this year, but that only lasted a month. I've started following a photo-a-day challenge for February, which has been interesting and actually makes the photos somewhat more interesting than a shot of the nightstand at 11:45 p.m., just so I don't miss a day.


If you'd like to see how I'm interpreting the challenge, click here. If you'd like to join in, here's the list of prompts.

Go, Giants!

The whole house smells like bacon

© Debora McNeer

According to my daughter, a traditional Cobb salad is the low-carber's perfect meal. I made a version of one last night for dinner (aren't they all just a little bit different?): torn romaine and red onions dressed with pesto salad dressing and topped with sliced black olives, chopped hard-cooked egg, diced chicken breast, crumbled blue cheese and bacon, bacon, BACON!

I bake my bacon on a rack in a 375° oven until it's crispy but not burned. Less mess than on the stove, but you'd still think I put parfume de bacon in the air freshener thingies.

The salad was delicious, and very satisfying – two of the results I love about lots o'protein.

I had to warn the husband that the five leftover pieces of bacon were a reserved ingredient for our Super Bowl supper tomorrow night. He has no concept, because he doesn't cook, that you can make more of something one day in order to use it later. He also has no concept, because he usually eats only one daily meal – dinner – of serving sizes.

For instance, when we had meat loaf the other night, I put two small slices on my plate, and he set out to eat the rest of it. I had to stop him – I used 20 ounces of meat in the thing! Even explaining that he nearly ate a pound of meat for dinner didn't phase him. He's accustomed to ordering a 16-ounce steak in a restaurant. I seriously had intended for that meat loaf to provide two meals for the two of us. Didn't happen.

The Super Bowl must be the low-carber's perfect party event. I'm taking full advantage of the fact that football food falls into the meat category. Our meal-of-snacks will look like this:

• crudites and baked low-carb tortilla triangles with hummus
• Buffalo chicken legs with bleu cheese sauce (this is what I'm adding the leftover bacon to)
• roast beef slices spread with horseradish cream cheese
• pickles and pickled okra
• sliced summer sausage and cheese
• sun-dried tomato and homemade mozzarella salad

It's a higher-fat menu than South Beach would like, but it's the Super Bowl! And I'm not serving football-shaped brownies for dessert. In fact, I think we'll be too full for dessert, don't you?

I just hope Eli isn't too full from his pre-game meal to beat the Patriots. I'll probably be too full to watch the final play, but I'm going to really, really try to stay up for the whole thing. We will then go into football mourning until September 1, when the college season kicks off with West Virginia against Marshall.

That is, if they're still part of the Big East conference. No matter who they play, I'm guessing there will be some bacon involved in our game-time feast. At least in September I can open the doors and windows.