Category: Slice of Life

Thursday Thoughts: Food Obsession

I sometimes feel like I’ve obsessed about food my whole life. I have a tendency to enjoy eating. I love flavors. Textures. Food. Even as a child, I read cookbooks, looking for recipes to make. I’ve always enjoyed cooking.

Here’s the thing. I tend to be overweight. I’ve tried cutting calories, I’ve done Weight Watchers and became a lifetime member. And yet I’m still overweight.

I. Like. To. Eat. So I’ve changed my relationship with food.

I’m through apologizing for being hungry. If eating a bowl of ice cream makes me happy, then I’m going to be happy.

I know people who talk about good food and bad food. “Oh, I was bad and ate a crumb of fudge, so now I can’t eat anything except lettuce for a week.” Did the fudge make you happy? Does lettuce make you happy?

My categories are different. Do I like it? Then it’s a good food. Do I hate it? Then it’s a bad food.

 

Office Update

I’m making slow but steady progress in my quest to redo my office.  I’m cleaning out stuff that should have been cleaned out ages–even decades–ago.

Example. I had over twenty years worth of old Romance Writers Report magazines that I mean to go through, tear out articles I wanted or wanted to save because I’d finaled in a contest or something. That project was at least four years old with no progress. There were also six years worth of RWA national conference handouts in spiral notebooks. I had these stacked in the hall outside my office.

It took a couple of weeks, but I tossed it all.

I have plans for that space in the hall, so I needed to start clearing.

Step 1: done.

I

 

The Man Fridge

Years ago, Parade magazine interviewed a female private detective, who maintained women make better detectives than men because if a man opens the refrigerator door to look for something, unless it’s right in front of him, he won’t find it because he won’t “move the mustard.”

That phrase has stayed with me.  The truth of it rings in my head at least once a week.

I once hid a bottle of champagne on the bottom shelf, in back of my refrigerator, for six months. No one noticed. Why? Because that would involve moving the mustard.

I have decided my path to riches will be the invention of The Man Fridge. The shelves will be only as deep as a gallon of milk. Initially I thought of using baseball’s “strike zone” as the height, but I’ve concluded that won’t work, because the bottom shelf would be too low. The ideal height would be waist to eye level on a six-foot man.  Even then, the lower shelves might be invisible.

The inevitable problem with The Man Fridge would be the width. It would need to be a minimum of three times wider than an average refrigerator in 2020.  Man Fridges could conceivably take up entire walls in kitchens.  And that creates the problem of doors. How many doors would be sensible? If a man won’t move the mustard, why would he open multiple doors? The doors, I’ve decided would have to be a deep as the shelves. That way, perhaps only twice the width of current refrigerators would work. Many refrigerators do have double doors.

Maybe this could work.

 

 

 

The Winter Side of No Make Up

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know I stopped wearing make-up several years ago. It happened one hot July day, when I realized how much money I was wasting wearing makeup that would be melted off an hour later. The time, effort, and money weren’t worth the outcome. I figured I’d start again after Labor Day. But Labor Day became Halloween, became Thanksgiving, and so on. After a year (or maybe two) passed, I ended up chucking most of the cosmetics taking up space in my house.

Recently, I’ve discovered a winter upside of no longer coating my skin with color: my winter coats and scarves stay cleaner. I can pull the fabric up against my face for warmth and nothing happens except warmth. In past years, makeup on the collar was always a winter-coat issue. Never again.