A few weeks ago I decided (for some crazy reason) to show solidarity to my brother by giving up caffeine. He was giving up a daily mocha fix and I felt I would give up my multiple cans of Diet Coke per day. This decision was incredibly hard. I spent a lot of time taking Advil and wondering why I was doing this. This wasn’t helped by my friends who constantly posted messages to me about the benefits of coffee, how coffee was good for you, and that a little caffeine really wasn’t that bad. Of course, I wasn’t drinking coffee. And no one was sending me messages about the hidden miraculous powers of Diet Coke. In fact, I got told about “that woman in Australia” who died from drinking too much Diet Coke. I think the person who first told me that story was also telling me I was crazy for giving up caffeine and sending me stories about coffee saving a baby from a well and how coffee makes you thinner and makes bathing suits look good on you. Aside: did you know that people can SEE you in your swimming suit, even when you’re under water? I think I’m going to start swimming in mud pits rather than YMCA pools. Well, it’s been four weeks, and except for half a can the first week, I haven’t had any coffee or Diet Coke in that entire time. Go me! The headaches stopped after about one week. The cravings took a lot longer. There are still days where I pass a 7/11 and think “I could just get a small Big Gulp.” Aside: does it make me old if I admit that I remember when a Big Gulp was the large size drink at 7/11? These days, it’s the smallest. That shocked me. But most of the time these days, I can look at a Diet Coke logo and not dream of gulping down all 12 ounces in 15 seconds of pure carbonated bliss. Okay, maybe not most of the time, but perhaps half the time. OK, maybe not half the time, but sometimes! Perhaps I should stop storing the case of Diet Coke on the kitchen counter? [caption id=“attachment_734” align=“aligncenter” width=“320”] The case of Diet Coke is now a stuff pile.[/caption]

I’ve been doing web design work since 1995, and one of the things I like best about it is how much it changes fairly regularly. When I started, writing HTML required that I know vi and be able to edit the files directly on the Unix server. Then I started storing files on my local hard drive, editing there in a text editor (Homesite was my poison), and then uploading them to my web server. In the last few years, I’ve started using the WYSIWYG portion of Dreamweaver to handle some of the trickier aspects of design and then using the text editor in Dreamweaver to manage the HTML. And of course, all the change in how I do this is not why I like web design, it’s just a side-note. What I find interesting is how stubborn people can be about their opinions about editors like Dreamweaver. Back in the 1990s when Dreamweaver first came out, the HTML that it created was questionable. Not as questionable as HTML from other WYSIWYG editors (FrontPage was especially bad), but still a lot of bloated code to do things that you could do much more efficiently in the HTML using a text editor. But that was over 10 years ago.  These days, even most of the no-code editors that I’ve tried out do a decent job with the HTML and CSS. It’s rare to see a FONT tag in an HTML document that was edited by a WYSIWYG editor, and tools like WordPress offer easy-to-use WYSIWYG tools (I’m writing this post in the “visual” editor of WordPress, for instance.) built right into the blogging system. So I don’t understand why even in 2012, I can receive comments on my About.com blog like this one (emphasis mine):

I have to say i’m very impressed with myself. On July 1, 2012, I started on an 8-week program of attempting to eat not only no sugar, but also nothing sweet at all (i.e. no Diet Coke, no fruit, no stevia, etc.). The first few weeks were tough. There were points where I thought that I would chew my arm off in the hopes that my blood was sweet. I would get frustrated at the drop of a hat, and don’t get me started on the headaches and general grumpiness. Anyone who tells you that sugar is not addictive is living in a dreamworld, or they have completely different metabolism than I do. For me, sugar (and to some extent anything sweet) seems to result in this intense need to eat more and more and more and more and more. I think the cravings were the worst. I would be doing something else, anything else, and suddenly I would think “what I really need right now is some chocolate.” Before this experiment, I would just head into the kitchen at that first thought and look for chocolate - or if we didn’t have anything chocolate, something sweet of any kind. But this summer, at the first thought I would then stop myself, and search to answer what it was I was really wanting. In many cases, this search would result in the whiny brat inside me starting to whine and cry and say “I don’t want anything else, I want CHOCOLATE!!!” There were some nights were I would completely miss the plot of whatever movie or tv show I was watching that night because all I could think about was the sugar I wasn’t eating. It sucks to feel that out of control. The second week is when the headaches started. I was waking up every morning with a migraine. The only thing that kept me from throwing in the towel right then was the knowledge that too much sugar has triggered migraines for me, so I was fairly confident that it wasn’t the lack that was generating these headaches. My husband pointed out that I had been drinking 1-3 cans of diet coke a day prior to this experiment, and perhaps I was addicted to caffeine. He is a genius! I now drink cafe au lait all the time (iced because it’s hot), or at least my version of cafe au lait which is: 1/2 cup regular coffee 1 cup whole milk 1 1/2 cups ice Pour all ingredients into a 20oz iced coffee cup (I use my stainless steel cup with stainless steel straw), stir, and drink. If it’s too bitter, add more milk. My son loves to make the coffee for me. Who needs a coffee maker on a timer when your kid will do it for you?

Week three started last Sunday on my quest to purge my system of sugar. This week, the goal is to eat no more than 10-20 grams of sugar per day (1 tsp = approximately 5 grams), or between 3-6% by weight. In some ways this is pretty easy, as I’ve already removed the crazy sweet things from my house. In fact, when I get a craving most of the time I can’t really do anything about it because we don’t have any sweets available. Yes, there are a few things—treats for Jaryth, Mark has some that he keeps in his office—but in general there’s nothing sugary that I might want. 

Sugar sucks. I gave up eating anything sweet three weeks ago, or was it two weeks ago? I guess two, but it seems like forever. I keep hoping that there will be a point where I won’t feel these intense cravings for sugar or something sweet. In fact, I can say with some honesty that the cravings are not as bad today as they were on July 1st. But saying that is like saying that my bathtub isn’t as wet as the ocean because there isn’t as much water there. Yes, the cravings are less, sorta, but when they hit, they hit hard! Jaryth is watching “Monsters, Inc.” and he just got to the part with the abominable snowman. “Sno-cone?” he says, and I immediately start wanting a lemon sno-cone. I don’t even like sno-cones and I especially don’t like leman! And then all I can think about are sno-cones, or maybe ice cream, or perhaps a popsicle or maybe a lollipop, my cravings don’t care.

So my newest life plan is to try out quitting sugar (and basically anything sweet) for the next few weeks. I started on Sunday, July 1st, which must have been a week ago now, right? I have discovered a few things in the short period I’ve been off sugar:

• I am, sadly, addicted to caffeine. Mark was telling me that and I was sure he was wrong, but man, today without Diet Coke, my head was aching and my temper was short.
• The cravings are ugly. I find myself thinking about sweets at the most random times. And if I don’t immediately start doing something else, they can end up taking over my head.
• Tea and toothpaste are my new best friends. I have drunk about a gallon of green tea today (read somewhere that it inhibits appetite — maybe because you’ve got so much tea in your stomach?) and brushed my teeth like four times (my dentist will fall over in a dead faint).

I feel almost ridiculous posting anything about this experiment after only two days, but I also feel like if I don’t I’ll give up sooner.

The hard part of changing my lifestyle is that while it’s going great, it’s easy to keep doing and not get frustrated. But when it’s not, it’s not. I’ve now had two weeks in a row of either no weight loss or weight gain, and my measurements have gone back up. And this is after I started going to CrossFit twice a week to try to get more fit. I know, I know, if I’m weight training I’m going to grow muscle and that weighs more than fat. But I’ve only gone to CF three times, and I doubt strongly that 2 pounds of muscle were formed in that time frame. I’m hoping it’s water weight and that if I just drink more water and wait it out this too shall pass. One success: I was able to keep from downing all the valentine’s chocolate in the house (which is really just one small box of See’s, but still…) after looking at the scale this morning. So, I’m trying to cheer myself up by posting the Valentine book I did for NORBAG (North Redwoods Book Arts Guild) It has the quote inside “Be around the people you want to be like because you will be like the people you are around.” And then in the heart cutouts I wrote artists, writers, book artists. The cover is this cabbage rose paper I got in Seattle with an appliqué heart that came on a card I got a while back.It’s an accordion book made from a kit that my mother-in-law gave me. Like many of the books I make, I liked it so much I didn’t want to send it out to the swap. :-) But I did, because I don’t need 90 million books lying around. I hope whoever gets it likes it too.

[caption id=“attachment_289” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“My First Sushi - Carrot Sushi”][/caption] For those who scoff at the idea of carrot sushi, well, I have nothing to say to you. I didn’t have any daikon or other more traditional veggie-sushi veggies. Maybe next week will bring more “real” sushi foods into the house. But really, carrot sushi was yummy. I debated trying celery sushi too. What about tomato sushi?

I’ve decided to compile a list of all the things that I’d like to change in my life (or do or improve, etc.). This is kinda like a master goals list. The point is that I can’t achieve my goals if I don’t know what they are. So here goes in no particular order:

• Eat less junk food - ultimately I want to get it down to 1 day a week or even just a few hours on that one day
• Bake my own bread
• Eat NO feedlot or factory meat. I want to only buy or raise my own grass fed meat and poultry.
• Have an artisan turkey for Thanksgiving in 2011
• Eat 5+ veggies and fruits per day.
• Sleep at least 8 hours a night.
• Go to the dentist every six months.
• Grow a vegetable garden - and expand it every year. This year I’m expanding to potatoes.
• Work out 30+ minutes per day (beyond our daily walk).
• Cook 3-4 meals a week.
• Read to Jaryth every night.
• Write a novel.
• Grow my site to be in the top 20 sites on About.com.
• Let’s get real, I want my site to be #1! :-)
• Build an eco-friendly house.
• With a tower.
• Ride my horse 3-5 times a week, regardless of weather.
• Go on trail rides with Betsy.
• Paint and draw.
• Create a website for swapping books with other book artists. Or (and) mail artists.
• Pare down my stuff to be more minimalist.
• Make cheese.
• Eat only locally-grown (within 100 miles of here) food.
• Support more local artists, farmers, shops, etc.
• Give something to someone every day.
• Get a tractor.
• Chickens - for eggs and meat.
• A small cow - for milk for cheese.
• Meditate 3-5 times per week.
• Yoga.
• Writing down what I eat.
• Journaling every day.
• Learn to make sushi I made sushi on Thursday night (photos to come soon)
• start seeds for veggie garden indoors (for earlier harvests)
• clean out the creek so that it flows better
• plan a nut orchard
• plant fruit trees
• give away at least 100 books in 2011
• clean my office
• write at least 1 review of an app or book that is pending per week
• build a bookarts swap site
• build at least one of the domains that I own
• move one site off of my home server onto its own site
• send more postcards - 1 per week at least
• read 100 books or more in 2011 (I’ve already read 14 – check out my GoodReads profile to see what I’m currently reading

For this week, I’m focusing on the following:

So, I’ve watched the vegetarian sushi video a couple times, I’ve bought my sushi rice and sushi vinegar (wasabi and soy sauce are already staples in my home) oh and the nori. Now I have to do two things:

1. finish my work for the day
2. stop being a wimp/chicken and start my attempt at making sushi!

Oh and we got a new 7-cup food processor (or “food robot” in my translation of the French) today. I can’t decide whether I want to make hummus first or chicken nuggets. The biggest challenge with reading a book about local food and you’re in the summer chapter is that now I want fresh tomatoes, peaches, and zucchini. I think I’m also going to make some zucchini bread tonight or tomorrow from the frozen zucchini I stored from the summer. Take THAT winter! It’s sad, but I’ve been wishing it would snow. Right now we’re having these coldish days and sometimes rain, and that just means that you risk losing your boots when you walk anywhere on the property beyond the 1/4 acre surrounding the house. And unfortunately, Jaryth doesn’t have any puddle jumpers because we didn’t buy them when we saw them in the stores and of course, there are none now. No one buys puddle jumper boots in January, do they? I suppose I could look in a consignment store, but that would require shopping and my agoraphobia limits me to the post office and school. ☺

So my two goals for the next week or so are to make:

• vegetarian sushi
• cheese

I’ve been told before that making cheese isn’t terribly hard. Of course finding rennet could be challenging… but one step at a time. There is a beer and wine making supply company in Kirkland that also sells cheese making supplies. And I want to make some bread. I think I need to get my Laurel’s Kitchen bread book out again. At least now I know where it is. This book is really inspiring me, taking me back to the things that are important to me.

So, I read my previous blog post to Mark, and his first response was “Good luck!” And of course, I got a bit frustrated because that’s the sarcastic (for those playing along at home, yes, he was being sarcastic) response I dread when I talk about trying to be greener and eat more healthy. But after we talked for a while, we came up with an initial game plan:

1. Salads for dinner – Three years ago we implemented the plan of having a pitcher of water on the table for dinner every night. This has become so ingrained that we will sometimes end up with two pitchers because he puts one on at the same time as I do. So, the new plan includes salad every night. I am in charge of the salad.
2. Getting a new food processor – The only one we have is a tiny 3-cup model that I got when I was in college. It has served us well (okay, it really has served us just okay, but we’ve been too cheap to get another) for the 13 years we’ve been married. But I want hummus! And other things you can make only in a nice big 9+ cup food processor.
3. Getting rid of the bread maker – Of course, in our tiny kitchen, getting a new appliance means getting rid of something else to make room. And the fact is that we never use the bread maker. We mostly use it for kneading, and we have a dough hook on our KitchenAid mixer, that we use more often. Neither of us like the bread mixes you can get and bread baked in it tastes dull and boring. Do you know anyone who wants a bread maker? Hardly used!
4. Getting rid of other things we don’t use – Finally, we’re going to go through our clothes, the kitchen cabinets and even (gasp!) my books and the storage shed; giving away or selling anything that we don’t use. This should free up a ton of extra space!

Determining a game plan is a great way for me to feel like we’re on the way to where I want to be. Then reading about the cynicism of Monsanto and the loss of heirloom seeds and the pro-corporate greed of our “representative” government is a little less depressing.

I am reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now. And at the same time, I have been regularly reading The Zero Waste Home (a blog). What’s interesting to me is that I started both of these reading projects by reading some reviews and comments about them. And the comments I read went along the lines of “this is impossible!”, “what you’re asking me/us to do is not possible except for crazy zealots,” and “I don’t believe that your kids are all that thrilled by this plan for (zero waste or growing all your own food) as you imply they are.” And I admit that I read both the book and the blog with those thoughts in mind myself, kinda like I was watching a train wreck and couldn’t stop myself from rubber-necking on the side of the tracks. The problem isn’t that the ideas in these books/blogs are impossible - clearly they are possible as at least two families have made it happen. But the problem is that I don’t like to feel guilty and I don’t like to feel hopeless and that’s what both of these things do to me. I know for a fact that my home is still going to be producing waste and buying food from the grocery store a year from now. I know, with relative certainty that my son, husband, and I are all still going to be eating cookies, chips, and french fries in 2012. And I’m fairly confident that while I’ll have a garden again this year, I probably won’t be able to get much enthusiasm from my son or husband for eating what I grow. So here’s what I need:

Jaryth liked licking the icing. I also learned that marshmallows must be eaten on a stick (courtesy s’mores we had last summer). He yelled “stick! Stick!” over and over until Mark gave him a toothpick.

So, I’ve started cooking again. I figure it’s not good karma for me to let Mark do all the cooking forever. ☺ But in order to facilitate this, I’ve started looking at online recipes. And I have two questions:

1. Why does Cooks.com get listed so often when their recipes are all the same?
   I did a search for something the other day, and was excited to see that there were like 20 recipes listed on Cooks.com. Of those 20, there were exactly three different ones. Three!?! I think Cooks.com is one of those user-generated content sites, and it’s obvious in this situation that there are no editors doing anything there. I mean, how many times do I need to read the same recipe? Even if they have slightly different titles, they are the same and once I’ve decided I don’t want the first copy of it, finding it again 10 more times just makes me leave the site without using any of the recipes. Lame!
2. Why do people, when rating recipes, give a recipe a 5 star rating and then proceed to explain how they completely changed the recipe?
   For example: “This was an awesome recipe! My family loved it! I replaced the chicken with tuna, added tomatoes and green onions (for color), and got rid of the garlic and onions (my family doesn’t like them). Oh, and I used cauliflower instead of potatoes.” And this is on a recipe for chicken-potato pie. It sounds to me like she made tuna-cauliflower pie.

Any suggestions for great, easy recipes are welcome! Please comment.

[caption id=“attachment_178” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Buttery Sticks - Margarine is for losers!”][/caption]

Yummy!

It’s sad when marketing has decided that “margarine” isn’t yummy sounding enough.

Psst: Nucoa people… Buttery sticks makes it sound like I’m about to use twigs that have been basted. And, personally, I’m not a huge fan of twigs.

I know, I don’t need any more sweets in my life. But Pepperidge Farms hit the jackpot with me with their Chocolate Goldfish Grahams. Jaryth doesn’t like them, but that’s okay, I do. :-)[caption id=“attachment_139” align=“aligncenter” width=“99” caption=“Yum!”][/caption]

I saw this advertisement today, and it made me laugh. King county decided that all restaurants must put calories on their menus so people have a better idea of what they are ordering. A year or so later they decided to see if this had changed how people order. It did. Now they make their kids eat more healthily while ordering the double-big-mac-large-fries-chocolate-shake for themselves. I’m taking my first step to be a better role model - I’ve made a dentist appointment (and haven’t cancelled it yet).