The Elephant's Child

Update to the Book Update.

Kid is in Vacation Bible School this week, so both today and yesterday, I was able to drop her off at church then take my stuff to a coffeeshop and actually work, knowing I wouldn't be interrupted for 2 hours. 

It was glorious.

I got so much done.  Not in words written (although I did get some words written), but just in thinking and pondering and editing.  Getting my head into the book.  

I can safely say, after spending a couple of hours now reading my draft, that my book doesn't suck. I don't know if it's good. (Probably not.) But it isn't awful. 

And that is big progress, just to feel somewhat positive about the thing again.

I hope, hope, hope, I can get enough done this week to steam roll some momentum into getting closer to actually finishing the first draft. 

Yeah, that's right.  All this work, and I'll only have the first draft finished. 

Thankfully, for me, editing and re-writing is the easy part...

Book Update.

There isn't really one.  

I'm stuck. Badly stuck. I have made no real progress since last October.  

I am ready to burn the whole thing in a fire.  One friend who read my mess of a draft said she can't figure out the conflict in the book. What's the issue that has to be resolved?

I don't know. If I did, I could probably finish the book in a couple of weeks.

It's pretty clear, too, that working 2 nights a week - oftentimes only one night - isn't cutting it.  But neither can I work in small bouts of time.  I've tried.  I can't get my brain in gear.  I stay up till 1 or 2 am on Fridays trying to write, but usually, I've been "away" from writing for enough days that it takes me hours of putzing around to get "into" what I'm doing and actually make any progress.  

I haven't figured out how to get to work quickly and make best use of what little time I have.  

I haven't figured out how to work 4-5 hours at a stretch of an evening several nights a week without staying up late enough that I'm too tired to function. I'm a night owl who is cursed with the ability to not function if I don't get at least 7-1/2 hrs of sleep most nights. 

I haven't figured out how to find more time to write uninterrupted.  I have no outside help caring for my kid.  I've tried writing while she's here at home but busy with other stuff, and I have the same problems as above - it takes me too long to get started and really going, and it never fails, that the minute I get two sentences written, something happens. 

A really big fire, so I'll never have to look at a the unfinished book again... 

Via the Museum of Hartlepool's collection of images on Flickr.

I can't find the ending of the book.  I can't link together most of the scenes in the whole second half of the draft. I can't find the "Why am I reading this?" to give to the reader. 

What I need (I think) is a several consecutive days of being to do nothing but work on this all day, each day, without having to stop to make meals, answer the phone, help with schoolwork, make meals, spell words, answer the phone, make meals, wash dishes.... 

Feels like that's not going to happen till I'm dead.

Via Powerhouse Museum

 And no, the irony of being able to write over four hundred words on why I can't write but not be able to write a dang thing on my actual book is not lost on me. 

Color Without Flowers.

Bummer. It doesn't show up well in a photo.  But I've painted the tin finial that sits in the Chemnitz Patch part of the garden.  The red-leaved Japanese maple, which actually looks more purple than red, but that's what horticulturalists call it, and the pale pink finial behind make a very nice focal point in this otherwise all green stretch of garden.

When thinking of color in the garden, remember that things other than actual flowers provide color to your garden as well.  Your neighbor's swingset off in the distance. The grass. A blue hosta. A rusty post.

Right For Your Kid and Right for You.

"...if John Holt were alive today, I think he would be saddened by the efforts of some people who try to turn his term ‘unschooling’ into some sort of a system, into a set of rules that must be followed. John trusted parents to learn from their experience with their children. He didn’t say, ‘If you’re going to call it unschooling, you’re going to have to do it my way.’ He wanted them to figure out what was right for them, for their whole family.” Source.

Probably the biggest piece of advice I (and other homeschooling moms who have been homeschooling more than 2 years or so) give out, over and over again, is that you need to do what works for you and for your kid, whatever that is, and entirely regardless of what labels or methodology that hot mess fits into or doesn't fit in to. 

That means making no apologies to your loosey-goosey homeschooling friends who "wing it" with the lesson plans when you, as a Mom, need a nifty little spreadsheet of what everyone's supposed to be working on so you don't go stark raving mad. 

It means not acting like you've commited some crime because you use a checklist when someone says that a checklist drives them nuts. 

That means making no apolgies for "unschooling" reading and literature and letting your kid read comics and tripe for now even if you're using a neato pre-packaged boxed curriculum for science and math and grammar and Latin, as long as it's working for you and your kid.  You are allowed to mix methodologies. 

That means no guilt if you're forcing your kid to read the booklist that came with that pre-boxed curriculum even when Betsy and Marge's kids are reading whatever they want, as long as it's working for you and your kid.  So stop acting like you "should be" doing more unschooly stuff, ok?

That means not taking it personally when someone is desperate for help, drowing in trouble with homeschooling her kids and she gets advice from others that is different from the way you do things. 

It means not getting angry when someone says your way of doing things won't work for them.  They are different than you. Their kid is not your kid. That it won't work for Brittney's family doesn't mean the method you've suggested is stupid

 It means stopping the obsession with labels already.  

 

You homeschool. 

That is enough. 

What I Didn't Expect.

Over the winter and this spring, I'd been having trouble with swelling and bloating. Bad trouble.  Sometimes to the tune of 10 lbs of weight gain in a few days.  A couple of times even more. (It's hard to say for sure since I have since learned that my scale at the time was not working properly.)  But whatever the actual amount, my clothes wouldn't fit. My wedding ring dug into my skin. I was short of breath. Full of brain fog. Tired. Crabby. Panicky and stressed. 

I was sick as a dog last December, too.  Dizzy often. Tired. Crabby. Weak. A couple times, I nearly blacked out. Bloated. I even went into the doctor, who ran a bunch of metabolic tests, which all revealed... nothing. 

After returning from a trip to visit a friend in mid-March, I felt all of this, and worse.  I thought I had perhaps gotten glutened while traveling, although I had been with a friend who kindly makes all sorts of accomdations for my gluten allergy.  Since I felt so awful, since this was happening all too frequently and I did not really know why, Mad Musician told me to start keeping a food journal. We thought perhaps there was some place I was getting gluten but didn't realize it. 

So I started writing stuff down. 

And the culprit was any food or meal that had more than about 20g of carbohydrate in it.  And it didn't matter if it was "good carbs" or "bad carbs." Or whether it was gluten free or not.  Rice pasta made me sick.  Ice cream made me sick. Expensive gluten free bread made me sick.  Juice made me sick.  Corn tortillas made me sick. I would feel sluggish (and when I say sluggish, I don't mean "It's only 3pm, when is the work day going to end already?!" sluggish. I mean, "drugged with double doses of codeine, then woken at 2am and asked to operate heavy machinery" sluggish). I couldn't concentrate. It took physical effort to hold a thought in my head for the time it took me to walk the clean laundry from the basement up to the bedroom. I felt awful.

On March 28th, Maundy Thursday 2013, I stopped eating sweets.  On Easter, I put back the glass of orange juice I had put on my tray at the Easter Breakfast at church. I stopped cold turkey.  I suspected that for whatever reason, my body simply does not process sugar or large influxes of carbohydrate correctly. Knowing the long history of addictive behavior in my extended family (my maternal grandfather was an alcoholic), I knew that limiting sweets wasn't going to work. "I'll just have a half a piece of pie" is not in my DNA. I had to quit entirely.  So I did. 

The worst of the bloating stopped, but not all of it. And I did not lose any weight. 

Yes, that's right. I cut out all sweets and lost no weight, other than the crazy bloating went away. 

A month later, on April 25th, I started a slightly modified version (note 1) of Atkins Induction. 

And I started to lose actual weight immediately. For the first time in my life. And I started to feel better, dramatically better.

I don't know exactly what weight I started at, because my scale was wonky. But making a guess based on about how far it was off, what I weighed then, and knowing what I weigh today, I figure I've lost about twenty pounds so far.  My goal weight is 25 lbs higher than the weight I was when I got pregnant with my daughter. It is now 21 pounds away. (See note 2)

Lots of things happened that I did not expect.

I didn't expect to lose much weight at all.  I looked at Atkin's methods because I needed to learn how to eat and live on very little carbohydrate, because it was clear that what government minders think is a "healthy" amount of carbohydrate (even the American Diabetes Association!) was making me sick.  I didn't set a goal weight when I started; I only ended up picking one after several weeks so that I would know when I had reached a point where I could move off of induction and onto the next phase of Atkins.  

I knew that most of the claims against Atkins are unfounded, from other reading and research I'd done in the past few years.  I was no longer afraid of eggs or of Saturated! Fat! (dum, dum, duuuum) And I knew that the Atkins diet isn't NO carbs, but is LOW carbs, and that the bulk of those carbs you do eat come from healthy, yummy vegetables.  

I did not expect to lose weight because nothing has ever worked for me for weight loss. Not dieting. Not watching calories. Not watching fat. Not dropping sweets. Not exercise. Not Lenten fasting. Not three years of going to Curves. Nothing.   But I am losing weight. 

I didn't expect that the entire nature of what "I'm hungry" means would change, once my body was "off of carbs."  I no longer have that "OMGWTFBBQ I have to eat now or the world is going to end!!!1!1" feeling. Ever.  When I'm hungry, which is rare, it's a "Oh, right, it's been a few hours, I should probably go eat a little something in a few minutes." I only rarely over-eat, and when I do, like this morning, it's because I've decided to pig out a little. And I can pig out a little, because the urge to do so is quite rare, which brings me to...

I didn't expect my urges to eat emotionally to change so dramatically. Too much carbohydrate in my system increases my anxiety and worry, messes up my stress tolerance, and make me feel tired more often, all the things that often trigger emotional eating.  (see note 3)

I didn't expect to feel stronger, but I do.  I can lift more.  I can do more stairs. 

I didn't expect it to be as easy to do as it has been.  It hasn't been a piece of cake. (HA HA HA) And sitting there with a diet coke while your family eats ice cream kind of sucks, no way around it. But I feel so blasted good most of the time that I almost don't care.  And every week, it gets easier. Every time I say "no" to something I shouldn't eat, I get stronger and it's a little easier to say "no" the next time.  But it has been, in no way, as miserable as I might have expected if you'd asked me a year ago what being on Atkins might be like.

I didn't expect to be able to stick with it. But I have.  It's been forty days, or nearly seven weeks, that I've been eating this way.   I will never go back to eating the way I used to.  I will eventually slowly add back high fiber fruits, nuts, and a few other foods, but never again will I eat regular desserts, nor will I ever again eat meals that are based off a carbohydrate.  I will be eating essentially this way for life.  And I'm ok with that, even if sometimes I still miss sweets. 

 

In a day or two I can write up some tips, tricks, and games I played with myself to get started in the first week weeks. 

 

Note 1: I made some small changes in the recommendations, for my sanity. To wit, I decided I was not going to count grams of carbohydrate specifically, but instead learn about foods in general, and get used to eating meals that were high in green veggies and protein and generally low in carbohydrate.  I shoot for 5 grams of carbohydrate per meal, roughly, but don't haul out a calculator. 

Note 2: having watched many other women embark on weight loss adventures, I have to say that most seem to me to have insanely unrealistic goals.  To me, it's completely ridiculous that, say, a 47 year old woman who has had four children should shoot for the weight she was when she was 26 and first married.  A certain amount of body fat is critical for hormonal balance, and this is doubly true as one approaches the menopause years. Also, you'll look older than you are if you go back to the weight you were 30 years go; a certain amount of body fat smooths wrinkles and softens features, which is beneficial if you're A Woman of A Certain Age! All of that to explain why I'm being conservative when setting a goal weight. 

Note 3:  I had to do some work on myself here.  For the times that I _did_ feel the urge to emotionally eat, I needed to find substitutes to fill that need.  But I think I'll write up a tips and tricks post to follow up this post where I'll include some of the things I did for this and as I was first working on turning down sweets.

This Is Important.

For there to be a half a package of one of my favorite cheeses still in my fridge nearly a week after I purchased it is really, really big.  It's so big that I'm posting a picture of it on the internet so that I can keep going back to remind myself how far I've come in the last two months. 

The story of why is a longer tale than I can write today, as today I am dealing with a Gluten Attack! Yesterday, I ate food prepared in a restaurant for the first time in about two months, and boy,  am I regretting it.  I can't brain very well today, and what little brain I can brain must be put to getting the grocery list together to go grocery shopping tonight.  

Also, I really need to clean the house.  Or at least the bathroom. And maybe remove a few dust bunnies which have migrated out of their home countries.  

Rise Up.

She fled. 

In her night clothes, with two leather bags strapped to her horse, she fled.  

She had no help. The priest had scuttled off into the woods as soon as they'd cleared the outer border of the village, her father's village, her childhood home. She'd hoped he would help her but he proved to be as weak and feeble-minded as she'd always suspected.  

She was perhaps better off alone; she could go faster. 

She wondered if the writing on the pieces in the bags would help her or hinder her escape. Which gods would be angered?  The Christian one whose pieces she was taking? Or her childhood goddess whose water she was going to sink them in?

May thy enemies be scattered.  She was her father's enemy. Not by intent but by circumstance. For what child wishes their father to hate them? But her choice had been made at mid-winter and there was no turning back now. 

And may those who hate thee be driven from thy face. I am a thief as well, she thought, embracing the label, spurring her horse to run faster, not worried about the dark, the lack of moon, because she knew this path like she knew the palm of her own hand. 

She knew The Water just as well.  Many times she had prayed at the edge of the Water. Sometimes, her prayers had been answered.  This time, her life depended on it. 

And the child's. 

She hoped it would be enough gold to ensure the child she carried was a son.  

I Just Want to Know.

Who dumped all the gold in that field in Staffordshire?

And why?

We Were Warned.

This sort of thing is not going to get improve as we move closer towards socialized, centrally controlled medical care.  I suspect many of the issues contributing to the problem can be traced to over regulation. 

 From the article, 

“There’s no upside to our guys talking about that (the shortages),” says a spokesperson for a manufacturers’ association. “Even if the FDA’s doing something terrible, we can’t criticize them. They regulate us. There’s not one cause of drug shortages. But if you call the FDA, they’ll say it’s our fault.”

 Other clues...

The existing manufacturers are at capacity, and bringing new ones online takes at least two years.

How much of that two years is tied up in regulatory red tape for various approvals and inspections? Surely a plant can be built more quickly that that. 

Another:

Hospital staff wonder why the FDA hasn’t already put a process in place to streamline foreign inspections and certifications so that labs abroad can manufacture emergency supplies on short notice.

Europe has no such shortages, sourcing from multiple manufacturers and countries. Why does the FDA tie up approval of drugs & supplements manufactured in Europe and Canada?

 

What You See: How Japanese Gardening Ideas Changed What I Do Outside.

I love Japanese gardens. The peaceful serenity of them, the deep thoughtfulness that goes into every aspect of them.  One aspect of designing a garden in the Japanese aesthetic has to do with "borrowed views," the parts of the world surrounding the garden that are not actually part of the garden itself but which are visible from it, and therefore become part of the design and structure of the garden. 

I've tried to take that idea indoors and to use it to dictate much of what I do outdoors with my flowerbeds.  Nearly everything I do outside is informed by what that view looks like from inside the house. (This is why, by the way, I dislike "foundation plantings"; I can't see them from the house!)

The view out of the front window of my entryway. 

Here, the peachy-pink of the dahlia and (yet to bloom) geraniums contrasts with the royal blue of my motel chairs and my bicycle.  All is set off nicely by the white wall and column of the porch. 

 

I made sure to paint the back of my wicker furniture because I see it from the house. 

This view needs some work yet.  The little green and wood table by the pink wicker chair needs to be darker and more solid-looking, but not too dark, because then I'll lose my nice antique bronze table lamp against it.  By a month from now, the hanging planter on the porch will have filled out a bit and will echo the rest of the porch colors with pale pink petunias and bright blue lobelia.  The tree's canopy and the white wall of the porch become a striped wallpaper for the "room" of the front porch. 

This is my view from my seat at the dining room table.

My hardest fought battles have been for control of the Long Bed in the backyard.  Everything out there is arranged so that it displays nicely from this seat in the dining room.  Can you see what this bed needs yet? Here's a clue.

No, not an English cottage in the background.  Here, I drew it in. 

Needs something to stop your eyes from going past the end of my property line. 

With a sculpture or artifact or tall plant there, the neighbor's garage across the alley would still be technically visible, but you wouldn't "see" it the same way.  Right now, his garage is a borrowed view I don't want. I need a garden folly there! Or something.  The trick is finding something without spending any money at all on it.

Just for fun, here's the Long Bed from the upstairs bedroom, take a week or so ago when the Eastern redbud trees were nearly finished blooming. 

Ahhhhhh.  That's seven years of hard work.

If you enjoy flower gardening (and only if; this post is not meant in anyway to guilt you into redoing outdoor beds unless you actually enjoy doing that kind of thing) have fun thinking about how you'll see that new perennial plant you picked up from the inside of the house before you decide just where you're going to plant it outside.