Once again, rounding the corner,
heading into 2007, the newest year yet…

1/28/07:
Among other things, for Christmas Jay got me silicone bakeware— a bread pan and a round baking pan. I have baked with both now and they work quite well, you don't have to grease them yet things don't stick. The pans are flexible and "give", so you usually need to put a regular pan under them. They wash up great, give the Chinese yet another product to manufacture for us and help use up those left over breast implant pieces.

Last weekend I wanted to make some biscuits or rolls or something and was interested in a popover recipe I had but (can you believe it?) I did not have a muffin tin. Guess I never make muffins or cupcakes, and have never made popovers. Now I can't remember what I settled on making, but yesterday when I was picking up some things at Walmart I noticed silicone baking sheets and a muffin pan on sale. You can see where this is going…

Today I made a big pot of my own version of vegetarian split pea soup (I didn't have carrots or potatoes so I cut up a big sweet potato, which worked nicely) and did the popover recipe— yummy, as you can see from the pictures. On top of it all, our owl cookie jar (which stores crackers) kept track of both my cooking and my end product.

I beat two eggs with a whisk until they were frothy, whisked in one cup of milk, added a cup of flour and a half teaspoon salt, whisked some more until the batter was smooth and then sat it aside for fifteen minutes, turning the oven on at 425 degrees the last five minutes to let it preheat. Then I whisked the batter again and poured. I used the silicone muffin pan so I did not need to grease it (if you use a regular pan you need to grease the flat part too, since they kind of spill over on it and you don't want them to stick) and when I filled the pan's shallow cups each 2/3 full there were nine instead of six popovers— what a deal! Bake the popovers for 25 minutes then turn the oven temp down to 350 degrees and bake ten minutes more. LOOK THROUGH THE OVEN WINDOW, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR. They should be golden brown when done. Pull the pan out, poke a small sharp knife in the top of each one to let out steam, cool 10 minutes and consume. The popovers reminded me of the cream puffs I used to make years and years ago when I still lived at my parents' home, air surrounded by a thin crust of yumminess. Try them, you'll like them, we did :)

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.— Martin Gardner

1/26/07:
Jay and I both have had colds recently, but are now almost fully recovered— time for me to stop this laying about and get back to the gym.

I just finished one of my dollar store books, Man Made, A Memoir Of My Body by Ken Baker, yet another find that I would recommend reading. Imagine my surprise when I started to write this blurb, put the author and title in Google search and came up with it as one of Oprah's book picks. Cool beans.

At any rate, the book is autobiographical, the author at the time a writer for US Weekly. Ken Baker engagingly tells his story of growing up in Buffalo and going through familiar struggles as an adolescent and teenager. He worked hard and was able to do well enough in hockey to win a full college scholarship, yet struggled with a flabby body. Ken could not figure out why he seemed to feel so different from other young males, especially around issues of sexuality. He eventually finds himself secreting fluid from his nipples and goes from experiencing frequent erectile dysfunction to having no erectile function at all (thus the interesting mushroom pictured to the right). Ken blamed these physical problems on himself, his own psychological makeup, and not being tough enough. Literally for years, Ken continued to have these and other physical problems until he finally sees a doctor, is honest about his symptoms and is diagnosed at 28 with a pituitary tumor. Ken Baker's story explores the war he waged with his own body and what it means to be a man.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.— Thomas Mann

1/25/07:
Jay and I get to regularly read, at our leisure, the New Yorker because of the kindness and generosity of my friend and co-worker Kate and her mother, who pass on to us their recent issues. We used to get them from the library but it was hard to always find time to peruse the magazines (beyond, of course, always reading the cartoons and poems) before they were due back. Kate's gifts to us afford us the luxury of wading through interesting articles at our own pace. Thank you Kate.

The following poem is from the New Yorker's December 4, 2006 issue. It speaks to the human condition in many ways, how very much we miss loved ones who have passed away, the unreality of reality, our sheer inability to express in words all that we feel and are. Life sometimes strikes me as being like a vacation, or a weekend, with that definite beginning and end, and the space between filled with planned and unplanned interesting experiences (some of which border on ecstacy), hardships, boredom, disappointments, surprises, losses, love, unfulfilled expectations, things done and not done, things said and not said… all over too soon.

RESEMBLANCE

It was my father in that restaurant
On Central Avenue in Orange, New Jersey,
Where I stopped for lunch and a drink, after coming away
From visiting, after many years had passed,
The place to which I'd brought my father's ashes
And the ashes of my mother, and where my father's
Grandparents, parents, brothers had been buried,
And others of the family, all together.

The atmosphere was smoky, and there was a vague
Struggling transaction going on between
The bright day light of the busy street outside
And the somewhat dirty light of the unwashed
Ceiling globes of the restaurant I was in.
He was having lunch. I couldn't see what he was having
But he seemed to be eating, maybe without
Noticing whatever it was he may have been eating;
He seemed to be listening to a conversation
With two or three others— Shades of the Dead come back
From where they went to when they went away?
Or maybe those others weren't speaking at all? Maybe
It was a dumbshow? Put on for my benefit?

It was the eerie persistence of his not
Seeming to recognize that I was there,
Watching him from my table across the room;
It was also the sense of his being included
In the conversation around him, and yet not,
Though this in life had been familiar to me,
No great change from what had been there before,
Even in my sense that I, across the room,
Was excluded, which went along with my sense of him
When he was alive, that often he didn't feel
Included in the scenes and talk around him,
And his isolation itself excluded others.

Where were we, in that restaurant that day?
Had I gone down into the world of the dead?
Were those other people really Shades of the Dead?
We expect that, if they came back, they would come back
To impart some knowledge of what it was they had learned.
Or if this was indeed Down There, then they,
Down there, would reveal, to us who visit them,
In a purified language some truth that in our condition
Of being alive we are unable to know.

Their tongues are ashes when they'd speak to us.

Unable to know is a condition I've lived in
All my life; it is a poverty
Of imagination about the life of another.
This is, I think, the case with everyone.
Is it because there is a silence that we
Are all of us forbidden to cross, not only
The silence that divides the dead from the living
But, antecedent to that, is it the silence
There is between the living and the living,
Unable to reach across that silence through
The baffling light there always is between us?
Among the living the body can do so sometimes,
But the mind, constricted, inhibited by its ancestral
Knowledge of final separation, holds us back,
Unable to complete what it wanted to say.

What is your name that I can call you by?

Virgil said, when Eurydice died again,
"There was still so much to say" that had not been said
Even before her first death, from which he had vainly
Attempted, with his singing, to rescue her.
— David Ferry

1/19/07:
It's been a while since I've written about the books I've been reading; I am quite behind. The picture to the left is the cover of a book by an author I read a few months ago. I picked this book's cover because it looked cooler than the cover of the one I read, There Is A World Elsewhere by F. Gonzalez-Crussi, MD.

The dollar store near my office serves as a nice, close place to walk to for a break from work. There I pick up bargains and some things I hadn't thought of buying before spying them there. The store also tends to have a stock of hardcover books that gets replenished from time to time— I have picked up a few there in the last year (including one or two I had looked at in the regular bookstores). All of these one dollar books have been good reads, and this one is no exception. Doctor Gonzalez-Crussi is a professor at Northwestern University and a "noted pathologist." He has written a number of books and it was evident early on in reading this one that he has a huge vocabulary and a broad grasp of world literature.

This book is autobiographical, the good doctor talks about growing up in Mexico and some of his family's history. Suffice it to say here, neither he nor his mother had an easy life. His mother's journey and his own are interesting, but it is his journey to the United States nearer the end of the book that cements its interest for me. Doctor Gonzalez-Crussi talks about traveling by bus from Mexico to an internship in Colorado: "This took place in the sixties, when crossing the border into the United States of America could still strike the foreign traveler with a sense of wonder and a young man raised in a Mexican barrio could find plenty of motives for astonishment... amply proclaimed that I had come to the most powerful nation on earth." Doctor Gonzalez-Crussi goes on to discuss his feelings as he experienced this new culture and he describes how it differed from the life he had known. He talks about heading out to the street in the evening, expecting people to be mingling, talking, interacting and finding that here people are more insular, driving in their cars, living in individual homes. They do not come out in the evening to chat with each other: "I was sure I had arrived on a national holiday." "It has been remarked that the word "privacy" has no exact equivalent in the Romance languages... All of this points out that the Latin countries belong indisputably within the kingdom of love, whereas England and the countries of English tradition, including the United States, form a a bloc that falls squarely within the kingdom of freedom." He speaks of missing his family and things familiar: "For who is so unfeeling, or so unhappy, as not to love his native land? Even those wretches who were born in the most destitute corners of the world, if later they should settle in more affluent regions, cannot help feeling nostalgic for the country of their birth." The cultural differences to get used to included religion: "To my surprise, every time that, impelled by curiostiy, I tried to visit one of these churches, I found it closed. I was accustomed to expect the house of God to be open all the time, at least during waking hours."

At any rate, the majority of the book covers his mother's childhood and his own, both very different from my own and therefore interesting. Doctor Gonzalez-Crussi did choose to stay here in the United States, where he enjoyed a very successful career. His intelligent observances about how the culture here differs from the one he grew up in illuminates, sheds light on how different peoples of the world approach this thing we call living. We all have a lot to share and learn from each other.

Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.— Jean-Paul Sartre

1/18/07:
Our country's leaders seem to have difficulty formulating plans for likely scenarios that might unfold when they take action. In both Afghanistan and Iraq it's almost as if the total sum of planning consisted of magical thinking along the lines of: we will go in, take over, hand out big contracts to our friends, it will be easy.

Historical, good old American "take charge" kind of action has also been frighteningly absent in our own country. Jay was jokingly wondering, since it has lots of oil wells, if Lousiana had been a foreign country, would we have done more, done a better job? In some ways it would be reassuring to be able to easily answer "yes" to that question. It seems like it would be preferable to realize our leaders' motives were misguided but their competency was intact, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It appears to me that we are led by people who are not only corrupt but are bumbling fools as well— scarey.

Change the channel.— Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops [NYT 12th April 2004]

1/14/07:
This winter's weather has been the weirdest and nastiest I can remember in the 23 winters I have lived here. Normally mild compared to winters I grew up with in Michigan, the winter here this year has included rain with the threat of flooding, high winds with massive power outages, ice, snow, daily highs below freezing, and more winds. Nasty. We have been lucky and have had only minor power outages in our all-electric home. This winter has cemented our ideas about putting a gas fireplace heater in the addition we are planning.

The winter weather has kept us inside, and I have done more baking and soup cooking than normal— quite cozy, albeit fattening, actvities. It is a long holiday weekend for me and I have work to do on the planning of that addition, ideas to form on things to write about on my page, and moods to conquer as I wait to see the choices adult chldren will make. Even though there are a lot of good things to be done and current joys to be thankful for, at times my heart feels heavy.

Our lives may be determined less by our childhoods than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.— James Hillman

1/10/07:
I was going to post this entry last night, but we had a big windstorm that knocked out our internet cable connection. We are back in business, despite a snowstorm that blanketed us this afternoon. It has been a wild winter thus far...

It seems like every time I drive down a street or road I haven't been down for a while, I run across a new commercial building either in the process of going up or already up. Many of the new stores are the same as ones found 40 miles south down the freeway, closer to Seattle. When I went to England and France in 1978, I was struck by how very old the buildings were. I remember telling friends it was like walking and living in a museum— the buildings were hundreds of years older than I was used to. In the US we have some lovely older buildings still in use, but many have already been torn down after a century or less of use. It's not unusual for a perfectly good home in a hot housing market to be torn down so that a larger, more expensive one can be built in its place.

It's interesting to go into buildings built during my lifetime and realize many of the components are indeed already dated and worn: electrical, heating, cooling, safety systems, etc. I know the generation or two before me found the pace of change mindboggling at times— it was. Change is a constant for us and seems to have accelerated in the last hundred or so years.

Once when I was in an "older", more worn-looking building, maybe built in the '70s, I chatted with an elderly lady who lived there. She told me how she had lived in that town much of her life and remembered the building she lived in being built, how grand and fancy it was, how the country club set went there to retire. Did you go into the bathroom downstairs? Oh, you must go in there! The paper towels come out just by putting your hand out! They come out without touching anything! I smile and marvel with her. Who would have thought I would ever live someplace like this? Who would have thought I would get to live here! She squeezes up her shoulders and almost shivers as she sparkles with delight, and I am happy for her.

The road of life can only reveal itself as it is traveled; each turn in the road reveals a surprise. Man's future is hidden.— Anon

1/6/07:
I wrote several months ago about my frustration with trying to lower my cholesterol levels. My mother's family tends to have problems with quite high cholesterol levels and heart disease. Cholesterol is present in foods from animals, including meat, eggs and dairy products, because animals make cholesterol. A lot of us Americans have problems with high cholesterol because we do eat so much food that comes from animals, and some of us also have inherited bodies that are exceptionally gifted at making cholesterol— oh, if I could only cash in on this gift!

As it turns out, I am not only adept at making cholesterol, I experience less common, serious side effects (muscle pain) when I take popular prescription medications designed to lower cholesterol in the blood, namely statins. I have been on an odyssey of sorts as I have looked at and tried options to lower my blood cholesterol down from its highest total score of 280. I have, indeed, succeeded in lowering that score and in the process have discovered a couple of things.

From nosing around, I have decided that statins were developed by drug companies directly from a supplement sold in "health" stores- red rice yeast. Lovastatin was the first statin medication, its manufacturer unsuccessfully attempted to get red rice yeast off the market because they contended it was lovastatin. Interesting. I tried three different statins, experiencing muscle pain in different areas with each one. The outer part of my left thigh still has numbness that started when I was taking Crestor last spring. Thus, I do not take any statins and do not take red rice yeast.

Per my doctors advice, I have been taking two fish oil capsules morning and night, slow-release Niacin (not just niacinamide) and CoQ10. My skin has not been able to tolerate (rash and yeast stuff) more than 500mg a day of the Niacin, although many people take a couple of thousand mgs a day. Additionally, I started taking plant sterols and stanols in early December. The picture of the hand/elephant links to information about fish oil, the grater chasing the cheese links to information about niacin and the pig links to information about stanols/sterols.

Someone at work mentioned a product sold at Costco called CholestOff. I looked at it and gave it a try, as I checked it out more. It looks like the product is simply a combination of plant sterols and stanols— substances that absorb cholesterol in the gut before it gets absorbed by your body, sending it down the tube, so to speak. I like to shop at SuperSupplements, a Washington supplement store that carries a good selection of higher-end products at discounted prices. The CholestOff directs you to take two pills fifteen minutes to a half hour before meals twice a day. Once I figured out how the supplement worked, I realized it only needed to be taken before meals containing cholesterol. Since I eat little meat, eggs or dairy, this is often only once a day for me. When I finished the CholestOff I investigated other plant stanols/sterols products and settled on a chewable tablet called Cholesterol Blocker that is taken during a meal— much easier to use. I have also noted that one medication my doctor had been considering putting me on, Zetia, works in exactly the same way as the plant stanols/sterols. Once again, interesting. Love those drug companies.

So, I exercise intensely about 4 hours a week, eat no beef, eat chicken only once or twice a week, eat egg substitute at home, and eat more soy products (changed from half and half to soy milk in my coffee, changed from yogurt with my morning oatmeal to soy yogurt, have replaced most of my cheese with lower or no fat cheese or with soy cheese), among other things. I do not really limit my intake of "good" fats such as olives, nuts, and avocados. I have used olive oil for stir frying for a long time, and now have discovered soybean oil for a plainer oil to use instead of corn or other vegetable oil (I don't know if this is important, but it seemed good to me). My last fasting blood cholesterol level was drawn the day after the office holiday party, after having taken the plant sterols/stanols for a only couple of weeks (so they are not likely to have affected the results much). As of 12/20/06 my total cholesterol was down from a high of 280 to 225, my good cholesterol was up from a low of 47 to 60, my triglycerides were down from 245 to 105, and my LDL was down from 185 to 135. I am expecting, especially with more time on the plant stanols/sterols, some of the lab values to continue to improve. If I think of it, I'll let you know how it goes. :)

He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.— James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

1/1/07:
Time, so predictably yet surprisingly, continues to allow me to observe its movements. It never stays still, never allows now to become permanent, as it moves everything into memory, leaving only the now to be briefly palpable, as it passes. I give thanks for the opportunity to continue to puzzle over these things

The neightbors have rung in the new year with fireworks galore, while we have been both more private and sedate in celebrating time's forward movement. How long will it take this year for me to consistently write the correct year when I write the date? The trivial fills our lives as much as anything else, while the color, the color… yes life's colors come in unpredictable shades and in shades that can only be seen by tilting the head while looking back. This year life will again bring many lessons; here's hoping for some kindness from the teacher.
HAPPY NEW YEAR MY FRIENDS, BEST WISHES TO ALL.

I was the clock face
whose hands bite the fleeting
now,
then silently
move on to what is
already no more,
and from what is already no more
life is born to me.
— Minou Douet (age 7 or 8, about 1955)

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