I have been remiss, once again, in writing blog posts. I will do my best to be better at updating in the future.
In February Karl got to spend time with two of his favorite people- his grandma's! Grandma came up to see a concert at the Kennedy Center and the following day Nana came out for lunch. Karl can't get enough of these ladies and follows them around like a lost puppy whenever they are near. I am so thankful to have both of my mom's living relatively close by.
This February also brought weeks of illness to our house. Either Karl or I had a cold at any given time. When we thought we were all well Karl came down with strep! Poor guy. After a few days of antibiotics he was back to his old self again. Luckily, we didn't get any of his friends sick.
Once we were back on the road to health we started visiting our favorite haunts. Here Karl is relaxing at the library with a good book.
At the playground in our neighborhood:
Just a few days ago Karl and I discovered a near by farm that has baby pigs & lambs! We took a picnic and enjoyed walking around listening to all the animal sounds we practice at home.
7 day old lamb
Karl loved looking at the piglets. He kept saying "aren't they cute?"
Karl trying to figure out the difference between hens and the rooster
Sheep in a "yucky water" pasture
"ewww...dat's yucky water"
Shortly after this picture was taken, the goat on the left came over to the fence and tried to get a taste of Karl. He thought it was hilarious and named the goat "charlie" as the quick lick reminded him of our own goat-dog.
A real farm hand knows how to stand on a fence and gaze out over the cattle.
Better get mowing!
Karl and I have a lot of fun together and he is so good at keeping himself entertained while I take a shower or use the restroom. After a recent shower I came back to our room to discover that Karl had found a bunch of "stickers" (panty liners) and had stuck them all over the floor. Life is never boring!
December and January have been busy months for the Sax family!
In early December my sweet sister came back from California to visit and to celebrate Christmas. Karl hadn't seen Lee in over 6 months, but still knew who she was. Having pictures of Aunt Lele helps a lot. We say goodnight to Lee's picture as part of Karl's bed time routine.
Karl wearing the awesome hat that Lee knitted for him this Christmas. Being at Grandma & Grandpa's house was pretty great because some of the nutcrackers were at Karl height; he staged many battles.
Braving the cold and playing at the park near Grandma & Grandpa's house. Thank goodness for this hat!
The 16th of December brought a big milestone for Erik- his 30th birthday! I surprised him with dinner at his favorite Thai restaurant with 10 of our close friends. It was great and we got to try a huge variety of dishes.
Happy birthday, Papa!
A few days after Erik's birthday the Sax family moved houses and dog/house sat for some good friends. We were there for about two weeks and Karl got pretty used to his new digs. Here he is eating a banana and watching MASH with Erik.
Lucky for us our house wasn't deserted while we dog sat. Our wonderful cousins, Marc & Cynthia, were in the area doing a window/roofing job. They happened to be here over Christmas and joined us for Christmas Eve & Christmas Day! It was so nice to have everyone with us and Sheila had plenty of delicious food for us all.
The best gift of the season turned out to be musical bells that I bought for Karl.
Cynthia & Mom try to play 'Jingle Bells' with some success.
Merry Christmas!
After the holidays Karl and I got back to our usual routine of heading to the library to check out new arrivals. Karl loves to sit with his puppy and read books while I peruse the stacks.
Karl has started calling relatives and having conversations with them. He especially likes to make calls while Erik or I are on the phone talking. We hear "Gand ma. Hi. What choo doing? Yeah. Ok. Bye"
Erik has been on baby duty a lot lately as I have been off at births or doula meetings. After a recent meeting I arrived home at 8:30pm to my boys both asleep on the couch.
Here is Karl with his favorite Pooh Bear having a snack of apple & milk.
Mimicking Mom by reading a book on the couch after dinner.
The Sax family met some friends at the Air & Space museum in Virginia recently. Karl found all the planes and the space shuttle fascinating.
Karl with Ross Perot's helicopter that made it around the world in 3 months. Karl thinks he can do it faster.
After the museum & dinner we went over to ride a carousel. Karl held on for dear life and then started crying. He didn't really love it. I'm not sure his goal to fly around the world in a helicopter is a reality if we can't handle a stationary fake horse.
Most of our weekends are spent at home playing & making music. Erik is learning the trumpet, violin and playing the piano again. Karl loves sitting with us while we play.
Erik here. Back in March I wrote the first post about my health in which I threw down my own gauntlet. I have to confess now that I'm the same weight I was then. This post is why that isn't a bad thing though, aside from the fact that with the onset of winter, I have until spring before I can get the kayak into the water.
In April I switched jobs, and started to drive to work again instead of bicycling. From my high of 240 in 2010, I came down to my present weight of 220 primarily with the bicycle. Going back further, when I was 18, I bottomed out at about 140 at this height. I was borderline undernourished. I lived a normal western lifestyle after that, gaining 8-10 el-bee's a year as a matter of course. I credit the bicycle with turning things around; I needed an excuse to shed weight faster so it would be easier to ride.
I look back on the last 6 months as mildly successful. I still have an "overweight" BMI at 29.8; which is really .2 away from "obese". That's a pretty narrow margin to hang my hat on. At the same time, my outlook on food has changed dramatically, and 2011 saw no weight gain for the second year in a row. So even without exercise, my weight has become sustainable. Everyone likes lists, so here's a list of things I need to double down on, and maybe something in the list will help you as well. Chances are, if you're reading this, I like you, and I want you to live longer so we can hang out.
1. Food is medicine. We think of them in separate ways, but food can have a much bigger impact on your health than medicine can. One of my prescriptions is "meatless" sandwiches for lunch at work, usually a 12 grain bread, honey mustard, and a huge handful of spring mix lettuce, spinach or kale. You don't need a big lunch, stop paying for one! (Breakfast is coffee and a nutri-grain bar).
2. Plant based is best. Just today I again heard the myth of humans and animal fat from someone. Don't fool yourself, there are plenty of genius vegans out there, and they are more likely to live to be nonagenarians than people getting meat at every meal. Homo-Sapiens has always had a plant based diet.
3. If you're eating meat, eat really good meat. This means spending more money, which should help with cutting back.
4. Make your own bread (or pizza). Bread is kind of difficult to make. As many loaves as I've made, I still screwed up one really badly at christmas because I was in an unfamiliar kitchen and getting nagged to death by my mother. At the very least you'll appreciate other bread more and have less mindless eating.
5. Find a fruit that you can snack on, and then snack on it when you're not hungry. I go with Craisins, or maybe pistachios. I'd go with a banana a day if I wasn't allergic to them.
6. Drink organic whole milk instead of skim milk or whatever percent, opting for "pasteurized" instead of "ultra-pasteurized" where possible. Since I was a kid, I fooled myself into thinking milk was ok if it was 1% or skim. This way I drink less and enjoy it more. Again, it's more expensive, and it's got a lot of that medicine stuff going on, hydrocarbons that are no-doubt useful to organisms such as yourself. If you're going to put something into your body, go for the gold or go home. You're a huge investment as an animal.
7. Drink more water. My mom shocked me last year when she turned her nose up at water. I didn't know that she just plain didn't drink water, instead opting for diet sodas or a daily iced-coffee from Mcdonald's. She was recovering at my house because they pulled a tumor the size of a golf ball out of her gut. I think the anecdotal correlation between her beverage choice and her tumor is sound; it has been confirmed by legitimate studies. If you want something else, drink coffee, tea, or Bolthouse Farms' Carrot juice. The ingredients are "carrots."
7a. Your trash is soup stock - AKA tasty water. I've made soup stock out of asparagus ends, carrot tops, brocolli and brussel-sprout branches, pineapple heads, aging veggie trays, potato peels, bones and fat. I've put things into stock I can't even recall. I bet you could even use bean ends and maybe even corn husks. After an hour of simmering, these bits can be pitched into your compost heap (see #8) instead of the trash. This is a much tastier alternative to store-bought stock, and you can hold the salt. One box of stock in our pantry has almost 3 GRAMS of sodium.
8. Grow your own food. We were very successful deck farmers last year. I recommend getting a basil and rosemary plant from a nursery if you have any sunlight at all. We've had a ton of both since we started growing them, and we've been more apt to cook for ourselves and choose healthy recipes. I calculate we harvested over 60$ in basil last year. The other bonus comes from being in touch with where your food comes from, I definitely appreciate each bite more if I had to do the watering and other care to grow it. These herbs have another bonus, they have more of those awesome hydrocarbons, in this case "essential oils" that are vital for human health.
9. Throw away cookies. I'm into throwing away or giving away at least half of any cookies I might otherwise eat. If they are "gross" cookies, made with high fructose corn syrup, throw them away. If they are "good" cookies made with flour, sugar, nuts and stuff, try to give them away. It's better to throw away calories than vitamins.
10. No soda, diet or regular. Replace with coffee/tea. Don't dump a bunch of sugar and milk into them. Agave nectar or honey are ok. I calculated that I'd had almost 2 million calories worth of soda in my 20's. These calories did not replace anything or sustain me in any way, I know because I eat the same after cutting them. My body had to process hundreds of pounds of essentially body fat (3500 kcals per pound of fat). It's really amazing I'm not much fatter.
The underlying theme here is to spend more money on the food you're putting into your body, and compensate for the increased cost by cutting back on tonnage, and on eating out. I will predict that for each one of these items on this list, you get a free year of life (you're welcome!) an untestable hypothesis, but one well rooted in proven science. Also, watch Dan Buettner's Ted talk, which I helpfully embedded below on how to live to be 100. Walk. Drink Argiolas Costera or other granache spanish wines. Eat fish, durum wheat, cheese from grass-fed cows, fresh fish and as many plants as possible. The longer you live, the more friends I'll have, and apparently that's good for you too. There it is, my confession: wanting you to be healthy and live longer is for my own selfish ends.
Today I got my last gift of the holiday season, the gift of time. I had enough time today that I had a chance to get to the movies, which parents of very young children can only dream of unless they can afford a sitter on a regular basis. I saw the "silent film" a movie called "The Artist," about the decline of silent films in favor of the "talkies." While I didn't have time to get popcorn - I was 5 minutes late - I did have time for the delicious irony that took place in between when the movie was scheduled to start, and when the previews were through. The final preview was for the re-release of "Titanic" (in 3D). No, I am not even shitting you.
"The Artist" is fundamentally a movie that will hit you over the head with the philosophy behind Tom Wujec's TED talk. By the time you see someone give the 'finger' early on in the movie, I already had the feeling that if I were to hear someone talking, it would be obscene and droll. Later on, when the main character gets an early showing of the first "talkie" he laughs at how ridiculous it is, and I'm right there with him. When the fourth-wall of movie-audience is toyed with and he starts hearing the sounds of the world around him, you almost fear that you might hear the main character, and mentally beg him to wake up from his nightmare. When there finally is foley-voice work in this movie, it's a well placed relief. No, it's not an entirely silent film, but it is entirely in that style, with audience script cues and lip reading when appropriate.
If you have time to see a movie soon, it should be this one. If you are so afforded by modern technology, you should check out the movie "The General" a 1926 movie with Buster Keaton first. Apparently, it's available online here; although if you can get a dvd or something you'll like it better than the crappy streaming on that site. Anyway "the general" is really cool in that you can get a sense for what kinds of things they used to try in these movies in the way of special effects, or as they used to call it, "creativity." Old movies used to be shot on a 4x3 aspect ratio onto rolls of proofs and edited together into a master. The prints made off the master might be toned in various hues and sent off to the theaters. I was delighted to see all the sliding transitions and toning, cigarette burns and dodged transitions put to work in "the Artist," subtle, but still there as an homage.
With "The Artist" you get a sense that these concepts of editing together proofs in a darkroom have become more refined and appealing, but you also get to experience what we've lost. Sure, talkies and modern movies have brought us all kinds of great things, but the silent films gave us certain affordances, and it's worth understanding what those are. It's relaxing, like getting a haircut, but thrilling like reading a book, and you get to fill in the voices and intonations in your head. You're afforded the opportunity to use your own imagination, and connect more closely with the story and it's rendering. For those of you who have ever intoned "the book was much better" you just might have your doe-eyed faith in the motion pictures restored after seeing such a film - no doubt shot on black and white safety-film to reduce risks from fires...
Erik here. Just eating some cheese and adding some pictures. Sadly, I've had to sideline the boat project. For one thing, I missed the deadline for getting it into the water by winter. I'll get it done for the spring though. Since then, just about everything stopped working in our master bathroom, so I started scouting for materials to gut and redo the whole thing. It all started when I found this funky chest at the Habitat Restore:
And used my jig-saw to convert it into a sink!
A craigslist find: a 5' claw foot iron tub. Some white enamel cleaned up the rustiness nicely.
In order to fit this into our bathroom, we required a slightly radical change to the layout of our master bedroom. This wall was moved from left to right about 3 feet, making room for a tub in addition to our shower.
Since that picture I've ripped down the wall with the door to out tiny "toilet room" to the left. Then I found a 2nd hand faucet and drain to complete FRANKENSINK!
Claire doesn't really like Frankensink. Yet. Once the whole thing is together, I think she'll like it. We're also pulling the old laminate and putting down tile, not to mention a full size shower stall.
Here are pictures of Karl acting out various "moods."
Thoughtful:
Incredulous:
Humble:
Surprise:
Nefarious:
Happy:
Recalcitrant:
Menacing
Frustrated:
Which Karl are you?
Claire has confirmed that I am not allowed to use these as a collage for a Christmas card. Too bad.
