Early December Rumbles

Hello!

I have been frantically searching on the computer for a poem I wrote.  Searching in real life also, for the concrete version. (Sounds heavy, doesn't it?)

The trouble with looking on the computer is that you are staring at an amorphous gray mass and sticking it with a pin, fruitlessly.

The earth poem should be easier to find, but even thought I KNOW (maybe) that it's in a white ring-binder with big brown and green stripes on the outside, I can't find that either. Ah well. Shall keep looking.

Lots of things to do in December. I have my bills to pay, Christmas presents to worry about (strange and bad that that should be a WORRY), dr's appts to keep, donuts to avoid,...but no singing lessons or singing to do.  I cancelled the lessons till the New Year.  A little voice in my head says, maybe for ever. Whatever kept me singing daily for10 months seems to have taken off, leaving me voiceless and unmusical. Ah well, we'll see as time goes on.

My eating regimen of Whole30  is now on Day Eight.  I looked at the array of goodies and doughnuts at church yesterday with deep indifference. Can you imagine what a step that is? From Craving Insanity on Day 4, to Deep Indifference on Day 7. Incredible. It means that I am getting to the point where I will no longer look at sugary things as Food.  

I was there once before, on the Atkins in the 1970's. I could look at a three-layer cake frosted with a curly ocean of fluffy white peaks with perfect detachment.  I went on the Atkins in October, and by early spring I had the most gorgeous knees ever. All the puffy "dirty-water" had exited my tissues and I was a lean mean good-looking gal. I was about fifty then. Who knows what it'll mean when I am eighty-five as I now am.  Dried up? Shriveled? I'll still welcome those knees. YAZZYBEL

Easy Waldorf Salad

Well, I've started on the "Whole 30", an eating plan devised by the Hartwigs, husband and wife.  Demons that they are.

It isn't as if I'd been deprived of food before. And I do find elimination diets the easiest way for me to alter my food consumption.  But, with all of those, there'd always been a little OUT, a corner of former bliss and ease, with which you could manipulate the diet for youself.  As, in Atkins, which is quite straight-laced, you can have your teaspoon of heavy cream and your packet of sweetener in a cup of coffee...and that's heaven after a day of nothing but meat and veg.

On this regimen, there's no recourse. No dairy at all, even butter. You can make ghee, which in my case comes out imperfect, a little opaque...does that mean I should throw it out and start all over with another two cubes of butter...? Why ghee, and not butter? you well may ask.  Because butter has milk solids in it (that's what tastes so good plus the salt.) When you make ghee, the milk solids burn off leaving you, after a lot of manipulation, with a clear amber colored liquid that solidifies like a stone in the refrigerator. You cook with it.

Read the book...It Starts with Food is the name of it.  The Hartwigs will tell you all you want to know and more.  This diet is for health, not for weight-loss, yet when I weighed at my diet group I'd lost 2 1/2 pounds in 5 days.  I'll have to do something if I keep losing at that rate...don't know what, yet. The Hartwigs are very young, judging by their pictures, and maybe they don't know that 85 year old boneless ladies don't need to lose weight that fast.

I had phantasies of donuts, cookies, bread, cakes, for the first four days. Day five was better. Today they're back (the phantasies, not the cakes, alas.) We just need to try. I had a doctor visit on day five, and he was pleased to learn about the plan. He encouraged me to stick to it and then we'll test me at the end of the month (that's the 30 in the plan) to see what's become of my "numbers," the be-all and end-all of US medicine nowadays.

You get primitive on this plan. Waldorf Salad has been reduced to a half-apple, some celery sticks and a few pecans eaten out of hand. I could put it in a bowl with some of my homemade mayo, which you can have since you're allowed olive oil and eggs...and salt. But why elaborate it? Simple is good. You get so hungry that it's easy to kid yourself that an apple, a stick of celery, and a few nuts is a Waldorf Salad. And it's GOOD FOR YOU.....YAZZYBEL

Thanks Be for Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow's big day is almost everybody's favorite holiday.

Feasting without guilt...
Historical reminiscences...
Family memories...
Coming together...
Crispy cool weather...
Love all over the place.

This year, I am alone, so am going to eat with a friend and her other friend...Three of us. The hostess is making Cornish Game Hens, the other lady is bringing sushi, and I am bringing a sweet potato/pecan dish which I hope isn't too sweet! I think it'll be okay.

When I was a child, we ate our sweet potatoes in the form of pie.  That was the Southerners' way of making them palatable.  Asked whether I preferred pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie, I always chose sweet potato pie.  Don't know why...maybe it was the way mama spiced it (or didn't) that made it preferable. Anyway, it's worth making...it has a separate kind of texture and flavor that's real good. We never used marshmallows in any sweet potato dish at that time, so we were spared that inundation of sweetness.  Then I went to college and I had marshmallow/sweet potato casseroles, and, Lo! I found them good.

Good they were not, but they sure were tasty. Made the idea of pie kind of redundant.

When I was about forty I found the deliciousness of baked potato, split, with a spoonful of finely-diced fresh salsa(tomato, jalapeno,onion) on top, equally yummy and probably much more healthy. I ate them that way for several years.  Now, this year, I parboiled the pieces that I got in a bag from Trader Joe's, put them into a ghee-smeared glass dish, and topped them with a mixture of ghee, honey and water boiled down a bit, and the pecans on top . I hope they are not sweet, as I tried to put in just enough honey to pique the flavor. Tomorrow we'll see, when I go to eat my Thanksgiving dinner with two other old ladies. YAZZYBEL

Restored to Life

I begin this posting with a--not with an explanation ("Never complain; never explain."), but with an apology for letting it go at all.

I meant to start a new blog page: "Haiku a Day," which I may add to the present address. Or may not; it's all that I can hardly drive this vehicle (my computer) at all and so had to stay on Bkfst W Yazzybel. SO BE IT.

I went to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to visit my eldest son and his wonderful wife, and had a lovely visit. I got to see my oldest grandchild, Miranda, on a quick visit to Iowa City where she's a senior at IU.  I got to spend time, precious little of it, but TIME, with my grandson Daniel. What a fabulous guy he is. I did not get to see Isabel, off to her freshman year at Ames, IA, at ISU, but she was never far from my mind and heart which is true of them all.

Weather was incredible..cold, cold, the coldest weather I've ever been in.  Snow all over. Ice--rivers, lakes, creeks, puddles...frozen. With kind help, I maneuvered over it all without calamity. I got to see Daniel's Show Choir presentation, which was simply astounding. If I can find it on the web, I'll send it to those interested.  He's the tall guy on the right.

I 'm ba-a-a-a-ck!  Back from Cedar Rapids, with a detour on the way home to see my friends the Longnecker girls in Denver (thanks to a serendipitous missing of connections on Tuesday and catching the plane out on Wednesday.) What wonderful people they are, they and theirs!

So I'm here at home astounded and pleased. Love to ALL...I won't quit again any time soon. YAZZYBEL

A Vacation at the End of the Known World

The I Ching makes us aware that our lives are really made up of constant changes. Tension builds up and things tip over and re-start constantly. Sometimes this happens almost unnoticeably, and sometimes it is sudden and precipitate.

When my husband died, my life turned over in a normal way. It's to be expected. Often, what is not expected is the completeness of the turn. Like a roto-filer, a device that used to be in all offices and held the names of clients, let's say, and could be turned by hand so that the cards came up and flipped over, our days after such a huge event can seem to be flipping over without much impact. But the impact was there, and made itself known again and again.  

I went on a vacation to my old old world, the world of my childhood and girlhood. Cards that seemed in the past to be flipping over in a fairly orderly way gave a big THUMP, and suddenly came to a stop. Things that come to a stop unexpectedly have the effect of making one pay attention.  

When the wheel stops, a movement of the hand will make it start up again, or the very momentum of time will restart it.  But things are not the same. A new life has begun; a new life begins every day actually but we often do not pay attention to that fact.  A jolt makes us see with new eyes; we restructure; we reprioritize.  This is good for us. But it hurts.

So, this is the end of Breakfast With Yazzybel. She will or will not breakfast again, but she will not be back under this chatty format.  Time to see with new eyes. Yes, it is. I was ending this blog post with the last paragraph but I realized that that was not all I had to say. Thanks for reading with me so far.    YAZZYBEL

Episcopalian Lectionary Readings, 9/7

Good morning.

Well, first there was Exodus. Exodus is very very interesting and contains so many of the Bible Stories we read as children.  Today's reading, Exodus 12:1-14, is about the intiation of the Passover. God instructs his people  through Moses and Aaron that they must slay a lamb and mark their doorways with the blood of that lamb. God intends to wreak havoc on the firstborns of all creatures, and the Israelites will be spared, God will pass over, if their doors are marked so he will know them.  God did not have ESP apparently.

The instructions are quite specific. I find this a very interesting story. But Passover is in the spring, which makes me wonder why the Lectionary organizers put this lesson in the fall.  There must be a reason...we are after all leading up to Advent, the little Lent...it's coming sooner than we think, especially this year which seems to have zoomed by very very fast to all us little folk. I don't know the reason.

I liked last week's story of the burning bush much better, and meant to write about it, but I didnt. The Fire that Burns but Does Not Consume. Interesting concept.

The second reading was St Paul's Epistle to the Romans, 13: 18-14.  Strange order of verses. That's what it says in the bulletin, however.  It is all about love, and loving each other. We are commanded to love one another. It is not an option, and it does mean everybody. Oh my. That is so difficult a concept, especially to live it.

We are winding up our discussion of Romans and last week it was brought to the attention of all that St Paul in this book seems to completely ignore the human story  of Jesus Christ. No lambs balooing in a stable, no weddings, no hunger issues where fish are divided in miraculous ways to feed a hungry crowd.  No, it is all about divinity.  Perhaps this attitude was fueled by the manner in which Paul became a Christian--struck down by the side of the road, whence he became a changed man.  He wasnt raised with any stories, maybe. Again, interesting.

I shall not deal with the Gospel, which is from Matthew and is about forgiveness. A very difficult subject and I'm not fit for dealing with it.  I try to live it, though. Here we must take Matthew's words quite literally and just humbly try to live them out. I have always been pretty good as a forgiver; it is harder now. Perhaps I am old and cranky. Well, no perhaps about it. Perhaps I should forgive myself. YAZZYBEL

"You may be right."

Good morning.

My husband and I went through considerable marital torment, and luckily--or unluckily--we experienced this in the midst of the greatest surge of "help" for marital woes ever created by a society. We Southern Californians had more counselors than if we'd been queens and kings. There were literally hundreds of groups and individuals, religious, public, private, who were all willing to stick their beaks into our business in order to straighten us out and get us happily on our way.

I remember telling one famous psychiatrist, "I've discovered a magic phrase that quells my husband's wrath..., " and it was: "You may be right."  I remember when I first said it to my husband, and saw its magic effect on the argument at hand. The waves calmed. There was nothing more to say. Magic, indeed.

I am moved to write of this by having recently watched "The Taming of the Shrew" on tape, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I have the tape and have watched it many times for the beauty of clothes, interiors, houses, architecture, etc. Alas, the movie was roundly panned and rightly so. Some of the acting is good, but Elizabeth Taylor was terrible as an actress.  It did not help that Elizabeth and Burton were still in love at this stage, for being in love never helped acting in any performance that I know of.

But Elizabeth was just awful. It was her voice that was so bad, I think. She never took the necessary training to develop it.  It is a shame that she did not, for her beauty was indeed exceptional.

The theme of the play, the changing of a shrewish badly behaved girl into a loving and well-mannered wife, is an eternal plot.  Katherine, the shrew, did a lot better than I did. Without the help of any marriage counselors at all, she managed to figure out how to make the circumstances she found herself in work in favor of her own happiness.

Her famous speech at the end: "....thy Lord, thy governor,...,"--is it said with tongue in cheek? Of course it is, I think.  Nobody could be that subservient, and it is to be noted that her husband did not take it in flat truth either.  He was just glad not to be harangued every day of his life and he was open and generous with his little wife, possession as she was in those days.  

That's what I think about it anyway. If you don't agree, let me say that you may be right. YAZZYBEL