Discombobulated Thoughts — January 16, 2007

• Wow, halfway through January already?
• I’m feeling slightly better, just some residual pain in my back and right side but not feeling like I’m splitting in half anymore.
• Pugly is acting very odd lately. I’ve been having to carry him to the car every morning to go to doggy daycare and sometimes I have to catch him to put the leash on him to go outside. Then there’s the weird matter of him not wanting to jump down from the car when we get home. Very strange little dog.
• I’ve been watching HBO’s Rome and I just love love love it. I love the two guys who always seem to be in the right or wrong place and inadvertently cause history to happen.
• I’m reluctantly switching from bottled water to Brita filtered water to save money at home. As long as it’s not tap water, right?
  

  It’s a jungle out there
  Poison in the very air we breathe
  Do you know what’s in the water that you drink?
  Well I do, and it’s amazing
  – “It’s a Jungle Out There”, Monk Theme Song lyrics

• I bought Seventh Generation dish soap, which I think is supposed to be biodegradable. At the very least it’s better for the environment that Joy, which is what I was using. I also bought an organic green tea hair conditioner. I couldn’t find the reusable grocery bags, but I’m thinking about making my own.
• I’ve been trying to find a sample Square Foot Veggie garden online for one adult that I could modify to my own liking. I just like seeing examples of what other people have done.
• I guess I’m going to have to create a gardening category.
• I knitted all day on Saturday on a dishcloth but I have nothing to show for it because I pulled it all out. No matter how careful I counted or what I did, by the time I got to the 12th row, I had an extra stitch and couldn’t figure out where it happened. So I pulled it all out. It’s one of those complicated patterns that is different on every row — you know, K5 P2 (K6 P2) repeat 4 times K5 P1 K2 and then the next row is something else and then like on row 12 you repeat rows 6 through 10. Oy. The scarf was all knit stitches and it took me how many months to do?
• I’m feeling uninspired to take a photo today.

Tags: discombobulated, Seventh Generation, Joy, project365, knitting, gardening, wellness, the puppy, bottled water, Brita, HBO\\\\\\\'s Rome

I Hate When She’s Right

I’m annoyed at my mother.

Last night I was excitedly starting to tell her about this book I’m reading about gardening and what I was planning to do when Spring comes and she, being who she is, pooped on my party. She told me not to get too excited about it and not to go all out and invest too much in it and start too big. She told me I should start with a small garden and go from there because I didn’t want to overwhelm myself and take on more than I could physically handle.

*hrmph*

The sad part is that for once she’s actually not being critical or saying I’m an underachiever or something. I really think she was talking about my illness like she finally gets it. She didn’t want me to set myself up with grand ideas that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with on my own and then I’d beat myself up about.

I hate it when she’s right.

So I need to think this out at a small scale level.

Tags: gardening, mother

When All Food Was Organic

I found an interesting blurb in the Parade insert in Sunday’s paper this week about organic food. As we all know, organic foods have become one of the hot topics in the grocery stores lately. Rather than question whether it’s healthier to eat organic-labeled foods instead the regular produce in the grocery store, someone wrote in to basically ask when it was that all foods used to be organic before. In other words, at some point in the past, all food did used to be organic, before mankind started messing with it, and the person wanted to know how many years it’s been that such has not been true. “AskMarilyn” replied:

Millennia! Humans have been attempting to improve their crop yields for as long as they’ve been hungry. About 2800 B.C. Sumerians used sulfur to control pests. Around A.D. 900,Chinese farmers saw that arsenic worked better. In the 1700s, kerosene was added to the arsenal. And 50 years ago, DDT was the leading pesticide.

Tags: organic food, farming, gardening, pesticides

Thursday Thirteen Things I’d Like To Do In 2007 (#18)

So this is the time of year when everyone is doing New Year’s Resolutions. I prefer not to do “Resolutions” because they’re generally broken and joked about by the middle of January and forgotten by President’s Day. Then, next January, they’ll be resolved again.

So, instead, I usually try to use the time to reflect and think about the things I’d like to work on in my life, changes, improvements, and so on. I don’t make myself any impossible promises though. I know my limits and I know physics. There’s no way I can lose 60 lbs in 2 months, for example; nor is it likely that I’ll be getting up at 5am any time soon to exercise 3 times a week.

Anyway, here is my list of things I would like to do in 2007, no promises, but I’m working on it. More

Tags: Thursday Thirteen, bloghopping, meme, New Years Resolutions, gardening, knitting, debt, weight, health, writing, Green Living, housekeeping, dysfunctional family