Now, here's what I'm talking about. 7:30 a.m., full of coffee and quiet, on a dark morning with rain outside. It's so nice I could almost eat soup. The high today is 82F, which might not sound cool, but believe me, it is. The rain is intermittent and light, so I hope to get in a substantial walk with Dora this morning, after a fairly inactive weekend.
Otherwise, I have two quizzes to finish for the poetry course, and then it's ready to go. Recording will happen the second full week of September, 9/11-9/15, and shortly thereafter it'll be available for subscribers to Homeschool Connections' recorded archive. Then I'll turn my attention to the Metrical Forms course which follows on it. That will record in November, and the Stanza Forms course sometime in the spring.
I'm fairly well caught up on Sun essays, I think. Two more to write for that same week when I'll be recording, but that's it for what we have scheduled so far. My colleague has been writing to poets and critics and other people in a fluster of activity, lining them up to write introductions to poems of their choosing as guest columnists --- I have to take deep breaths when he gets like this, because I feel that I should be doing the same thing (or more precisely, I feel that he feels that I should be doing the same thing and wonders why I'm not), but really . . . I know where this fluster of activity comes from, and I'm not in that same place, and I'm also not the senior editor, so I just have to let this phase run its course. And, in the meantime, write my piddly little essays, one after another, for as long as there are piddly little essays to write.
Wearing today:
Willow, for a fourth August wear. And I've broken out my good old Birkenstock Madeiras, possibly the hobbitiest of all the hobbity shoes I own. Yeah, they're a little clumpy, but they're also comfortable, and I like the toddler-shoe aesthetic that they suggest, especially with a swing dress. They've sat unworn all summer and could use, maybe, a little cleanup and oiling, but I'm happy to have found them waiting for me in the closet. They're a great shoe for this transitional time of year: less beach, more back-to-school, even when back-to-school has nothing directly to do with me anymore. I bought them on Ebay two years ago? Or three? I can't remember. And I've always thought, "Well, these are pretty nerdy. I love them."
Anyway, here we are. These shoes will be fun with colorful tights later on, but they're good for walking right now, especially as I want to save my suede Rosemeads from the wet.
The inevitable rear view. In a lot of ways, dresses with waists and flared skirts (read: Fiona) sit better on my body, I think, but eh. I love swing dresses. The pleat in the yoke of this design is such a pretty touch. As well as adding volume to the swing, it also draws the eye upward, which is frankly welcome as far as I'm concerned. By all means let your eye rest between my shoulder blades and not elsewhere.
Front view again. I like this dress's neckline so much, too. I'll be comfortable for working, walking, and exercising inside. After two days off, I'm looking forward to picking up my weights again and getting down on the floor to work arms, shoulders, back, core, and glutes. And I especially look forward to just being able to do that when the impulse strikes me, without all the hassle of changing into "workout clothes."
In food news:
Yesterday, coming out of Mass, we stopped at the enormous fig tree which flourishes beside the basilica parking lot. My husband had brought figs home one night last week, and we'd had them halved, roasted, with brown sugar (actually Swerve, which I love), a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and honey (from Greece, brought back in bulk by our children, so I guess if we ever go to Greece we won't have pollen allergies). Yesterday, again, we went picking and brought back a whole dog dish full of figs (because a dog dish was the receptacle we had in the car, that's why).
Dinner last night --- which pushed me way over my "caloric budget," but it was worth it --- was brie baked with
1) a layer of diced red onions caramelized in butter, brown-sugar Swerve (I don't know why I bothered, except that I don't have real brown sugar at the moment), and balsamic vinegar, which reduced to this lovely sweet-tart-oniony compote. I spread that over the brie in the baking dish.
THEN
2) a layer of halved figs
AND
3) a thin layer of shredded prosciutto
I baked this for half an hour, which was really too long, because then I had to put the whole thing in the fridge to solidify again a little. At any rate, all the layers sank nicely into the liquefied brie and then were re-congealed there.
We ate most of the brie round, with these additions, with pita crisps and sauvignon blanc. It was decadent, but then it was the feast of St. Monica, and I love and lean on her. Besides, you just gotta live a little. As I said, it was totally worth blowing the top out of my daily caloric allotment.
Tonight I think we'll have pork chops, because they're in the fridge drawer and need to be cooked. I want to remember to marinate them in something acidic today --- not sure whether we've consumed our limit of balsamic vinegar for the week or not, because that would be one option. The other would be lemon juice. Or lime, if I wanted to go Mexican-ish, but then we do that an awful lot. On the other hand, I have all these tomatoes and peppers I need to do something with, plus some cilantro, so maybe I should make salsa to put over the pork chops and just go that route. OR I could do something Greek-ish with lemon juice and also peppers and tomatoes. That's another option. The main thing is not to have the chops be too dry --- always the challenge. I don't really like cooking pork chops, because they never turn out moist or tender, the way restaurant chefs seem to be able to make them. They have to be well-done, but there's such a fine line between well-done and too well-done. And I don't have a sous-vide apparatus, which I guess would be the answer in such an instance. I've never done sous-vide, and I'm not sure I'm going to start today, especially as I don't have the apparatus. Is there a way to do sous-vide without the equipment? I'm not even sure.
For now I'm going to finish my coffee and gird myself for a long walk with the dog. It's early, and usually the greenway is crowded --- that's why I often wait until the heat of the day to walk. Better heat than a new dog to face every 50 feet. But if it's rainy, possibly lots of folks will stay home. Rainy days make for excellent walk days, because fewer people want to walk in the rain. Dora thinks I'm nuts --- she does not like to walk in the rain. But really it's the best time.
So, on with it.
PS: Yesterday was St. Monica's day, and today it's the feast of her famous son, St. Augustine of Hippo. Reading Suzanne Wolfe's beautiful novel The Confessions of X would be one good way to commemorate these great saints of the Church's first four centuries.
LATER:
Walked an hour and ten minutes, and 3.25 miles. It's a lot cooler out there, but very humid, so I came home sweaty. Had an early lunch: a low-carb tortilla with two slices of prosciutto, a little smear of neufchatel, a couple of small tomato slices, and a red banana pepper. Now drinking water and reading, in a desultory way, more of Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry. Husband has been to the dentist (abscess, needing a root canal, but they can't get him in until sometime in October) and now has gone to the gym. Then he'll decamp to school to teach his one Monday-afternoon class.
By the way, since none of my various apps has a place for this, I'm going to drop my current measurements here:
Bust: 36
Waist/abdomen (at my belly button, not where I usually position my belt): 40
Hips: 45
Thigh circumference: 25
I offer myself this information with no shame, though inescapably I think, "Yep, shaped like a pear all right." I really should measure my bicep circumference, too, but there I can already tell that my exercises are paying off: my arms are firmer and more toned after several weeks of more or less daily work with small weights. This is what I'm hoping to accomplish in other targeted exercise: to replace body fat with lean muscle mass as much as possible, to increase strength, flexibility, and stability, and to continue that trend as I age.
My aim is to do weekly measurements from here on out. I already weigh in on Mondays, which is . . . I mean, I keep losing and gaining the same pound, but as my husband points out, it's the measurements that really count as markers of progress. I don't mind what I weigh, and I'm certainly not going to starve myself --- the point is that strength, muscle mass, and overall physical ability that I want to nurture and sustain as much as I can for as long as I can.
All of this, incidentally, is a peculiar function of American life. I can't help recalling how fit I was the entire time we lived in England, at least when I wasn't pregnant, without even trying. Part of that was a function of being 35, not 58. But most of it was simply that we walked and biked everywhere, or we didn't go there. We lived up a flight of stairs, too, and went up and down multiple times a day, if not an hour. I moved there with a toddler and my own leftover postpartum fat; by that Christmas I still had the toddler, but had dropped two sizes in all my clothes.
Again, I was 35, and that makes a difference. How the pre-menopause body behaves, even through the upheavals of pregnancy and breastfeeding, is not at all how the post-menopause body behaves. BUT put the post-menopause body in an American city or town, where it's a challenge to find a way to walk three miles in pleasant or non-dangerous surroundings, and where all the social infrastructure is organized around having a car, and you find that you really have to try, in ways that I think must sound mystifying to Europeans. I think about the June day in Bergen when we walked ten miles, just seeing the city --- and it was easy and normal and pleasant. We stopped in a coffee shop. We stopped in a supermarket. Everything we could possibly have wanted was available to us, readily and easily, by foot. It would actually have been far more trouble to drive to the supermarket than it was to walk (having a car in Bergen was a first-class pain, and I wouldn't do it again --- I'd wait to rent a car until I was leaving the city).
This is simply not the way things are in America, unless you live someplace like New York, which most of us don't. I don't like it --- it's hands-down my least favorite thing about American life. Everything is oriented toward being sedentary. I hate it. All my neighbors joyride around the neighborhood in golf carts, passing us as we walk the dog, and I think: you want to know what America looks like? This. I mean, it looks like a lot of other things that are mystifying to the rest of the civilized world, and on many fronts I can't blame the rest of the civilized world for being mystified. Believe me, there's a lot I don't understand, either, and it's my country.
Anyway. Later, after I have digested my lunch and my husband has gone safely to work and will not interrupt me, I will do some more exercise --- possibly as some weird reparation for all the golf carts. (I must not think about the golf carts, I must not think about the golf carts, I must not th. . .).
And after this little interlude, I'm back to work for a bit.
AFTERNOON:
I have
*made up the last two quizzes for my course
*revised several handouts and reloaded them onto the course page
*exercised intensively for 25 minutes: core, arms/shoulders/upper back, glutes, quads
*written some lines
*read and annotated the first 40 pages of Jane Scharl's play, Sonnez Les Matines (highly recommend, by the way), for this big essay I have due in mid-October --- you know, the month I'm planning to spend largely on the road
*refreshed my email a billion times, because I'm tired of these editors not making decisions about the poems I send them
*learned about the dead roaches in the Texasgirl's house (they had the exterminator come, and I guess the resulting insectoid carnage is coming as kind of a shock)
*laughed out loud at something Simcha Fisher posted on what used to be known as Twitter, about a young man entering seminary and receiving the mysterious white stone on which is engraved the one word he will mispronounce forever. Our pastor got "persevere."
BEDTIME REPORT:
Pork chops are intrinsically dry. That is all.