I'm not one to spend a lot of time in the kitchen or do anything elaborate, but I don't actually mind cooking. What I really don't like is having to think up what we are going to eat. Like everybody, I have about four old reliable recipes that I use over and over, and I get just as bored of them as everybody else in the house.

So I tried Hello Fresh (a couple of years ago) and Blue Apron (last year), and I liked them. A lot. Somebody else thinks up what you're going to eat, sends you the ingredients, and then you just cook it up. The recipes from both services were simple, but they had sauces and marinades and sides that I would never have thought of. It was great. 

(It wouldn't have worked when the kids were still living at home, though, even if I ordered the family box-- it wouldn't have been enough food for MadMax in his Teen Eating Phase, which was astonishing. The boy can eat.)

But there are some problems with the whole system. One, of course, is the massive amount of packaging. You get a big cardboard box that is tightly fitted with another big styrofoam box, and then everything inside is individually packaged. And there are several fake ice packs. The only thing we can recycle around here is the cardboard box. The services go to great lengths to remind you that you can reuse the ice packs, but still they pile up. Who needs thirty ice packs?

The other problem is the same problem you get with any subscription service: the weekly shipment comes unless you remember to cancel it. With Blue Apron last year, you could schedule (or cancel) your shipment up to five weeks in advance (if I'm remembering right). I knew I wouldn't want any shipments in the summer when MadMax was home, so I went online and cancelled five weeks out.

Then of course I forgot all about it. The five weeks happened to run out while we were out of town for two weeks, so when we got back, there was a food box that had been sitting in our garage for a week, and another one that arrived the day after we got home. And then, because you have to cancel about a week in advance, we got ANOTHER box the next week. I used some of it, but most of it just went in the trash. *fume*

Now I'm trying something else, and so far I love it. It's called PrepDish, and instead of getting actual food, you get a weekly menu, with recipes for four dinners, a breakfast, a salad, and a snack. You also get a beautifully organized shopping list and a prep plan. The idea is to spend two hours one day per week doing all the prep work for all the meals--chopping, making sauces, baking potatoes,etc. Then most of your work is done and you can throw dinner together in 20-30 minutes. 

Honestly, I have yet to do the whole prep day thing, but it's worth the price (less than $10/month if you get the annual plan) to have someone send me menu ideas and organize my shopping. The meals are good ones: simple but different than the kinds of things I normally think of. I've modified them some-- we don't get good seafood in land-locked Montana very often, so sometimes I sub in chicken instead of fish or shrimp--but usually I just need the ideas. So far, thumbs up.

Oh, and one other thing-- she has three menu choices: paleo, gluten-free, and keto. We don't need any of those diet options, but it's easy enough to modify to suit yourself. Paleo is low carb, so I use that one and add a side of rice or whatever. 

Have you tried a menu subscription service? What did you think?

As always, this is not an ad, I don't get anything from it. Just telling you my experience.

Less is More

You gotta feel for the Pulitzer Prize committee. Everybody knows that the one inescapable, inarguable contribution that the US has made to the global scene is entertainment-- and especially, that glitzy, slick, nine-figure-budget that is the summer blockbuster movie, the superhero extravaganza, the self-defined epic space opera. (And I'm a charter member of the blockbuster fan club so no disrespect meant.)

But this doesn't exactly sit well with those who are concerned with the higher echelons of American ART. What are the judges for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction going to do? They can't just throw up their hands and hand the Pulitzer to James Patterson (with apologies to the prolific Mr. Patterson, who successfully writes more novels in six (three?) months than I have written in my entire lifetime). They must feel the need to recognize something or someone that lends some gravitas. Some credibility. There's a certain need to prove that American capital-A Art isn't all about the glitz, the latest advances in CGI.

Unfortunately, that means the Pulitzer prize-winner often ends up being a book I don't want to read. It's not that I'm a literary idiot. I have my cred. I wrote my master's thesis on Ulysses, which I have now read four times. I somehow managed to maintain a 4.0 en route to my master's degree, which I finished when I was 52. But at this moment in my life, I don't want to read dense, difficult, existential plodders, or atrocity-filled horror stories, even if they do accurately portray the dark side of the USA. I know horrible things have happened and are happening, but reading fiction about them gives me nightmares. Literally.

So you can imagine my happiness while reading Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, which won the Pulitzer in 2018. It's the story of a middle-aged gay man who is escaping the country so he has a legit excuse for missing his long-time now-ex lover's wedding to someone else. It's poignant and literary and erudite (air-you-dite or airoo-dite, which are we choosing?), but it's also witty and absorbing and even outright hilarious at times. I started giggling so hard about something or other while reading next to sleeping Dean the other night that I was afraid I'd wake him up. Less is actually fun to read. Highly recommended.

p.s. I wonder how much push-back they've received from people who think the Pulitzer winner should always be serious. Hmmmm. I don't follow that stuff enough to know.

Fwd: 7ToM: Things you do. As one does.

Lily pads in bloom at the pond near our house

1. In the early Facebook days, I had a set-in-stone rule for myself that I would never click on the ads. It was pretty easy to follow because there was rarely anything I was interested in. I'm not on FB very often anymore, but I have to say their ad-targeting algorithm is a lot better than it used to be. I'm often tempted to click these days, they've got my tastes nailed. (So far, if I'm really interested, I leave FB and google it instead of clicking on the ad, but I'm not so naive as to think that FB isn't figuring that out.)

2. I'm less good about clicking on things in my Google news feed. Partly this is because it can be hard to tell when something is an actual news story and when it's an ad. I try to always notice the source of the headline and only click when it's a source I recognize-- Reuters or AP or CNN or whatever. 

3. But I'm not sure about Buzzfeed. Is it real content, or is it just fancied up ads? (Is there any difference?) I click on their stuff all the time-- 27 highest rated Amazon life hacks, 18 best YA books of 2018, 21 Things Europeans can't believe Americans Do (one of them is wear white sneakers (trainers)-- and I'm having reverse disbelief that this could be a problem. Why wouldn't you?) I've learned about some great stuff from them, like my current favorite gizmo, the Smart Funnel, which makes it easy to salvage the last few drops of your shampoo. Makes my cheapskate little heart go pitter-pat.

4. Here is my favorite Buzzfeed article so far, though: 27 Things Everyone Over the Age of 40 Does For Absolutely No Reason At All. It's my favorite because I am proud to say I only do three of them, maybe three and a half, so it makes me feel not quite so irrelevant. And I'm OK with those three because they're wrong-- why does everyone over the age of 40 think having holes in your jeans is so funny? Because paying for jeans with holes in them is ridiculous. I mean, if you get an artistic rip or hole in your jeans due to wear and tear, of course you wear them. But to PAY for jeans with holes already in them is silly. Amiright?

5. Or #24, why does everyone over the age of 50 hold their phone with two hands? Because aging wrists, obviously. The dang phone gets heavy after awhile. 

6. But I don't love coleslaw, I don't double-click on links, I use my thumbs for texting unless my thumbs are getting sore, and I never dictate my texts (although I confess that is mainly because I have tried and I can't get it to work).  In fact, Siri never works for me. I've always blamed this on MadMax. Once not long after I got my first smartphone, I came upon him and his friends making rude 11-year-old jokes and fart noises to an increasingly confused Siri. I don't think she's ever forgiven me. The only response I ever get from her is some variation of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that."

7. Here is one thing you should never do: shop for underwear online. My sisters and I have a long-standing tradition of restocking our underwear supply at our every-other-year family reunion. It's in Destin with its enormous outlet mall, and we go to the rhymes-with-hockey outlet and stock up. But for some reason this past year I never made it to that store, and a couple of weeks ago I noticed that my underwear was in tatters. So I went online to the rhymes-with-hockey website and ordered more. Now everywhere I go, my browser is plastered with underwear ads. Just what I wanted.

I'll get back to the mental health topic later. Have a great mental health Monday!

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I know. I'm late.

Years ago, I said to Dean how lucky we were that we have had no major health issues in our family. He looked at me blankly. It took me a few minutes to figure out what he meant-- at the time, I was having chronic migraines (according to my neurologist, more than 15 migraines a month="chronic"). For some reason I don't think of migraines as a health problem, they're just something I deal with. It hadn't even occurred to me that from the outside, chronic migraines would seem like a major health problem.

(The migraines are way better now-- I've had only two in the past month, and since I have meds that mean I can still be up and about while I have one, it's not a big deal anymore.)

But I've discovered a similar attitude in myself about mental health. I have intermittent draining-but-not-devastating depression. We've talked about that before. I also have problems with paranoia (more about that in a minute). But I've never thought of myself as someone with mental health issues. At all. Never crossed my mind.

But last month on Instagram, there were a zillion posts about May being Mental Health Awareness month, and people were posting about their mental health issues, and suddenly some of them sounded pretty familiar. OH. I guess I have mental health issues. And then suddenly, everywhere I turn I've encountered people, books, blog posts, and conversations about mental health. I'm trying to pay attention.

I seem to be immune from the national-level conspiracy obsessions (how in the world would Hillary have had time to run a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor while she was campaigning sixteen hours a day and was one of the most watched people on the planet? it doesn't even make sense) but I can drive myself pretty nuts with paranoia in my personal life.

Part of it stems from being A BIT hypersensitive-- a small unexpected reaction from one of my friends can lead to days of absolute certainty that I've offended her and now she's turning all our other friends against me. Dean has a new job as of a year and a half ago, and his enthusiasm and new-found absorption with his new responsibilities has on two different occasions led me to confront him with his supposed affair, because why else would he suddenly be so happy to go into the office on weekends? (and half-a-dozen other perceived certainties).

And I am not just suspicious. I am dead certain. To the point where I was already thinking about how we would tell the kids and where I would move and what furniture I would take with me. It's, if you'll pardon the colloquialism, CRAZY. I'm discovering that I'm a little nuts.

Hmmmmm. I haven't even made it to what I set out to say but this is already long and I have other things I need to do today. To be continued. Maybe. Do I even want to get into this? I will hit send before I have a chance to second guess.

We're gonna party like it's 1979

So guess what? My 40th high school reunion is this summer. FORTY. How the hell did that happen? 

You may remember me freaking out about my 35th college reunion last fall, but let me tell you-- that freakout was minor compared to what I'm going through now. For one thing, I was a junior transfer to the school where I received my undergraduate degree, so I didn't really expect to see many people that I knew. And for another, my follow undergraduate alums are such a distinguished group that there was no way that my life as a mom and an occasional part-time office worker was going to measure up. So instead I could take a perverse pleasure in under-selling myself-- little ol' me, just a bottle blond doctor's wife with no career. HA!!! 

But high school. I could completely lose my mind over this. It's casual, thank the lord, and not formal, so I can get by with capris or a t-shirt dress (I think). But how nuts should I be? 

I thought about dieting, but then I ordered Spanx instead. And I thought about getting a facial and my eyebrows done and my teeth whitened. (I might still do all that.) But I'm pretty sure no matter what I do, I'll still look like a chubby, 57-year-old version of my formerly teenage self, and there's not a single damn thing that can be done about that. 

I keep reminding myself that everybody else in my class is also 40 years older than they used to be, but I went to high school in the land of discreet plastic surgery and botox. Doubtless there will be quite a few who are considerably better preserved than I am. 

Getting there is going to take a feat of insane air travel logistics, since it falls the weekend between two other reunions of the family type. But since reader Laurel will be there, and our mutual dear friend Kim, and maybe  few other people that I truly am looking forward to seeing, I pulled out the credit card and threw caution to the wind. 

And since it's not till mid-July, I've got plenty of time to stress. 

7T: aches and pains and baby geese

1. I went on a road trip last week to visit both kids. First stop was Bozeman to get the annual tour of interesting places from MadMax who is at school there. Then the next day we drove to Salt Lake City for PellMel's birthday and Mother's Day weekend. I love a good road trip and this one was really fun. Dean was able to fly down for the Salt Lake part. 

2. But nothing shows your age like having to sit still for a couple of hours. I used to be a road warrior, but not anymore. Between the bathroom breaks and the now-mandatory stretching stops, we rarely went more than a couple of hours without a break. At one point we went three hours and I could barely walk when I got out of the car.

3. For some reason I couldn't get interested in the audiobook I had downloaded, so I listened to a bunch of podcasts. Highly recommend the Broken Record podcast interview with Pentatonix, the Without Fail podcast interview with Paul Holes (about the search for the Golden State killer), and the 10% Happier podcast interview with Brene Brown.

4. When I got back, we had babies! We've had a Canada goose hanging around for a couple of weeks, but there didn't seem to be a partner. So we were surprised when one day there were two geese and six or seven goslings in tow. They are the cutest things. I will try putting a picture in here and we'll see if it posts. (If it doesn't, you're not missing much- I don't want to scare them so I took it from pretty far away.) 

5. In honor of the appearance of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue this week (doesn't it usually come out in February or March? not sure why it was so late this year), here is the link to the rant I wrote back in 2013. I don't usually care all that much about it, but that year they published a special insert about how to "get the look" of a swimsuit model, and it pissed me off. To put it mildly. They've never done it again, so I must not have been the only one who didn't like it.

6. Remember when I was on an eco-guilt trip about using disposable face wipes every night? Well, I found a great solution and I am a happy convert. They're called micro-fiber face cloths and you just get them wet and wipe your face, then throw them in the laundry. No soap required. I have about a dozen and my favorites are here. 

7. One of the things we tried in Salt Lake City was Top Golf. It's sort of like if you made a golf course into a bowling alley. It was fun for all of us, but especially for Dean and MadMax who are big golfers. The scoring system favors accuracy, so Dean cleaned up. MadMax is more about the huge drive that doesn't really go where you want it to but soars one hell of a long way. It's expensive but fun if you're a golf fan.

And since we are, and it looks to be a rainy weekend, we'll probably spend the better part of ours watching the PGA Championship, which starts today (it's Thursday as I'm typing this). Have a good one.

p.s. I forgot that I get an email version when people comment, so Hi Laurel and Julie! But I can't respond to them directly at the moment.

7T: Game of Thrones edition, plus a couple of extra things

Spring is here!

(I'm not a fan of GoT, but I live with and know a bunch of fans so this is my --what do you call it? hot take? spicy take? bored take?)

1. PellMel read the first four Game of Thrones (GoT) books before the fifth one came out and gushed, You have to read these!! They are amazing!! It was probably around 2010 because I remember I got her the fifth one for Christmas and it was published in 2011.

2. So Dean read them. But I refused. No freaking way, I said, I am not getting sucked into another epic fantasy series before all the books are out. I will read them when they are all published. If you know anything about the GoT books, you are laughing now, because no more have appeared (the author George R. R. Martin is/was projecting that there would be seven, with an option for eight if he needed it).

(2a. Same goes for Patrick Rothfuss. Dean loved the first two of his Kingkiller Chronicles even more than he loves GoT, but the first one was published in 2007, the second one in 2011, and nothing since. I haven't read them because I was waiting until all of them had been published. But I might cave in on these ones because Dean loves them so much.)

3. So then the TV series started in 2011. (2011 was a big year for epic fantasy, wasn't it?!) We didn't watch it because a) we don't have HBO, and b) we were going to (hahahahaha) wait until all the books were out, because everybody knows you should read the book first, right?

4. But this winter, with nothing we wanted to watch on TV, we decided to try them. I picked up the first season on DVD awhile ago when I saw it on sale, so we had it. I made it through the first episode, which was considerably too dark for my taste, but by ten minutes into the second episode, I was done. Dean is completely absorbed, but every time I try another epsisode, I give up again. What is wrong with you people??? Why do you love this show? It is horrible. There are horrible, cruel people doing horrible, cruel things to each other and the camera lingers lovingly on all of it.

(4a. We went to see Avengers: Endgame last weekend, and a character was stabbed and then the camera cut away. I leaned over to Dean and said, if this was Game of Thrones, we would have spent another minute and a half watching blood gush out of that guy while he died.)

5. Seriously. The last time I tried to watch an episode, in the first five minutes, one of the dozen or so horribly cruel people asked someone who was being tortured in front of him, "would you rather lose your fingers or your tongue" and since I immediately got up and left the room, I don't know which one he picked but I could still hear him screaming from the kitchen. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND our culture's current obsession with torture as entertainment.

Don't get it. Don't want to. Never will. But Dean is apparently not bothered because he finished out the season and to be honest I'm pretty sure he wants to watch the rest. So I will probably get him the boxed set of all the seasons that are out for Father's Day, but I am not watching them. The good thing about knowing I will never watch GoT is that I can read all the funny opinion pieces and memes and I don't have to worry about spoilers, because I don't care. Go ahead and spoil me.

6. I have found a balance of social media involvement that is working for me, so I'm going to stick with it, which means after this one, I'm going to post by email. When you post by email, you can't schedule the posts, or post pictures (I don't very often anyway), and I won't be able to read or reply to comments. Just so you know. Y'all don't comment much anyway. Email me if you need me, link is in my profile. Apologies for not posting on a schedule.

7. I don't think we've ever talked about tarot here because I was trying not to offend my more conservative readers, but as I told you a couple of months ago, I've lost my conservative readers anyway, so why not. Maybe sometime I will post more background info (short version: tarot isn't magic, it's just a way of accessing intuitive knowledge). I have a new deck called the Rebel Deck, which I love with a great love. Usually I pull three cards from it, and this was my most recent reading. It made me laugh. I think the message is clear.

Three cards from the Rebel Deck

Have a great day. I missed this.

call in your angels

Look. Those of you who are rational, skip this one. This is for the dreamers, the agents of change, the weirdos.

I'm going offline for awhile. I'm still figuring out exactly what that means, but it will mean at least for a couple of weeks, I won't be posting here, and I won't be in any of the usual social outlets either. I did my own version of a ritual this afternoon, a set of actions that helps me sink a little deeper into the unknown, so that I could see if there's anything I needed to say before I sign off. (And you all know from experience that it may not be very long. I never seem to be able to leave aside blogging for very long.)

Anyway. This is what I came back with. Where we're going, the new thing we are trying to birth-- it's different. It's not going to look the same as what's come before. If like me, you can feel the tiny fragile new beginnings of this, the flame that nearly gets doused under the flood of hate day after day after day, .... we just need to keep going.

Keep breathing in the anger and the hate and the prejudice, the clinging to power, the structures that never seem to die, and keep breathing out your own version of the new way. It won't be the same for you as it is for me, because that is part of the difference that is being born. the old way was about measuring up to an external standard, fitting in, making yourself fit other people's expectations. And even our current attempts to change this have just resulted in more external standards we have to measure up to-- liberal ideals or conservative ideals or the way you were raised or the way your friends think now.

Let it be new. Figure it out as you go.

that's all I got.

updates on several things

I should stop talking about things I'm unqualfied to talk about, so I will just update you on things we've talked about previously.

- A couple of months ago I told you I was going to try out a more intentional meditation practice. I did really well for about six weeks, at least in terms of keeping up with it. I'm sure I didn't meditate every single day, but I didn't miss many days, either. Then a couple of situations happened and things got stressful, and as I've said before, the more I "need" to meditate, the harder it seems to be to find the time.

But overall, this is going well-- the doing it part of it. I'm still terrible at meditation. I used to think it was because I had an unusually distractible mind, but now that I'm using this app (10% Happier) that is sort of a meditation community, I'm discovering that it's that way for everybody. So, I'm still doing it, I'm still terrible at it, and it's still helping with my sanity.

- Oh, Lord, remember the winter vegetables project? That has been a total fail. Partly because I haven't cooked much. We were gone, and then Dean was gone, and we've both had things going on in the evening, and a couple of times when I was planning on cooking dinner, we got a last minute invite to meet friends out for dinner, etc etc. You get the idea. But the intention is still floating around in my head, and since this is Montana, it's still winter no matter what the calendar says, so I may get back to this. After vacation (see below). Although by then, it really will be moving toward spring. I hope.

- Last week I told you I was halfway through The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. Honestly, I picked it up because I knew I didn't have the stomach for the brutality I've heard about in his better known book Underground Railroad, but I'd heard he is an amazing writer, so I wanted to read something by him. And he is. A terrific writer, I mean. Intuitionist is crazy smart.

You could read it as just a standard plot-- young woman gets framed for an elevator accident and goes off on her own to find out what really happened-- but it is also an allegory? satire? alternate reality? with all kinds of stuff happening. It's fascinating. Highly recommended if you want your brain stretched, but if you just want to read a good plot (which is all I'm going to be reading on vacation next week)(see below), probably not the best choice. I will give it this-- unlike most allegories? satires? alternate realities? where the plot eventually falls apart under the weight of The Message Being Delivered, this one really does work as its own story.

- You know, I confess I've had the thought I don't have any friends a couple of times in the last few months. I've been surprised to hear two other people say the same thing recently. People who look as if they have plenty of friends. Which has me wondering, is this part and parcel of the larger changes we're going through? Is there something about the breaking up of cultural expectations that is also disrupting personal connections? I don't know. Have just been thinking about this.

- So here we are at below. I can't remember how much I've told you about our upcoming vacation that starts on Saturday, but I am really looking forward to it. We went to a little town north of Cabo for a week last spring with both kids and loved it. When they were able to finagle the same week off this year and I asked them where they wanted to go, the unanimous decision was the same place.

So off we go. I won't be writing anything new next week, but while poking around for some other stuff I ran across a couple of old posts that made me laugh, so if I have time I'll set them up to repost next week. Otherwise, I'll catch you when I get back. Hope spring is springing wherever you are.

7ToF: you may be right, I may be crazy

1. We rented "First Man" this week. The space program has always fascinated me-- when I was in third grade, I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything, in spite of the fact that I was blind without my glasses and I had recently thrown up on the Mexican hat ride at Six Flags. The space program part of the movie was fascinating and well done, but like everybody, we thought Ryan Gosling's portrayal of Armstrong with a totally flat affect was a) kinda boring and b) not accurate, based on the little we know. Interesting choice to portray him that way, but not entirely successful.

2. So, on to the real topic of today's post (just didn't want it to show up in the lede). I wrote a post about this once before and then deleted it, because it sounds nuts. But I'm tired of worrying so much about what other people think-- literally exhausted by it-- so I'm writing it again and this time I'm not deleting it.

3. I sometimes get sort-of psychic responses to the things I post here. I'm definitely not psychic, in fact I can be remarkably clueless about what's going on around me (I should write a post about this sometime because I have some stories to tell). Butsometimes, somehow, I know how someone responded to a post, without them ever contacting me in any way. This doesn't include knowing who the someone is, but just a very clear sense of someone's approval, or disgust, or anger, or eye-roll. The reason it seems psychic rather than just something-that-occurs-to-me is because sometimes it surprises the hell out of me. In the vein of, it never occurred to me that someone would think that way.

4. In response to the post that went up on Wednesday, really I got nothing. Which may just mean that nobody read it. But in response to the second part that I posted yesterday, I got a very strong response: No no no no. We are not building bridges. This is a war and we are going to win it.

5. Which would never in a million years occur to me, because I am a middle child and an Enneagram 5 (with strong tendencies toward 9) or maybe it's just me, and I am incapable of not seeing both sides of an issue. I am a peacemaker, a bridge builder. The thought Why can't we all just get along? occurs to me regularly.

That thought, that this is a war that someone will win, inevitably makes me think, well then what are we going to do with the losers? Think about the aftermath of WWI, or WWII, or Vietnam. Is that what we want here? To be the same-old, same-old, to the victors go the spoils and devil take the hindmost?

(give me a minute here while I think of some more clichés.)

6. Maybe that is what you want. And if so, you've lost me. It's not much help to me as I'm involved in trying to hold a congregation of much-loved church members together. We're supposed to pick a side and say to the 20% of our congregation (on either end) that would leave, sorry, we've moved on. You're no longer welcome here. That may be what happens. But if it is, it's wrong.

7. I guess it's kind of presumptuous of me, but I see our congregation as a microcosm of what's happening in the larger world. I'm hoping we can BUILD BRIDGES. Take your war somewhere else.

I get that the reason I can think this way is because I am white and not poor and my children are not in danger of being shot because they're wearing a hoodie. And maybe that's all it is. Maybe this is just me being insensitive about how bad it is. But I can't help but hope that we could figure out some way to bring us all along toward a new way of being together.

That will probably get an eye-roll. Excuse me while I find my eight track tape of kum-by-yah. I still know all the words to I'd Like to Teach the World To Sing. (in perfect harmony)

I just went and watched the YouTube video of the New Seekers singing that song in 1972. They're all white.