What's the Plan? My Left Brain and Right Brain figure out Thanksgiving Dining

Thursday, November 22, 2012

I thought you'd like to listen in on my School Marm Left Brain and my Wild Child Right Brain as they get ready for this Food Fest of a Day.

LB Happy Thanksgiving to you! How do you feel?

RB Thanks, pretty good. How do you Think?

LB LOL It's not HOW I think but WHAT ... and I think we look pretty durn good compared to a year ago - which was an improvement over the year before. Doin' good girlfriend

RB You know what? That's just how I feel too. I'm really proud of how slim I look and I really love that sparkly shirt we bought

LB Yeah - even though we DON'T NEED ANY MORE CLOTHES! I think we look good in it too, though. So. I am thinking also about how to keep on looking this good. I have a plan.

RB Why am I not surprised. I hope it isn't a Nothing Good To Eat plan

LB of Course not. I wouldn't ruin Thanksgiving for us. My plan is this. Let's figure out how many calories/points a modest thanksgiving dinner is and then decide how to eat around it the rest of the week. AND figure out how much more exercise we're going to have to get in to counter the "weight" of that dinner.

RB ...uh. OK. There will still be pie, right?

LB Absolutely. And thigh meat and dressing - but .. how about skipping the gravy?

RB What about the jello?

LB You betcha.

RB And cranberry sauce?

LB If you want it.

RB hmmm. and wine?

LB yep

RB Well. It doesn't look like I'll have to give up anything. what's the catch?

LB I think we might pass on the whipped cream with our pie.

RB well... okay. I'm always sort of sick by pie time anyway

LB And if you decide to NOT put butter on your roll - that saves something ... but that one is up to you. I've factored it in.

RB What about the surprise dish our guests are bringing?

LB I've factored that in. Plus the hour of housework we have to do and the 2 mile after dinner walk we'll take.

RB So. what's the damage?

LB Well - dinner will be about 2400 calories or 50 points. give or take

RB oh. that's a lot

LB It will be less if you eat less turkey thigh - but that's about the only place I can see you could cut back and ... even I don't want to do that

RB Me neither.

LB But we can shave off 4 points by taking that after dinner walk and cleaning this house - the floor looks awful!

RB LOL but we always do that anyway.

LB Yes - we do. But listen - this means we have oatmeal with apples for breakfast and only carrots and apples the WHOLE rest of the day.

RB I'm good with that.

LB I'm glad. It also means we only have 15 bonus points and 10 activity points .... about 1,000 calories of wiggle room the rest of the week and there will be ALL THAT PIE in the house.

RB Couldn't we give some of that away?

LB Yes! We can! And I plan to cook only enough mashed potatoes to eat up in this one meal. No Leftovers of that. You know that - it's not really this one big meal that causes so much damage. It's all the aftermath. The snacking. The pie for breakfast.

RB Yeah. I know. I wish ...

LB Don't go there. It's NOW. and it's HERE and TODAY deserves as much fun and attention and enjoyment as ANY Yesterday!

RB Okay. I won't go there. Besides, I'm looking forward to getting to know the K's better.

LB Me too. And sharing the beautiful autumn colors with two artists. Won't they love the views and the colors and the fresh air smell?

RB Yeah - I'm so thankful we could invite them this year. And really really thankful it's such a pretty day.

LB I'm thankful too - for the opportunity to have a smaller feast.

RB LOL I bet.

LB and we'll be taking long walks on Saturday and Sunday and maybe even going to the gym on Friday. We can rack up some exercise points this weekend. But we really have to eat only healthy nourishing food the rest of the week - in appropriate sized portions.

RB Yeah yeah yeah. I understand. But talk to me about THAT later because ... I can't care about Saturday when there's today to live in. Remember "It's NOW. and it's HERE and TODAY deserves as much fun and attention and enjoyment as ANY tomorrow!

LB Touche! And thanks for having this talk with me. I'm really THANKFUL for it. I love you, you know.

 RB I'm thankful for it too. Love ya right back

Better'n 3! It's a 5 Day Weekend!

Of course, it is Thanksgiving too - and I am thankful for both the day and the reason for the day - thankful for the thousands of blessings I enjoy - but most of all - I am thankful for some time off.

And just typing this makes me pause and wonder why I feel that way. This way. This is more than the usual delight-in-goofing-off sensation. This is a taking-off-tight-shoes feeling. This has a soupcon of relief to it. And it's been a long time since I felt relief at escaping my day-to-day world. But this has been a very challenging year. I love that word - it's such a good euphemism for rotten. And of course, this hasn't been a rotten year either. But for a ENFP Virgo - which is already such a conflict - I've had to spend more days than I like doggedly getting through whatever I had to get through.

But not this week.  This week I am going to savor my time, enjoy my family, explore new foods and read the Percy Jackson series.  My traditional holiday weekend reading is usually the 4 high school books in the Betsy/Tacy series - and I'll read them, too, but they are fun all the way up to - and through - Christmas.  The last of my 12 in 12 habits is to read YA and older children's fiction 20 minutes a day. The underlying intention is to be better grounded in that genre and I'm not going to get too weird about the 20 minutes a day thing after December .... though I will stick to it during this final month of 2012. And since I'm thinking of using minutes of reading instead of number of books read for our Summer Reading Club, it will be interesting to see the effect of monitoring my reading time.

I like this series - it's got a lot in common with Star Wars and Harry Potter - the same 'special' kid, the same fight against the dark side, the same enigmatic teachers who won't lay it out, but insist upon their charges risking their lives while figuring it out. I have always found that last aspect sort of weird because if I were coaching someone who's life was at risk, I'd give him all the tools he needed to reach his quest  - but there - it's a guy think, I think. BD used to do the same thing to LD and I, at least, had the good sense to stay out of it.

I also recently, and at last, read Lois Lowery's The Giver - a different sort of book - with much less of the quest and a much greater development of an alternative culture. In many ways it was a far more horrific book because a single soul was expected to contain all the feelings of an entire community while everyone else buzzed along in neutral.

The initial books in both of the series are good enough to tempt me to continue reading - even if their structures are very predictable. They are, after all, intended for young readers.  In fact, that's part of why I enjoy reading children's literature. I like distilling stuff down to clear lines.

But before any indulgent reading happens there must be HouseCleaning and Feast Preparations. I have silver to polish. I have pies to make. I want to go to the gym before lunch. We have New Guests coming for Thanksgiving. First the Feast - then the Fiction.

Ta.

Chahuli at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Somewhere in the library's collection there used to be a DVD, probably from PBS, about unique artists in America. One of them was Dale Chahuli and when I saw his work my mind boggled. I am sure my eyes bulged out like a cartoon character about to be crushed by a falling wall or run over by a train. That's how I felt after seeing this man's amazing manipulation of color and glass. Obviously I sent the right prayer out into the universe because last spring the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, announced that he'd be putting an exhibit up in the fall. I have been chomping at the bit, waiting for it to be open and for me to have a day off so I could go wallow in the magic. That happened yesterday. Sigh.

BD had a crack-0-dawn eye doctor visit and we were free to play in the city by 9:15. We took a lovely walk around the neighborhoods west of The Boulevard, around St. Gertrude's HS - where I spent the 3 most awkward years of my adolescence. It's a dear part of the city - almost as dear to me as The Fan and if I were ever to move back to the city I could imagine living there. Love me a walking distance neighborhood.  

Alas, his eyes were so dilated he couldn't see anything. Museums aren't as much fun for him anyway, now that he has only the one eye. Also, he couldn't remember who Chahuli was or ever seeing the dvd, though I've watched it twice and he doesn't usually miss anything I'm looking at. So after a cup of coffee on the cafe deck, where we could see the first - or the last - of the installations, he strolled off for another walk around the city while I dipped myself in visions of colored glass.



My favorite of everything I saw was the boat filled with snaky lass dancing in the air and reflected in the black plexiglass platforms. Mind now - I liked just about everything he did - but that was my mostest favoritest of all. I can't describe what it did to me - how it made me want to become that object - to absorb it, subsume it, eat it, just everything. Meld! That's the word. I wanted to become one with that glass.

I also, particularly liked the way the lighting caused magical shadows on the wall behind the exhibit.

My second favorite was the ceiling of glass objects. More than 1000 individual objects are set out on the clear glass ceiling so that you can see through one to another. This was one of the types of installations I saw on that DVD - though my memory says he has a FLOOR!!! like this in his house. And if he doesn't .... he ought to! LOL. Can you imagine waking up to look at this every day - or entertaining guests beneath it? I don't know if I'd ever leave the room if it were in my house. I might just fade away there and leave a pile of shadowed colored bone dust.... 

There were also some collections on walls. One was of his drawings which, though they did not thrill me, showed me how his eye and mind worked when he wasn't making glass. The arrangements of Navajo blankets and 100 year old Native American Portraits were interesting. In fact, I was inspired by the blankets to come up with some stranded colorwork designs ... comparing Navajo weaving with Shetland Island knitting - that would be a fun art student's  graduate's thesis.


















In contrast to the vivid color of the first two glass displays was this series, inspired by baskets, of mostly clear glass vessels. I'm not sure which impressed me the most - the Douglas Fir table cut from a single slab or the fragile glass vessels. They were beautiful - almost ethereal - but not as effective in capturing my heart - my soul. These were pretty - but they never owned me.









The next room held these huge bowl like shapes ... and now I forget what he called them - I thought of them as flowers, but he called it a spotted forest - only in a foreign language. Forgive this reporter's negligence and lapses. What he said in the audio comments was that he had gotten a collection of 200 color rods and he wanted to use all of them in something. He used some colors  inside the shape and different colors outside the shape, with a layer of white glass sandwiched between. The sheer size of these things made me shiver.

I had seen him making them with his studio team on that video. While one man is twirling and blowing this enormous circle of hot glass, Chahuli would tap it with these giant paddles to push it into the bowl like shape. Alas - my photographs were way too muted - the room was quite dark. Just know that these giant flowers are 3 feet across.

And then

And then you step into the garden. It is a garden of unimaginable (so you have to see it with your own eyes) intricacy, color, shape, and movement. It's an enormous display, each object worth an hour's study and all of it reflected in the black plexi-glass, giving you two places for your eye to visit.

I probably spent the longest time in this room, even though I still love the boats full of colored snakes the best. There's just so much to see in this room it's hard to fall in love. Too much to do with your eyes to let your heart stake its claim.

But sometimes art takes time. It's possible on my next visit - for you can be sure, I am going back again - I will have a more emotional reaction to this room. But here I was all intellect - looking, seeing, thinking.

I did not photograph his neon and glass tumbleweed. It is actually a very interesting thing and if it had been earlier in the exhibit I might have felt its impact, admired it more, loved it some. But after the giant garden, I was really not able to appreciate it - and didn't think I could photograph it well, either.

Instead, I went into the next room where blue candles had a Zen effect on me, calming me down from all the energy in the garden.

Can't you hear the music of that blue fringe?

The last display is one I had glimpsed already as I drove past the museum in the early evening last week. It hangs in the window at the front of the new wing - and it is classic, Medusa-like Chahuli - all sinuous snakes of glass arranged in perfect proportion.

I think that is one of the amazing gifts Chahuli brings to his work - beautiful, musical balance. He calls them "Installations" and that's an apt name but I think he could also call the symphonies.

Like the other installations, this one hangs above a black plexiglass platform so you can look down into it or up.

Thank goodness for zoom lenses, too, because this is such a big piece and so far away  you can't really enjoy the details and they are also such an important part of any Chahuli exhibit.

Richonders are so lucky to have something like this right in their own back yard. Virginians who can get to the capital city really owe it to themselves to come see this. I am so so so thankful for the whole experience. I feel blessed to live in a time when this sort of beauty can be created, shipped, and displayed. Lucky Lucky Me.

 

Yes. She's Alive. She's Even Knitting.

There is even a post from last Saturday that I just haven't gotten around to finishing. Because I don't have any photos of my knitting.

Wait. (10 minutes later)

Proof!!

The multi-hued yarn is a Plymouth yarn called Gina that's similar to Noro with its long color way. It's a cleaner yarn than Noro (used to be? Never really look at that stuff - have a bad reaction to it.) and I originally bought this yarn to knit a blue sock (the solid is another Plymouth in superwash merino) with a fanciful cuff - never thinking about that long colorway and how many inches of sock cuff I'd have to knit before the color changed at all.

Sudden change of plans turned this into a hat brim for a solid colored crown. I may also do some fun stuff with the crown - something pop-corny or cable-y - though even as I type this I shudder because I like classic with a bit of whimsical trim - not all over funky. But this blue hat will end up as a gift anyway - so there is time to ponder before I switch yarns.

And so you see - Proof of Knitting. 

But the real project I've been working on is a series of watercolor Christmas postcards. I'm doing these with the same friend with whom I did the 31 days of sketching in August. We are having way too much fun with these - Here is a Christmas Fairy, doing her magic.

So. Just in case you were wondering ... Is she alive? Does she Knit? - the answer to both is "YES" I guess the real question should be ... "Does she still blog?"

November's 12 for 12

And so the year slips into November, drawing the covers up around its shoulders as it prepares to go to sleep for the winter. It's also time to add the next to the last habit to my days and to look back a bit and asses how well those other habits have been integrated into my life.

There are only 2 habits left and for November I choose: 

Clean the kitchen every night.

This is an easy one for me to integrate because .... way last winter when I selected these 12 habits I started cleaning the kitchen every night. As I wrote back then, 

I am a morning person and am often really tired at night. It's easy to get up at 5 and clean the kitchen - but seeing a dirty kitchen first thing in the morning starts my day off with a tiny bit of ugliness. How about starting it off with something pretty instead?

As soon as I'd written those words, though, I realized that it would be easy to just start doing this right away and now it's already a habit.And I was right. It's nice to walk into a spanking clean (at least as spanking clean as I can get it) kitchen and start making the morning coffee. There have been evenings when I've walked through the kitchen and thought "I'm too tired" but then the habit would pinch and I'd  spend the few minutes to tidy things up. That is what a habit is for. 

As I move into the holiday cooking time, it will be good to already be in the habit of cleaning up after myself. I expect it will make this stretch of time go much more smoothly.

As for the rest of my good habits - I must begin with a caveat. October has been a difficult month in spite of the many lovely events and pleasures that dotted the weeks. First off there is An Issue that needed to be dealt with - something I've dreaded - and, though I put on my big girl panties at last and peeled back the curtain, I was only able to let in some cleansing sunshine. It's better - but it's not done yet - and, alas, may never be done with - which is part of why this is such a difficult situation. Like humidity in the summer, this is something that will always have to be factored into the equation.

Also, we've been short staffed at work due to illness, making the work days feel sooooo long. In addition, I'm facing a huge staffing rearrangement - the consequence of time, as a senior staffer is retiring. I have been dreading and grieving over the shake-up because this particular team has worked so beautifully these past few years. Even though I can see wonderful developments arising from the staff alignment that's moving into place - I hate to see something old, successful and precious come to an end. Oh Yes. Then there was the storm. Yeah. Dread + Stress + Mild Grief = Difficult Month. 

So I am cutting myself some serious slack on the habit forming stuff. Still, it is better to know how I've done before it all becomes a blur and I lose all the ground I've made this year

Food Tracking

I have done so poorly at this I should give myself an F. Looking back at my track records I see I only tracked daily for one week. After that - once I had 'blown' it for the week ...usually by Saturday ... I just quit. Yes there was the 1200 calorie cheesecake (of which I ate only 1/2) and yes there was the wedding and the anniversary and the convention. Okay. So why am I so afraid to look at myself when I'm not being perfect? I think there is a serious SERIOUS issue here with self delusion. I want to see me as being a Good Girl and Not Making Mistakes and Knowing Better ... and a tracker that says I ate enough to feed a football team won't let me see that. But if I did eat that much, gosh - what's the point in saying "I did not write it down, so maybe I didn't really eat it" ... Like those jokes about Southern Virgins we told in the '60's. "I didn't get caught so I didn't do it..."

hmmm. 

I think I need to come to peace with myself about what food and eating is all about and perhaps about why I am bothering to care about tracking and what I weigh and how I look and the entire body thing. I do care. I care because I want to be healthy. I care because I want to look good. But unfortunately I also care because I want to be a Good Girl but I want the food that makes me feel like a Bad Girl.

There's a focus on the wrong things and I am going to have to do some serious thinking, some deep soul searching, and realign the focus onto the positive issues. In fact - I need to get comfortable seeing me overeat - because I promise you, when I overeat I refuse to acknowledge it till later - in short - I won't look at me doing something I think I should not do ... even if I do it. I need to get comfortable looking at all of me if I ever want to get along with all of me - instead of getting blindsided by the chocolate-candy-eating me. It's time for the Left Brain School Marm to have a little chat with the Right Brain Wild Child and see if they can start working together again. 

And so, even if my actual tracking activity earned such a low grade - the fact that I have explored what was going on before November got into full swing earns me a low, but passing grade this month - a D+ 

Exercising

All the traveling I did this month interrupted my beloved weekly schedule and I missed weight training several times - but I got in lots of other activity - frequently deliberately substituted for the tried and true. I will give myself a B+ 

Drink 6-8 cups of water every day

Eh. sometimes yes, too often not - but enough to earn a C 

The Charles Schwab list at work

I couldn't have made it through the month without that. There were a few days when I forgot and it just made things SO bad that I could not really function. It earns a B+ 

Read my 5-year play every morning week

Which I did till last week and this - and I will blame that on travel and hurricanes and give myself a C

Compliment someone on my staff every day

Every Day? hmmm. Perhaps 3 times a week. I wonder if every day is impractical and yet I fear if I don't hold on to the daily intention I will drift into forgetfulness. I will have to ponder this question. But ... I grade myself with another C 

Draw 20 minutes a day. I will never get any better if I don't practice every day

Surprisingly - I've kept up with this fairly well. I am not drawing every day because I am painting some too - and working on a 'project'  that has kept my art supplies spread out on the dining room table all month. This has earned me an A-

Select a big life goal - a big personal thing - and take one step towards it ... every day.

Okay - this is a tricky bit. If I want to be fit and slim and healthy and to develop my artistic skills ... all specific Previously Mentioned Habits and I do something towards even one of those Previously Mentioned Habits, then ... have I also fulfilled This Habit? Uh. The operative word is Select because if it's a habit did I select it? Well. My intention when I wrote these habits was to be conscious of my efforts and deliberate, not just lucky. In light of the Other Challenges of this month I will give myself a C

Ditto at work - Same issue - same grade C

Pray. 

You can be sure I have done one heck-uva-lotta praying this month - praying for courage, praying for wisdom, praying for the storm to miss us - but not the daily thing I should have done and again - not the deliberate and scheduled way I intended when I first plotted out this scheme of habit forming behavior. But though I did not pray at scheduled times, my prayers were not just the plea for pleasure selfish ones.  There was enough of the true prayer this month to justify a grade of B+