Tuesday, May 18, 2010

A Late Mother's Day

With Davan's Love Always show going on over Mother's Day weekend - in fact, the last day of shows followed up by a cast party - we did not really do the Mother's Day thing on Mother's Day. I suggested that we go backpacking the following weekend and call it our Mother's Day celebration. Anthony's job was to find a route for us.

Well, we ended up not doing that. I've been having an ankle issue (no idea what I did to it originally) that got to it's worst point just before Mother's Day. While it's, thankfully, on the mend now, it wasn't up for three days of trekking around with a loaded pack.

We kicked around the idea of a bike camping trip, but Anthony wasn't able to come up with a good game plan for that. Finally, we opted to go to my parents' for the weekend. Yeah, they live in town (more or less) and yeah, that wasn't what we'd been planning, but it sort of was.

You see, they live about 30 miles away. We rode there, on a route that gave us 35 miles of bike riding, on Friday. Then we did a day ride on Saturday over in their neck of the woods. On Sunday, we rode home. It was a really nice weekend and much easier than camping, although I have mixed feelings about not just doing the camping.

I got to ride my fast bike because we we didn't need to carry much. I made Anthony ride his commuter with the rack and panniers as it was for Mother's Day and all. My mom even joined us for Saturday's 40 miler.

We got in some nice, fun rides and got to spend time with two of our favorite people. All-in-all, it was a winning Mother's Day celebration.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Food Happenings

With the challenge of making do with less, I have to say that I haven't been meeting other challenges. Right now, I've got challenge enough!

That isn't to say that we aren't eating healthily or well, I'm just not trying to meet any other challenges. The something green with every meal challenge went by the wayside, but I've still been managing to get something green at nearly every meal just because that's how we eat.

We've been managing to stay in our new food budget, but I am making choices at the grocery store. There are changes, but I don't think anyone is feeling overly deprived, although Davan would like more frozen raspberries, I know. I think I'll be able to get a bulk order of them from Azure Standard with this month's order, but it may mean not getting something else - like walnuts. We'll have to see when the time comes.

I haven't come up with a new challenge for this month, either, but, again, just making things work on our new budget is challenge enough. Really, we're okay, but we do need to be careful right now if we want to remain okay if this goes on longer than a few months.

Our meal plan for today was:

Breakfast - steal cut pear oatmeal
Lunch - Davan: two carrots, some cabbage, Mexican-style pumpkin seed dip leftover from dinner last night in which it was a salad dressing, four strawberries, and leftover Tamale Pie from last night's dinner (corn meal base with leftover Mexican bean soup, TVP - I don't actually use this much anymore, but we still had some in the cupboard and I'm using up, carrots kale and extra seasonings to make the soup stretch); Me: a green drink with spinach, a frozen banana, four of the fruny looking strawberries, and the last of a smidge of frozen cherries (I opted for just that because I wasn't overly hungry after eating a whole bunch of oatmeal at breakfast)
Dinner - Bowls - that's our shorthand name for it. Tonight's bowls were wheat kernels, black beans, shredded raw carrots, sprouts, cucumbers, lightly steamed kale, green onions, sesame seeds with a cashew sauce in peanut sauce style and/or teriyaki sauce. Each person assembles theirs according to what they like. Or I assemble for them if I'm packing, as I was tonight because it's Do Jump night.
Snack - oatmeal based raw lemon cookies

So, yeah, still pretty healthy, I'm thinking and not much different than we'd been eating anyway, but it is somehow different. The fridge isn't as crowded even after I've just shopped and yet, we're certainly not going hungry. It's hard to say what the difference is for sure. I do know we're doing fewer lettuce salads, figuring that other greens in a meal is good enough.

Love Always

Davan and the rest of the Zig Zags are doing a great job with their show on love. They've done two shows and have two to go this Sunday. Sunday is nearly sold out, so if you are local and wanting to go, you should definitely buy in advance! You can do that here, if you're interested.

Anthony and I were supposed to wait until this Sunday to go because we used our comp tickets (two per Zig Zag) to get seats at the 1:00 show on Sunday and we're ushering for the 4:30 show. Due to money, we were planning on that being it. I couldn't stand it, though. I started crying and we decided to go ahead and spend that money. I'm really glad we did. Davan was so happy to see that we'd come that she started crying and we also got to bring a friend who may not have been able to go otherwise.

We dropped her off very early Sunday morning, in respect to when call was. They were supposed to be there at 11:00, but we had her there at 10:30. This is because of the adventure we had the night before for dress rehearsal.

We'd left with plenty of time to get Davan to dress rehearsal at 4:30 (in fact, we figured on getting there around 4:20), but there was an accident on the freeway on the way. It was just before a freeway split and the exit previous to that one is five miles back. As we approached that previous exit, traffic was just backing up. We opted to stay on the freeway. Big mistake. It took us nearly an hour and a half to drive those five miles. We didn't get Davan to rehearsal until 5:40. The poor kid was so stressed out. We were able to call and let people know what was up with us, but it was not a fun experience. Thus, on Sunday morning, we left extra early and took surface streets rather than the freeway. Davan was gently teased about how early she'd arrived. She's lucky to be in a group of supportive people.

Meanwhile, Davan has been renewing an old hobby. When she was something like six or seven, she got into making stop action animation movies. She made one that was eight minutes long, composed of individual pictures - 2, 712 pictures in all.

This is the first little bit of the current venture. I'm afraid it's a little jumpy, as she wasn't interested in using the tripod. Perhaps when she sees how jumpy it is, she'll change her mind:




I was going to post part of the Rabbit Movie, but that doesn't seem to be working. Maybe another time. It was less jumpy because of the use of a tripod, I'd say. For that one, she even came up with a whole script for it and we recorded it with the help of a friend to do some of the voices, but never were able to sync it up with the video with the equipment we had.

I've got our old laptop (which my mom did some updating on for us so it's pretty usable) at Fred Meyer's, which is why I'm able to upload things this evening.

While I'm giving the whole Davan update, she's also busily brainstorming business ideas. She is thinking of offering a Mom's Afternoon Off at our house once a week. The other forerunner is doing a two week long, two hour a day camp over the summer. She's been busily reading up on business and money for kids/teens.

While she is lucky to have a lot of what seems to be downtime, she's awfully good at filling it up! I'm glad for this. Self entertaining is an important quality.