Exercising My Fingers

Now that thirty days have passed, with writing every day, I managed to get thirty-two posts online in the time frame. Unfortunately I goofed and did not set the publication time correctly for one post and posted two on one day and missed a post on the next day – something I discovered after the fact. My attempt at NaBloPoMo was both a success and a disappointment. Because I am also writing an Advent blog, which has led to posts on two blogs since Sunday, I do not know if I have it in me to compose two blogs a day through most of December.

Fortunately the Advent blog comes with built in inspiration of the scripture passages for each day of the period.

This blog requires me to find inspiration somewhere in life either from what I am reading, watching or doing. Fortunately I do not sit still very often so come across something worth saying more often than not. I just do not force myself into it on a regular basis like I do this month.

Fortunately this month a confluence of events presented the opportunity to again focus on reading and writing. The time change coupled with canceling cable television gave me so much more time to engage in creative endeavors. I rarely “watched” television before cancelling the cable – or so I thought. I have found that even though I usually only had it on for noise, I paid much more attention than I thought I did because I have had so much more free time now that the television is not on.

My greatest distraction now comes when I leave an instant messenger on and start getting chat messages from various friends. That too, is something I am learning to turn off while I turn on my brain and exercising my fingers.

Free Black Friday!

Black Friday for me involved staying home avoiding the masses, and other than looking for a food disposal to replace mine which stopped working the day before Thanksgiving, I did not even begin to shop for the holidays. I have not yet decided what to get anyone for Christmas this year, so I guess I better start shopping soon. I did however purchase a few days of pure pleasure for me on Amazon. iTunes has free songs each week. Amazon music has free songs AND entire free albums.

Most of the free albums on Amazon are music samplers from various music publishers, but so far, everything I have downloaded from classical to world music has been music that I would listen to at length. While the process can be a bit tedious and the system does not warn you when you have already purchased (grabbed, snatched, taken) an album which sometimes leads to a double download of a particular selection, it can easily be cleaned up after they make their way into iTunes with the display duplicates function. Since my Black Friday raid on the free music on Amazon, I have been listening to a variety of artists I likely would never have experienced.

Which is exactly what the free music push-outs on iTunes and Amazon would like.

I like some new artists I probably would not have sought out on my own, but now that I am familiar with them, I am much more likely to search out something they have for sale on one of the music sites.

I have not played with the Amazon cloud player enough yet, but have played with the iTunes program enough to know that I like having a wide variety of music available at nearly any time. It comes in handy at work when I cannot count on otherwise streaming music to fill my office and have to rely on the radio.

Fortunately there is a classical music station I pick up most of the time.

Not long ago, I relied on the radio for the majority of my musical exposure, but in the last six years, I have hardly listened to commercial music. With friends posting music on social media, the period of time I had satellite radio, and now with the streaming music sources, I hardly turn on the radio more than to get my daily news fix in the morning and evenings.

I am happy with the much broader variety of music I get now than ever before – and the much broader selection than I can get from the broadcast stations in Austin. Honestly, I cannot slam them too much because I have not listened to them in such a long time, I could not tell you the format of any but the local NPR station and local classical music station. I stopped listening to them for a reason, and the few times I have turned  one or the other on, I heard nothing new that made me want to come back on a regular basis.

For the time being, I am going to continue taking advantage of the music to which I have access via social media, streaming music stations, and the other random sources.

And I’m going to continue growing my music library whenever I can.

iTraining

I do not know where my puppies, Bart and Lisa, got the idea that digging in daddy’s pot plants was a good idea or a fun thing to do, but lately it is one of their favorite things to do. They have also taken to biting limbs off the shrubs in the back yard.

I give them plenty of toys and give them new ones when I suspect they are being bored of the ones they have.

Still, they manage to be destructive.

Bringing the plants most threatened by the promised freeze we were to get with the latest cold front reminded me to be prepared for puppy damage. I have spent two years nurturing pineapple plants grown from the top of two pineapples I purchased on a whim (and during a particularly good sale) at the local grocery store. They managed to knock one off the plant stand in the yard twice and I worried about what they would do to it in my kitchen.

After playing with a couple placements, I think I found a spot where the plants will get enough light and not be in the path of the puppies running area. Much of what they do in the house is not malicious; it is brute muscle carelessness as they run around playing. And some of it is just them being puppies.

Still, I have to clean up after them.

Realizing that they are just puppies, I am ok with doing it. Unfortunately I can never catch them in the act because they are always nearly angels when I am home. They manage to do the damage when I am at work. I need to get a nanny-cam so I can see which of them does what during the day when I am at work.

Of course that would work best if I had a remote control and could watch the camera from my desk at work and activate a recorded “Stop!” command when I saw them doing something they were not supposed to be doing. I have an iPhone and my home theater system is connected to iTunes. Surely there is an app for that.

And Now I Bleed

Shaving remains the personal grooming activity I like the least. On weekends and holidays from work, I avoid shaving as much as possible and only shave for special reasons. I see why a month like November can become a month like Movember, a month for men to grow out their facial hair, would catch on. I could participate in something like that.

Except four days of facial hair annoys me about as much as shaving, so I give in.

And now I bleed.

One of the side effects of not shaving for several days is that I always nick myself trying to get every bit of the thick stubble. I keep a styptic stick and toilet paper handy, but I think I am a slow bleeder. It always appears after I have finished my shower and gotten dressed.

So, many of my shirts end up with blood stains around the collar because my Adam’s apple always gets the nick.

Honestly, I cannot grow a good beard. I have too many thin patches on my face. I could get a good moustache going and maybe even a goatee, but that takes even more work because it involves shaving AND trimming. Until someone comes up with a remedy for facial hair, I will continue to shave and I will continue to have my breaks from shaving.

And I will continue to bleed.

Blah

The company at Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful, but the food was, by my standards, a great disappointment. The challenge has been to figure out what I would have done differently.  Going into the meal, I was concerned that people would find the food too spicy for their liking; instead the food came out bland. After going through the consideration of making new foods for Thanksgiving, I decided to stick with the traditional foods I have cooked for years.

Because I have made these dishes many times, there was no excuse for them turning out the way they did.

I have gone over everything I could imagine that could cause the dishes to come out the way they did.

I purchased the ingredients just days before preparing the meal, so everything was fresh.

I did not have a cold or sinus problems affecting my sense of taste or smell.

Still, something had to be going on for every dish to come out so bland tasting that I was embarrassed to serve it. Of course, I did not know it was so bland until I actually took it out of the oven to serve it.

Everyone who ate the meal said it was wonderful and thanked me many time for having them over, but after tasting the food myself, I am convinced they were just being polite. Despite their polite assurances, my search continues to get to the origin of blah.

Thanksgiving Lunch 2011

Of course, I cooked too much, but I do not really know how to do otherwise. The foods today were:

Turkey - soaked in a citrus brine and cooked breast down to stay extra moist. Cooked with lemons, limes, apples and an onion in the cavity for extra flavor.

Cornbread dressing.

Corn pudding - with bacon grease for that extra goodness/badness.

Steamed green beans with bacon and a honey-mustard dressing.

Cranberry salad with fresh cranberries, diced apple, and fine pecan pieces.

And the best part of the meal:

Sweet potato souffle with slivered almonds and brown sugar crust on top. I personally think it is as good as any of the desserts.

And speaking of desserts - pumpkin cheesecake, pecan pie, double layer pumpkin pie, mincemeat pie.

Altogether a pretty nice meal.

Tryptophan Dreams

If I judge the goodness of a meal by the silence around the table, I think today was fairly successful. After my friends and I filled our plates, we sat in silence as we made our way through the different dishes. After having a few pieces of pie, we settled into a post-meal stupor watching football and different YouTube videos.

This is such a nice way to spend the holiday. Ample food to share with friends and then just hanging out is the way to spend the holiday. Cooking and sharing the table is one of my favorite activities - and is made even better when I get to share with friends I do not get to see very often. In spite of the stress that often comes with the holidays, the chance to spend quality time with with friends and family.

I like it for the chance to spend quality time in the kitchen whipping up some of my favorite foods that are not always the best for me. Even thought I do not eat nearly enough turkey for the tryptophan to truly be an issue, I enjoy it for the opportunity to blame it for an afternoon nap while the games play on in the background.

So will belly full and dishes washed, I nap and am thankful.

Another Week of Running - Week 4

One upside of food poisoning is the weight loss. I lost ten pounds in a week, but it comes with the down side of almost no energy. On my first run of the week, after not running for a week and a half, I only made it 3/4 of a mile before I was completely exhausted. I walked another quarter mile and tried to run the mile back. This time I only made it 1/2 mile before I could not run any farther.

Probably the worst part of the second stretch of running is that it re-aggravated the pulled muscle in my back. Apparently it was not as healed as I thought it was. I'm going to have to take some time doing other exercises to get more of my core strengthened so I can do as much running as I would like to.

Following the bad run, I decided to start doing some weight lifting and other actions to strengthen the core, but my back kept that from going as far as I wanted it to. I have just been focusing on stretching. Hopefully in a few days I will be back into condition to run again because I truly enjoy it for the health benefits and stress relief.

Cooking with My Besties

This week I purchase an extra bottle of dishwashing liquid so I could run the dishwasher as often as I needed while preparing the Thanksgiving dinner for friends and family. Even running the dishwasher every time I get it filled, I never seem to have the dishes I want to use, though anyone who has ever been in my kitchen knows I have more than enough dishes to stock a small restaurant.

It is just that there is always the one pan I REALLY want to use that happens to be in mid-cycle in the dishwasher.

Some dishes just seem to be best for cooking, stirring, mixing, storing, etc. I have my favorite knives, spoons, mixing bowls as well as my favorite appliances. All of them work together to make cooking as much fun as it is for me. And with the holiday preparations in full swing, I am making the most of them in everything I do.

The Silence of the Televisions

I have now gone several weeks without cable television. Technically, I still have "basic" cable, but it does not work, so I have lived off the channels I can pick up with my antenna. Despite no longer having the cooking shows or my weekly fix of Ghost Adventures (the best comedy that is not meant to be a comedy on television), there has yet to be a night I came home and missed turning on the television.

Many more opportunities appear when the television does not take the center stage of the night. As much as I thought I would be reading, I have actually spent more time studying various things for work or just personal edification. I have also taken the time to write some every night - whether it is with inspiration from the people sitting around a coffee shop or the random ideas that have popped into my head.

The more I have been writing, the easier it has been to write, which is far different than saying the writing has gotten any better, it is just easier to get words down on the page. Using my iPad as the primary composition device has also allowed me to work with far fewer distractions than working on the computer. I have not quite mastered the habit of turning off the chat program or Twitter when working with a laptop. At least on my iPad, the notice that something has happened out in cyberspace that I may be interested in comes with a simple bar turning at the top of the page instead of some obnoxious sound (unless I plug speakers into my docking station).

What I most need to focus on is the editing. Once NaBloPoMo ends and the pressure to post every day subsides, I will not feel like I have to go on and publish something just to get it out there. Until then, I am keeping my eyes open for a daily muse to get me through one furious time of typing and a basic visual spell check. I long ago learned that just because no words on the screen have a dotted red line below them I should believe that every word is spelled correctly. Too many actual words lurk behind a simple typo, and given that my left hand types faster than my right hand (and I am right-handed for the most part), many typos come from the over achievement of the left digits.

The other project I have taken on in writing receives a bit more thorough editing because it is topical and people will be able to take something meaningful away from it if they read it regularly. I will post more about it for the two people who read this blog on a regular basis when it is fully functioning (yes, another blog - and likely a third is coming along soon).

We shall soon see just what no longer turning the television on will lead me to do.