Update on "The Cookbook"

For those of you who haven't been reading for long, I'm working on an ebook lovingly referred to as "The Cookbook," even though it's as much a collection of tips and tricks as it is a grouping of recipes. About a year ago, I decided against writing it, and then I started it up again as a Christmas gift idea for several young couples in our family. I was typing away on the last chapter back in December when my laptop hard drive died, and my flash drive would no longer open. So I lost the whole kit and caboodle, and I had to start over with the new year.

So, I've had to give out IOUs to the couples, and I've been writing up short articles, recipes, and tips to send out via email to them over the last few months. These I intend to gather up and edit together during the rewriting process and put together with the larger how to chapters I'm not sending through messages.

Anyway, here I am typing away about budgeting, and ways to stay or get fit and healthy, entertain, and maintain a nice home even with tight budget or time constraints, and I'm failing at it myself. I know the tips and tricks work. When I use them, our house stays nice, other than a maelstrom of toys to be picked up before lunch and the girls' bedtimes. I manage to fit in my workouts, and we eat amazingly well on a limited budget. Yet, I'm horrible about letting things get in the way.

Most times it's something medical. Either the girls are sick, I get run over by a migraine, or an old injury acts up and everything starts running in slow motion as a result. Lately it's been the time I've been donating to help the school Hubby works for with a revitalization and rebranding project. Not that I can't fit all the work in, but I forgot the time management tips and tricks I've picked up over the years. I just kept pushing on with one project until I was so worn out, I didn't have the strength or energy to move onto anything else.

The worst part of computer work is it's tendency to sap energy. But if you alternate between an hour working on the computer and an hour doing more physical labor, be it gardening, housework, cooking, or even fitting in a workout, not only do you have more energy throughout the day, but your computer work ends up being of a higher quality.

So I've realized I'm writing this book as much as a reminder for myself as I am hoping it will be helpful to other people. It's not about making life into this idealized fantasy but remembering ways to get the most out of ourselves and what we have at hand.

Weekly Weigh In: Ups and Downs

This week's a mixed bag. On the one hand, I gained a couple pounds. On the other, I finished my first 5K with an okay time considering I only had two weeks' notice to prepare.

I can't say I'm all that surprised by the weigh in. Hubby and I celebrated our fifth anniversary over the weekend, and my weight always seems to shoot up for a day or two after eating a meal out. The real question is will it go back down in the next day or two. If it doesn't, then I know it's something more than a reaction to all the salt we've had over the weekend.

I made it across the finish line in fifty minutes and forty-five seconds. That's not so bad considering I walked the whole thing. I enjoyed it more than I expected. Enough so that I'm thinking of doing the Cotton Row Run on May 31 to see if I can beat my time. I'm thinking of actually training this time around. If nothing else, I should at least be a little less sore the next day.

(I'm hobbling around like an old woman this morning.)

Well, nothing for it either way but to move forward.

Sunday Sides and Suppers: Peanut Butter Ball Cookies

Okay, so they're neither a side nor a supper, but I think you'll enjoy these tasty treats. Hubby and Mom are big fans of peanut butter cookies, so when I had tons of leftover candy making supplies after Christmas this year, I experimented with adapting the family peanut butter ball recipe into a cookie.

I was surprised at how pretty they turned out, and they were enjoyed so much I made them again for Hubby's birthday and our anniversary. I just have to remember to stay out of them myself, and I usually don't care for peanut butter cookies!

You can use either half and half whole wheat and white flour or all plain white flour to taste. You can leave the glaze off as well if you like. Nutritional information is per cookie and based on half whole wheat, half white flour with the glaze included.

Peanut Butter Ball Cookies

2 Cups Rice Krispies Cereal (crushed)
1 Cup Smooth Peanut Butter
1 Cup Flour
1/2 Cup Salted Butter (melted)
1/2 Cup Skim Milk
1 Tbsp. Ground Cinnamon

Chocolate Glaze

1 Cup Powdered Sugar
2 Tbsp. Cocoa Powder
2-3 Tbsp. Water
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a small saucepan, melt butter and peanut butter together, stirring occasionally until smooth. In a large mixing bowl, roughly crush cereal. Mix in flour and cinnamon until well blended. Add peanut butter and butter mixture as well as milk and fold together until combined. Roll tablespoons of batter into balls and flatten them. Space on a greased cookie sheet half an inch apart and bake for 10-12 minutes or until mostly firm. Cool thoroughly before adding glaze.

For glaze, combine powdered sugar, cocoa powder, water, and vanilla in a small mixing bowl. Spoon into a piping bag, and drizzle over cookies once fully cooled.

Yields roughly 30 cookies.

If you're using a cooling rack, make sure to put some paper or tin foil under the rack to make clean up easier. The glaze dries quickly, but it tends to run off the sides of the cookies as you apply it. It's a pain to try to wash off if it dries before you're ready to clean up.

Five Years and Counting

This time five years ago, Hubby and I were heading off to our wedding reception.

It really doesn't seem like it could be that long ago. Then again, considering we've been a couple for roughly eight and a half years, it's almost hard to remember a time when we weren't together.

So much has changed in the past five years. Both of us have floundered a bit in our careers. Getting married a matter of months after graduating college, it took us a while to find our footing in that arena. Now he's settled into the private education sector, and I'm finally on a workable path with specific career goals laid out.

When we were married, we'd planned to wait two years before trying for a child. Our girls will be four and two come mid-July. It was a lucky break as it turns out. We wanted two children, and if we'd waited as originally planned, chances are we would have been lucky to have one.

We've been through disappointments and triumphs. Jobs have been lost to budget cuts, and better jobs found. We celebrated my first professional publication and shared the terror for our daughter's welfare when I went into labor two months too soon. We've made new friends together and mourned the loss of loved ones. We've shared the joys of parenting and battled the lows of postpartum depression.

It's the little moments, a shared laugh, a kind gesture, or a swift kick in the rear when needed that make marriage such a wonderful thing. I honestly don't know where I would be today if I'd decided against taking student publications my sophomore year in college. Sure we might have met during one of the brown and black belt classes held by the three combined Alabama Wado-Ryu schools back in the early years of the decade, but would we have talked outside of class? I don't know. I don't think I really want to know.

Thank you, Hubby, for five wonderful years thus far. May we have many more to come.

* The first picture is of our wedding ceremony. The bottom one is a family portrait taken over at my folk's house back in January.

Oops, I Did It Again!

Just when I thought I'd learned my lesson about over doing things, I did it again. Oh man, I'm so exhausted!

First off, the past couple of weekends have been absolutely packed! Birthday dinners, Easter festivities, Hubby working overtime all weekend, writing up as many advance posts as possible, training for a 5K, and doing some volunteer work for a local school all while trying to keep up with my writing schedule for the "cookbook," keep the house in some sort of order, and tend to an extremely active preschooler and a toddler with a penchant for climbing everything in sight.

Being that a lot of the "work" stuff is computer related, I thought it would be okay. Unfortunately I seem to have forgotten how long some of this copywriting, blogging, and design stuff can take, and apparently long hours on the computer translates into insomnia. Or maybe I'm just taking so long, I end up hitting my second wind just before I finish, and it takes a couple of hours for me to settle down again. I'm not sure.

Time to start taking some mandatory breaks or setting a time to close up shop for the day, I think.

It only occurred to me this morning that spending several hours a day working in front of a computer screen may be one of those mystery migraine triggers, even with the aid of my reading glasses. The prescription is four years old, and I'm starting to find myself squinting at the screen even when I'm wearing them. And "painless" optical migraines were the listed reason for prescribing the reading glasses in the first place. Eye strain would certainly explain why I still have issues with bright spots, multicolored webs, and shadows in my field of vision even when I'm not experiencing pain.

Weekly Weigh In: Another Baby Step

Well, it's nothing big, but I'm another half a pound down from where I was last week. So that's two pounds even from where I started. Oh well, glacial movement in the right direction is still progress.

I can't say I'm surprised it was so little. An old injury was acting up in the mornings most of the week, so my usual morning workouts where hit and miss, though I did manage to work out most days at least once. Then I spent the weekend grappling with a migraine that was determined to break through no matter the medicines. (I hope the preacher didn't think I was nodding off during services, but overhead projectors are second only to the sun on the ouch meter for optical migraines. I was listening; I just couldn't look up.)

After birthday dinners and worship, I took my medication and headed to bed early. If I can just get past whatever has triggered this migraine, things should look better for the week.

So far the only trigger we've found since I was diagnosed with chronic migraines is too much sodium, but there's sure to be others with as often as I was having them. Especially since we've been on a low sodium diet for over two years now, and I was only diagnosed in November. Chances are both the old injury issue and the migraine are related to the sudden shift in weather patterns in the past few weeks. March wasn't so gentle on its way out this year.

Tuna Boats

Our family is fond of tuna. Actually, it's our go to quick meal, so I try to have a couple ways of fixing it up my sleeve. We were running low on bread one day, and the girls were clambering to eat right then, so I decided to try using celery in place of the bread.

So, instead of chopping up a couple ribs of celery and mixing them into the tuna, I simply cut them into four inch slices and added some spices to the usual tuna salad sandwich filling. The extra punch added by the spices gave it enough flavor to stand up to the celery.

Now, you can dress up the "boats" with pretzel masts and cheese sails, but my girls are happy with these little canoes.

Tuna Boats

10 oz. Tuna (drained)
24 4" Celery Stalks
3 Tbsp. Light Mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. Pickle Relish
2 Tbsp. Onion (finely diced)
2 Tbsp. Bell Pepper (finely diced)
2 tsp. Garlic Powder
2 tsp. Ground Red Pepper
1 tsp. Rosemary (ground)
1 tsp. Thyme (ground)

Wash and cut the celery into roughly four inch pieces.

Drain the tuna well. Add garlic, red pepper, rosemary, and thyme. Mix well. Add in mayonnaise, pickle relish, onion, and bell pepper and stir until just blended. Spoon into the grove of the celery and garnish if desired.

* Don't let Boo Bear's expression fool you, she loved the tuna boats. She just wasn't crazy about Hubby snapping pictures while she was trying to eat.

Realizations of Self Through Art

I wrote about finding my audience on the other blog Tuesday. When the realization I'd been writing for the wrong people came, it felt like a slap. I was stunned. I didn't quite believe it, and I felt like a fool for having missed the fact for so long all at once. How does a writer miss something like that?

I started writing for pleasure when I was ten. Elementary music classes, a.k.a. band, started in fifth grade at the school I attended, and looking back it's like learning to read music and actively participate in an arts class is what first introduced me to my muse, finicky posterchild for ADHD that he is. I threw myself into learning music as the school year began that fall. By Christmas, my list consisted mostly of art supplies and craft kits.

As winter began to warm into spring, my fingers began to itch for pen and paper.

It took a few weeks, but I finally caved and began scribbling a skit in my notebook during a D.A.R.E. presentation. (I know. I know. But it wasn't like I was interested in trying any of that junk I'd seen on the news that made people act like morons. When would I have time anyway? Homework kept me busy until way past bedtime.) Mr. Nelson, our band director, caught me scribbling out a different story a couple weeks later. He encouraged me to keep it up, so long as I wasn't writing during class and inadvertently alerted my friends to my new past time in the process. Their reaction once they wore me down and I let them read it is what hooked me on fiction writing.

Back then I wrote for my peers. As I aged, so did the audience I imagined. Well, it did most of the time anyway, I did try writing two or three picture books, but they stunk. However, my imaginary audience's ages stopped inching upward as I left high school.

I blame my muse's issues with Peter Pan syndrome.

Eight years later, I sat there wondering why he was suddenly shouting at me to up the age of my audience. (ADHD, posterchild for it, all the way that one. What was he doing for eight years?) Maybe he saw something lurking on the mental drawing board, being scribbled out because it didn't fit with the audience I was writing for at the time, and decided it was a better idea.

I've always had a sarcastic and acerbic sense of humor. It's one reason I was so quiet in school. Kids my age didn't always get the fact I was joking, and I can't stand arguing. So if there was any chance my attempt at humor would result in unintentioned insult, I kept my mouth shut.

It's cliche at this point, but it's also true we all have light and dark in us.

I realized my sense of humor is an expression of the darker aspects of my nature years ago. What I hadn't noticed was the increasingly disturbing ideas garnered by my perusals of science articles. Give me a scientific advance, and I can follow it out to a projected perversion of itself, twisted through long term exposure to human nature. This is what makes me a science-fiction writer, this automatic look into the kaleidoscope of possible futures when presented with a recent discovery.

I started out in college with the idea of becoming a biochemical research scientist who wrote as a hobby.

Months of periodic, uncontrollable shaking spells put an end to the notion I'd be spending my career in a lab. No matter how much I joked about it in high school, I had no desire to prove my senior prophesy of blowing myself to Timbuktu my first day on the job after receiving my doctorate. So, I changed my major from chemistry to English, keeping my minor in biology, with the intent to become a reporter with aspirations of working for a wildlife magazine one day.

As time went on, through the ups and downs of life, my studies, and some things I heard, saw, and read about during my internship and early career I began to hold a more jaded view of human nature. I understood more of the science articles I was reading. With this greater understanding and less than optimistic view of humanity when viewed through a mass lens, the colors in my kaleidoscope darkened.

That's when my audience changed.

The line between YA and adult fiction is one of perspective. To teens the world - life - is full of hope. Sure there are bad things out there, but life stretches out ahead of you. No matter how horrid things get, there's plenty of time for everything to turn around. Adults have been through enough of those rough patches to know they come with the frequency of chuckholes on a forgotten street. Adults often expect a world full of shadows, and that makes the sparks and patches of light all the more precious.

* Photo is of "Little" Brother with the girls. He's just a similar image lounging in the picture here to what I have of Muse Boy in my head, though not quite the same, and I can't draw. Sorry C.

Wordless Wednesday: First Haircut

* Taken all the way back in 2008. Boo Bear was not a happy camper!

Who are You, and What Did You Do with My Child?

Sneak has to have been replaced by a pod person. It's like she woke up a completely different child a couple weeks ago.

Experienced parents know what I'm talking about. She's entered...

The Tantrum Phase!

Sneak has always had a temper, but she didn't have many fits before now. She was a relatively laid back child, if insanely independent for a child her age. She's only twenty-months-old.

I knew it was coming soon. This is about the same age where frustration, disappointment, and irritation started catching up with Boo Bear. I'd fooled myself into thinking maybe it would be a bit tamer with Sneak since Boo's main source of frustration was an understanding of language that far outstripped her ability to communicate. Sneak concentrated on speech before she did anything else. She can say a lot more than Boo could at her age, so I thought she wouldn't get as frustrated.

What I didn't count on was her frustration with herself. Here I was thinking perfectionism was a learned trait, but it looks like Sneak has it inborn. She speaks very clearly for a child her age, but apparently this isn't good enough for her. Once that first language bloom slowed, her used vocabulary shrank.

The only reason we know she's still growing in language is we've heard her as she drifts off at night. After her bedtime glass of milk, after the story and kissing her baby doll goodnight, Sneak lays in her crib and practices saying a word over and over until she drifts off. She does this until she's happy with her annunciation of a word before she'll use it outside her crib. So far she's gotten Mama, Daddy, Sissy, eyes, that, ball, diaper, and sit down up to her standards.

Oh, she makes herself understood. Who couldn't understand what a child wants when they hand you their sippy cup and proceed to walk to the refrigerator and pat the door? She knows we want her to say, "Juice please," and she can say it to where we understand her. But it comes out as "Jews peas," and she knows this isn't what the phrase is supposed to sound like. So she refuses to use the words.

The real trouble comes when she can't figure out a way to say what she wants. We've attempted to show her some signs, which worked beautifully with Boo. However, Sneak just looks at us like we're stupid when we do.

It took me a bit, but I realized we've never explained sign language to Sneak. Boo didn't care, she saw a way to express her wants and went for it. We don't spend as much time over at Hubby's parent's house as we used to when Boo was little, and Sneak hasn't seen sign language used much as a result. And she's a girl who needs to know the how and why of things before she'll accept it.

I've started trying to explain its use to her. How speaking with her hands has helped their Aunt K, and even Hubby in noisy places, but she doesn't seem to believe me just yet. Maybe if she sees her Aunt K using it next time we're visiting, she'll know I'm not pulling her leg. Still, I'm also explaining Hubby and I can understand what she's trying to say most of the time, and we don't care if she's saying something perfectly.

Even then, I know it's going to take time to give her the tools she needs to deal with strong emotions. It's going to be a long haul, and it's a necessary one. Just ignoring the tantrums aren't going to make them go away when she doesn't know how to deal with these new emotions she's feeling.

Still, I'm so glad this is our last time through the tantrum phase.

* I don't have any pictures of her in mid-tantrum, of course, but here's a snap shot taken just a few moments before one started up. Can you guess why?