Zen

I have said many times that I would rather swim a mile than run a mile.  I do not like running.  I have too many moving pieces to enjoy running, thanks.  I have heard that eventually you space out enough that you relax in a way, that while you work out somehow you're disconnected from your body in good ways.  Yeah, I cannot get much past the pain in my chest, feet, back, etc.  

However, I can do that in swimming.  My mind is wandering off in different directions as I make it down to the other end again.  I can pick a few things I want to focus on as far as working on my stroke, but I think more about which lap I'm on, arguing whether it was the twelfth or thirteenth, until I need to worry about whether it was the thirteenth or fourteenth.  I spend enough time arguing with myself that I'm the right kind of distracted and still making good time.  

What I think I like most is that I can carry that feeling with me for the next couple of hours outside of swimming my laps.  Part of it is knowing that I did something good for myself, certainly, but that right kind of detached calm, I find that it makes the exercise feel worth it for longer than I was expecting.  

There are other things that illicit that kind of calm for me.  I have my desktop at work set to pictures of the Aurora.  When I catch a glimpse of that, I take a deep breath involuntarily and feel a similar wave of peace.  

I can remember having a conversation with a friend of mine once about how different people can connect better to different environments.  My father and I, there's something about water that touches us.  Something about sailing with the wind and the water together soothes my soul and mind in a very unique way that I know I need once in a while.  My friend pulls energy from desert environments and has since moved to New Mexico.  I know a  few people that find it in the trees and some others that love mountains.  Some of that is how you connect to nature, and it is different for different people.  Either way, I would argue that the sense of calm and peace is the same.  

The real trick is learning how to bring it with you.  I can cheat a bit by going swimming, mixing that zen from water and the exercise high together, which is more successful some days than others.  But how can I take it with me when I'm not in a comparable space?  

I haven't figured out how to do it all of the time, yet, but I think collectively we could use a little more of it, particularly as the full flurry of the season begins to settle upon us.  I find those moments of calm wherever I can--I've got a feeling that I'm going to need it, for reasons I'm not even completely sure of yet.  I would encourage anyone to take a moment of self reflection to learn how to reach that space, if you're not sure how to find it, and otherwise exercise taking that kind of zen with you.  Find your peace and hold onto it.

Secret World

So, as I may have mentioned before, living with my husband is a barrel of laughs.  

When we both get tired, we get punchy and ridiculous.  

As an example, Andy went to tickle me the other night.  I turned around to tickle him back immediately and he yelps and cries, "Ah!  Don't tickle me back!  This was supposed to be one-way!  I didn't think things through!"  I have to admit it was an effective strategy because I was laughing too hard to continue.  

Or another night, I don't remember how this was relevant to the conversation, but I brought up gazpacho.  Andy asked, "What, like the Italian mafia?  No, wait, the mafia is Italian."  I replied, "Honey, I think you're thinking of 'gestapo,' and that's German.  And that is still not gazpacho."

This is not to say that I have never had a ridiculous moment or several, but I have conveniently forgotten them just now...

These are just a couple examples of the things that make us laugh in our house.  There are many, many things that take far too much time to explain, are prime examples of "you just had to be there," or are not appropriate for *ahem* polite conversation.  On occasion, I do wish that I could remember or otherwise share because spending time with Andy brings me joy.  On the other hand, we have our own secret world and there is something beautiful about that.  How we act outside of the house?  We really do act about the same, only at a higher concentration with the appropriate amount of lazy because, hey, we're at home.  There are some things that we don't talk about in earnest until we're at home--like not criticizing the service until we've left the restaurant because the kinds of problems weren't worth talking about at the table--but both of us are authentic to ourselves outside of these walls.

So many secrets...

I think everyone's secret world is different.  Mostly because all people are different, yes, but there are also different kinds of strategies for decompressing, maintaining a house, managing bills, etc.  And each house works differently and hopefully works in a healthy way.  Otherwise, we only see what people choose to show us.  Some people match their mask closely, some do not.  I argue that either way, the mask is there.  If masks don't work for you, I like filters as an analogy even better.  Home, I am darn-near unfiltered.  In certain company, I have a certain filter--"me" is still coming through, but select parts of "me" that are appropriate for the situation.  How much we allow people to see, sometimes it depends on how hard you push or how you ask.  Truly, some people may choose to never open up to you and that is okay--there are some well-meaning people that you may still not want to spill all your life secrets out to.  

Andy and I find that complete strangers will open up to us on occasion.  Sometimes, we'll be able to stop everything and listen to the person in question and remember that we're all human and need to have that moment.  Other times, we're trying to find the most polite way to extradite ourselves.  I'm not sure specifically what it is about us that makes us trustworthy to strangers and friends.  Maybe it's just as simple as being good listeners?  Bearing that in mind, do some people have more access to secret worlds than others?

Either way, over this long weekend I've had a lot of time to think about how much I enjoy just spending time with my husband.  I'm really thankful for our little world, full of spontaneous songs, ridiculous stories, moments of rest, and whatever trouble we get into next.  

...and you thought you were done with the Thanksgiving sugar coma, didn't you?

Winter Carols

Inevitably, there are persons who turn on their Grinch face to anything Christmas until after Thanksgiving.  There's an odd self-righteous attitude when said person (maybe it's you) tries to enforce that Christmas decorations should not go up until Thanksgiving.  Firstly, I have worked retail enough to know that this is a losing battle.  Secondly, I will sing Christmas carols at ANY time of the year and no scolding has stopped it yet nor does it seem likely to.  

I don't just celebrate being alive on my birthday, so I don't see the sense in not watching a Christmas movie or feeling the Christmas spirit just because it's not cold enough outside.  

However, if you have a particularly Scrooge-y soul that does not want to hear Christmas Carols except for the month of December, I present you with a wonderful, wonderful loophole.  

There are a number of Winter Carols, songs that get lumped in as Christmas Carols, but don't actually have anything to do with Christmas.  

1. "Jingle Bells"  This is actually a Thanksgiving song.  See if you can find a line that implies differently.
2. "Let it Snow"  This song is about the weather and staying inside where it's warm.  It's more a love song than it is a Christmas song.
3. "I've got my Love to Keep me Warm."  Same vein as the former.
4. "Baby, it's Cold Outside" Ditto, even though it can get a little creepy.
5. "Sleigh Ride" Just about the exhilaration of a sleigh ride
6. "Winter Wonderland"
7. "Frosty the Snowman"
8. "Over the River and through the Woods"
9. "Marshmallow World"
10. And Andy tells me that there's a song called "Suzy Snowflake" that I actually haven't heard of

If you want to get technical, "The 12 Days of Christmas" continues after Christmas itself if someone is trying to shut down carols after New Years.  And if we want to get super technical, you could be singing "We Three Kings" for a long time, since the wise men were actually not at the nativity.  

There we have it, some carols that you can get away with all through February at least.  

One of my Favorite Things

So this weekend saw one of my favorite things happen once again:  The Festival of Trees.  This event has sparked off the Christmas season in my mind for a few years now, that first genuine hint of real holiday wonder and excitement all in one space.  This year, I made it there twice, once with my parents and a car-full from their new church and another time with a few of Andy and my friends that had not experienced it before.  I have been telling random strangers about it the whole week leading up to it.

For those that haven't heard of Festival of Trees, it has been going on for twenty-two years now, brought to the Baby Fold by Ralph Dude, God rest him.  People and groups will take a tree, full-sized or short, and decorate it.  Some are really classy, some take a theme and go off running with it--the year that Frozen came out, there were at least three Frozen-themed trees--and some are in honor some a person or a cause.  In addition to the trees, there are now table settings, wreaths, art pieces, gingerbread houses, signed memorabilia, and more.  Sometimes, the trees come with tickets to an event or a spa day or one year a plumbing company decorated a tree and threw in a free toilet and sink.  All of these donations are then bid on, all of the money going to the Baby Fold.  What's really cool, too, was that these things have been donated, even by the celebrity factor, at the simple asking.  We saw large donations volunteered just at the asking on opening night.  It's amazing what can happen when you just ask.

And it is truly a worthy cause.  The Baby Fold is an organization that helps with adoption services, foster care, family counseling, care for wards of the state and students with special needs, and more.  I have known many people touched by the work of this organization.  

So there you have it--great cause and super, happy, holiday factor.  I will share a few of my favorites with you from this year.  

A well done gingerbread house, done by an 11-year old, if I remember correctly

Elegance

Stylish, classy theme

And a well-executed whimsical theme

And some weird themes that can work

Cthulhu Santa demands your cheer.

The Cinnamon Roll Test

My boss has brought in these wonderful, fluffy cinnamon rolls to work before and I had asked him for his recipe, hoping to bring those to Grandma's house for dinner.  I made up Dad's bread dough recipe the night before and let it rise.  This is the part I've done many times before.  

Then the directions got a little fuzzy.  "Combine milk and brown sugar until it's spreadable."  I made a brown sugar and milk slurry.  Evidently, there was too much milk.  It looked fine on the bread dough rolled out.  I make a pumpkin roll usually a few times every holiday, which involves rolling a cake in a flour sack, letting it cool, unrolling it, smothering it in frosting, re-rolling it up, and slicing it to serve in these beautiful little pinwheels of deliciousness.  Ergo, rolling the cinnamon rolls up and then slicing them into individual rounds made sense.  

The problem came in the rolling.  

As I started to roll it up, the slurry started to move in slow, sloppy wave with it.  And it didn't stay in a round kind of roll, instead falling like a deflated tire, more of the slurry oozing out the ends.  

This was the "pretty" pan.

This resulted in some urgency in the slicing, where it was a race to a) cut it before everything oozed out and b) get it over to the pan without more of it dripping on to the floor, since the only place there was room for the pans was on the counter behind me.  Some of the rolls dissolved into a sad puddle.  I picked those up, squeezed some of the brown sugar and milk slurry off, and made some cinnamon crescent rolls instead (featured in the bottom of that picture). 

However, this left the pool of slurry on my counter.  It was viscous enough that I could take sweep it up and cup a few handfuls over into the sink.  Three times, no less, taking handfuls of brown sludge over to the sink, remarkably not dripping much at all.  

Thankfully, everything was water soluble, but it really did take about as much time to clean that up as it did to bake them, once they had some time to rise again.  

So, about those slurry puddles that formed around my rolls?  Yeah, that made a kind of caramel at the bottom of my pans.  I found that the pan I started prying up from first was much easier than the second one I did, since it had a little more time to cool.  It did not make the chewy, stretchy kind of caramel--it was rock hard once it cooled.  There were many effort noises as I tried to pull them up in one piece AND not fling them up to the ceiling by accident because goodness knows that they would have stuck there, with the way my luck was going.  

Note sticky outlines.

And yet, for all of that chaos, they tasted well enough.  Dad's dough has been a favorite for a long time, and my boss's recommendations for how to make them cinnamon rolls was pretty good, if not any kind of precise (with all kinds of love, Chuck!).  I have a few ideas on how I'm going to make this better next time, including not flattening out the bread dough quite that far and using a LOT less milk in making my brown sugar spread.  It was still edible and enjoyed.  And we've officially gotten to the "well, that was pretty hilarious" space, recounting the adventure and the sheer mess of what I made in the kitchen.  I have left the scraping of those pans for another day, thanks.  

Hipster Mentality

It happens every now and again that I have a well-meaning person suggest something to me enough that I decide I never want to try it.  As an example, the Final Fantasy series.  The more that something has been touted to me, the less inclined that I am to want to try it.  A trusted source suggests something?  Sure, I'll put it on my list.  The whole world is singing its praises?  I don't want much anything to do with it, thanks.  Football and iPhones are on that list of things I don't really care for and mostly because they're so popular.  (As an aside, I like being with people and going to events, so I will go to a game, but I don't choose to watch a football game on my own.)  At first, I just called this "being stubborn," but my brother has informed me that I have a hipster mentality.  

It's the glasses, isn't it?

The thing is, I cannot decide if this a good thing or a bad thing.  If I finally do try something that has had its praised up and down, there are two ways it can go:  
1.  It's not all that great.  My expectations are set so high at the point because everyone has been talking about it or one person has not stopped talking about it, that it is actually impossible for said thing to meet those expectations.  As an example, Avatar.  It's a pretty movie, I'll give it that, but it's Dances with Smurfs--it's the colonization narrative told in the same way and didn't do anything new to it except get distracted by its own world.  And the ending?  Total cop-out.  Want a well-done story that tackles similar themes?  Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is really well done.  I'm harsh on this movie for a few reasons, but one of them was because the world was so caught up in it that I couldn't escape hearing about it.
2.  It's actually pretty awesome.  The best example I can think of this one is Firefly.  I had heard about this series from a few people and was not quite to the point of resisting when I finally saw it.  It lived up to the expectations.   

So on the one hand, I can be protected by not suckering in to something just because it's popular, but on the other, I can miss out on something that I might really enjoy.  That is not to say that I don't like things that happen to by popular--in fact, I don't have a really good theory as to what makes some things go one way or the other, but I have narrowed down some commonalities.  

• If I have already happened upon said thing before it becomes a big thing, then it's okay to still like it.
• I have certain sources that I trust because we have similar tastes and their recommendations have proven solid in the past.  The opinion of these sources can cut through some of the hype.  
• Pure exposure--the more I hear about it, the more I push against it.
• The verbage in how something is pushed plays into it, too.  Anything that is touted as the "best thing ever" or something that will "change my life" either directly stated or wholly implied is an instant turn off.  

It has occurred to me more than once that this is not specifically fair, because when you like something, you want to share it, yet some people are just better at persuading than others.  We're bombarded with advertising all of the time that it's tiring, too, to sort through all of the things we should be trying or buying that deciding what I want to spend my money and energy on is difficult enough.  

I have an open mind about many, many things, but I do not have time for everything.  The line has to be drawn somewhere.  I just hadn't put a name to some of my own decision making process.  But hipster is mainstream now anyway so I'm confused enough as it is.

Kings and Centipedes (Or "Another Another Song Stuck in my Head")

Yes, centipedes.  We see them every now and again in our house, and it another reason that I'm hoping for a cold winter, to make sure that they are at least mostly wiped out again.  They pop up every now and again, some small black moving thing just in the corner of your eye, more startling than terrifying.  There was a particular incident last week where I had taken my glasses off and was about to turn the water on for the shower when I saw a fuzzy black blob moving in the tub:  suddenly, I was very awake, and when I put on my eyes again, it was officially the biggest centipede I had seen yet.  Andy's beard shampoo (yes, it is a special shampoo for his beard) was the closest blunt object I could find.  

Thank you for your sacrifice.

I had a proper icky-dance after that one, all the same.  So, suffice to say, I don't have a high opinion of centipedes.  So the title of this song caught me off guard in any case.  

But click here and check out the song for yourself:  "Kings and Centipedes" by Stepdad.

I've put another of their songs up here before, "Must Land Running," for those that might recall, and this is definitely more of that Stepdad flair.  "Kings and Centipedes" starts off without much real warning--it is bright and rolling and a few flavors of upbeat that can catch you off-guard if you're not expecting it.  It definitely falls into that category of "songs that I have a hard time NOT dancing to."  

As with many songs, the chorus drew me in:

"Rise to your feet my god, you must maintain your dignity
Rise to your feet my god, what have you got to prove to me?
Rise to your feel my god, you must maintain your dignity
There's lots of middle ground between the kings and centipedes."

Particularly that last line.  That was the real hook for me.  This one was of those songs that I listened to over and over and couldn't immediately figure out why it touched me.  "There's lots of middle ground between the kings and centipedes," has always meant to me that there is room between the very best and the very worst.  It's easy to polarize opinions of yourself, where we get into a rut of I'm really good at X and really bad at Y.  For some reason, we don't give ourselves any middle ground whatsoever.  I tell you truly, you don't have to be the very best in order to be good at something.  If you are not the very best, that does not mean that you are the worst at it.  

Let me say that again:  if you are not the very best, that does not mean that you are, by default, terrible.  

There is so much middle ground there; can we allow ourselves that luxury?  Creative careers have a real problem with this especially, where if you have not won a Pulitzer or sold your art somehow we start thinking that our art isn't good enough.  If you're not a best-seller, why are you writing?  It's hard to keep creating when you don't feel recognized.  Do we have enough heart to keep pressing on even when no one tells us it's good?  Can we believe in ourselves enough to know a) it has goodness in it and b) it doesn't matter anyway?  

For the first part of the chorus, "Rise to your feet my god, you must maintain your dignity," I haven't decided whether it's an exclamation from an encouraging source--Get up, for the love of Pete!--or if someone is talking to their inner ego.  Either way, the voice is commanding that they keep pressing forward, even through the circumstances of whatever has brought that figure down.  

And then another call to take heart and stand up again with the reminder "What have you got to prove to me?"  What are you trying to prove?  Who are you trying to prove it to?  And why do we hold ourselves to impossible standards of all or nothing?

The verses reinforce the idea of pushing past these walls we've created, with the repeating order to "Bang the Timpanis!" either to create a rhythm to trudge forward again or in celebration and otherwise recognizing some of the weight on the world pulling the figure down.  I like to think of it as a conversation with a good friend or with yourself, finding the courage to start up again after a low moment.  There's another area of focus in the verse "Dying to know how do the rumors lock up your majesty and will the new ones set you free?" as well as "Did I really change the way you think about everything?" The opinions of others really can factor strongly into how much or how soon we want to jump back up and try again.  

But the key point that I want to really hammer home is that I hope you will give yourself the leeway to not be the best or the worst.  Talent is on a scale rather than a yes/no checkbox.  How good you are at your job is not based off of how good someone else is at their job.  Doing the best that you can do and being the best that you can be is more important that being THE best.  Love yourself enough to allow you to be who you are and to celebrate that.

And get yourself a Burger King crown to make yourself feel better if you need to.