Lynn's blog

We had the opportunity to buy a whole tuna the other day--just about straight off the boat. I think it had been in the ocean not eight hours before. It weighed 22.5 pounds. Beautiful fish, truly. But we had NO IDEA how to clean it. As it happens, it was much easier than we feared.

Read on for how we did it!

Viking bait being, of course, Spam:

One of the few processed products we buy, and one of the few factory farmed items besides Tillamook cheese, is Spam. "What?!" I hear you cry. "That's so not you!" Oh yes it is, when we po'.

Almost all of the meat we buy is ethically farmed (the eggs, too). We know the farmers, we know the conditions under which they grow and harvest their animals. We pay on average $4 a pound for meat. When you eat as much meat as we do--and we eat PILES of it since we don't eat much if any grain--we need to economize somewhere, especially on breakfast meat. Jo needs, I mean really needs, meat at breakfast.

So Spam it is. The Weston A. Price Foundation has Spam on its shopping guide for those folks who can't afford or don't have access to quality meat sources, and that's a lot of folks. It's a good source of both protein and fat. (Remember: Fat Is Good For You, as long as it's not hydrogenated and/or rancid.) Spam has no MSG, it's shelf-stable like forever, and it's tasty. It's also a mainstay of several Asian diets that produce healthy, long-lived people (notably Okinawa).

Spam was on sale at Safeway this week for $1.99 a can. That works out to $2.65/lb. For us, that's cheap. We cleaned them out. The store manager was not happy. We were unsympathetic.

So far, we're on track with the 100 push-ups/200 sit-ups program, doing them M-W-F with weekends off. Tomorrow I'm back on it. And we've biked every day so far for the 30 Days of Biking, even though Friday night we only got a ride in around the block and Saturday we had to use a stationary bike at a hotel. If you're riding, you're biking! Tonight we rode to meet a friend at the pub.

Friday night's ride was really rather interesting; I didn't want to take my bike just once around the block--it's a bit of a production number--so I just grabbed my old Townie, which is now Josie's bike. I'm glad I did. I've been feeling as if I'm a biking poseur; my own bike has an electric assist, and I've been telling myself, oh, without the assist you couldn't ride anywhere, you're just kidding yourself, blah blah blah. Then I jumped on Jo's bike and rode around the block like it was nothing. I actually enjoyed myself. It was late at night, the streets were quiet, the bike was so very lightweight and responsive that I over-corrected a lot and had to relearn riding.

Anyway. So far so good with this regime.

A quick check-in at this task I've set myself. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I'll be doing the pushups/situps; every single day for the month of April, I'll be getting on my bike even if I just go around the block.

Yesterday, I did 17 knee pushups and 20 crunches (I think; I forgot to check). Today was the first day of 30 Days of Biking. We took our usual not-quite-2-mile round trip to the market and back, then hopped up a few blocks more to pick up our eggs. (We get these terrific local free range eggs direct from a farmer who drops off at several points around town.) Tomorrow I'll do the last of the pushup/situps for the week, and I'll get some kind of a quick bike ride in. I need to take some clothes into the local plus-size reseller; maybe that'll be my destination.

Now that the deck and kitchen are more or less finished, we turned to a vexing problem along the side of the house. When that community group planted our yard three and a half years ago (and then dropped us on our heads when it came to the promised follow-up), they planted a grape vine by the house, and a dippy young man built a huge bamboo trellis.

Sadly, he anchored it to the electrical conduit feeding the house.

Last year we finally got grapes from this vine. We took down the trellis late last summer when Mr K, our contractor, came to build the deck. This week, he's here with the final piece, the new trellis/arbor for the grape vine. The arbor will run the entire south side of the house, and will have room for four more vines; it'll be pretty, and give the house a little shade protection, too.

I went out yesterday afternoon once Mr K had left, and discovered that in sinking one of the posts for the arbor...well, I bet you can guess. He tore out the grape vine. Yes, he tore out the grape vine for which we were building the arbor. I could swear I pointed it out to him, but he didn't remember which plant it was. O irony! O fortuna! O. Henry!

There's enough of the rootball left that we're hoping we can save the poor thing, but if not, well, we were planting grapes anyway. It'll just take three more years before we get any at all.

In the scope of things, this is one of the few "disasters" that have beset the remodel, so I can't complain too heavily. I was just looking forward to grapes this year, that's all. Guess I'll have to buy 'em at the store.

From time to time here at TNH Central, odd boxes show up at the door, addressed to "Editor." Sometimes I know they're coming; sometimes I don't. Usually they contain books, but not today.

Today, a long thin one showed up, and inside was a HomeRight Paint Stick Kit. I vaguely remember telling a PR guy I'd give it a bash. After all, we have a kitchen to paint--oh yeah, hey! We shooed the last of the workmen out! The cabinets, flooring, countertops, they are all done! Jeffy the Hippie Contractor has only a tiny bit of mudding to do, then we get to paint! Eeek! I have to find colors now!

So the Paint Stick showed up at the right time. We've been curious as to whether these work better than just an ol' roller and tray, and I guess we'll find out. If this does work, it'll make painting the high ceilings around here really easy, almost fun. We'll keep you posted, and I'll try to get pix of the kitchen soon.

It gets very dark and gray in Oregon in the winter, so any bits of color I can get into my life, I do. The cheapest, most instant-gratification-y way I've found? Nail polish. Cheap bottles can be as little as a dollar, and I get them in all kinds of colors, anything that appeals! Right now my nails are a warm metallic gold--gilded like a picture frame! But at other times this winter, they've been deep red, mermaid blue, dark green. Cheers me up every time I look at my hands.

Another way to get color: Embroidery floss! Also cheap, and in vivid tones. Here's a big pile I've collected:

And this is what I'm doing with it:

This started life as a Russian punch embroidery kit we could never figure out; the punch wouldn't punch. But I liked the design, so i decided to just do regular old embroidery over it. I'm done with the background and have started the chicken. It's turning out really well and will be framed and hung either in the kitchen or in the TV room. Possibly the latter. We have this odd animal motif going on in there.

The unexpected jolt of color:

One of my youngest daughters' friends managed to somehow snap the axle of my spinning wheel clean off. Luckily, it's a Babe Production wheel and almost everything on it is pretty much open source/self-serve--we just need a dowel.

The funny thing was when JJ took it apart to pound out the broken pieces. Inside (the top of the supporting tube is open), we found my missing needle-nose bottle of spinning oil, its refill bottle (I've been missing both for six years), five colored pencils, a bright blue knitting needle, and a big piece of pink pink pink sidewalk chalk!

Meeting someone you've known for 13 years for the first time is an odd thing. Will we like one another? Are we each the person the other thought she was?

For thirteen years now, I've been a member of an online support group of mothers. We formed as a group early in our pregnancies on what was then the only dedicated listserv for pregnant women. We were supposed to be together only for the duration of our pregnancies, all due in October of 1997. (Josie came in September, earlier than expected, but they let me stick around. ) At one point early in the babies' lives, someone said, wouldn't it be funny if we were still together when the kids were in kindergarten? We all scoffed.

We have been in this fershlugginer kitchen remodel/recovery since AUGUST, and before then our old floor was a disaster. Well, feast your eyes on this (commentary by JJ):

Marmoleum in Barbados (off-white), Raven (black) and Bleecker Street (red--yeah, I don't get the name either). As you can see, the baseboards aren't in yet, nor is the painting done. But oh, man, it's an improvement from this:

End of February it should be 100% done, the railings on the new deck in, the painting done, everything fresh and tidy and re-organized. It's like having a new house. I keep going in there as it is, with the new floor and the stainless steel appliances and countertops, and think I've walked into the wrong house...

The "Aughts" were a hard decade for this family. We started out healthy, happy, and rich--yeah, we were multimillionaires there for a brief, shining moment. Then we were plunged into poverty and sickness.

We've spent most of the decade climbing painfully out of both conditions, and while we're not entering the "Teens" in as good as shape as the previous decade, we're sure ending it better than we've been through most of the "Aughts." The main things we're grateful for about the decade are that we have Louisa (2001), and that I'm still alive after the medical cock-ups that started in 2002. I still fantasize about suing everyone involved, but I can't take the stress.

But here I am in 2010. I'm still alive. I'm finally feeling as if I can stop looking backward, as if I've finally processed what happened to us, and what happened to me. Financially, we're about as precarious as most middle-class families these days, but nothing like we were post-2001. Our kids are well. John's well--better than ever. And I'm ready to look ahead, not back.

It's only October and I'm already waiting happily for 2010, not because this year's been so horrible, but because it's been so up-in-the-air. I've decided 2009 is the Year of Breaking Things.

My brain broke in February (well, it'd been broken for years, we just figured it out then). It's repairing itself fairly well. I still have ups and downs but they're not nearly as ^UP and _DOWN as they used to be.

My uterus broke in April, and I discover I didn't write about it here! I've been so distracted. I nearly bled to death in April, from a regular old period. I ended up in the hospital for two days for a near-emergency ablation and two units of blood. Who knew you could bleed to death THAT way!

Our kitchen ceiling broke in August. The upstairs toilet plugged and ran at the same time, and there was nowhere for the water to go but out. The upstairs bath flooded for about 30-45 minutes. We discovered it when water came pouring out of the walls in the pantry hallway and basement staircase--it had come through the bathroom's pocket door into, rather than down, the walls. And we saw a little bit of water coming out of a light fixture. Long story short, the next morning we woke to a crash and discovered the kitchen ceiling on the kitchen floor.

One of our relatives asked us for family photos for a class project. Ben, Ben, Ben. You should know never to ask for stuff like that:

If you can believe it, my youngest girl is eight. Some of you have been following this site since before she was born, and now she's eight.

I'm going to be upgrading TNH's software--it's really, really out of date!