hubby bday! (or how my diet goes down the drain)

Oh yes, during the regular days I follow orders. No wheat, no sugar, no grain (except brown rice), no milk, no cream, no alcohol.

Then someone has a birthday and I ignore everything I’ve learned in the first year of medical school and BAM!

Chocolate stout cupcakes, filled with chocolate whiskey ganache, and topped with bailey’s buttercream frosting and a chocolate almond.

Hopefully enough people come to my husband’s party to keep me from eating more than one!

potluck practitioner cultivation.

"Know thy shit", as one of my professors told me a couple quarters ago. "Know thy shit, or it will come up with a patient."

Well, here's some of my shit. It came up last night, and I figured rather than ignoring things and just watching a lot of bad television, as I am so prone to do, maybe I should write it down. Look at it under the scrutiny of whoever you 30 people are that check on my every blog update. Hope for some accountability so that I can't ignore the shit and watch a lot of bad television in the future.

See, last night I had a potluck. I spent all day shining the house up, got out all of my great grandma's fancy (and not terribly easy to break) party trays with matching cups and my tiered food display trays. I baked and shaped and layered, and then got all the dishes done so that the kitchen still looked spotless. I swept and I mopped and vacuumed and did a billion loads of laundry.
15 minutes before people were slated to arrive, I did my hair and makeup.
And then I waited.
and waited.
waited.

Finally, when everyone was forty minutes late (including my husband, who slept through the potluck) I had a plate of food and a couple cups of sweet tea and flicked on some netflix.
Nobody came, not late, not at all. Many didn't even bother letting me know why not.
So I put all the glassware in the cupboard and put all of the extra food in the fridge, and went to bed, feeling totally rejected.
And that's my shit. I automatically assume that I'm the second choice for everyone I come in contact with.  That people only really spend time with me because their number one choice of activity fell through. And every time someone only talks to me when they need their cats fed, or only says hello when I say hello first, or only looks my way when their "better" friends aren't available, that's what I tell myself. Rejected again. Second best.

I'm sure this has something to do with my homeschooled social skills- as a kid, the neighbor kids  only hung out with me when there was no one else to hang out with- when their school friends were busy. My best homeschooled friend had her real best friend who lived half a mile away, and I wasn't invited to any of their parties. The guys I seriously dated all left me for "better" options, whether that was friends or in one case, a skinnier and four years younger girl. In college, I was always on the outside of something, looking in.

And that's kind of how it always is.
And I forget that most people feel like outsiders and second best most of the time. Most people don't have best friends, where the best friendship is returned.  Most people are thoughtless, and just looking out for what's best for them in the moment.
Patients will be the same way. I can't have a rejection-fest every time someone blows off an appointment. I can't have a pity party if someone changes providers.

That said, I think I'm going to lay off making the first move for a few weeks. I clearly need to get more comfortable being by myself. I need to let go of this weird attachment I have to everyone, and give myself some time to get over myself and all these declined invitations. I need to stop wanting so desperately to be option number 1. That's not where real life happens.
I'm not the first person on the list, and that should be okay. 
I need to learn to be okay with the way that life flows.

Everything happens for a reason, even no-show potlucks and seeing the pictures from parties I wasn't invited to.

To do:

feed cats
yoga class and meditation
feed neighbor cats and water neighbor plants
install swamp cooler in bedroom so that husband can sleep during hot july days
start laundry
declutter house
harvest lavender and lay out to dry
make grocery list
change out of grubby yoga clothes
take shower
feed self
keep laundry going and put it away
clean kitchen
vacuum and sweep
go grocery shopping
prepare potluck dish
get things set out for potluck
make sweet tea?
take nap?
have potluck
have fun
go to bed at reasonable hour.

looks accomplishable from here, after all- it's only 9:30 and I already have about 1/3 of the list done.
Go, me, go!

everyone still wants a gold star.

New this week!

-One Chore Chart, complete with written instructions for the possibility of getting gold stars.
I was tired of how low on my priority list my house was. (And let's be fair, school's always going to come first- unless I have a project due tomorrow and holy crap, when was the last time I scrubbed down the windows?)  Capitalizing on my unending desire for more gold stars and the innate competition drive that sits within my very bones, I sat down with excel for a couple hours and wrote down the bare bones basics of appropriate house cleaning schedules. Including only 40 items, every basic cleaning routine and how often it should be done is covering my entire freezer front. I get a gold star every time everything on the list is taken care of once during a week, another gold star for every time everything daily in a room gets done every day for a week, and ANOTHER gold star for everytime a weekly task gets done more than once a week.

I plan to keep this up for 6 weeks, a scientifically acceptable amount of time for a habit to form.  Hopefully it'll stick throughout the school year.
And I already have the stickers, thanks to a good friend in Washington!

-One meal planner +grocery list.
Apparently excel is getting on my good side. In an attempt to cut the grocery budget, I've planned out meals for the next week and a half. I'm rather pleased with myself. I think this is a great step in the right direction, and it'll make things so much easier on the lunch planning front.  This is how mom always did it, and I'm not sure why I stopped, other than in the early years of college, writing ramen interspersed with hamburger helper down for dinner every night is really depressing.
The current plan of food includes such culinary wonders as thai spring rolls with peanut sauce (but wrapped in cabbage, we couldn't afford the rice wrappers), taco salad with guacamole, pork fried rice, and tuna salad on rice crackers.

-And lastly- ads on the blog. You probably noticed. For a corporate sponsorship, I would de-ad my blog again (any takers?) but until then, I'm giving in to the propaganda to line my wallet in a nearly labor free way. Granted, it's not paying so well yet either. I'll give it a month. If no money has been made in a month, I'll take the ads back off.

The Practicalities of Scrooge Mcduck's Swimming Pool

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was very, very good at working with her hands and her mind. She wasn't very good at math, and once in college she overdrew her account and ended up with something like 500$ in fees. It's not that the math is too hard- it's just frustrating and time consuming, so she prefers to not do it. When she does do math, the numbers jump around and don't follow the rules, subtractions coming out greater than the initial number, things that all should end in zeros ending in 39.45s, and decimal places swapping locations like a bunch of young kids playing musical chairs.

For some years after her college overdraw, she was pretty careful to stay within a mental limit of allowable spending, dependent on the paycheck. It's not as hard to keep track of paper money as it is plastic, so paper money was her favorite method of paying for things.

Fast forward a couple years and this woman has married a man who can make math jump through hoops, line up single file, and quietly wait their turns to be computed. Relieved, she turns over all responsibility for everyday math to him. Her paychecks get signed over to him, and he sorts out when rent is payed, and how much electricity really is this month, and how much they should spend on groceries. While money is always tight, everything runs well and all are happy in the land. Plastic begins to creep back into the picture as the tips from working in restaurant culture fade like the horrible memories of working in the restaurant.

A few more years into the future, life is grand. The apartment is swell, the food is fabulous and organic, the treats are many, and the dinners out are fabulous. The woman gets an allowance, but sometimes asks if it's affordable for special treats. The man almost never says no, and the general impression is that if the woman and the man were much like Scrooge Mcduck in form and animation, they would be swimming in a pool of dollar coins, compared to many of their same age friends. The months go by, and the woman is in medical school. Eating out is more common, as study groups often require the purchase of a coffee or something to remain at a public place, since everybody is too busy studying to clean their homes. The woman runs in to a lot of health problems, even to the point of emergency surgery and check ups every single week. The cats that the pair own get worms and require medication. The best potato-fry cooking pan breaks into three pieces. The weeks are busier, and gas is more expensive. The apartment raises the rent by almost 100$, but the woman talks them into only raising the rent 75$, which is still a lot of money. Friends get married, and need gifts for ceremonies and bridal showers. All throughout, the impression is that the money is fine and scrooge mcduck is still swimming.

Then one day, the woman goes for a dive in the pool of luxury and hits her nose on the bottom of the mysteriously empty pool. Upon realizing that all is not right with the world, the man and the woman sit down and work out the budget as it currently stands, and find that the amount of money that they're spending is about 300$ more than they're earning a month. Their savings are almost gone. A ticket arrives in the mail. And suddenly, all of the illusions about how well they were doing shattered.
They puzzled and moaned and pounded out a new budget. They found a way to pay all the bills and still save 50$ a month, and still go on a date once a month, but the frills that had seemed so commonplace were chopped up and squeezed for pennies.

The moral of the story is-  you can't ignore a facet of life that is a joint effort.
Both spouses really need to know how much money is coming in, and how much money is going out. You can't be indulgent because your spouse likes nice things, and you can't not do math because you don't like doing it. You can't eat organic food simply because you want to.
And my real take home lessons-

and also:  Dreaming is great, but you have to be practical too.

Stretching Life

I’ve been working my way through Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by BKS Iyengar, which I bought yesterday when I was intending to buy merely Light on Yoga.

It’s been a fascinating evaluation of where I am in this practice and how much farther I have to go.  As the cover of the book says-

“Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is the Bible of Yoga… to practice yoga without the profound and panoramic inner catography of the yoga sutras is to be adrift in a difficult and potentially dangerous ocean.”
There is so much more to yoga than merely holding strange poses! The word yoga itself means “union or integration from the outermost layer to the innermost self- that is, from the skin to the muscles, bone, nerves, mind, intellect, will, consciousness, and self.” (Iyengar)  While most gyms combine the ancient art with pilates and focus on merely the physical activity itself, the poses are designed and refined through thousands of years to produce specific physiological effects, to effect the consciousness in specific ways, and to eventually produce such a deep state of meditation that one finds unity with the divine at all times through life.

My own practice is just barely beginning, after 5 years, to move beyond the physical and physiological stages to the consciousness and meditative stages. I’ve been blessed with a neighborhood free/by donation only studio, and the class that I attend is Classical yoga with a Shadow yoga trained teacher. She studied in India, and has met a Guru who helps her continue her own personal growth in yoga. She’s also my primary care physician, which is so convenient for my post surgery recovery. (There’s nothing so awesome as a hand tailored physical therapy class that often consists of only me.)

Some things I’ve learned in the last few months:

• Yoga is meant to be practiced 4 hours after food consumption and 1 hour after liquid consumption
• One should not practice yoga during the full moon, the new moon, or the first three days of the menses.
• Because yoga is an internal purification ritual, it is part of the ritual that one bathe before and after the practice of yoga to cleanse the external self.
• In the 8-fold path of yoga, only one of the paths is asana, or body postures.

So keep that in mind the next time the p90x yoga video is playing and Tony Horton is yelling at you. There’s more to yoga than movement, than unity of breath and movement…and if you approach yoga from a purely physical standpoint, not only do you have a good chance of injuring yourself, you’re potentially cheating yourself out of a clear mind, a good detox, a sense of peace, and if the old texts are true, the ability to attain supreme knowledge of all that exists and manifests.

12 bites.

There have been a lot of moments to write about. Somehow, it was never the right time.
Today seems pretty good, though.
Know why? I'm procrastinating something else. It's only fair that the truth behind the writing comes out. Last night, while I slept, a bug bit me 12 times.
12.
12 times.
So my goal today is to destroy all life but me, my husband, and the two cats. And maybe the refrigerated baker's yeast. This apartment will be clean of living things. I'm still freaked though, so I'm going to procrastinate the bug battle for just a little bit longer.
-----------------------------------------------------------

I'm a bit of a hypocrite. All of that preaching. for cohabitation of all things. The native american ideal, that we own nothing, no land, but share with all creatures. It hasn't stopped me from locking my doors and windows, but it does usually make me think twice before destroying a spider's web or smashing a flying nuisance. Before buying something off Amazon if I can get it at an independent store nearby. Before walking past someone hungry and on the streets if I have anything to help them with. My home is fairly eco-friendly. Many of our things are recycled, upcycled, or straight out from the dumpster. (a 5 foot tall cat tree?! we had to have that. Those are like, 400$ when you buy them.)
We use cloth towels, not paper towels. I try to only eat fair trade, when I can. We barely use the lights, and not only because one of us is a day sleeper. We don't use electricity to heat our house in the winter, recycling pallets from the garbage pile in our fireplace instead. I love buying local designer clothes (and who am I kidding, that's not because I'm eco-friendly.)
I suppose the line is always drawn for us. Survive. Survive. Thrive. Kill or be killed.
So today, the war begins in this house. You don't bite me 12 times without inspiring a little bit of the survival instinct. .
-------------------------------------------------
I went to a wedding this last weekend. It was lovely. Their pastor did not mispronounce their names, deliver a sermon against specific request, or forget the vows that we wanted to say. 
(someday the husband and I will have a do-over, and it'll be in a real garden that actually got watered with an officiant who cares about our requests, and it'll last about 10 minutes. not that I'm bitter.)
More importantly, this wedding showcased beautiful love.  A relationship as it should be- respectful on both sides, long lasting (they've already been together for 5 years), willing to work for the success of the partnership- not needy, not demanding. Truly just love.
In contrast, some of the other relationships I've witnessed in the last couple weeks leave me shaking in my boots for the fate of love in the world.
For the sake of anonymity, I won't name anything specific. Couple 1, though, their relationship smacked of the selfishness of one and the willingness to put up with anything just to have a place in the world for the other. Understanding comes on many levels, and simply living with someone rarely means that people understand each other. Look at how many times roommates have problems.
Couple 2, they're just a mess all over. Any time one part of a relationship is ashamed enough of their actions to lie about the other person, to lie about situations and actions, is a great sign of forthcoming unhappiness if it's not already evident.
I'm so glad I have my lovely husband. We're coming up on 5 years together and 3 years married, and he just gets more handsome and kind and funny every day. He's also no longer giving me food poisoning when he cooks, which I think is a great thing.
True love is a partnership, is a trying, is a working sort of thing. An understanding sort of thing. An all encompassing sort of thing. A shared dream.
------------------------------------------------

Germany is coming up soon! I can't wait for European bread and coffee and beer. and walking around and hearing a different language. Another grand adventure!