Girl Detective

From Wikipedia on “Life Hack”

Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.

From The New York Times, “Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems.” I’ve tested using my head as an amplifier for my car remote; it works.

From Wired, “10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning.” I’ve adopted the glass of water upon waking up. It’s a great idea. (This and above link from The Morning News)

At Smarterware, a snapshot of good advice for getting through one’s day, “Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality Over Quantity” (My husband sent the link to me; I didn’t get it from a site.)

From In Style magazine via CNN, “Drop 5 Years in 5 Minutes” offers simple make-up techniques that have maximum impact. The day I tried a few, I got an unsolicited compliment from a makeup-artist friend.

Also from In Style’s January issue, some down-to-earth advice on losing weight:

“Restrictive diets don’t work,” proclaims nutritionist Oz Garcia, Ph.D. Instead, he suggests:

Sleep 8 to 9 hours
Massages to reduce stress
Dark chocolate in moderation to control cravings
Sunshine (the real thing or a light box)
Exercise
Eat different things each day. Garcia recommends the Mediterranean plan from the Mayo Clinic.

Today’s my birthday. Forty-one, and even though that sounds “old” to me, I don’t feel it. Emotionally, at least–I have some early morning and post-yoga aches that make me humble and remind me to slow down. I also wish my other February birthday friends (so many of them!) health and happiness as this month comes to a close.

I’ve had a lovely day thus far, despite an oncoming cold. We began the day with a family snuggle, then I had my favorite breakfast–two cappuccinos, with a cherry pomegranate toaster pastry AND Stella d’Oro breakfast treats. G and the boys went out so I have time to myself this morning to read, write, journal, use my light box, do yoga and my hand labyrinth, and be amazed by the well wishes pouring in.

I feel very grateful today, for life in general and the specifics–my husband G, our kids 5yo Drake and 3yo Guppy, our community in Minnesota, family and friends both far and wide, real and virtual, present and absent, and for all who helped in ways big and small during my post-partum depression three years ago, part of my ongoing journey toward balance.

I feel more than a bit stunned by it all, and deer-in-the headlights when I think how impossible it would be to express all the gratitude to all those I feel it for. This quote, by Elizabeth Gilbert from Eat, Pray, Love, helps me feel a little less overwhelmed:

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.

I am saying thank you, right now, today, and I’ll try to keep on saying it however I can. Namaste.

Oh, how bitter I used to be about Valentine’s Day! Less bitter than I was in the old days, I’ve learned not to wait for someone else to give me what I want or need. It’s important to have pretty, delicious things in life, otherwise we STAY bitter, I think.

Here are a few links to neat items for you, a loved one, or a mom you know, for Valentine’s Day, any other occasion, or to create your own:

Rogue Chocolatier chocolates: Artisan chocolates created from bean to bar in micro-batches in NE Minneapolis. On sale at local shops such as Surdyk’s.

Chocolat Celeste: Truly beautiful chocolates crafted in St. Paul, MN.

Legacy Chocolates: Treasures from neighboring Wisconsin. Try their Potion 9 chocolate sauce over Sonny’s vanilla ice cream. Divine.

B.T. McElrath chocolates: I can’t pick one flavor to recommend: passionfruit, cinnamon/star anise, green tea, dark chocolate truffles. All are eye-rollingly good.

Pretty flowers. No need to buy for Valentine’s Day, when it will cost extra. When you do though, skip the cheap stuff: mums, daisies, carnations, baby’s breath, ferns. Go for just a few beautiful striking blooms, instead.

Bags! I’m going to venture outside of the Twin Cities and recommend Queen Bee Creations in Seattle, carried by Dabble in NE Minneapolis, among other stores. Super cute, well-made non-leather bags, wallets and accessories. Bonus, they just created stylish bike panniers that also have a strap for shoulder carrying!

Local jewelry! Northeast’s Dabble also carries a good selection of locally crafted jewelry, like the lovely, affordable items from Gazelle Beads that I can’t stop buying as gifts.

Shoes! I don’t know anyone who’d turn down a new pair of shoes. Something fancy and impractical, like strappy designer heels from Nordstrom Rack. Or warm, stylish boots to perk up the tail end of winter from Red Wing boots in Minnesota.

Use your imagination. No need to go for broke, especially in this economy; often the lovely little gifts are remembered most.

In the New York Times, Perri Klass on when to keep a sick kid home.

What do we know about the common cold, and about how it is transmitted? Just how infectious is that child whose cough hangs on for weeks? And how about the one with the drippy nose?

My friend Kitty is vindicated, as she said the same thing in the comments for my post on Wellness Remedies.

Also from the New York Times, if you do get a cold, don’t blow your nose. Yes, really.

My kids are prone to barfing. They’re not only susceptible to whatever stomach virus might be running around, but if they skip dinner (which they periodically do, in protest of my healthy, whole-food meals) their blood sugar drops so far that they throw up the first thing they eat in the morning.

After the latest virus visited now-3yo Guppy and 5yo Drake, I joked I was an expert at the barfing protocol. “What’s that?” someone asked. I learned what to do from the handbook my pediatrician gave at the first visit. Once I got the hang of it, I appreciated how effective it was–it limits the duration of the bout to about 6 or 8 hours. Those 6 to 8 hours are yucky ones, but much better than if they’d lasted 12 to 24, which is common when fluids and food are given too soon.

1. Wait ONE HOUR after vomiting before offering fluids. Sooner, and it will come right back up.

2. Start with small, frequent sips of clear liquids, no more than 1 ounce every 30 to 60 minutes. It’s tempting to give kids as much as they want; this will only lead to further vomiting. As hard as it is, limit the amount and speed of what they drink as best you can. I set a timer in the kitchen, so the kids can count down. It lessens (somewhat) the whining, pleading, and arguing. Give water, Pedialyte, Gatorade, white-grape juice, lemon-lime soda or ginger ale. Growing up, my parents would give us Jello water–one packet in twice the amount of water called for. Try to avoid things sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, though, as it’s been shown to contain mercury.

3. Once vomiting has stopped for 3 or 4 hours, you can increase the amount of fluids.

4. After 8 hours, you may begin a bland diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, toast, crackers, clear soups. Continue to serve tummy friendly foods for 24 hours after last vomiting.

At Salon, Rebecca Traister examines some recent women’s confessional articles in “Girlie Gross Out”, and wonders if it’s liberating or too much information:

Oversharing is in. And for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it’s not so much “too much information” as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body.

Traister doesn’t draw a conclusion, and I’m not sure there is one. I had an experience very similar to one of the several described in the article. I talked about it at the time, but rarely do anymore. It scared people, and that didn’t seem kind to do.

I’m reminded of the hubbub over breastfeeding photos on Facebook. I breastfed both my kids until they were at least a year old, often in public. But I always tried to be in a quiet place, and be discreet. It was something between my kid and me; I didn’t and don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. Yes, I fully support and encourage women to breastfeed in general, and their right to do so in public. Yet while I see how photographs of this support that right, they also bug me–they _are_ too much information. Mommy friends of mine breastfeed their kids around me all the time; that’s great. But they don’t deliberately solicit my attention to it, as do public photos, and the type of articles described at Salon.

My own conclusion then, if there is one, can be only about me. I try not to overshare about the messy bits, except to my OB/GYN. If somebody else does it, I appreciate that there are positive aspects, but part of me would also be fine if I didn’t know that. I support someone else’s desire and right to do it, but also my own right to be ambivalent, bothered by it, or avoid it.

Link from The Morning News.

At Men’s Health, “The 20 Worst Foods of 2009” (link from The Morning News.) What simultaneously entertained and horrified me was the comparisons in the commentary for each selection, like the appetizer that has as many calories as THIRTEEN Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

From Salon’s review of Food Matters by Mark Bittman:

The essence of the Bittman approach is simplicity, ease and quality, but that means he has to walk a fine and constantly shifting line. Americans’ attitudes toward what we eat are laden with class and cultural baggage.

Now Bittman has waded even further into the fray by publishing “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating With More Than 75 Recipes,” an unusual blend of manifesto, self-help manual and cookbook designed to convince people that they can drastically improve their diets with relatively little discomfort. Not only that, but in doing so, Bittman avows, they can also save the planet and relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. As promises go, that’s a whopper, a super-trifecta encompassing the major obsessions of the current moment: weight loss, environmentalism and penny-pinching.

Laura Miller succinctly notes that Bittman’s book is “applied Pollan”, referring to Michael, who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma (reductive summary: eat more local, sustainably created foods) and In Defense of Food (reductive summary: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”)

I’ve been a fan of Bittman’s since he wrote for Cook’s Illustrated. He’s the creator of the New York Times cooking column “The Minimalist,” advocating real food cooked simply and easily. He has Bitten, a blog at the New York Times, and his How to Cook Everything, which I consult so often pages are falling out, just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

My family and I aren’t ready to try the “vegan till 6pm plan”, but I was game to give the Food Matters approach a try. This was Monday’s meal plan:

Breakfast: yogurt and cereal
Morning snack: tofu and berry smoothie and frozen waffles
Lunch: Spinach and sweet potato salad with warm bacon dressing
Afternoon snack: buttered popcorn made on the stovetop, and hot cocoa
Dinner: Beet soup with Three Legumes (From Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)
Dessert: B.T. McElrath chocolates

The downside was the time involved in planning and making things, and having a lot of dishes to clean. The upside was that the food tasted great, the kids even tried the beet soup, and I felt good about the quality and variety, and I didn’t feel deprived or resentful. Now I see if I can keep this up, and if practice makes it easier. (Salon link from Arts & Letters Daily)

Cribbed from an article I’m working on somewhere else. Three cold/flu remedies that have more than anecdotal evidence to recommend them:

Sambucol: This brand of black elderberry syrup also comes in tablets. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized study, Sambucol reduced the duration of flu symptoms to three to four days. Also, it’s pleasant tasting, so my five-year-old and two-year-old sons are happy to take it.

Oscillococcinum: In several studies, it’s been shown to reduce the severity of symptoms and length of flu illness.

Andrographis paniculata: In a double blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group clinical study, subjects who took this herb showed a significant reduction in upper respiratory tract infection and sinusitis symptoms.

Please remember: I’m a girl detective, not a doctor, so consult yours before taking anything.

I went to the bookstore yesterday for a title my psychologist recommended. I knew the author and the area the book would be in. I checked the shelves, but didn’t find it. I continued checking in related areas, but didn’t find it. Then I asked for help. A kind bookseller led me directly to the book. It was in the area I’d been looking, sitting face out, prominently on the shelf in its own special section.

The book? Driven to Distraction by Hallowell and Ratey. The section? ADD.

*Sigh* I do not think my difficulty finding the book and its topic are unrelated.

We live in Minnesota. I have one son in preschool, and one in daycare. Virus season lasts from September to April. We’ve already gone a few rounds, but the current virus is the worst yet. After some online research, I set off to the grocery cooperative to stock up on remedies.

This article, “10 Ways to Boost Immune Health” recommended vitamin C. I got lemons, satsumas and kiwis. It warned against caffeine and sugar, but encouraged sleep, protein, and moderate outdoor exercise.

This article, “How to Treat the Common Cold with Traditional Chinese Medicine” distinguished between colds caused by “wind cold” and “wind heat”. For heat-related symptoms, it recommends Yin Qiao. It also warns against caffeine, and sugar, plus ginseng.

From “10 Best Cold and Flu Fighters“, recommendations for echinacea and andrographis, which I bought in liquid, Yin Chiao, astragalus and elderberry, which I got in pill form, plus my usuals of garlic and ginger, which I put in chicken broth and then pureed.

I took a round of all these that night, then chewed a clove of raw garlic, which caused me to vomit it all back up, then was more ill the next day. After much rest, I’m doing better, but 2yo Guppy is still having trouble, so we’re off to the pediatrician to rule out pneumonia.

I love the morning. I look forward to it every night before bed. My current regime is a double short cappuccino (with another waiting in the wings; thanks, G. Grod!), and Nature’s Path cherry/pomegranate toaster pastry. Today’s book, which I finished at breakfast, was David Gilmour’s The Film Club, recommended both at Entertainment Weekly and Mental Multivitamin. Good for film geeks and parents.

I hope I’m not in need of comfort as the election results roll in tonight here in the US, but just in case, a few things that shore up my soul in times of trouble:

Big, fat novels, re-reading favorite novels or novels by Jane Austen. (These aren’t mutually exclusive, I know.)
Flannel sheets and fluffy duvet over cushy chenille mattress pad over firm mattress, with puffy propping pillows for reading.
Being surrounded by books, in my bedroom, a bookstore or a library.
TV procedurals with character development. People to get involved with, formulas, and a tidy ending. So satisfying.
Oversize flannel or fuzzy pajamas.
Cookies, pie and cake.

I’m just going to assume that I’ve had at least 500 memos over my 40 years, and start with 501, like the classic jean. Memos to Self are my hopeful attempt to analyze recent mistakes so as not to make them again. Usually, enough time passes that I forget, so maybe writing them down will aid my memory.

Memo to Self #501: Plan ahead for kid vacation weeks. Sudden, increased togetherness for me and the boys, which is already at a peak, results in stress, not bonding. Babysitters, playdates, and planned activities would have helped.

Strangely (or not) my husband G. Grod and I did not have this problem when we went away for a mini break, the weekend before last. Sudden, increased togetherness resulted in increased relaxation and happiness. Go figure.

G. Grod and I married one another ten years ago on Friday, on the fifty-somethingth floor of a building in downtown Philadelphia named after a bank that no longer exists. Our family and friends helped us marry one another, and it was a lovely evening.

To celebrate, my sister Sydney is working overtime, and flew my parents out to watch 5yo Drake and 2.5yo Guppy so G. and I could drive up to Grand Marais, on the north shore of MN on Lake Superior. G and I have walked, shopped, napped, eaten very well, read a lot, and enjoyed each others’ company. We watched the sun rise over the lake this morning. I feel very happy, and grateful, this morning.

(I’m reading Dostoevsky for my book group. It is not an ironic commentary on marriage. At least, not intentionally. Heh. G. is reading Infinite Jest. Interpret as you will.)

When we returned to MN from the east coast, 5yo Drake began to snuffle pathetically, and his eye itched and wept. I called my retired-allergist father and asked what had triggered these allergies. He said mid August was weed season, early evening was the worst time of day, and had a few recommendations:

Children’s Benadryl
Opcon A
Nasalcrom
Air conditioning rather than open windows.

He said weeding the yard wouldn’t make much of a difference, since week pollen travels quickly and for long distances. Which is good, because I’m no match for all the weeds in our tiny yard.

(Mostly unrelated, other than they all interested me)

When to wear sunscreen? Almost always. (Sheesh. Next they’ll tell us to wear it to bed.) (Link from The Morning News)

How to store bread? Only for a day or two, loosely in plastic, or in ceramic.

You can too wash mushrooms!

Josh Whedon’s internet comedy, Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, is coming July 15, 2008. (Preview here. Link from Everybody Loves Saturday Night)

Remember a few weeks ago when I celebrated a mother’s trifecta? Well, yesterday’s good fortune went on from there. Uninterrupted night’s sleep; hot coffee and pastry for breakfast; time to read in peace; kids playing independently so I could practice yoga; a double espresso (our machine’s still in the shop. Sigh) on the way to the park/pool; kids left pool without a fight; nap, reading and writing time; grilled Caesar, Duck confit and grilled duck on a date with my husband at St. Paul’s new Strip Club; browsing at the bookstore without buying; excellent chocolate desserts from Nick and Eddie’s excellent pastry chef. It was lovely.

Then last night was interrupted by 2yo Guppy crying for water in the wee small hours, and he was awake before 6am demanding love, attention and books. And today’s trip to the pool involved fights on either end. So life is more like usual. But yesterday was really great.

May and June mark several personal anniversaries:

10 years ago: I moved to Minnesota and met friends Big Brain and Blogenheimer, and the future Mrs. Blogeheimer.
8 years ago, I began practicing yoga. Still can’t do a headstand or crow pose–8 years of humility.
6 years ago I started blogging, after my friend M. Giant told me about his blog, Velcrometer.
4 years ago, I resigned from my job to stay home with my son Drake, who’ll be 5yo in August.

All good things.

Well, our little family is either on our third virus in 5 weeks, or on the third version and second iteration of the virus we got at the beginning of May. Either way, we’ve been sick since then, and can’t seem to get enough rest to kick it. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details. Supplements and vitamins haven’t done doodly squat. I feel like we’re the Schleprock family, with a little raincloud following us about. I’m bitter, cranky (even more so than I usually am!) and hope this is the final round till virus season begins again in October.