Shortly before the turn of the new year, Sona put an excellent post on her blog about making outrageous commitments. You can read the post for the full explanation, but the high points are that an outrageous commitment:
Isn’t bound to any time frame.
Comes from deep within.
Is surprising, even to those who know you best.
Is a commitment you only make for yourself.
And while I applauded the idea and Sona’s own outrageous commitment to become a yoga instructor, I didn’t feel like it was something for me.
You can make an outrageous commitment when you least expect it
Those of you who are keeping up with this blog already know that I’ve been working with a fantastic nutritionist since last July. Working with Leanne has been instrumental in helping me change my relationship with food so that I can be passionate about creating delicious, yet healthful, meals.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much a single cookbook would also change my views of food. After receiving a Chapters giftcard for Christmas, I picked up Mark Bittman’s The Food Matters Cookbook. Apart from providing 500 phenomenal, yet simple recipes made with whole food, it also opened my eyes to some of the problems associated with eating a largely meat-based diet (and if you’ve read Sona’s review of Food, Inc., you’ll know this is on the minds of a lot of people these days). I didn’t know that it costs two calories of energy to produce one calorie of plant-based food, versus forty calories of energy to produce one calorie of meat-based food. I also didn’t know that the majority of grain raised in the US goes toward feeding the meat that we consume at our dinner table every day, and that if we took some of that meat off the table we could help eradicate some of the world’s hunger issues just by giving that grain to people.
That said, I know that I need to eat some meat to feel healthy, so my outrageous commitment is this: I am going to consume meat in much smaller quantities, using it as a garnish as Mark Bittman suggests, and trying to only have it once a day. Also, not only am I reducing the amount of meat I’m cooking with, but I also want to ensure that the meat I’m eating is both raised and killed ethically. To that end, I’m going stop buying factory farmed meat and buy it from a local butcher.
I understand that this may not seem outrageous to some people, but for me it’s huge. I’ve always been a big-time meat-eater, and this represents a major shift in the way I will be purchasing, cooking and consuming food going forward. It won’t happen overnight and I don’t think it will be easy, but do I think it will be rewarding, since I know it will help me to improve my health and will be more sustainable for the environment.
And why am I putting it out here? I want to be accountable. So go ahead and ask me how I’m doing from time to time. I hope I surprise both of us.
It’s been a weird holiday season for Neil and I, and until yesterday the only Christmassy thing we had done so far was go to my workplace’s Christmas party.
Okay, okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. In August we paid for flights to visit my family in Ontario, and then last month I ordered most of the gifts for our families off of Amazon.ca or Amazon.com. We also picked up our own gifts early (we have a system: rather than each of us try to guess what the other wants, we set a dollar amount and then just get ourselves whatever we want).
But we didn’t listen to Christmas music and, because we weren’t going to be in town for Christmas and because I was afraid our two little dogs would knock it over, we didn’t put up our tree. My parents’ home is always decorated enough for two houses anyway, so being with them for the days leading up to Christmas would help us get in the holiday mood.
You can’t plan for everything
It was a good plan, but it all got derailed this week when Neil got sick. Our flights were set to leave at 7:00 am on Monday, but Neil got really sick on Sunday. As if the vomiting and headache weren’t bad enough, he ended up with a fever that was so bad I started to get afraid. He was in no shape to travel and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving him. It was hard at the time because I didn’t know what would be the right thing to do. If it was a 24-hour bug he would probably be okay to fly–do I cancel or not? The customer service agent I spoke with from Air Canada advised deciding in the morning, but I spoke with Neil’s mum who wisely said that if I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to travel, I should just go ahead and cancel and get a good night’s sleep.
She was right. I got my sleep and in the morning Neil’s fever was gone, but he was still in no condition to travel. I was relieved that I had made the right decision and that I had my family and godson’s gifts delivered to my parents’ house so everyone would still have their gifts for Christmas morning. So I took a few hours, mourned the loss of my trip and time with my family, and moved on. Neil and I would still have 12 days off in a row together, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t enjoy them.
Neil remained sick for another 4 days or so, which meant two things: I made a big batch of purple soup (I really should have peeled the purple off the carrots before throwing them in the pot with the rest of the ingredients!) and we watched a whole lot of Netflix. I left the house once to go to Planet Organic, but other than that we didn’t go anywhere until yesterday when we came to Neil’s parents’ place.
A Calgary Christmas
When it became clear that we wouldn’t be heading to Ontario, I said I wanted to stay over with Neil’s parents. We’ve spent the last two Christmases with them and I love waking up at their house and heading down to the main floor in my pyjamas for present opening and bacon rolls. If I couldn’t be with my parents at Christmas, this was the only other place I wanted to be.
The house is beautiful with both trees up, but it still didn’t feel quite like Christmas. We had a lovely dinner together and settled down to watch Whitechapel. It was excellent (review forthcoming), but after watching all three hours of the first season, I don’t think Diana or I were ready to go to bed–I know I was a little afraid of dreaming about serial killers. So the two of us then tucked in on the couches with some duvets, got a whole bunch of chocolate at the ready and set down to watch White Christmas.
The Christmas movie I needed
And that’s what did it. Watching White Christmas finally made it feel like the holidays. It’s long been my favourite Christmas movie, and growing up it was probably one of my top 10 movies. My paternal grandmother got me interested in musicals (I think I was the only six year old in the 80s who demanded to watch Betty Grable movies), and this was one of them, so watching it last night gave me a connection to home that I needed.
It’s hard to predict the way things will go sometimes, which can mean it’s hard to know what will make Christmas feel like Christmas. But sitting back and watching that movie made me feel like a little kid again and reminded me that Christmas is about family, whether near or far, alive or dead. And that means that even if I’m missing Ontario this Christmas, I’m grateful for my Calgary Christmas too.
What was that I said about loving my site’s theme?
After spending a couple of hours inserting that default image into back posts and reformatting stuff, I realized a few things:
I wasn’t even nearly halfway done updating posts.
There was way too much whitespace following the post titles in the individual posts, and on our Macbook I couldn’t see much of the text of each post.
I needed to do too much tweaking and while I muddled my way through some of the issues (despite having no real knowledge of how to work with CSS), I didn’t want to bother anymore.
And since I’d much rather be blogging than figuring out how to make the template work just the way I like, I decided to scroll through some free templates. I like this one. It’s clean and I won’t need to re-jig all my past entries. So please bear with me as I sort things out with it.
Hello there to the 12 subscribers that Feedburner says I have!
I’m back. I know I’ve said that before, but yesterday I knocked down the biggest barrier I’ve had to blogging in the last few months.
Really, the problem was that I both hated and desperately loved my template. I hated it because it requires a header image, and if you don’t include one, it leaves a gigantic white box on the homepage feed, which just looks stupid. So that meant looking for images for every post, inserting them in the header knowing that if I ever go to another feed I’ll lose that from the post, etc.
But I also love this template. I love the way it looks, I think it suits who I am and most of what I want to do with this site. Also, I paid for it, so it seems wasteful to not use it at least for several months.
Fast-forward to yesterday, when I was talking to Comic Canuck from Comic Book Therapy (while you’re clicking links, go read his kick-ass exclusive interview with IronE Singleton from AMC’s The Walking Dead). CC asked if I was still blogging and when I told him my problem with the template, he suggested creating a default image.
Of course, it’s the simplest thing and I should have thought of it, but I didn’t. So now I have a default, white image that’s just slightly larger than the header text so that it looks like I don’t have an image at all.
Why am I telling you all of this? I have no idea. But on the brighter side, here are some things I do want to talk to you about on this blog and soon:
The podcasts I’m really into lately
The books I’ve been reading since the summer
My take on the James Bond movies (yes, I’m starting to watch them all)
Experiences I’ve had with local Calgary businesses
The recipes I’ve found online and have been trying out
So yes, I’m back and I’m excited about it. I hope you like what’s coming up.
Around 10 years ago, back when I was actually in university, I signed up for a service called Scholarships Canada. I thought it was great because it let me find the scholarships I was eligible for (hey, what student doesn’t want free money?).
Fast forward to this year. Despite not being in university since 2003, I’ve begun receiving emails from them. I thought that was weird, but whatever. I signed into my account, adjusted my settings so that I wouldn’t receive any further email and promptly forgot about them.
Well, forgot about them until a month later when I received yet another email telling me about my scholarship deadlines. This time I went into my account to confirm that I indeed had updated my settings, sent them an email asking them to cancel my account since I’m not a student and again, promptly forgot about them.
I think you know where this is going. After receiving another email in May, I sent them a very angry email making an empty threat to email all universities affiliated with them if they didn’t stop sending me email. I was kidding myself there–I’m not going to do that. I’m lazy. I have better things to do. But I’d hoped it would be effective.
Today I got another email. And while I’m not prepared to email every university to talk about what a bad service Scholarships Canada is, I am prepared to use my blog to tell anyone who does a Google search for them. But I’m still lazy, so rather than write up a rant right now, I’m going to use the perfectly adequate rant I emailed to them in May. Enjoy.
What do I have to do to stop receiving emails from you, because obviously deleting all of my scholarship data and opting out of everything didn’t work (see the attached screenshot of my email subscriptions). Continuing to send me email is ABUSIVE; STOP SENDING ME EMAIL.
Better than that, I also want you to DELETE MY ACCOUNT. I sent an email requesting that you do so a few weeks ago, but you clearly didn’t since I’M STILL RECEIVING YOUR EMAILS DESPITE MY SUBSCRIPTION PREFERENCES.
I have been out of school since 2003. I don’t need your services. More than that, by beginning to send me emails again in the last few months, you’ve proven to me that no one should use your services because all you’ll do is hound them years after anyone has outgrown their need of them.
Please send me email confirmation when my account is deleted or I will send a lengthy email about your abusive email practices to the awards office of all colleges and universities within Canada that are affiliated with your site.
After talking to a few of you through comments or actual conversation, I’m going to stick with the hybrid approach. I really appreciate all the feedback and it’s nice to know there are some people who are interested in seeing me continue working in this space.
Some things you can expect:
I’ll still share links, because really, I find a bunch of stuff semi-regularly that I can’t not share
I’ll try to do reviews more often. These will include books, films and tv shows, so long as I’m not too lazy, or they’ll just be reactions to the same types of media if I’ve grown to close to it to be able to do a proper review
I’m also considering doing reviews of series starting with James Bond. I’ll focus mainly on the films, but will try to tie in the books as often as I can (and since I own 10 of the books that should be for about… 10 of the films)
I’m going to start talking about what’s going on in my life. That could mean cooking, the dogs, family, whatever. When it’s (eventually) time to have a baby, I’ll probably chronicle some of that here
So that it’s. Again, thanks very much for your feedback and if there’s anything you want me to write about, just let me know.
Earlier this week I was rightly called on my lack of posting by Rhett. I started strong and was excited about this blog, but for various reasons, I’ve burned out and even quicker than I thought I would. Work got busy and stressful, I started playing more video games and my RSS feed reader got overwhelming.
I wish I could say I have a plan, but I don’t. A part of me likes the current format of the blog: take the links I would have put on Facebook and put them here instead. It’s easier to find them later when I want to refer back.
Also, I liked writing up book reviews. Thing is, I haven’t been reading much either. The 95 Book challenge started to get pretty damn un-fun when I realized I was reading poetry and comic books just to try and keep up with the numbers. That feels a lot like cheating and it’s hard to read a lot what with my full-time job, two crazy dogs and a marriage I like actively investing in. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect it’s a lot easier for the people who are doing lit degrees and need to read a lot of it for classes anyway. But I digress.
So… I’d like to ask you, the 8 people who have subscribed to this blog (most of whom I know personally)–is there anything in particular you’d like to see? I’m considering a few things:
Continue with the current format, but try to update more often (i.e. do the reviews, post links)
Make this more of a personal blog, talk about some of the day-to-day
Do a hybrid of 1 and 2
If you have any thoughts, please do leave a comment. I don’t want to close this, but I need to figure out what to actually do with it.
A good friend and I launched a new site this week and we’d love for you to check it out. It’s called The First Time I Ever and it’s a place for people to come and share their stories about the first time they ever did anything. We already have stories about the first time someone went on a date with his wife, got a black eye and cooked.
Share your own stories and let us know about the first time you held your child, went to school, got grounded, or maybe even arrested. If it’s funny, sad, weird, interesting–we want to know. Submit your story here or email it to admin@thefirsttimeiever.com.
Donald Miller posted this video on his blog. It’s a few years old, but it’s Frances Chan doing a great job of showing how Christians often choose a safe life over all else. I almost didn’t post this and then I thought about what he said again, so here you go.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much a single cookbook would also change my views of food. After receiving a Chapters giftcard for Christmas, I picked up Mark Bittman’s The Food Matters Cookbook. Apart from providing 500 phenomenal, yet simple recipes made with whole food, it also opened my eyes to some of the problems associated with eating a largely meat-based diet (and if you’ve read Sona’s review of Food, Inc., you’ll know this is on the minds of a lot of people these days). I didn’t know that it costs two calories of energy to produce one calorie of plant-based food, versus forty calories of energy to produce one calorie of meat-based food. I also didn’t know that the majority of grain raised in the US goes toward feeding the meat that we consume at our dinner table every day, and that if we took some of that meat off the table we could help eradicate some of the world’s hunger issues just by giving that grain to people.
