laurabee

Since 2008, I have been keeping a daily diary. It has all the boring inane stuff like what I watched on TV, what computer game I played, and what the weather was like. I think it’s fun to see what I was doing a few years ago and how things have changed or stayed the same.

When I started the diary, I got the idea from someone who arranged their diary by day, rather than by year. This makes it easy to see what I was doing a few years ago on this day. But, it is difficult to get a sense of what I did this year as I sometimes want to see.

Also, I write this information in a nice Moleskine notebook, but there weren’t enough pages for one day per page. This means that after 3 years, I’m starting to run out of space on some of my wordier days.

Since I am almost always near a computer these days, the natural solution to my space problem is to write this information down on the computer. But, there are a few drawbacks to this: missing the tactile feel of my nice fountain pen and my inner-control freak’s search for the perfect organization system for these notes is consternating.

I could use something like Evernote, which tags things nicely, is searchable, and accessible from everywhere. But, there is no easy way to separate the daily notes from everything else I store there, and it’s difficult to view the same day on previous years (possible, but not automatic).

I could use a file folder full of plain text files. I could use a relational database, or XML files, or start another blog just for daily entries. I could buy a bigger notebook and stick with pen and paper.

Or, I could use this as an excuse to learn PHP or Ruby to write my own web application.

For now, I’m still considering my options. I have several more months before I run out of space in my diary. If anyone has any brilliant insights or recommendations, let me know.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

I tried a recipe for lentil salad yesterday. I was looking for a recipe that could be eaten cold, and had something more savory in mind, but this one caught my fancy, so I tried it instead.

As with most recipes, there are things I would do differently next time. I way overcooked the lentils, so they just disintegrated into mush rather than being distinct. I think it would have greatly improved the texture to cook them for less time than I did. I cooked for 18 minutes, but I think they were ready after 10 minutes.

Also, I forgot how difficult it is to dismember oranges. Next time I will use canned mandarin oranges instead.

Finally, I realized that I just like brown rice a whole lot better than white rice. So next time, I will use brown. That may overwhelm the flavors from the shallot, orange, cherries, and parsley. Although it sounds like a potent mix, this recipe has a surprisingly mild flavor.

Rice and Lentil Salad with Orange and Dried Cherries

Submitted by: laura

Details

• Prep Time: 35 min
• Ready In: 35 min
Servings: 6

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 cup long-grain rice
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup French green lentils
• 1/4 cup finely chopped shallot
• 2 Tbsp red-wine vinegar
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1 Orange
• 1/3 cup dried cherries, chopped, or currants
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Directions

1. Boil water, rice, and salt in a 1 1/2-quart heavy saucepan, uncovered and undisturbed, until steam holes appear and surface looks dry, about 8 minutes. Reduce heat to very low and cook, covered and undisturbed, 15 minutes more.
2. While rice cooks, simmer lentils in water to cover by 2 inches for 18 to 20 minutes, or until just tender, then drain.
3. Stir together shallots, vinegar, and lemon juice and let stand. Finely grate zest from orange and cut away remaining peel and pith. Cut sections free from membranes and cut sections into 1/2-inch pieces. Toss warm rice with lentils, shallot mixture, orange, zest, cherries, oil, and parsley and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

I never thought of myself as an emotional eater. I don’t really like ice cream all that much, so the stereotype of a distraught woman eating a pint of ice cream just doesn’t fit. But I do enjoy eating. I really enjoy good food and I can afford good food on a regular basis, so I go out to eat a lot.

A few days ago, while looking at a restaurant menu, I thought, “I’ve had a tough day and that steak would make me feel better”. I was a little startled by that thought, but I got the steak anyway. It was tasty and I did feel better.

Part of me wonders if eating makes me feel better because I’m getting my way. When things aren’t working out, I can go to a restaurant and get exactly what I want, so at least something is going my way. This line of thinking is kind of silly for me because I get my way most of the time.

I joked with some friends once that I was “living the dream” because I had a nice computer on which to play video games. But then I realized that I really am living the dream. I have pretty much everything I ever wanted and more. That is a wonderful and humbling realization. I am so lucky to have the life I do.

Flush with the realization that my life is pretty awesome, it seems ridiculous that I would ever eat to make myself feel better. But like anything, living a good life desensitizes me to real hardship or sadness. That doesn’t make my sadness any less real, but some perspective often helps lighten the load and makes my troubles easier to bear.

Now that I’ve realized I eat emotionally I can do something about it. Nothing like a little character development to make a dream even better.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

You might think I’m an Apple fangirl. I have used an Apple computer as my primary machine for about 10 years. I bought my first iBook in 2001. A few years later I upgraded to a Mac G5 which lasted me for several years. Last year, I bought a Mac Mini to replace my PowerPC G5. I also have an iPhone and an iPad. I have been very happy with the hardware, the software, and apps for a very long time.

So, it may be surprising that I recently finished building myself a new PC.

About 6 months ago, I realized that the graphics on the Mini were just not up to the task of playing World of Warcraft very well. WoW does not exactly stretch the limits of modern video cards, either. I was getting 5 frames per second in some zones that were really crowded. My husband was sick of me complaining about it and suggested that I should get a better gaming machine.

I looked at places online that will build sweet gaming machines for you, letting you customize the components. That was certainly the easy option, and there’s something to be said for having a really cool computer arrive on your doorstep.

But, it had been long enough since I built a PC from components that I wanted to do it myself. We jokingly said I needed to “keep my street cred” in the PC hardware world. The only big misstep was buying an after-market CPU fan: the fan would fit, but the memory wouldn’t fit on the motherboard at the same time. Doh! In the end, I used the stock CPU fan and it’s working fine.

The funniest thing in all my components was the velvet bag around the power supply. I kid you not. I totally have a new dice bag now.

The install of Windows 7 was painless. The last time I installed a Windows OS was XP and it was fairly painful. (I won’t even mention Windows 95/98 as I’m trying to forget those days.) Using Windows 7 is a very pleasant experience. It is clean looking, reasonable, and does what I expect. My other Windows 7 experience was that Windows 7 was slow, but functional. That was on a Netbook that was just barely capable of running it. On new, awesome hardware, I understand what people see in Windows.

While I’m not ready to ditch my Mac Mini or my other Apple devices entirely, I have been having a lot of fun re-discovering the PC and Windows world. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

When I was in grade school, time was measured by school years. When I was in college, I measured time in semesters. When I started working full time, I felt lost without milestones to measure by. I couldn’t remember if something happened one year ago or two.

Eventually, I adjusted to using seasons, calendar years, and life events to measure large spans of time. It’s not perfect because major life events just aren’t that common and because seasons all tend to look the same after a while, varied by how the garden did that year or how much snow we got.

When I think of time, I think of a long spiraling scroll with previous years to the left and the future off to the right. The further to the left something is on the scroll, the longer ago it happened. As a visualization, this works fine but it lacks the mental highlights of what happened when. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing in 2006, for example, without some other milestone to anchor the year to.

At some point, I got the idea to try to make this spiral of time more concrete. I have drawn up plans for wheels, ribbons, paper chains, picture collages, computer programs, seasonal clocks, and large-scale calendars all in an attempt to put perspective on time. None of these have felt quite right, so I’m still looking.

It seems that, as I get older, projects are longer term. In school I could focus on the semester or the school year. Now my plans stretch into the future on the order of years, not months. As my projects get longer, a sense of perspective on time seems even more important.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

One part of running for the fun of it, is there are no goals to achieve. With no goals, there is no motivation for me to improve. When it comes to running, I’m okay with that. My goals are to be healthy and reasonably fit, which, I admit, is kind of vague.

A while back, I decided that was too vague and I needed a concrete definition of what it means to be “fit”. I found the federal government’s definition for adults. And, one of these days, I may get around to taking the measurements they suggest.

Internally, I keep coming back to these:

1. Able to walk up two flights of stairs without getting winded
2. Able to run 1 mile without stopping
3. Able to do 10 real (not girl-style) push-ups
4. Able to do 1 unassisted pull-up

These may seem arbitrary, but over the years, these are the ones I keep coming back to when I think, “when I’m fit, I can…”. How am I doing so far? I can only do 5 real push-ups and I can only do assisted pull-ups, but I can check off the first two. For now, I keep trying, I keep lifting weights, and one day, I’ll be able to check off all of those items.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

I’ve been trying some different recipes lately and here are two that I’ve really enjoyed. They’re both good chilled, which is perfect for summer, and quick to make. The curried salad can be made ahead and I think it will last a week in the fridge, but it’s usually gone in a few days. Yum!

Watermelon, Cucumber, and Feta Salad I saw mention of this as a common breakfast in the mid-east, so I went looking for a recipe. This is a good combination of flavors, but isn’t something I’d spend a lot of time measuring. Just mix and go!

Curried Carrot and Apple Salad This is very similar to a tuna salad recipe I found in the book Nutrition Diva’s Secrets for a Healthy Diet. I adjusted that recipe for chicken, and it was spectacular, so I went looking for version to post here. I found this one instead and it’s equally delightful. They’re similar enough that I may just start adding chicken to this recipe and call it done. :)

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying an experiment. See, my feet hurt. Well, to be completely accurate, my right foot hurts. My amateur diagnosis is plantar fasciitis or a similar injury to that tendon. Since this is a common ailment for runners, my experiment was to stop running for a while and just use the elliptical machines which have never given me problems before.

The results of my experiment: my foot still hurts. Being a good scientist, stopping running was the only thing I changed. What I’m still doing is standing at my desk at work. After one of several articles I’ve seen recently on how bad long bouts of sitting are for you, I started standing at my desk at work. After the two week experiment my foot still hurts, but on days when I sit more, my foot feels better.

Why just one foot? Long story short: it’s weak. I’m already doing stretches and exercises to get my right hip and leg stronger, so I added in some foot exercises I found online. It’s too soon to tell if the exercises are helping, but I’m hopeful.

Knowing that it’s not just the running that hurts my foot makes me happy. I’m somewhat disappointed that I’m not cured, of course, but having found a root cause, I can work on getting stronger.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

After three years, I have finally put a proper door on the garden! The fence helps keep the deer out. When I put up the fence, I thought I would get around to a gate soon enough. My procrastination knows no bounds. Now the only thing remaining is to put a latch on so the door stays closed at night and when I’m not around.

A month or so ago, I decided that I wanted to grow some climbing flowers (morning glories), but I had nothing for them to climb. Since trying to do things “right” often leads me to inaction, I decided to do something half-ass instead. So, I tied together some sticks from the yard and made a little tee-pee for the flowers to climb up. The flowers are coming up now, so we’ll see how the sticks fair when they actually have to support some weight.

Here’s a picture of my veggie garden so far and the flowers in the front garden.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.

laurabee

Yesterday morning, I was thinking I’d like some exercise, but I wasn’t sure I could run for long. I put aside a thought that if I couldn’t run well, I shouldn’t run at all and headed out. I thought that even walking a few miles was better than nothing.

Once I got moving, I decided to run a bit, trying to apply some advice and still more advice on how to run with good form. The promise of good form is fewer injuries, which I think is a worthy goal. After trying for a while, I found what felt like a good pace, foot strike, and posture.

Posture is one of the areas I struggle with. My posture mostly sucks while standing, sitting, and walking, so it doesn’t surprise me that posture during running sucks. But, bad posture in running introduces injury and, for me, makes it harder to breathe. So on my return run I tried to focus on my posture. I had to keep on top of it, correcting myself every 10 steps or so, but the difference was notable.

All in all, it wasn’t a fast run or a particularly long run (only about 2.3 miles), but I enjoyed it. I thought about how I had hesitated to go out because I couldn’t do a “good” run. Then I thought that maybe some of the reading I’ve been doing is counter-productive. So much of what I see is “how to run faster!” or “your best race time!” or “training tips!”.

I don’t want to run faster, I just want to run. I don’t want to train, I just want to run without injury.

That’s when it dawned on me: running is something I want to do and if I happen to improve, so much the better. For me, it’s like gardening and playing video games: I don’t want to become better at it, I just enjoy doing it. Somehow, that takes a lot of the pressure off. Maybe it’s okay to have things in life that don’t need improvement.

Originally published at A Rabble of Butterflies. You can comment here or there.