I have finally gotten around to playing with some of the features of my recipe database (MacGourmet) and making use of the homepage at my dotMac account.
Although the site menu leaves much to be desired, to my eyes, I don't want to spend any more time on it. At least some of my recipes are up and shared with you all, and wherever I travel, as long as I can get on the Internet, I can get to my recipes.
I'd love to hear what you think about any of them that you make, particularly if you modify it in some way. Many of my recipes that come from Epicurious.com make use of modifications suggested by the reviewers.
Good eating!
I have been spending the month of January ruthlessly going through our house and getting rid of all the accumulated crap. So far I've organized Jonathan's shelves in his bedroom, gone through every single toy in the house and disposed of each accordingly (kept out, stored, given away, thrown away), done the hallway linen closet, Kayleigh's shelves, the hall bathroom drawers and cabinets, our master closet, the utility room, cleaned the refrigerator and freezer, reorganized the pantry. There's probably more, but that's all I can remember right now. I feel I have to get these things done before I get my craft stuff set back up, because once that comes out then I will not be engaging in these other kinds of activities. Probably not again until next January.
Which makes me very happy I live in the here-and-now without the expectations that my mom was handed by Foley's department store when she registered there upon the occasion of her wedding to my esteemed father. Compliments of the store, she received Happy Living! A Guidebook for Brides, by Evelyn Enright and Ann Seranne. It has some pretty good advice in it on some subjects, but one page in particular horrified me so much that I borrowed the book from Mom to see if the words really remained the same on the page from one week to another. Sure enough, they've never changed. Let me share with you what the authors advised in the "How to Keep House" chapter:
They opened by instructing the new bride in "How to Draw Up a Work Chart", and then they provide the following suggestions to use as a basis in setting up one's own schedule:
"Daily Routine
Swab the kitchen floor with a mop wrung out of hot soap or detergent suds. Wipe the range burners and refrigerators with a sudsy sponge. Empty trash baskets and replace paper liners.
Dust and tidy rooms. Vacuum or carpet sweep. Use a dry mop on uncovered floors.
Wash the bathtub, basin, and toilet with hot suds. Wipe the bathroom floor with a mop wrung out of suds.
These tasks, of course, are in addition to the essentials--dishwashing, bedmaking, marketing [grocery shopping], and cooking.
Once-A-Week Tasks
Scrub the kitchen floor with warm suds, rinse, and mop up excess moisture. Clean the range thoroughly, inside and out. Defrost the refrigerator, remove contents, and wash with suds inside and out. Wash trash and garbage containers with hot suds and scalding rinses.
Vacuum upholstery, draperies, blinds, window and door frames, rugs, floors and baseboards. Vacuum or brush fabric lamp shades. Swab plastic shades with a sudsy sponge.
Clean the bathroom, scrubbing or mopping the floor thoroughly and swabbing down tile walls.
Do the laundry and ironing. If this requires multiple loads, space them over two or three days.
Polish silver and decorative metals. Swab railings and doorknobs with a sudsy sponge. Wash mirrors and glass table tops. Rub up wood furniture.
Occasional Chores
Remove contents of closets. Wash floor, walls and fittings with a sudsy sponge. Empty drawers, wipe clean and reorganize contents.
Shampoo upholstery and rugs. Launder washable curtains, draperies and slipcovers.
Vacuum the walls. Wash the kitchen walls with soap or detergent suds.
Wash wood floors, woodwork, blinds and furniture. Wax or polish those surfaces which require it.
Empty, wash, and rearrange cabinets, medicine chests, cupboards and shelves.
Wash light bulbs, window shades and fabric lamp shades with warm suds.
Suds-sponge flower pots and the leaves of houseplants.
Wash the windows."
The authors then return to the subject of setting up one's own work chart with this helpful advice:
"Now you are ready to draw up a chart on a large sheet of paper, indicating hours of the week and hours in the day. When you have decided on your schedule, list each task and the estimated time allotted in its proper place.
Just how you arrange this chart is your own personal decision. When you are tempted to stray too often from your arbitrary format, remind yourself that housework will never become a problem if you don't let things go."
Frankly, words fail me.
Today is my day to have Magda all day, so after taking Jonathan to school I ran by Jenny's to pick her up. By ten 'til 9 a.m. we were heading for my house, both little girls in their car seats. They are always delighted to see each other, and today they decided to tell jokes on the way home. If I recall correctly, the conversation went something like this:
Magda: Kayleigh, I am going to tell you a joke now.
Kayleigh: Okay, Magda.
Magda: Put your eyeball on your nose.
Kayleigh: Gross!!!
[Both girls giggle maniacally.]
That went on for the rest of the ride, with each of them taking turns saying something, the other responded with either "Gross!" or "Ewww!", and then the crazed giggling.
At lunch, instead of joketime it was storytime. Those sounded something like this:
Magda: Once upon a time, there was a little girl and she went to sleep. The End.
[Silly giggling.]
Kayleigh: Once upon a time, there was a door. The End.
[Giggling.]
And so on. It's a good thing they delight themselves so much! They are awfully cute to observe.
Over the last few days I have gotten some very interesting and useful information about the work I've been doing with a personal trainer at Lifetime Fitness over the last four months.
First of all, I repeated the body age assessment that I'd had done prior to starting training. First assessment was done on 31 August, this one was done on 27 December. In those four months, I changed my body composition considerably even though on the scale I lost only 3 pounds. What I did was to lose 10 pounds of body fat and replace it with 7 pounds of muscle. Not bad at all! One very nice way that was measured is that I lost 12mm off of my thigh skinfold caliper test.
I also added two inches to my sit-and-reach flexibility--still a long way to go, but two inches is a good amount to add. I could do 61 pounds on the bicep strength test, which put me firmly in the "good" category, the second-highest category. Regarding pushups--which I'm very pleased with since one of my stated goals at the beginning was to increase my upper body strength--I went from doing barely one at the end of August to doing a full 11 (not modified, but full pushups) last Thursday. Yay me!
So all this shedding of body fat and replacing it with muscle improved my overall fitness from the low fair category into the bottom of the average category--26.3% of my potential to 41.7%. I lopped six years off of my body age and am now at 41 instead of 47. Considering I'm 37, I still have plenty of work to do, but I am definitely headed in the right direction and what I've been doing has produced some real, measurable results.
Then two days later I did an O2 Metabolic Assessment Profile (try here or here for further explanation). That gave me information about how efficiently my muscles use oxygen to produce energy. In order to burn fat, oxygen must be present--so if I'm exercising with my heart rate above the zone that I'm using oxygen, then I won't burn any fat. Very important for someone to know who is trying to undertake any kind of significant weight loss!
My point was much lower (149 bpm) than would have been statistically predicted, so now my workouts can be very precisely targeted to accomplish what I need them to do. We did find that my heart had an excellent recovery rate (how fast it drops down after being up at a high rate), which is great.
I also found my VO2 peak (the maximum rate at which I consumed oxygen), which represents my current fitness potential to perform exercise. I was at the absolute top of the average range for my gender and age, so I was very pleased with that.
I really feel like my exercise is now doing exactly what I want it to do, and I'm strong enough that I can do 5000 meters on the rowing machine and not really even feel it--it's actually fun, and I really hated it when I started. I still don't like doing pushups or planks (an abdominal thing), but I can sure do them a lot better than I could in September. It's great to look back and have some good progress to measure.
Here's to 2008!