I can feel it coming in the air tonight.

Food choices have been my ad nauseam personal development topic of the year, I think, so I was pleased to read Dom's post today about the changes brewing in his diet--pleased because for once someone else is sounding off about it, and pleased because it's all positive stuff about laying off the sugar-crack and giving up the meats. I was gunta spare you another post about my new experiment, too, but he gave me a little charge, so I don't mind telling you that I've gone weekday vegan. The mac and cheese was a nice little sendoff, though I didn't plan it that way. I just got up Monday morning and thought "aight, I'm going to try something else now."

I don't have a lot to report about the experiment so far, except that it hasn't been difficult and I feel good.

It's weird: I feel like I've been working through some resistance about various things over the past few months, without really knowing that that's what I've been doing. Take, for example, the biking: in the past, I always threw out a lot of reasons why it wasn't a viable choice for me, and while a lot of those reasons still stand (like, riding to a rehearsal is a bad idea, especially if the weather is crappy, because your voice will be thrashed when you get there, from the panting if not from the cold air rushing past your vocal folds), most of the reasons have evaporated in the face of how slick a mode of transport biking is, and how good it feels to do it.

Again I should reiterate that this is THE PERFECT time of year to start biking for any reason, and I'm kind of hoping that by the time the weather goes to shit, biking will be habitual enough that I will change my other habits to suit it. I will for example allow more time to get places (so far so good), and wear the right kind of clothes for the job, and shower at work if I need to, or buzz my hair off, or whatever.

Anyway, there's also been some food resistance going on, which I haven't totally thought through--I've just sort of noticed it here and there. It's possible I'm coming out on the other side of it now. But I have this feeling I'm going to go off coffee eventually. I don't know when. It just seems likely, based on everything else that's been going on.

I don't know what will be next, but I welcome it because it all pretty much falls under the grand question of "how will you live so as not to make a mockery of your values?"

PS: If you google "placatan" I'm in the top ten results. What.

Damn! I punked out on yesterday's daily post. But I did post a recipe for this:

Yes you do care what I had for lunch.

I want to give some love to Solomon Snacks and Bakery, even though they don't have a website, even though I haven't been to their storefront, because their whole wheat bread is OFF THE HEEZIE. I've been sitting here eating it lightly toasted with one of my all time favorite things, mashed avocado with salt and pepper. When you have a good avocado (check) and good bread (check check) this is one of the world's great snacks.

I am also jazzed about this salad I just made up, a carrot-apple-beet slaw with chickpeas, which recipe I will blog about later. It is delicious and it looks even better than it tastes, I think, thanks to the gorgeous beets.

And and and, I'm about to make a shake to take with me for this afternoon/evening's teaching stint, and that shake has me jumping too: soymilk, frozen bananas, cocoa powder, peanut butter. PLACATAN!

Best of all: the weather is perfect and I'm riding to my teaching locale along one of the best bike trails in the cities. Sweaty ass be damned!

There's one thing I'm not psyched about, though, and that's my first experiment with turmeric dye. I was trying to dye this dress and it turned out to have invisible pit stains that SUCKED UP all the orangey color, far more than the rest of the dress. I still want to salvage it, but I'm not sure how. It looks like crap. And it also turned out kind of sports-team gold. Alas. Not everything can be rosy.

Sing out loud, sing out strong.

Oh man. I just whipped up some Chipotle Mac and Cheese and I am having such a passionate affair with my dinner plate right now. It's a good thing I only make this stuff every two months.

The BFS's birthday was yesterday and some of us convened to celebrate, but we will also be convening on Tuesday night to do karaoke in honor of her birth. The rule for that night, apparently, is that you can only sing a song you've never karaoked before, and I'm baffled. At one point I was keeping a little word file of things I might/should sing at karaoke and very recently I deleted it because I thought "you are an idiot for having this." But now I wish I hadn't.

So what should I sing, internets? I'll tell you what's off-limits, based on my past karaoke stints:
Patsy Cline: "Crazy"
Justin T-lake: "Cry Me a River"
The Cardigans: "Lovefool"
Gloria Gaynor: "I Will Survive"
Queen: "Another One Bites the Dust"
Young MC: "Bust a Move"
B-52s: "Love Shack"
Wham: "Everything She Wants"
Cheap Trick: "I Want You to Want Me"
Deee-lite: "Groove is in the Heart"
Atlantic Starr: "Always" (obviously)
Hall & Oates: "Sara Smile," "I Can't Go for That" (oooh, I can sing a LOT more Hall & Oates)
Most of Madonna's catalogue
And others I'm forgetting.

I tell you, what I really want to sing is "Cool it Now" by New Edition, but I'm not sure I'm going to find that on any karaoke list. This particular DJ is really good, though, so maybe he'll have my back. I'll keep you posted.

All I have to do is dream.

I woke up before 6:00 this morning, right out of a lucid dream into the pre-dawn darkness. I'd been walking through the corner store of my childhood, but it was big and empty, painted white, mid-renovation. Someone might have been upstairs, but I walked briskly through the place, straight to the back, through a door into a big red cinder block room, and out the back door. I woke up then, and tried to get back to sleep, and almost succeeded a few times. During one of these interludes my brain cooked up a song, sort of a psychedelic CSN-influenced number by Ween, that had the lyrics "I've got a bluefinger, she's got a redfinger, we've got a greenfinger YELLOWFINGER! Bluefinger. Whitefinger. And just a finger." I wish I could sing it to you, with the harmony and guitar and everything.

When I woke up sick the other day, it was from a dream in which there was a 60s soul kind of song with the lyrics "You're awesome...yeah, you're all right." "Awesome" was long and melismatic and then "you're all right" was just a kind of tag. I wish I could sing that one to you as well, with the horns and the dudes backing me up. I hope my brain keeps churning out the hits like this.

I'm feeling better today, going back to the office and my spreadsheets (I love them all; they are like my children). I fired up my morning with some homemade sour cherry-pear crisp. I would say there was a bit too much crisp on top, which makes it perfect for stirring yogurt into. Then I read this hilarious bit of prose:

Circus Act's level of fetal activity is unprecedented, at least in terms of my own personal womb occupation experiences. If I hadn't seen the correct number of limbs on the ultrasound, the smart money would be on me birthing an octopus.

While I'm quoting and linking, I should also point you to a random discovery I made the other day whilst clicking around my flickr contacts: These Days in French Life, a blog by a woman living a "Slow Year" with her little family in the south of France. It's basically about opting out of consumer culture and generating as little waste as possible. Naturally a lot of life ends up revolving around food: getting it, preparing it, preserving it, etc, and she's issued additional monthly challenges to herself, like no food shopping for a month, or "Meet Your Meat" (i.e. source the meat and visit the farm and the animals), or cook everything on the woodstove for a month. It's interesting to read about what she discovers through this type of discipline, and it all fits neatly into the things I've been thinking about.

I'd guess that most folks would be very dismissive of the so-called slow life because they've got bills to pay, and that's fair enough. But one of the most potent ideas about slow livin', for me, is that most of us work work work so that we can buy Things, and when you opt out of buying Things, you have more time to concentrate on subsistence activities like feeding your family in a conscientious, creative, use-every-scrap kind of way. There's something very appealing to me about that--about how much it calls upon you to do, and how much togetherness it engenders, and how intimately connected it is to the environment in which you live.

The Slow Year blogger also runs a flickr group called A Slow Year, if you want to get in on the action.

I was thinking about taking a bike ride, but now I see that it's only 39 degrees. Woof! Spring schming.

Lay it on me.

You may already have gleaned that I work at a university, so now I will tell you that the library system at my workplace will deliver books to your campus office. Given that the libraries are spread out over two cities, this is a big bonus that I am going to be taking advantage of like ALL THE TIME. About two days after launching my request off into the intertubes, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter showed up in my mailbox, adding a tiny charge of excitement to my workday. When I'm done with the book, I just put it back into the special bag in which it arrived and send it on back. Hooray!

Many thanks to all of you who recommended this book, by the way. I love that it is co-authored by an ethicist who examines food choices using sound data and logical thought processes because that is the only way to convince people that food choices are important and not just an arena in which bleeding hearts blubber about our furry and feathered friends. Despite the litany of horrific things happening behind closed doors at factory farms and the fact that farm animal welfare is not regulated until you get to the slaughterhouse, I have to say that THE most depressing part about the book is how market-driven every shitty corporate practice is. Over and over, producers say things like "well, if I don't do this, the farmer up the road will, and I'll be out of business." It's always about increasing productivity and yield, and never ever about doing the right thing: for the animals, for the planet, for the workers, for the people who ultimately eat the food.

Obviously, this is true in other industries as well. If you've been with me for awhile, you know that I've been tweaking my shopping habits on an ongoing basis. My two month experiment with buying nothing new last year, or whenever it was, most definitely changed the way I shop for clothes--permanently, I think. At first, I found that retail stores were generally just depressing me with their excess and sameness, but now I can't go into one of these places without wondering how many types of exploitation produced that $10 shirt and wondering who else is picking up the tab. That's another thing this book does such an excellent job of making clear: the low low prices that we seem to expect as our inalienable right along with life liberty etc are essentially fake, full of costs that are shouldered by people who live next to polluting factories or whatever. Sing it with me: Freedom isn't free, no, there's a hefty fuckin' fee.

On the other hand, some companies and people are trying to do the right thing and the fact that Whole Foods, for example, is hugely profitable and is still one of the 100 best companies to work for (number 16 this year, in fact) shows that there is a giant place for ethical business in a capitalist system. But there still needs to be a cultural shift, not only in the standard American diet (which is as SAD as its acronym suggests), but also in the way we think about food and about everything that happens before it gets to our tables. Well, it's a little bit chicken and eggy, isn't it, the whole question of supply and demand. Businesses and consumers need to be moving toward better choices simultaneously.

It just makes me crazy that for so many people, self-interest and profit can outweigh everything else. It's tiring to think about.

Also, I'm finished with fish, except maybe something that my dad caught.

Oh yeah. I started out this post talking about the library, and what I really wanted to ask for is more book recommendations, about anything. I need to quit rereading stuff so much.

Green Smoothie update.

I've now had a solid week of drinking my greens every day. After day two or so, I even got the Brit on board. I make a blender full in the morning, drink a glass while I get ready for my day, and fill a 16 ounce bottle for snacking on throughout the morning. I'm not really kidding about the snacking--that's how it feels, since there are enough greeny and fruity bits to chew on a little.

My anecdotal evidence goes like this: I am feeling better, I am less tired during the afternoon, and I am uninterested in snacking on crappity crap. Drinking coffee in the morning even feels kind of counterproductive (though I am having some anyway, because I love the stuff). And I feel a little silly about this, but last night I told the Brit that I was already excited about this morning's green beverage. Don't mock me; I had a fresh pineapple to cut up and add to the recipe, and fresh mint to go with it. Have you never sprinkled chopped fresh mint over your pineapple chunks? It is the bomb.

I have a horror of becoming an obnoxious evangelist about anything, but I have to admit that I can kind of understand why raw foodists are always going on about their energy levels and using lots of exclamation points. By 11 AM I've had 10+ grams of fiber, all the Vitamin A and C I need for the day and then some, a pantload of potassium, a really nice start on the day's calcium and iron, and a whole bunch of other vitamins that do I know not what. Also, this stuff is delicious. I wouldn't bullshit you.

In other news, I dropped my laptop yesterday and apparently destroyed the connection to the screen. Green smoothies won't keep you from doing stupid stuff.

Progress.

Yesterday I finally, FINALLY joined my favorite co-op. To give you an idea of how stupid it is that I hadn't joined earlier:

• I have been shopping there since I was an actual child.
• I lived in the neighborhood for 3 or 4 years, and did about half my shopping there during that time.
• Prior to that, I lived just a few neighborhoods over, for 4 years, and did a quarter of my shopping there.
• I am a fan of the co-op model.
  
• Their share price is one third that of other area co-ops.

When I lived nearby I kept putting it off, and then when I moved out of the area I thought I wouldn't be going there so often. As it turns out, I'm there once a week, if not more. So yesterday when I was loading up on green smoothie supplies, I finally joined up.

Along the same lines, some friends and I have been trying to sort out which CSA we're going to join for the growing season and how we're going to divvy up the food. I'm pretty excited about this move. I'll pay about $250 up front to split a share of local produce for 18 weeks or so, starting in June. That ends up being about $14 a week for 4-13 pounds of produce, depending on the season. Sweet sweet! And then, as Anna said, we will have Ladies' Nights where we have to use the vegetables we have no idea what to do with. I think she was talking about potluck dishes, but it sounded filthy.

These items, along with the green smoothie experiment (basically, I've started drinking my greens every day), are helping me along on my little food journey. What WHAT!

Food problems.

My diet seems to be undergoing some kind of revision, and I can't yet tell where it's going to end up. What I do know is that for the past few months, I've been clicking away on vegan blogs. And then on raw food sites. Going vegan makes good sense to me; going raw is appealing for reasons I haven't quite parsed yet. I can tell you that it seems right to me because basically we are just fancy monkeys, and a raw diet is a monkey diet. Of course I capped off reading about the raw diet the other day by having a delicious toasted ciabatta roll with earth balance and apricot fruit spread, none of which bore any resemblance to the green smoothies and what have you.

One thing I haven't personally sorted out is what happens to farmers if we all stop eating dairy products etc, bearing in mind that I don't really give a shit about what happens to factory farmers. I also wonder what happens to the animals that have been domesticated for farm life and for use as food in one way or another. Obviously you want them to live out their sweet ruminant lives in a field somewhere, but they can't live in the wild anymore, can they? Does this mean cattle, goats, sheep, and all the rest of them are going to die out and/or go feral if they're not being raised for cheese? I'm not being flippant; I am actually wondering about this. I wonder about people like the Reads, profiled in this excellent article in City Pages not so long ago--people who tend their animals with great love and who make (apparently fabulous) cheeses, on a small scale.

I also wonder about how to reconcile the food choices you make for yourself with the ones you should rightly make for the health of your pets. This is especially potent at the moment, because we're switching Ace to wet food and the mass market stuff is repellent in terms of what it contains, and the alternative is expensive, but both contain meat because he is a carnivorous beastie.

Then of course there are leather goods, which are infinitely superior in every way to their vinyl counterparts.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

It's boring to read about other people's food dilemmas if you don't share them yourself, I'm sure.

The thing is, I don't really see myself becoming rigid about any of these things. It's more likely that I'll just go ahead and exist inside a paradox or two for the rest of my life.

I'm turning off the computer for the evening, FYI.

Items for your consideration.

This should probably be three or four different posts, but the bits all do fit under the umbrella of things for you to consider.

So first. I have this master plan to become a more efficient grocery shopper, which I may have mentioned. I feel like I spend way too much time faffing about at grocery stores, and while this is mostly an activity I enjoy, I simply do not have such a wealth of free time that I want to blow it all trekking between the co-op, Whole Paycheck, and Rainbow Foods. In a perfect world, I would be going to a wonderful market daily to pick up things for dinner, or there would be one conveniently-located place that carries everything I need at a good price, but things sadly are not set up that way here.

WiseBread has been posting little tips about grocery shopping and bulk food prep and such on an ongoing basis, in case you're interested. Many of those tips aren't going to work for me because I am a vegetarian, I don't buy many packaged foods (forget coupon-clipping tips), and I'm not cooking for a crowd. But I'm tracking expenses this month (and probably next) to figure out how much I really spend on groceries. And, inspired by some listmaking urge and my own inner librarian, I just took inventory of the cupboards, and categorized and rearranged the contents. Then I went to the condiment wing of the fridge and did the same. I dumped some languishing, assy dressing from Trader Joe's and a 6 year old tub of thai curry paste. I froze some prepared garbanzo beans for later use. And I may actually make a spreadsheet on Google Docs to use as a shopping list and food inventory. I know, it's crazy.

Also:
Read
The Millennial Crier is always at least pretty entertaining, but I think it is especially so if you have spent any time at all thinking that grad school is/was a bit of a wankfest for you. To wit: today's entry, a summation of the concrete ways in which the writer has improved since college.

Heard
This song by Rose Polenzani came up on my ipod today and I really think a lot of you will like it (unless dreamy folky music pisses you off). I love the lyrics and all the funky harmonica effects.

Watched
This was awhile ago, but I suggest you go get The Lives of Others if you have not already seen it. Beautiful and thought-provoking and just really well-made and acted. We also watched La Vie en Rose (aka La Môme) this week, which is worth seeing just for Marion Cotillard's astonishing performance as Edith Piaf. What a voice; what a sad, crazy life. I see that Cotillard is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. Without even seeing any of the other movies (except Elizabeth and I thought that was crap), I'm going to hazard that probably no other performance this year comes close.

Also, have you been watching this Austen fest happening on PBS? I thought "Northanger Abbey" was campy and adorable, with totally appealing romantic leads. Hooray!

That is all.

Local flava.

Dear Minneapolis, did you know that the New French Bakery at 26th and 26th has a sale every day starting at 4? Rolls and sandwich bread are two-for-one and artisan breads are half price. You never know what's going to be available, but today I walked out with a sourdough boule and a heavenly good baguette for a grand total of $2. I cannot recommend this sale enough, if you're available to get your ass over to Seward between 4 and 6 Monday through Friday. (I don't know about the weekends.)

In the back-to-the-future department, the magic of websurfing landed me on a MN-centric blog written by a dude with whom I went to school between 6th and 12th grade. In fact, I believe we "went together" for about two days. Anyhoo, in scanning his front page I found this thing about praise and its paradoxically negative impact on kids. I have not bothered to investigate the source further because I have other things to read, but there's an observation here about so-called gifted and talented kids turning into quitters that kind of struck a chord with me. I wouldn't say I'm a quitter, but I do think I wasn't pushed enough as a kid because I was smart in a very school-friendly way. In fact, I just commented on Madness's blog today about how I could have used more sports-related life lessons while I was growing up. I have always gotten a lot of rewards for achievement, but have not been encouraged to persist with difficult things. Something to think about.

Even THAT niblet is not the point of having stumbled across this dude's blog, however: I clicked over to his flickr and learned, finally, that all those people I saw tooling around Nicollet Island on Segways while I was teaching at opera camp this summer were not actually in a gang. I am kind of disappointed about this. It was actually a tour of the riverfront area, which is sort of cool and made obscurely hilarious by the whole Segway thing. I cannot dissociate Segways from GOB on Arrested Development.

Now I must go quietly freak out about all my high school classmates who are in this guy's photostream. In case you check your stats and trackbacks, Ed: what up.

I'm gonna go talk to some food about this.

For your consideration:
-The spork that comes with the Mr Bento lunch jar is called a "forked spoon" in Mr. Bento documentation. This tickles me no end. I'm not sure I can explain why.
-You all know about this already but I'm going to tell you anyway because I'm cutting-edge like that. When Radiohead's "In Rainbows" came out a few weeks ago, it was all over Minnesota Public Radio, and not just on The Current, and I got intrigued and downloaded it. I do like Radiohead, but I really extra-liked that they decided to make the digital version available much earlier than the "discbox" version. You pre-order the discbox, you get a download anyway; you go download only, you decide whether and how much you will pay for it. Totally worth the 3 or 4 pounds I paid for it. I'm mentioning this now, well after the fact, because I just started listening to it today and I really dig it.
-I had a routine eye exam yesterday and mentioned the delicious occupational health hazard I am currently facing with my new and expanded job: eyestrain. The recommendation from my doc? Buy some drugstore reading glasses, the lowest power, for working at the computer. On the one hand I like this low-tech solution; on the other hand I'm not ready to start shopping at Chico's and scrapbooking and wearing a funky chain around my neck. No offense, of course. Just sayin.
-This brings me neatly to my next thing. For some reason I was thinking (as I often do) about Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and about the whole belted-maxi phenomenon and I remembered a really splendid adjective cluster that my friend Nynorskmann told me about a few years ago. It is to be used to describe attractive women of a certain age, in place of, say, MILF. The adjective is "belted-maxi hot." As in "Helen Mirren is belted-maxi hot." Why had I forgotten about this? We may never know.
-Here is a recipe for ass problems. I mean it's delicious and nutritious and cold-weather-delightful, but forewarned is forearmed. Perhaps drop some Beano before you start cooking.
Lentil Barley Stew
2 medium onions, diced
6 cloves of garlic, bashed and minced
4 stalks of celery, minced
big pinch of red pepper flakes
basil and rosemary to taste (a teaspoon each?)
Sautee these in your soup pot in olive oil for 5 minutes.
Add 12 cups of water and 1.5 cups of rinsed and picked lentils. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
Add a big can of diced or crushed tomatoes and 1.5 cups of barley. Simmer for 40 minutes or so, til everything is tender.
Add 2 cups of grated carrots (3 or 4 medium) and a few handfuls of spinach and cook for another 5 minutes. Other delicious additions would be green beans, zucchini, kale or chard. Go nuts. Salt to taste.
Serve with delicious bread and maybe some crumbled feta on top and then await the storm.
-I have such a big crush on Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin right now.

Convenience is the enemy.

Yesterday I had that day where you wake up and suddenly realize you are fatter. To celebrate, I went to the gym and listened to a Russell Brand podcast. You know what's funny? Listening to a comedy show while you try to lift weights in the very very serious weight room. Everyone is grimly exhaling and looking at their muscles in the mirror and meanwhile I'm trying to curl 12 pound dumbbells with noodle arm due to audibly laughing at something that no one else can hear. I was truly entertained, but it was probably not my most efficient session with the freeweights.

This brings me to my next point. Getting exercise 6 days a week is easy when your schedule is pretty much your own AND the weather is beautiful. When it is cold crappy soup-and-baking weather and you can't find time to go the post office, you're lucky if you can get gymified twice a week. In other words, my 30 day experiment to see whether I could manage to exercise everyday was successful but not, apparently, sustainable, unless I want to give up other things such as lounging around watching sitcoms or picking outfits for other wardrobe remixers.

So I have a new 30 day experiment about cutting out sugar and stuff. I've done this before, so it shouldn't be too difficult, and perhaps it'll help me control the inevitable winter logeyness that I usually address with baked goods and naps. Also I think my mind easily becomes a dark and scary place when I am not eating well. Would someone please just come over and chop vegetables for me? Thanks.

Heathcliff, it's me, your Cathy, I've come home.

I had the song "Wuthering Heights" in my head for the majority of the UK trip, before I even knew we were going to stop off at Haworth to see the parsonage where Emily, Charlotte, and Anne wrote their books (and Branwell led a dissolute life). It's probably a natural progression from "Oh England, My Lionheart," another Kate Bush song that invariably queues up on my mental jukebox when I start thinking about England.

The other song I had in my head the most while we were traveling was "English Country Garden," at first because we saw a lot of flowers and then because the Brit shared some juvenile alternate lyrics with me: "What do you do when you've got to take a poo / in an English Country Garden?" Then there's something about pull down your pants and scare away the ants, I don't remember it exactly, but it obviously captured my imagination. Practically every time we saw any dell that was even remotely dingly, I started to whistle the song (which, by the way, I knew from elementary piano books I whipped through when I was little).

The Brits aren't messing around when it comes to their gardens. They say "garden" where we would say "yard," and this is not just a cute cultural word difference. Even the most asphalt-crusty yard has a garden in it with roses as big as your head and watercolored hydrangeas and cascading, burgeoning greenery.

The price exacted for all of this efflorescence is, obviously, relentless rain. It's been a crap few months in the British Isles. Magically enough, though, we had mostly stellar weather, at least one perfect day everywhere we went. My spirits were so ludicrously lifted every time the sun was out: yet more evidence of how poorly I would function in a gray climate. My emotions are way too tied to the weather, apparently.

I would've ordered at least one more day of good weather, though. Trying to climb mountains in heavy mist (that may or may not turn into, like, shards of rain) is a totally losing proposition that forces you to turn back while also driving home to you the inadequacy of your gear. Here's a tip: don't try to camp in England with inadequate gear.

A few more tips:

1. It's true what they say about the roads and traffic in England: they suck. I mean people tell you to take provisions because you might be sitting there on the motorway for hours, long enough to be hungry and dehydrated. Taking a road trip is not quite the relaxing and invigorating experience it is in the States. We were actually lucky to hit only about a half hour's worth of traffic jams, but then there was the harrowing experience of driving on two-way roads that are about 6 feet wide, and meanwhile because of some cock-up in the Chunnel there were people sitting on southern roads for 5 hours or more. So I guess my tip is: if you're trying to get somewhere in England by car, be ready for anything.

2. Also: with the current exchange rate, which is shite, gassing up your toy rental car will cost about $80, you won't be able to pay at the pump because it hasn't been discovered yet in England, and you won't be able to find a gas station when you need one. This will renew the mock hate-on for England that is your major comic trope while you're there.

3. It is also true what they say about the airports: they are migraine-inducing monuments to inefficiency. I was very zen about the huge lines for our return flight, but unfortunately we were posted next to this spazzy dork who wouldn't stop fidgeting and standing on his tippy toes and checking his watch and asking everyone about how long things were going to take and would he make his flight and like that. It would've been more hilarious if it didn't threaten to harsh my mellow so bad. We made our flight, but I didn't have any time to buy delicious airport chocolate and so I still have pound coins jingling around in my wallet. Boo.

4. Almost all pain au chocolat I encountered on this trip was well worth eating, and that includes convenience store pain au chocolat, which I bought in Haworth and munched as we whipped across the moors on our way to the mountains. Not bad. Even in the rain.

Next time: the good, the very good, the transcendent.

Son, you got a panty on your head.

Today I basically just ate granola all day. One of the things I truly enjoy about being a grownup is indulging my own dietary whims. Probably I talk about it too much (see previous post re: ice cream for dinner), but there are so many other things about being a grownup that I do not enjoy; I figure I'm entitled to a day's worth of granola and a few sentences of food commentary.

One fun thing I did this weekend is figure out my net worth, after hearing Boston Gal on Marketplace Money the other day. Do you know about this woman? She's an "open wallet," a personal finance blogger who charts her net worth monthly and shares it with the internets. I've been tracking my income for awhile as a matter of freelancey necessity, but have never baldly regarded my assets next to my liabilities. Thanks to my private college (that I will never ever regret attending), my liabilities still outweigh my assets, but not as much as I might have imagined. I mean, I'm currently worth more dead than alive, but still: there is something a little bit reassuring about seeing it all spreadsheeted up and thinking about how next month I will have chipped away at the debt a bit more. I recommend the exercise.

Of course, next month I will be experiencing the financial fallout of international travel, so maybe the spreadsheet will cease to reassure at that point. We leave for England on Wednesday evening. The Brit's sister is getting married, and and we are having a little vay-cay-cay. It will involve hiking and camping, and also swanky wedding accommodations and stays with the family, and hopefully some thrift-shopping (I am collecting recommendations). I'll be blogging at you from the UK, never you fear.

Opera camp wrapped up on Friday. It was fabulous. The kids did two performances of the scenes they'd been working on, and just tore it up. Watching them work was a slightly complicated source of joy--complicated only by my nostalgia for that type of innocent discovery. I don't mean innocent in the condescending or proto-sexual way; I mean like they don't have a clue what it takes to be a practitioner of this art form, but they are learning RIGHT THIS MINUTE and are choosing to do this thing, some even paying for it themselves. And you watch and listen and think about their broad uncharted futures and get sort of wistful, even if you yourself had a lot of great opportunities as a kid.

But then on the other hand you now get to spend your days eating nothing but granola if you wish, so really you should get over yourself.

That would be a great full-circle post-closing sentence, except that I forgot to report a few other things:
1. I watched RIZE and yes, it was amazing, and yes, Bring It On: All Or Nothing makes a mockery of krumping (but I knew this). I also enjoyed that it's possible to get "krumpness" or to be "krump," though I realize I will achieve/be neither.
2. I had my last hip-hop class and was significantly more coordinated than before. I also started demonstrating my moves to the opera camp crew. Holla!
3. My brother was in the hospital for three days with a skin infection. I think he's okay, but he was rather f-ed up, thanks to an ongoing resurgence of childhood eczema. When he was a baby, my mom made little paws to attach to his jammies, so he wouldn't scratch himself silly in his sleep. Maybe I should send him some paws. They would be the size of your head.
4. I saw a bald eagle flying over a mall parking lot.
5. I slipped in water, ran into a wall, and have fat mustardy bruises on my right arm. On the plus side, the ice pack they gave me at the opera felt like a weighty dong once it had warmed up, and the best part about it is that everyone I slapped with the ice pack instantly knew EXACTLY what I was trying to convey, which was: dong-slap.