Big Yellow Taxi

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”

— Joni Mitchell

Late last winter, I came down with a nasty cold that wrecked my vocal cords for months, and I learned not to take my pipes for granted.

A week later, our campus closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and I learned not to take in-person teaching for granted.

Campus reopened briefly in October, but the state ordered my boss to take all the flexible seating out of my classroom and replace it with traditional desks, and I learned not to take my professional autonomy for granted.

I came down with the coronavirus in November, complete with several weeks of brain fog that screwed up my ability to get words out of my brain and onto the page accurately, and I learned not to take my intellect for granted.

The virus also forced me to quarantine, and I learned not to take my pantry and freezer for granted.

In the middle of all that, one of my oldest and dearest friends died, and I learned not to take people I love for granted.

Last night, a colleague and I realized that our usual regional inservice day — which everybody generally hates — will happen online this year, in a scaled-down form, and I learned not to take free doughnuts and coffee and a day of bitching about consultants behind their backs for granted.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been on doctor’s orders not to run again until I can walk three miles without feeling winded. Ramona the Pest and I walked 3.8 miles today, and I feel better than I have at any point since last spring. I did not take that for granted, and I am looking forward to a gentle run later this week.

After a year of loss, I think a good workout is going to feel a lot like slashing the tires on a big yellow taxi.

Emily

Looking ahead

I’m tired, but I think I’m finally ready for the new semester.

Last fall was rough. Rather than go into all the details, I’ll sum up the low points:

1. Thanks to ineptitude on the part of some folks in Santa Fe, I didn’t find out what classes I would be teaching until a week before school started — whereupon I learned I would have seven preps, including two I’d never taught before.
2. Remote learning was a virtual hellscape of buggy software, lost passwords, and tech access issues that persisted much farther into the semester than they should have.
3. We returned to in-person learning for about a month, from early October to early November, before somebody in our building caught COVID-19 and managed to share it with me. I realize how fortunate I was to have only a “mild” case, but it was still unpleasant, and the brain fog and fatigue lingered long enough to make the last month of my first semester of grad school unnecessarily difficult. I still managed to pull out a 4.0 GPA, but it was a near thing, and it wouldn’t have been if I’d been healthy.
4. Being sick and exhausted and busy with grad school meant I didn’t keep up with housework the way I normally would.

By the time I got to the end of the semester, I was exhausted and frustrated and overwhelmed. Last week, I took the bull by the horns and did myself three favors: I cleaned, decluttered, and reorganized my kitchen and office during a three-day period beginning Christmas Eve; I got on the FlyLady website and started re-establishing the habits that I’d learned there 20 years ago and hadn’t needed in several years; and I started a new bullet journal using a cheap dot-grid journal I found at the dollar store last fall but hadn’t had time to set up.

Tonight, I have a shiny sink, a set of lesson plans (and most of the ancillary materials) ready to go in Google Classroom — which I spent several hours taking self-paced classes to learn over break — and a glass of sangria in hand. This is the calm before the storm of another semester, but the point here is that it’s calm, if only for a few more hours. That’s something I haven’t experienced in a while, and I’ll savor it while I can.

Emily

Folk Thursday: The Fallow Way

It’s been a bit since I posted anything for Folk Thursday. With a little more time on my hands than usual, this seems as good a time as any to do it.

In “The Fallow Way,” Judy Collins’ lyrics speak to the value of stillness and solitude — two commodities many of us have in abundance at the moment.

I found myself thinking of this song Tuesday as I was standing in the lobby of the Roadrunner Lodge, minding the desk while the owner was busy with a teleconference. Here in Tucumcari, the winter is quiet, but this time of year, we start to see the snowbirds stopping in on their way east from Arizona, and the first few tourists begin wandering up and down Tucumcari Boulevard, cameras in hand. Every spring, I look forward to watching Route 66 come back to life, a bright blossom with petals made of neon and chrome.

A quick update

I noticed my “Excellent Time-Wasters” page was out of date, with a lot of broken links. I put it up about 10 years ago, when a colleague was scheduled for surgery and was going to be stuck recovering at home for a while. A few of the offerings on that page seem to have vanished from the internet altogether (or become inaccessible because of changing technology), but a lot of them just moved, as things have a way of doing.

As I’m sure many readers could use some good ways to kill time while sheltering in place, I spent a few minutes updating the page this afternoon. Click the “Excellent Time-Wasters” tab or click here to access it.

I left the Venice Cafe link (“Trippy mosaic-covered bar”) in place because the site is ordinarily really good, and I didn’t want to direct people away from it, but if you go to it at the moment, all you’ll find is an announcement saying the venue is temporarily closed due to coronavirus concerns. In the meantime, you can see photos of it here. When we lived in Belleville, Illinois, Ron and I spent a lot of time slipping across the river to the Venice Cafe on our nights off to see what new art was in the works. It’s quite a place.

If anybody is missing the March Madness office pool, a good alternative might be to start a betting pool on how long these disruptions will be in place before I start attempting to turn my backyard into an unholy hybrid of Dave Dardis’ secret garden, the Watts Towers, and the Venice Cafe’s beer garden. I’ve only been waiting my whole life to have the time and resources to do something like that.

Emily

Look for the helpers

Ron and I went to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood when it came to Tucumcari a few weeks ago. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s well worth the $3 to watch it on Amazon Prime while you’re practicing social distancing.

As the coronavirus scare unfolds, I find myself wondering how Fred Rogers would handle it. What would a coronavirus-themed episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood look like? What would Mr. Rogers tell his young viewers? What would Lady Aberlin say to reassure Daniel the Striped Tiger? How would King Friday address his subjects in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe?

In an interview many years ago, Mr. Rogers mentioned that when he was a child, and something sad or frightening happened, his mother would say, “Look for the helpers.”

I don’t have Mr. Rogers’ gentle, soft-spoken demeanor or a set of puppets I can use to reassure you. But I do have some training in looking for the good in every situation, and while I’m a bit rusty at it, I still remember how to look for the helpers.

With that in mind, here are some hopeful signs amid the deluge of bad news:

• The Washington Post reports that pet adoptions are up, along with the number of volunteers willing to foster homeless animals, as people find themselves at home, with time on their hands and a need for companionship.
• The Christian Science Monitor reports that grocery-store clerks, whose work often goes unappreciated, are being treated as emergency responders in several states as the value of their work becomes apparent.
• On a related note, here in New Mexico, during her most recent press conference, our governor made a point of thanking journalists for putting themselves at risk to provide the public with information that may help keep them safe. It’s not unusual for journalists to do that, but it’s unusual — and heartening — to hear an elected official acknowledge it.
• The Monitor also noted in a recent editorial that charitable giving is up.
• While scientists are still working on treatments and vaccines, the Post reports that it appears they’ve found a faster way to test patients for coronavirus, which should help leaders, medical workers, and individuals make better decisions.

There are plenty of helpers out there. Keep looking for them.

Emily

‘Til the storm passes by

The world is losing its mind over the coronavirus.

In big cities where people live, work, and socialize in close physical proximity to each other, that probably makes sense.

Here in Tucumcari, where we aren’t in each other’s faces all the time, very little has changed — which also makes sense.

School is out statewide for at least the next three weeks. A lot of churches have canceled services. I assume the bars and restaurants are all complying with the governor’s order to modify their seating arrangements. But otherwise, things are pretty normal.

The grocery store is still well-stocked. The hardware store still had plenty of dust masks when I needed one for the flooring project I’m working on. Nobody has treated me like Typhoid Mary this week, despite an ill-timed cold that turned into laryngitis just as the governor’s emergency order came down.

I am concerned, of course. I have friends in high-risk groups. My community’s economy depends, in part, on tourism. I’m not impressed with the contradictory messages coming out of the White House. But I am heartened by the common sense I see around me. People are being reasonably careful, but they aren’t letting fear get the better of them.

As I think about it, being in Tucumcari in the midst of this unprecedented disruption feels rather like being in Red Fork during a tornado.

In Red Fork, if a tornado warning went into effect, nobody panicked. Everybody just grabbed a beer and stood on their front porches to watch the storm. They weren’t stupid. They knew when it was time to go inside. But they also knew that worrying has never changed the trajectory of a storm, and they’d been through enough storms to know that this one, like all the others, would pass, and when it had, they would simply get up the next morning, survey the damage, and start cleaning up the mess.

Rural New Mexico hasn’t been through anything like this. But people here are pretty self-sufficient, and they know that if all hell is going to break loose, panicking won’t dissuade it. So they watch the storm, and they wait, and they know that when it passes, it will be time to start cleaning up the mess.

There’s something reassuring in that.

Emily

 

Ask the Hippie: Controlling Hot Flashes

Q. You had your ovaries removed during your hysterectomy. How bad are the hot flashes, and what are you doing about them?

A. For about a week after surgery, I kept the hot flashes to three or four a day, but the frequency (12 to 15 a day) and intensity spiked as I started feeling better and drifted away from the carefully planned, phytoestrogen-heavy meals I’d prefabbed before my surgery. When I started eating right again, the hot flashes settled back down to manageable levels.

Phytoestrogens occur naturally in most plants. Soybeans are among the richest sources; other good sources include black beans, peanuts, ground flaxseed, oats, tree nuts, and sweet potatoes.

Here are five easy ways to boost your phytoestrogen intake:

Source 1: Smoothies. Blend together half a frozen banana, a cup of frozen berries, two tablespoons of powdered peanut butter, two tablespoons of ground flaxseed, orange juice (I freeze mine in ice-cube trays and throw a few cubes in a smoothie), a cup of soymilk, and a little water. These are loaded with protein, fiber, and phytoestrogens and make quick breakfasts, especially if you assemble the frozen ingredients in advance and freeze them in individual containers.

Source 2: Oatmeal. Microwave half a cup of old-fashioned oatmeal with a quarter-cup each of nuts and dried cranberries, a pinch of cinnamon, and as much water as needed to reach the consistency you like. Sweeten with honey, brown sugar, or — for an extra dose of phytoestrogens — a half-cup of applesauce. Rich in protein, fiber, and phytoestrogens and nice on mornings that are too cool for smoothies.

Source 3: Soynut butter. Made for little kids with peanut allergies, soynut butter looks and sort of tastes like peanut butter. I spread some on a whole-wheat mini-bagel and add a tablespoon or so of marshmallow creme to make a soy-based Fluffernutter for breakfast.

Source 4: Baked sweet potatoes. Bake ’em in a slow cooker for a few hours. Top with butter and either brown sugar and cinnamon (for a sweet treat) or salsa and a little lime juice (for a savory snack).

Source 5: Veggie corn dogs. Morningstar Farms makes these. They’re 150 calories apiece take a minute and a half to nuke, and taste like regular corn dogs. Easy lunch on busy days.

Beyond that, I try to drink plenty of water, eat popsicles, and wear a cooling scarf in warm surroundings.

Emily

Ask the Hippie: Surviving a Hysterectomy without Opioids

Q. A hysterectomy is major surgery. How did you get through yours without opioids, and what are the advantages and disadvantages?

A. Opioids are magnificent painkillers, but I can’t keep them down, and the last thing I wanted was to have my stomach acting up immediately after abdominal surgery, so my doctor prescribed 800 mg of ibuprofen every 8 hours instead.

The medicine worked pretty well when I remembered to take it. More helpful than the ibuprofen, I think, were two tips I picked up from HysterSisters, which is a pretty good resource.

Tip 1: Use an abdominal binder to support the incisions and keep your internal organs from squirming around too much. I didn’t have a binder, but the extra-wide Ace bandage I’d used to support a ribcage injury years ago made a serviceable substitute.

Tip 2: Get a couple of those flat ice packs that are designed to go in lunchboxes. Keep one in the freezer, tuck the other between the top and bottom layers of your bandage, and rotate them out as needed. Instant relief.

At its worst, my pain really wasn’t any worse than moderate cramps, and by skipping the opioids, I avoided the constipation and mental fog that come with prescription painkillers. The former does not play well with abdominal incisions, and the latter makes me nervous, so I was just as happy to dodge those bullets.

I was a little concerned about the risk of inflammation, so the week before my surgery, I made myself a big batch of those frozen fruit bars I use to cool down after a workout. To make them, you just puree frozen berries, which have anti-inflammatory properties, with enough cranberry juice to make a pourable liquid, pour it into molds, and freeze it. I figured the cranberry juice would also reduce my risk of catheter-induced bladder infections. Bonus: The frozen treats made a pleasant antidote to hot flashes.

Hope that’s useful to somebody.

Emily

Sunday Self-Care: Making the beds

As I mentioned several weeks ago, I don’t stop gardening in the winter. Time spent working in the sunshine is a necessity if I’m to keep seasonal depression at bay, and winter is an ideal time to work on a garden’s infrastructure. My focus this year has been adding raised beds. I had six last year, and my goal is to have a dozen by planting time this year — a task that should be accomplished easily enough, as we generally buy one every paycheck, and we’re still five checks away from Planting Day.

I think that bird’s-nest concept takes up too much room to work in the garden proper, but it’ll be cute around a flowerbed in the front yard later on.

I’ve been filling the beds with compostable materials, peat moss, and finished compost. A third of a bale of peat on the bottom provides filler as well as drainage and aeration, and three bags of compost on top will just about fill up the bed, for a total cost of about $8 per bed.

I can’t say enough good things about these beds, which are just plain old 36-inch fire rings. They run between $30 and $45 apiece, depending on where you buy them and whether you catch a sale, and they’re lightweight, easy to position (just roll them where you want them), and make planting and weeding very easy. I installed them out of necessity — the juglones from the neighbors’ black walnut and pecan trees have rendered the soil in my backyard worthless for growing most vegetables — but they’ve proven so advantageous in so many directions, I’m not sure I’d go back to traditional rows even if I had the option.

As you can see in the picture, I’ve also started mulching with cedar shavings in between beds. They look neat, discourage pests, and smell nice when I walk over them.

Emily

P.S.: The tin cans you see in one of the rings in the top picture are leftovers from last year’s plantings. Besides being a good way to start seeds, the cans help protect young plants from marauding squirrels, which love to dig through my raised beds in search of nuts. My tomato plants wouldn’t have survived without them last year.

Scaling back

Late Saturday night, I realized I’d spent nearly 10 straight hours doing blog-related stuff and STILL didn’t have a whole week’s worth of posts filed, and I ended up so tired and frustrated, it literally made me sick. It occurred to me that I’ve taken something I started for fun and made it stressful. That’s really screwed-up.

My New Year’s resolution was to do less, live more, and hopefully spend less time battling the stress-related health problems that plagued me for most of 2016. To that end, I’m making some changes around here:

Vegetarian Friday. When I started this feature in 2014, my goal was to try one new vegetarian recipe every week for a year in an effort to incorporate more plant-based meals into our diet. Posting them was a way to keep myself honest. Three years later, a good 80 percent of the meals I cook are vegetarian, probably a fourth are vegan, and I’ve learned a lot about staging food photos. The most important thing I’ve learned is that I don’t like staging food photos. I see no point in doing something I don’t like if I’m not being paid for it, especially if other people are better at it. With that in mind, if you enjoyed Vegetarian Friday, I would encourage you to visit Oh She Glows and Minimalist Baker. If I dream up something really exceptional, I’ll still share it like I always have, but it’s probably not going to be a weekly occurrence.

Eco-Saturday. I’m not getting rid of this, but I’m changing it. Like Vegetarian Friday, Eco-Saturday was supposed to run for a year. Three years later, I’ve gone about as far as I can where I am, so I’m going to focus more on reviews, recommendations, links, and daydreams about things I’d like to do someday. If there’s anything you’d like me to cover, feel free to suggest it in the comments.

Make-It Monday and Tiny Tuesday. You’ll get one or the other each week, but probably not both, because they overlap a lot, and separating them out is starting to feel forced.

I hope that doesn’t disappoint anybody too terribly. At this point, trying to do too much is easily my worst habit, and I’m trying very hard to break it. Bear with me; down time is still an alien concept for me, and self-care isn’t really one of my strengths.

Emily