Quipping

Coming to you from...

...the keys of my new Air-y Apple gadget

...the throes of middle-aged menopausal "fat-fuzzy-frazzled" miasma

...super mugginess and daily flash flood warnings

...more sleep deprivation

...explaining, not complaining...as you can see, I am still here...somewhat upright and kind of smiling.

Thinking about this summer season as a time of tackling some niggling things off my life list (mundane and not-so-mundane...but mostly mundane):

• tap dancing

• finishing the lap blanket that has been unknit for nearly two years now

• my Superhero Lunchbox

• homeschool planning

• writing a household budget

• getting back to reading

• getting back to writing

Gawd.  Making the above list is enough to send me crawling back beneath the nearest rock.  It's all a bit overwhelming these days.  (We also have vacationing in MA and CA planned for August.)

Anyhoo, here are a few things to read and listen to:

• a piece about food and Boston

• a yummy sounding egg bake recipe

• a bittersweet rumination of life's twists

• a song I have long loved not knowing it was a COVER. loving up the original.

Peace and love.

Ma(lady)

In lieu of what's in/on my mind which is: blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...a pic I took today (the herb garden) and yesterday (me and the kids).

I got my period yesterday and it is forcing my hand: I must embrace irregularity and unpredictability one way or another.  The more joyful I am in the process, the better for me (and those around me).  

@#$%

I am allowing myself a day to feel this way.  To think about chowing down on a bag of potato chips or a slice or two of pizza.  To be borderline fetal.

Yesterday I was distracted by laundry folding and Shameless and became a cocoon.  Part of me resists all this inward-ing.  But it's pretty powerful.  I am dreaming up a storm and sleeping like a hibernating creature.

Peace and love.

O sleep

Each of the last few days has been revelatory in the new pockets of energy experienced.  With the energy has come more smiles, more laughter and more peace.

Last night, though...a sleep setback. 

The post-common meal hungries were particularly strong (the kids and Cap often need a second dinner because they didn't get too distracted playing and not liking the food).  I enjoyed a dinner plate of salad with roasted chicken and feta cheese and a piece of watermelon for dessert, but in this post-ovulation second half of my cycle...I was hungry again a few hours later.

10pm last night I was chatting in the kitchen with Cap while he made me a signature, masterful, grilled cheese sandwich (Udi's white sandwich bread buttered with Kerrygold sprinkled with garlic powder on one side...my cheese last night was smoked gouda).  And then I stayed up till midnight watching the Olympics.

I fell asleep pretty quickly and went into dream sleep again.  Can I digress?  I had noticed...for at least the past few years...that I was no longer remembering my dreams.  It never occurred to me, I don't know why, that I wasn't remembering because I wasn't having them.  Since the weekend, I have been waking up remembering my lengthy and cinematic dreams.  They've had lots of narrative and suspenseful tension.  It has been a homecoming of sorts and I've come to feel that I am sleeping not only longer, but more deeply for a longer stretch of the night, thanks to the herbs.

Sleep deprivation is an insidious and bad thing for well-being.  My eyes have been opened (no pun intended...but I like it) to how significant an obstacle it had become in my own path of healing.  I see Vinny again today.  I'm glad to have some observations to report and wonder what he'll say.

This morning, I was roused from dream-sleep by the clattering clamor of a powerful downpour on the metal box in the bedroom window that has kept me sane this persistently hot and/or humid summer.  A disharmonic convergence.  My eyes couldn't unsee the daylight, my stomach couldn't unfeel the late night sandwich deposit, my mind couldn't unwake the abrupt transition from my olympic dream.

Less than six hours of sleep.  And a rain system pressed down on us for the duration of the day.  I feel tired...but not as tired as I felt when I first got out of bed nearly two hours ago.  I feel happy...I feel the energy of possibility.  And that?  Pretty wonderful.

Wending wednesday

Breakfast with a friend this morning.  Lovely and connective.  (The woman in the photo is a random person.  I like what her fingers are doing.)

Drove Cap up to work and ran a couple of errands on the drive back home.  Cedar blocks for the closets and floss sticks for the kids.

Played a Lego game and then deep cleaned the bathroom with the kids.

Fixed lunches and noshed.

Touched base with Jamie about seeing her this weekend while we're in MA.

Sighed as the phone continued to cut in and out.  Our delicate phone lines do not like these blustery winds.

Head is filling slowly but surely with congestion of the season.

Dreamed of blood and violence...on a small scale, but personalized.  Rare bad dream.  (But happy to be dreaming again.)

Sad thinking I won't be seeing Lana and her other friends in Brooklyn tomorrow night.

Poking at the pastured ground beef to see if it has defrosted enough to make sliders with.

Off to make a cup of milky tea and go through recipes to see what I want to make for our Easter dinner (Saturday in Plympton).

Peace and love.

These days and nights

...reading Last Night In Twisted River.

...watching Lucy Liu in Southland (love this show and cast...she is a new addition).

...drinking Amy & Brian's Coconut Juice.

...considering the pros and cons of caffeine.

...knitting the Cavendish throw in Noro Matsuri.

...sleeping like a bear in Winter.

...expanding and contracting as if exiting a chrysalis.

...dreaming about travel/retreat.

All of this and more...with so much gratitude and love.

Fall gazing

Kid spotted #1:

Kid spotted #2:

Me spotted #1:

Me spotted #2:

I had a bite of nisu (Finnish cardamom bread Cap makes GFCF for us every name day celebration) the other morning.  It was a conscious decision.  And, as it turns out, not a good one.  (Unless one wants to say since I learned something some good came of it...)  Today, I was spacey.  In that ADDish way.  Shook me a little.

It led to a second ill-advised food/eating decision at dinner tonight.  Slippery, slippery slope.

So, now I know.  I am renewing my commitment to get back to a truer, more essential, sugar- and grain-free way of eating and living.  With an emphasis on Paleo (little to no dairy either).

Cap and I grabbed some "us" time tonight.  The kids had a great time with Daniel and Donna and we stayed home with Thor and Chinese take-out.

Yellow leaves and autumnal light to you.

P.S.  Have I mentioned I want a laptop?  A screen of my own.  The hard press is on here.  I dream it, I visualize it, I mention it to Cap and the kids every day...

Cyclic

In the last hour or so I have gone from feeling much better than I did yesterday to feeling like I've been hit by the exhausted bus.  I had a niggling suspicion and so checked the calendar and today is the textbook 14th day since the first day of my last menses.  I must be ovulating.

(Not to be wishing time away, but I am looking forward to a post-menopausal state of being.)

I have been somewhat distracted this morning.  But, I did make a kickass soup and a delectable chicken salad.  (The chicken from the stock takes on lovely sweet notes from the carrot and onion.  Yum.)  I've gotten a bit of organizing done.  Just a tiny bit.

Here are the pics from my night out with Cap.  We unexpectedly ate dinner at Costanera, a newish Peruvian restaurant in town.  I was thinking about Vanessa quite a bit while there.  It was a great meal made better by the conversation we shared about the future.  I feel so lucky to be in a relationship with someone where after twenty-plus years, we still dream together.

 Causa.

 Ceviche.

 Vegetarian duo.

mood hinted at though not quite captured.

Oh my goddess, I just want to drop and sleep.

V

...is for vampire.  I look a fright.  The menses vampire hard at work draining me.

...is for very.  Sag woke me up around 5:30 trying to figure out why his lip hurt.  We fell back asleep and Gem never woke up.  Woke up again around 8:30 and Gem and I said, nearly simultaneously, "I just had the weirdest dream!"  Mine was very weird.  It involved giving birth to an otherworldly girl creature.  She was bluish and after coming out, stood (looking about four years old) and proceeded to pull an extra third ear which looked like a Spock/elf ear (her other two looked human) right off her head.  I then nursed her, nervously.  And a while later delivered the placenta myself...very weirdly and graphically.  The placenta looked so weird...kind of like the lungs in a box from House last night!

...is for verge.  Cap should be on his way home.  He could have taken one of two flights and both have already landed at JFK.  The first thing Sag said when he woke was, "Isä, Isä, Isä, Isä..."  We are all so looking forward to welcoming him home.

Transparent

Rare experience today.  Awoken in the throes of a dream by an alarm clock.  My own clock.  In these months of insomnia, in particular, the shock was not unwelcome.

The dream was intense though not nightmarish.  I was trying to get somewhere...with Diane, I think, and we kept going in the wrong direction despite consulting a map several times during the process.

In an hour, I will be dropping off Sag at Danielle's and driving Gem and myself to the dental clinic.  I have a "thing" about driving to a place I have never driven before.  (I used to have Cap drive out to the location of a new job with me the night before said job was to start.)  If we had driven to the clinic last night, I probably wouldn't have had the dream I did :-)

Off to wake the children, make some oatmeal, pack a GFCF lunch and snacks for Gem...all while aware that the big work today will be done by Gem.  He is quite nervous about the 'not knowing' how it is all going to go, what it will be like, etc.  (Baby tooth extraction.)  The iPad will help once we're in the waiting room.  We'll be walk-ins so who knows how long we'll be there.

Peace and love.

Greek coffee

I like to think you never know.  And live in the moment.  And when the moment simply feels right, like it was made for this, I do things like drink my first little cup of Greek coffee, ever.  Even if it's past 8pm.

image borrowed from Bespoke by Brouhaha.

The blogger from who I borrowed the above photo describes Greek coffee as: espresso with mud with a lot of sugar (her ratio is 1:1) that then has the hell boiled out of it.  I found it very close to hot chocolate...without the dairy.  And I thought it was yummy.

But, as I had quietly expected, I did have trouble falling asleep (and no, I didn't get the bathroom cleaned, I watched The Office and Community instead).  I was dog tired, but my eyes were doing this intense weird thing where they were drooping but I couldn't close them.  It was like each lid contained the same force...both positive? both negative?...and were doing the opposite of magnetic thing.

What I hadn't expected was waking up about five hours after falling asleep, seconds before the alarm, as I was bawling in a dream just having seen the horrorific sight of someone who had hung himself.  When I say horrorific, I mean as in the genre of horror movies.  Or in this case, tv.  I've been watching The Walking Dead and this corpse looked like a zombie.

Off to make meatballs.  (Have I mentioned Sag requested a "meat party" for tonight's family gathering?)  And today I really do have to clean the bathroom.

One bowl

By the time noon rolled around I was definitely hungry.  Which was interesting because:

• I rarely feel hungry

• I ate dinner very late last night (another rare occurrence and no doubt a factor in my active dreaming)

I actually pulled the eggs out of the fridge thinking of quick protein.  It's my go to and I was willing to forgive myself and not stress.  But, I forced myself to slow down a bit.  I pulled out my garlic press from the drawer (how I love my garlic press) and pulled off three cloves from the large head on the counter.  I retrieved the scallions and safflower oil from the fridge.  The ginger joined the garlic on the cutting board.

I had some baby spinach in the crisper waiting for just this moment, apparently.  Everything went into the pot with some coconut aminos and a dash of red pepper flakes.

I washed and dried my favorite bowl which I am beginning to think of as my "one bowl" (still have to read the book!)  The aroma wafting out and around the pot held my attention and focus.  I put away the eggs and decided to save the water chestnuts and bamboo shoots for later.

I plated and ate.

One meal at a time.  One bowl at a time.

Now to go sip some tea with honey and rebuff the chocolate littering the computer desk.

White cyclamen

image pulled from web.

Right before I woke up, I dreamt I was in a  marketplace.  My friend Kelly was in one of the stall shops selling bunches of white cyclamen.  The flowers were a bit fuller than cyclamen actually are in real life.  They resembled the thickness of a tulip.  The stems were long and leafless and they were cut.

The flowers were beautiful and plentiful.  I would be taking some home.

The European-feeling market was on Austin Street, the street that had all the shops on it in my old neighborhood.  In real life, the area was struck by a tornado a couple of days ago.  One person was killed, my brother says it was a miracle that more people weren't.  A friend from Hunter posted on Facebook that her parents, her mother specifically, had a very close call.  Another friend from Hunter posted a photo of a downed very old, very big willow tree in the front yard of the apartment building of yet another Hunter friend whose mother still lives in the building.  My sister and brother-in-law's parked car, which was empty at the time, sustained a shattered windshield and dented hood from a very large falling branch.

I don't 'do' mainstream media for the most part.  I never watch the news on tv.  So I have been sheltered from the clamor of images and sound bites.  But, clearly, Forest Hills is in my thoughts.

Two interesting dream details:

• I walked by quite a bit of food in the market and though it all looked delicious, I didn't eat anything.  The flowers felt like my destination.

• I started my journey in the lobby of an apartment building which was a combination/permutation of the lobbies of my sister and brother's apartment buildings.  (Both live in the old neighborhood an easy walk to the location of the marketplace.)  As I walked through, I saw another friend from Hunter, but one who has no connection to the old neighborhood that I know of.  This friend was seated at a large dark wood table (my sister's lobby features a lot of dark old wood...it's a beautiful old building).  We both glanced at each other and I left.

Off balance

...literally. 

Especially as my head changes position from vertical to horizontal or back.  Inner ear?  Delicate channels flooded by excess fluid?  Manifestation of energetic/physical imbalance?  Sensitivity to atmospheric pressure bearing down?

Who knows.

I'm somewhat used to it by now.  It happens every six months or so...maybe once a year.

This morning, I staggered out of bed wanting to record fast fleeting images from my dreams and if it hadn't been for a fortuitously placed wall I would have gone down.

Powerful swings of pressure and force out of my control.

I may be quiet here for a bit.  Today is the start of my Fall schedule with the kids.  The days will be infused with more structure. 

Also, I'm really bummed about some things.  Feeling the (lung) season, as it were.

By being here, I feel 1) too close to exposing raw nerves; and 2) too close to producing (continuing to produce) a barrage of textual diarrhea or painfully inert constipation, as I try to move forward through this emotional, psychic morass.

And who wants that?

Fire

For now, a favorite and wondrous moment from a day full of such moments.  Their cabin is so special, so them, and they've been there less than a month.  They have worked incredibly hard and the fruits of their labor are amazing.

This place is so great it has me thinking more vigorously about my adult life long dream of retiring to a cottage on the edge of woods overlooking the ocean.

The fire has been stoked.

Spiraling back

I'm feeling a bit better.  The slope, gentle as it may be, is upward.

Then, I feel a sudden compression.  Whole body.  Head down, tailbone up, ears in, shoulders in, hips in.  Blood starting to pound as veins narrow and tighten.  Everything becoming a wall, and because I can't get very far from Star Wars raising these boys, for some comic relief, the image of the gang in the trash compactor comes to mind.

Pressure.  My brain gasps, my heart skips a beat.

Then, I remember my childhood recurring nightmare.  Walking along a driven snow white picket fence, entering a house that contains a bloody, wet, red organ, pumping and pumping.  It's a heart with vines of veins so dark they appear black. 

The house is dark as a moonless night and the heart is so very red.

It's grotesque.  The sight is deafening.

Ultimate dreams

I found a list I made in December of 1998 as part of a yoga class.  My "Ultimate Dreams", which I had to list with specifically dated deadlines.  (Turned out the yoga center was run by folks who were way into The Forum.)

I thought it was interesting to see which dreams were realized.  Only one so far :-)

Have a baby or adopt a child by January 1, 2000.

Visit New Mexico by August 31, 2003.

Wake up to a view of the ocean every day by August 31, 2023.

Visit Finland by December 31, 2008.

Subway dream

Last night I had a dream.  Notable because I can actually still remember it though the details are fast fading even as I type.  (I took a few minutes to look for an image of the subway which contributed to the dilution, but I saw some interesting shots...love googling.)

I was in the NYC subway.  And somehow I dropped my bag and coat onto the tracks.  It was an accident of the flukey sort.  The track well was dry and clean (not the track wells of my childhood) and I had a strong feeling that all could be well so easily if only I could retrieve my belongings.

I called out to a worker for help and she, in turn, called out to another worker.  This second worker, also a woman, came to talk to me.  She informed me it would not be as simple as I had hoped.  We could hear the rumbling of oncoming trains.

I was discouraged.  Then, encouraged as a train pulled into the station on another track, but then discouraged again as a train rolled in on the track my stuff was on.

The dream held such sway that I dreamt about it again later in my sleep.  I was relaying what happened, that I had dropped my things onto the track, to someone.  I took the situation in stride.  There was clarity in the inevitability, as opposed to any sense of fatalism.  

Also, as I retold the story in my next, or continued, dream, I could see in my mind's eye my things were still there, unmussed, unharmed...to be collected at any time, upon my return to the scene.  Now that I am awake, I still feel this potential.

And that's a good thing.

Kinks

I just wrote a post about sometimes dreaming of opening a café and my love of leftovers. I debated about where to post it and decided to post it at the GFCF blog which I am already rethinking as more of an Eating blog.

Still working the kinks out of how to separate these strands when sometimes that is (naturally) hard to do.

You can read the post here.

Askew

...yet in balance.

Making a daily habit of a one bag-two cup pot of Raspberry Earl, but am sensitive to caffeine.

Practicing Qigong every day, but unable to rein in the food situation as planned.

Going to bed and waking earlier, but my sleep is being rocked by incredibly active dreams.

My mind feels awake and alive, but reluctant to land in total concert with my body.

The car's getting in on this action, as well.  Making new and unusual noises, but deemed safe for Cap's trip to New England.  ($700+ in repairs waiting in the wings...)

Drear

turtle by Sag.

Is that even a word?

Again with the dreams.  They continue to be intense and action-packed.  Happening for sure right before I awake around 6am, but perhaps going all night.  Hmm, I just checked the Dragon's Way book and between 5-7am the Large Intestine is 'in charge'.  Makes me want to delve a bit deeper.  3-5am is the time of the Lung.

When my eyes opened, I turned the alarm off thinking I'd rather fall back asleep.  I felt the drear.

But, as very flimsy thoughts of 'Qigong is the base' moved around the discomfort my body was feeling (no doubt tired from digesting the parts of the meal I didn't divulge last night: tomato gorgonzola soup, bread and butter, lime rickey, pumpkin pecan pie :-), Gem walked in.  In the time it took him to trot to bathroom and back, I decided to get out of bed.

I pulled open the shades and the dark pavement was slick.  I remembered it's supposed to rain and snow today.  More drear made clear.  Me + low pressure systems = low me.

But, seeing Baxter always gives me a lift.  He arrived yesterday morning and is with us till next week.

So, I am off to practice, to widen the channels and let some energy flow.  Get rid of some carbon dioxide and reconnect with the Universe in a more intentional way.