Who Has Two Thumbs and Starts A Whole30 on a Random Tuesday? This Girl

Happy Labor Day, my people! I hope you all have enjoyed a long weekend or some sort of respite from your labor today.  Tomorrow is Tuesday, and tomorrow is also the day I will be starting another Whole30.  Don't know what the Whole30 is? You can go here to read more about it.  

It's an elimination diet that is designed to remove all kinds of foods that are known to cause sensitivities in people.  Are you likely sensitive to everything on this diet? No, but you eliminate it all and have a controlled reintroduction to see what you might consider eliminating or minimizing forever.  Or you just keep eating this way more or less forever because it makes you feel good.  

While I feel like I just did one of these a year or so ago, it has actually been a lot longer than that.  (no scrolling back in the blog for my last Whole30 entry!).  Why am I revisiting the Whole30 now?  Well, there are a few reasons.  First and foremost, I want my guts to be happier while I also wean myself off my Nexium.  My proton pump is tired of being inhibited.  I also want more energy and to help ease my seasonal allergies, which some people say is possible with a modified diet.  

Also, the underlying reason I do or think about most any eating plan, is that I want to be a healthier weight than I am now.  I gave up aspirations of being Vannah White thin years ago, but I would like to feel better in my body, to be more flexible, to feel less blah, and also to win the lottery, which sadly, an elimination diet won't help me accomplish.  Maybe the lottery gods want to give the lottery to a thinner person, because fat discrimination exists, and if I have to shed some pounds to fit in to the exacting body standards of the lottery gods, I should at least explore the option. 

This last week has been kind of messed with my mind.  Since late August, I've been trying to eat up my non-Whole30 foods, like crackers, yogurts, granola, and a host of other things that I had stocked up on since the pandemic hit.  September 1 hit, and I still had things in the house that didn't jive with the plan, like M&Ms, frozen pancakes, yogurt covered pretzels, and pasta.  Temptation was here!!!! But I had already purchased several meals for the week that were healthy. So I would eat a bunless burger for dinner followed by M&M's for dessert.  One week in, and there are no more options for foods I am eliminating. I finished my M&Ms yesterday, and I had the frozen waffles for lunch today.  So long reasons for living.  Uhm, i mean, so long foods that make me feel bad and that don't help my health or my waistline.  

Today I made a pot roast to have for the next few meals.  I roasted some carrots and cooked some sweet potatoes.  I also have ground chicken to make a ground chicken, vegetable stir fry thing.  There are some vegetables in the fridge to cook this week, and I have strawberries and blackberries for fruits. So here we go.  Old me wants to say, "This is going to be so hard at first, everyone. UGH!," but I'm going to try some cognitive behavior therapy on myself and keep telling myself this is easy! All you have to do is buy the right foods and eat them. No problem.  Here we go!  (I already want some cake....and ice cream.) 

The Four Week Challenge

I don't know about everyone, but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused me to think about the food in my house and my use of the food items I already own. The whole "stocking up" notion, the infrequent trips to the store, the need to best organize how and when we eat the foods we buy, and making sure to use the foods we already own have me looking at what I waste and what I'm not using. 

For example, when this stay home stuff all started, I ordered some frozen items from a meat supplier.  As a result, I have easily 30 pieces of chicken in the freezer, frozen tuna, and some hamburger.  This is on top of the things I had already stored in the freezer.  Some of that chicken is for Taz, but some was ordered with the thought of me making my own meals. 

I have cans of soup and broth, oatmeal, frozen vegetables, and all sorts of other things, much like I image most average kitchens in the U.S.  Yet, when I go to the store, I'm often buying fresh chicken, cookies that I shouldn't be eating, or adding in another jar of pasta sauce just in case even though I have enough pasta sauce to give myself a tomato sauce bath. (that thought makes me gag by the way because something about washing pans with tomato sauce in them and the smell of wet tomato sauce embedding itself on my hands is really not ok with me. Why do I buy and force myself to eat pasta sauce when the idea of washing pans full of pasta sauce makes me gag? It's time to free myself from the tyranny of pasta sauce.)

Here's another interesting tidbit.  I also get a general feeling of panic and dread when I have too much clutter in my house.  Having full cabinets with things shoved in there without being able to segregate and properly order them makes me a little anxious like I'm suffocating under all my things.  I have friends and family members that have so much stuff in their fridge and freezer that it makes me panic just to open the door and look around.  How on earth do you even know what's in the back of that shelf because there's so much piled up? What's good? What's bad?  My god, how do people live that way? I like everything in my fridge to have it's own space with several inches of clearance around it.  Kind of like social distancing in the fridge.  When I stock up at the store now and have to stack things and put some stuff at the back of the shelf, behind other things that are stacked, it's hard to take. I never claimed I was normal, folks.   

I was cleaning and sanitizing all my groceries and seeing my shelves fill up again, when I thought, "I wonder how long I could really go with all the food I currently have in the house." I have two choices when faced with the food in my house and wanting to use it the best way possible: 1.  Feed myself for the next month or 2. Hold a block party for 100 of my closest friends and neighbors.  Since we are social distancing, I can't cook well enough to satisfy the taste buds of people that want food to taste good, and I hate hosting parties, that leaves me with feeding myself for a month on my existing stores of food. 

Four weeks seemed like a manageable yet somewhat challenging amount of time.  I'm pushing myself, but I won't be eating nothing but oatmeal and rice for two weeks. I'll still be able to have vegetables everyday, and fruit for at least part of the time.  I won't be eating canned tuna each day, especially because I only have three cans of tuna. 

I decided to make this next month into a game.  I will eat what I have at my house for the next four week.  I can go to the store once in those four weeks, and I have to spend $50 or less.  I imagine that will be to stock up again on things like eggs and fresh produce.  I can order food out 5 times in the four weeks.  That's one meal out a week and an extra meal out to use whichever week I choose. 

I'm hoping this month helps me think about conserving money, reducing waste, impulse control, making do with what I have, and also eating better.  I didn't think to do this until after I had gone to the store yesterday, and I am sure some of my food choices would have been different if I had considered this before my shopping trip.  I would definitely have purchased way more brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts (don't need) and probably another steak (also don't need but better than pop tarts), but that's part of the challenge. 

So, you know where I'll be for the next four weeks. I'll be here, scratching my head and planning out how to best use my groceries.  As I mentioned, I'm pretty heavy on chicken, so if you have any easy chicken recipes that don't call for lots of ingredients, drop me a line.  My first meal will be steak and roasted root vegetables.  Then, tomorrow, I'll cook a pot roast that will go well with the leftover vegetables. 

Letter to David Sedaris

Update: I started this blog post in November of 2019.  It was going to be my long soliloquy on why I love David Sedaris's writing.  I'm not sure what got in the way of this great and moving masterpiece of a blog post, but something interrupted me, like a bomb went off, and I walked out of the blog post with dinner on the table and the television on.  Scientists would stumble on the blog months later saying, "Where'd she go? What happened at the reading? What else was she going to say? Why didn't she eat this perfectly good macaroni and cheese before she left?"

Like the breeze blowing dust down the road, so went my great ideas of how I was going to capture the spirit of seeing David Sedaris read and talk in person. It was going to be so insightful that it was going to go viral, and we were going to begin a long and interesting friendship and letter writing tradition that would be published posthumously, many, many, many decades from now, and people would look back and reread our letters and wonder at the serendipity that brought us together as friends.  Ours would be a classic in the long history of letter writing classics.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would have nothing on our letters.

What is it about people we know through their writing or singing or acting that makes us think we would become such good friends if only we had a reason to meet?

We know how it ends now, folks.  Half-baked blog, no long correspondence with El Señor Sedaris, no unwieldy amounts of social media traffic to deal with when the blog hit the airwaves and spreads across the globe. All you're left with is the fleeting feeling I had after seeing his really good reading in Tucson in November.  If you haven't read any of his books, I highly recommend them.  If you have a chance to see him read in your town, I suggest you go.  It's a really great way to spend an evening.

I had two books signed from him after the reading, and we talked a bit about personal tragedies we both experienced.  Thinking back, it was such a fleeting talk but also weirdly personal and jarring.  On a hilarious note, I told him I was giving one of the signed books to my brother for Christmas.  My brother always gives really thoughtful gifts, and I always get him something really useful like awesome socks.  So, I told him I had to up my game.  David wrote in the book, "You Deserved Better" to my brother.  David's right, and David deserved better from my blog.  Here's what I wrote back in November.  Forgive the schmaltz. or don't.


FROM NOVEMBER 2019
Dear David,

I went with a few friends to see you read in Tucson in November.  This must be the fourth or fifth time I've seen you over the years, and I never get tired of it.  When I tell people I'm going to hear a guy read stories, a lot of people are skeptical.  "Wait. So you've probably read the stories, and now  you're going to hear some guy read them out loud?"  If only they knew...that's almost exactly what it is, but it's also pretty darn amazing.

I love your writing because it's funny but it also makes you think and cry and wonder how in the hell you were able to write such a balancing act of a story.  I've had stories where I laugh so hard my stomach hurts and tears stream down my face, and then this profound, emotionally difficult part comes along, and I am still crying from laughter but now also crying from sadness.  Because I am so emotionally mature, I have many moments where I say, "Damn, dude.  That's some real shit right there. Did you see him drop that real shit?" See.  Emotional maturity.

In the everyday and the mundane and the millions of instances of small life tragedies, we are changed.  We develop workarounds to deal.  We become.  I like how you shine a light on our neuroses and problems and pitfalls and our grace and lack of grace.  Somehow in the parade of the best and the worst of people, there's still this love.  I like how you steep us in the situations of your stories and show how we deal with the happenings of life around us.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? WE WILL NEVER KNOW?  Fin.

Hi Grief. It's Me, Allison

I opened my blog on a whim today, and it has been a whole year since I posted my last entry, the riveting and hard hitting write up on raisinettes.  A year flies by when you're having fun while also suffering miserably and feeling like life knocked you in the face with a sock full of nickels. This has been the year of the great and the depths of awful.

I was driving home from work yesterday, enjoying the fact that I was headed for home, when a song came on from Jason Isbell.  It's called Something to Love, and when it started to play, I just started sobbing and driving and sobbing.

I kept thinking of my brother Jerome and that moment he must have realized something was wrong.  I kept hearing my brother Jeff in the car as we made the long drive to Tazewell from Richmond saying, "I hope Jerome wasn't scared."  The small comforts we seek. I hope he wasn't scared when he got so sick, and in the space of that breath between life and the end of life, I hope he wasn't scared.  And even thought I know he's not scared now, sometimes my mind goes back there.  It's at once a useless exercise and also a way to force myself to face this grief. 

Grief makes for a strange bedfellow.  One moment you can be driving down the road, feeling pretty good, and the next you're hit with a tsunami of sorrow.  Yesterday I didn't hear the tsunami warning, but there it was. A half an hour later, I felt like I had been dashed against the rocks, but I was going to be ok.  That's grief.  Then you text your brother and tell him you miss his brother, your brother, the third in the trifecta of awesomeness.

I had a dream about him where I called him on his cell phone.  We had been looking for him and trying to find him all over the place. When he answered, I said, "We're here waiting on you."  He said, "I already left. I didn't need to be there anymore." 

Music is a tricky thing for me these days because so much of my brother Jerome is tied to memories of music...songs he liked or that he sang a lot...songs he would send me via messenger...the song going through my head the day I saw a red bird and thought of him and later realized the song was "Time to Move On" by Tom Petty.  Sometimes I listen to that one when I'm not quite in the tsunami, but I'm pacing like a wild animal that knows some awful natural disaster is about to happen.  I listen to that song when I want to unleash the impending wave of grief, when I want to see the big sky moving above me as I drive the open road and think my brother is out there, moving on.



 

Why It's Problematic to Have Raisinettes in the House, a Guessing Game

Tonight after a dinner of cauliflower, sweet potato, and a lean hamburger patty, I couldn't resist cracking into my brand new movie theater-size box of milk chocolate raisinettes.

That's right. You read that right.  Raisinettes.  I can't help it that Nestle spells it wrong.

While I love this tasty little treat, I don't really love having them in the house.  I made a rare exception this weekend in a moment of weakness. Can you guess why I don't like having them in the house?

1. They are made with California raisins
2. They are bad for Taz
3. They make me fat and because they are soooo delicious I can't resist eating the whole box
4. All of the Above

If you guessed 4, guess again.  I wouldn't make it soooooooooo easy.

Still stumped?  If you guessed 1, that's wrong too.  I fully embrace the California raisin industry.  While I don't fully embrace the California Raisins a la Hardee's 1988, I do happen to know and like a few people that grow grapes.  While they might not grow raisins commercially, they are the precursor to raisins, so we're all good.  Plus, I'm not in a trade war with raisin people, so let's chill and make the California raisin people feel welcome.

If you guessed 3, you're really bad at guessing. I don't begrudge the rainsinettes my ample girth.  It has taken a bit more than a box of raisinettes to cultivate this lushious set of curves, folks. Haters gonna hate, but I suggest you don't hate on the raisinettes.  Plus, it's kind of like eating fruit, so technically raisinettes are healthy.  Chocolate is a super food.  SUPER FOOD! Would you hate on kombucha or chia or acai or cacao nubs? Of course you wouldn't, so let's not hate on the raisinettes, either.  Super food.  

That leaves us with number 2. I don't love having raisinettes in the house because they are little nuggets of poison covered poison for dogs.  The deadliness of chocolate sensually enveloping the life-ending raisin.  Yep.  I worry that I'll accidentally drop one and like a stealth ninja, Taz will be there to scoop it up before I can pick it up.  I used to eat them at work exclusively, but now that Taz goes to work too, it's just geography.  There's no safe space except for the movies!

So ultimately, raisinettes are awesome because I can go to the movies, get my own butter covered popcorn and box of raisinettes.  Life is beautiful, and the world is a wonderful place.

Returning from A Pilgrimage Across the Desert

I left my house at 7:15 this morning to drive across the vast and open desert to Yuma, Arizona.  It was a trip to pay respects and say goodbye to this really amazing human being who left this earth too soon, William Brooks.  This four hour drive across some pretty rural areas of the state...it just felt like the right thing to do to say goodbye.  We were making the pilgrimage, the effort, the intentional journey because Will mattered a lot, and this was a small step to paying the debt for having known someone so worthy.  It was the least we could do, and still it wasn't enough. What is, really? What is enough to honor someone?  I guess that's something we all answer in our own way. 

I rode with another friend of Will's, Bruce Bracker, and along the way, in the midst of talking about life and work and mutual friends and the goings on in our county, we would talk about Will and what an amazing person he was.  It can't be said enough.  He was humble and kind and so, so smart.  He was a true leader in that he cared for the people who worked for him and helped them be the best versions of themselves.  You could see it in how they respected Will.  He was welcoming and funny and always had a smile.  He was innovative, and I'm not exaggerating when I say he changed the world and how Customs and Border Protection operates at our ports of entry.  He changed the world, and that was just one small part of his big, big legacy. 

The room was full of all these blue uniforms of people he worked with at CBP. It was also full of all these people that weren't related to Customs at all.  They were Will's civilian friends and family, if you will.  I knew Uniform Will having gotten to know him through his leadership at CBP.  These other people knew the kicked back, flip flop, hunting and fishing Will.  The friend and father and brother and husband.  It was interesting to see both of these worlds coming together, and each and everyone there described Will in many of the same ways: humble, smart, funny, honorable, innovative.  He walked the walk no matter if he was at work or spending time with his loved ones. 

I was speaking with a close friend at the service, and I asked how everyone was doing in the Field Office after Will's passing.  She said all they can do is live up to his example, and it was such a good example to follow.  Our "What Would Will Do" moments are perhaps a small tribute to his legacy.  So, in moments of struggle or in trying to decide how to handle certain situations, I'll try to ask myself how Will would handle it.  How do you honor and value the people around you, how do you solve problems, make people feel noticed, lead, innovate, and have the utmost integrity while doing all of that? I'm sure I won't be close to Will's example, but if I head at least in that general direction, I don't see how I could go wrong. 

Safe travels, Will.  Thank you for being someone to look up to.  I'm glad that Bruce and I could make the journey today to say goodbye and honor your legacy. 

Airport Shenanigans, Whole 30 Beyond the Whole 30, and Welcome to Chicago

Ok.  We will get the Whole30 discussion out of the way first.  My first Whole 30 went well for the most part, even though I didn't lose weight.  I still felt better and noticed benefits to my health that go beyond weight loss.  And truthfully, it was probably closer to a successful Whole28.  F-ing donuts.

Now I'm 12 days into my second Whole 30.  I have probably been 80 percent complaint.  I traveled two days to PHX, and now I'm in Chicago for four days.  Sigh...travel is a real challenge for me still.  I also still haven't given up all fruit. I DON'T WANT TO GIVE UP MY FRUIT! And that's a clear sign that I need to give it up.  "My precious....don't make me give up my precious!" I'm not quite as bad as Smeagul from Lord of the Rings, but I'm close.

I arrived in Chicago today for a work gig.  It will be busy and annoyingly hard to eat well when I'm in meetings and on the go.  Tonight I went and bought some apples, I packed some compliant bars and almond butter, and I also have a baggy of pumpkin seeds.  That should help in a pinch, but my meals are probably not going to be perfect. Lunch today was a sandwich.  Not great.  Dinner was salmon and green beans...better.  Of course those fig newtons I had for dessert didn't do me any favors.

My goal for this trip is to make more better decisions than bad and try to have two compliant meals a day.  We will see how it goes.

I am still avoiding legumes and dairy, for the record.  There might have been a bit of butter on the green beans tonight, but not a ton.  There was probably some added sugar in the marinade for the fish, I had a sandwich and fig newtons.... Still, I am avoiding legumes and dairy minus the very rare instances of butter in things.  I might eat the occasional sandwich or fig newton, but I gotta draw the line somewhere!

And this leads me to airport shenanigans.  It was so odd that I have to share.  I had to leave for Chicago on a 5:30 am flight.  That means I had to get up at 2:00 am, get ready, feed and take Taz out, feed cats, etc.... and still leave the house by 3:30 am to get to Tucson by 4:30 am.  When it's that early, my body isn't quite all the way awake, you know?  I'm functioning, but certain functions aren't quite all systems go.

After an hour drive, when I arrive at the airport around the time I would normally be waking up, my guts decided to wake up and greet the day too.  Yep.  I had to go to the bathroom, and I was on a mission.  Thank goodness I was parking at the airport when my guts decided it was time to go, but for the record, I guess I DID have a suitcase full of clean clothes in case there had been a major catastrophe (like my last bathroom story that involved me walking in the middle of nowhere along the train tracks.  I digress.) 

If you aren't familiar with the Tucson airport, there is the perfect bathroom for a 4:30 am bowel movement.  It's downstairs, right where you enter the airport, nestled in the back wall of the baggage claim area.  There aren't ANY people in the baggage claim area at 4:30 am.  It would just be me, some privacy, and a morning constitutional.

I'm walking pretty fast from the car into the airport, because there really is no time to dawdle.  Plus, there is this weird psychological phenomenon that dictates that the closer you get to the bathroom, the more you really gotta go to the bathroom. Walk, walk, walk, walk...focus, focus, focus, focus.

I walked into the bathroom to see three people at the sinks.  WHAT?! How dare they be in my public airport bathroom! Oh well, there was no time to change course now.  I initially thought they were in the process of clearing out anyway.  I mean, come on! They were at the sinks! Wash up and get out already!

Except this wasn't any normal bathroom stop for this crew.  Two older ladies were traveling with a kid who might have been 10 or 12 years old, and from what I could gather, this little girl was in the middle of a hysterical crying fit.

At first I thought something awful had happened to her.  She's sobbing, and the main woman in charge kept saying, "It's ok.  She's ok.  She's safe and sound," as I'm trying to be as quiet as possible but it's not working out so well.  ppfffftttttt.

Oh my gosh! Something awful happened to this kid, and she's going to remember some woman in the bathroom letting er rip.  Seriously? Is this my life?  pppfffffttttt.  Evidently.  The problem with an almost-empty bathroom is there isn't enough background noise to disguise what you're up to in the stall.  In a busy bathroom there are lots of flushing sounds, sinks running, people talking, etc... and you can almost be disguised. In an almost-empty bathroom, sound carries, and EVERYONE knows it was you.  You either want a super crowded bathroom or one that is completely empty.  I had the worst case scenario.

The main woman keeps saying, "It's ok.  She's safe and sound," in a loud voice.  "You're just stressed, but it's ok.  Safe and sound."  I am so sorry I'm pooting it up while you comfort your granddaughter that probably had to bury her mother or her best friend from school or her other grandmother.  The way she is wailing, something profoundly awful has happened in this family.  My god.  I'm an awful person having a big pooh through their misery and sorrow. 

Then she starts saying that the cab driver will be there soon, and they can get the stuffed item out of the cab that the girl left behind.  I'm stuck in this public bathroom with the crying girl and her weird family because of a stuffed doll left in a cab????!!  All bets were off.   ppppffffffhhhhttttttttt.  ppphhhhfftt pppttttfffpppp.

This weird situation continues for another minute as the woman is still chanting, "It's ok.  Safe and sound.  Safe and sound."  After a few repetitions of this, she starts whispering the same thing.  It's creepy,  "Safe and sound. saaaaffeeeeee and sound."

And my guts give one last final, "pppfffftttttttt...."

The other woman starts saying, "Think calming thoughts.  Calming thoughts" while lady one continues her "Safe and sound" mantra.  These people are killing me!!!!  The kids starts to get her hysterical sobbing under control, and I start thinking, "Can you please leave now so I can exit this stall, wash my hands, and carry on with my day without having to face you weirdos?"

No.  No they couldn't.   No. Such. Luck.  So, I walk out, look at all three of them, wash my hands, and proceed to go and check in for my flight.  Safe and sound.  I'm safe and sound.