Back in the saddle again

Not so much the saddle, I guess, as the office chair. Although I do sometimes get saddle sores from it.
I have been off gallivanting this summer and have just not spent that much time writing. I know you'll understand - summer is busy! Not only do you have the regular activities that you usually do - jobs, kids, housework, birthdays, eating - but then in summer you add additional activities - lawn mowing, barbecues, baseball, camping and festivals. Double your pleasure, double your fun (as long as you have double the energy).
I've also been busy with food. I've been inspired this summer by the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. She and her family of 4 spent one year eating local. What does that mean? They grew much of their own food (they do live on a farm) and bought from local farmers or farmer's markets or even products in the grocery store that came from local sources. This meant lots of squash and tomatoes and no bananas. It also meant forethought and rethinking food in general. Do you know how food grows? Where it comes from? How much it really cost to grow? and what really goes into making what you eat?
It's not so much a plea for vegetarianism, or raw food, or even specifically organic. It's an encouragement to pay attention to what you are eating, how it got here and what is really in that thing you're eating. Even if you don't read the book, I encourage you to take one day to pay attention to what you eat. Do you know where it came from? Large corporate farm or small local farm? Sustainable? Environmentally safe? Pesticide free? How long did it travel (and how many gallons of gas to get there)? How does it taste?
My mom had a big garden when I was growing up and I definitely know that carrots fresh out of the ground (even with dirt on them) taste better than most of the carrots in the store. Tomatoes in the store can't even compare with those from from the garden. And did you know there are actually over 1100 varieties of lettuce out there? Oh the things we've forgotten.
So this summer I'm spending more time at Farmer's markets. More time in my garden. More time freezing (and soon to be canning). More time cooking and of best of all, more time eating.
Recently my sister came to visit. I had just picked up my CSA share and had been to a local Farmer's Market. She also brought food from my mom's garden, not to mention 2 dozen eggs from her chickens. Bon Appetit!

unread

Book Meme from Inspirasana and originally from YogaMum. List of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Mark the books you have read with bold, underline books you read in school and italicize books you started but did not finish.

Reminds me of how little I remember of my school academics.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye - SCHOOL
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (the rings trilogy)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island - read this to my son when he was a baby
David Copperfield

Vacation?

As in "I need one" or "you thought I was on one". No, I have not been in some tropical locale (I wish). I have been on what you could probably call a growth vacation. I've been going through a personal growth spurt and have been compelled to read voraciously. Last week I read 3 books! Among other things. I've noticed I seem to go in cycles of:

GROWTH: read, study, discuss, intake, process, learn, Yoga
INSPIRATION: Blog, write, ideas, create, clean, sew, dance, exercise, Yoga
LAZY/REST: Sleep, TV, Sit on my butt, sleep some more, really lame TV, do nothing, eat Girl Scout Cookies, not so much Yoga

So I did a little bit of the LAZY/REST (not necessarily the same thing, but often alternates between the two) and couldn't hold my eyes open past 8:30pm. Then Daylight Savings! Sad, but I actually welcomed it. For our family it was really just time adjusting to our changed sleep schedules. (And yes, I know it was early but you'd want it early too if your kids started waking up at 5am by mid April.)
And I did a lot of GROWTH - hence all the books. I read the God Code by Gregg Braden, The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard and of COURSE I'm reading A New Earth by Ekhart Tolle. I mean, who isn't? Let's see, population of the U.S. - Oprah Fans. More about that later. The book is really great at the end so keep moving through the beginning if you're just starting out. Let's just say EGO isn't just for Psychology majors anymore.
And now on to INSPIRATION! More to come...

Books part duex - Dr. Suess

Dr. Suess. AKA Theodore Geisel. He started writing children’s books in the late 30’s and early 40’s with “To think that I saw it on Mulberry Street”, which was rejected by 27 publishers. He was clearly ahead of his time. Not only in that he wrote fun, nonsensical rhyming books for kids, in an age of Dick and Jane, but many of his books carry a deeper meaning about the environment (The Lorax), war (The Butter Battle Book), hatred and segregation (The Sneetches) and health care (You’re Only Old Once: a book for obsolete children). Here are my favorite lines from that book:

For your Pill Drill you’ll go to Room Sic Sixty-three,
where a voice will instruct you, “Repeat after me…
This small white pill is what I munch
At breakfast and right after lunch
I take the pill that’s Kelly green
Before each meal and in between.
These loganberry-colored pills
I take for early morning chills.
I take the pill with zebra stripes
To cure my early evening gripes.
These orange-tinted ones, of course,
I take to cure my charley horse.
I take three blues at half past eight
To slow my exhalation rate.
On alternate nights at nine p.m.
I swallow pinkies. Four of them.
The reds, which make my eyebrows strong,
I eat like popcorn all day long.
The speckled browns are what I keep
Beside my bed to help me sleep.
This long flat one is what I take
If I should die before I wake.”

If you’re ever in the mood for simple fun, try my other favorites, What Was I Scared of? (pale green pants with nobody inside ‘em!) and Fox in Socks. It’s hard to not to giggle while reading about when tweedle beetles battle with their paddles in a bottle on a noodle eating poodle.

Books

25 days of my favorite things - # 9

Unofficially, bread was #8, although I think I may make it the 2nd addendum to Food (glorious, food!). Today I'm celebrating the equally large and all encompassing category of BOOKS (glorious, books!).
My name is Marya, and I'm a bookaholic. Which is not an easy thing to get over as many of my friends and family are too. I avoid Barnes & Noble and other stores, I've tried the library, and I've even signed up for Booksfree.com. I used to keep them (or hoard them, depending on who you ask). At least now I can give them away. I sell them on Ebay, I give them to Goodwill and give them away as Christmas presents. But I just can't stop! I've resigned myself to my wish list on Amazon and at least try to pace myself.
I've also gotten much pickier about the types of books I read. Funny, but it hasn't seemed to diminish my selection in any way. In my teens I read a lot of Stephen King and sci fi and classics. Then I started reading more historical fiction and best sellers. Now I love good short stories. Stories from real people telling about real and wonderful events. And yoga, and inspiration, and manifesting, and wellness, and quantum physics, and on and on.
I also tend to read several books at a time. It doesn't always make me feel productive but at least there's one for my moods:
The book for light reading or fun: Timepiece and The Letter by Richard Paul Evans
The book for bedtime reading: The Bhagavad-Gita (qualifies for several categories)
The book for inspiration: Inspiration, Your Ultimate Calling by Dr. Wayne Dyer
The book for deeper learning: Ask and it is Given by Hicks-Abraham

Read any good books lately?

Curious George

I love Curious George. My 4 year old is not a TV watcher in general but loves this show. I, in turn, love it too. Through this love of Curious George we are adding to our already unique family language. We can thank George for the terms “Smell-o-Vision”, “Flopification Pot” and “Window Monkey”. I am now fond of saying: “I want a window monkey! Where’s MY window monkey?” (using a tone of voice much like Veruca Salt from Willie Wonka).

My husband already calls our son “monkey bucket”. He’s the king of nicknames. When our son was born we argued over what to name him. We’re not so good with boy names. I wanted Jalen, he wanted anything but. Actually, it had more to do with Chicago sports than anything. You see, we have 2 dogs named “Walter” and “Payton”. Our first son is named Samuel, but we call him Sammy (as in Sammy Sosa – that was the deal we struck). So for the second boy we went through any number of Chicago sports player names. Brian (Urlacher), Mike (Ditka), Michael Jordan (first or last name would have worked), George (Halas). I think he might have even considered Rex. Anthony was the only name I would consider, after Anthony Thomas. We flipped coins. I lost. Anthony it was (and his middle name actually is Thomas).

When we brought him home from the hospital our older son (then 1 ½ years old) couldn’t say Anthony. He called him Ant-ny and it stuck. My husband also called him “A-train” which later turned in to “Freight Train” and that stuck. The monkey part came from the way he would just hang on his. As a baby and toddler you could hold him on your hip and he would “just mold to your body” as one of my friends’ mother said. He was like a monkey – you could let go and he’d hang on.

Don’t ask me where bucket came from. Oh, and sometimes there’s a “lips” thrown in for good measure. We sure do love our Freight Monkey Bucket Lips.