The Story of Stuff

We all need to watch this. Now. If you watched it a year ago, it’s time to watch it again.

If anyone questions the impetus of the 100 Thing Challenge, this twenty minute video boils it down beautifally.

Cron-O-meter

After seeing a segment on Oprah about calorie restriction/life extension, Jennifer and I have been measuring everything we eat to see just how many calories we’re eating in a day. Weird, huh? It’s tedious but this free software, CRON-O-METER, makes it interesting. Interesting, I mean, for a dedicated health nut like myself, anyway.

The software is connected to 3 massive food databases, so anything you are eating will be in there (unless you’re eating things like pencils, paperclips, and tree bark). It automatically calculates all the vitamins, minerals, lipids, carbs, protein and gives you a complete picture of your nutrition. CRON stands for calorie restriction optimal nutrition.

For breakfast I just (mixed up in a bowl) a cup of cherries, a cup of blueberries, almonds, pecans, and a cup of unsweetened soy milk.

That’s exactly 441 calories.

Making fun of Jennifer at 5:30 in the morning

I never miss out on an opportunity to make fun of Jennifer. Last night, she comes downstairs to get Chloe to do some of her homework, which includes reading “Ramona Quimby, age 8.”

She says “Chloe, have you read your stroller, yet?”

After much laughter (mostly from Ainsley, Chloe and I) she heads upstairs where she grabs a box of cereal that was left on the table and promptly heads into the bathroom with it.

wet cat

In Sri Lanka, elephants screamed and ran for higher ground because they sensed the oncoming tsunami. Dogs refused to go outdoors. Flamingos abandoned their low-lying breeding areas.

Here in my home, I’m alerted that the basement has begun to flood by a wet cat jumping onto my desk–a perfect spot, I suspect, for a prolonged bathing session.

Mission accomplished

Well, it took almost a whole year, but I finally reduced my personal possessions from four hundred and something down to 97. Now that I have nothing left, I’m bored out of my mind. Nah, that’s not true; I’m not deprieving myself, I feel freer. My closet is definitely less cluttered. The office in the dungeon is clutter-free. Here’s a few of what I have left:

• 3 pairs of footwear
• 1 pair of gloves
• 1 belt
• 1 necktie
• 1 sweatshirt
• 1 coat
• 2 iPods
• 4 hats (I could trim here, but I have only 1 baseball cap left and I never thought THAT would happen)
• 1 pair of jeans

I think I could knock off another 7 items to get down to 90. Then I think about my wife and how she’s clinging to eleven-year-old high school “love” notes from yours truly. I couldn’t stand to even unfold one to read what was on my mind back then. Eventually, I will probably burn them one Saturday morning before she rolls out of bed. Poor woman has hoarding tendencies, I think.

So, after a year of this blog, what have I learned?

Counting fruit is friggin’ boring, that’s what I’ve learned, and I’m not saying that because I’m falling short of my fruit-eating goals. It’s just tedious and silly to sustain it for a WHOLE year.

Needless to say, I won’t be counting my apples again, but the 100 Thing Challenge ended up being much more rewarding than I ever imagined. It taught me to be much more aware of my wants and my needs, to distinguish between the two. I don’t buy a pair of shoes on a whim just because I like how they look. I don’t have 6 hooded sweatshirts and 3 coats clogging my closet just to have a choice of colors.

Now I have to make this attitude stick.

Five miles of green

Jennifer and I, for the 2nd year in a row, ran the St. Louis St. Patrick’s Day Parade Run on Saturday; neither one of us wore a stitch of green.Whoops!

The temperature was 37, not bad for running five miles. We weren’t out to kill ourselves; we took an hour to finish. Since it was Jennifer’s birthday I agreed to stay with her. Last year we used this race to prepare for the St. Louis half marathon in April and I finished about 15 minutes quicker.

The atmosphere was festive. It’s not unusual to see participants running and drinking beer at the same time. Between mile four and five, we passed a runner wearing a full Gumby costume (unless it was the “real” Gumby). The road gets crowded and Mr. Gumby left me wondering how he navigated his way through so many people without falling.

We were passed by a large dog wearing an official St. Patrick’s Day Run t-shirt, dragging a leash behind. I couldn’t tell if the owner was nearby. To me it looked like the dog had left it’s owner behind in a bid to win the whole damn race.

We were also passed by a group of young men pushing a guy in one of those race car shopping carts. Of course, the cart was painted green. In the cart with him were his crutches. What great friends.

We saw guys wearing woman’s green, lacy tights. We saw green hair, green wigs, green boas, green “you name it.”

I started out with my iPod on, but before hitting the one mile mark, I realized that I was missing part of the fun. I wanted to take in as much of the experience as possible: the odd sights, the snippets of conversation, and the general feeling of determination that comes with 9,000 people sharing a common goal.

Knitting is a manly endeavor

My new hobby is knitting!! I found out this week (Thanks CS!!) that tons of guys knit. Straight guys even! My goal is to knit myself some kick-ass socks–socks that stay up on my legs and don’t stretch out and fall into an ugly bunch around my ankles. First, I’m going to knit without a purpose for a few more days, then I’m going to learn how to read a pattern, then I’m going to knit a scarf (which I’ll immediately donate to Goodwill). Finally–socks!

So, this post is to declare that I’m not embarrassed to be a knitter. In fact, women should be embarrassed; it was men who started it all. I’ll leading the charge to put more testosterone into the hobby.

“Why don’t you grow a pair and knit me a cable-knit sweater, dude!”

Yes, you’ll be hearing statements like this before you know it.

Recalling what I learned from an Interpersonal Communications course, the most well-adapted people have both male and female–actually, I’m not sure of a good way to explain this and I don’t want to look it up. My dad would say “grocery shopping is for women,” for example. I cook, clean, KNIT, but I can also hang shelves, wire a house, dig a hole, and burn stuff.

Like today, while burning some scrap lumber, stray leaves missed by our “gardener” in October, and hundreds of those damn sweet gum balls, I set our yard on fire. My wife would never bother with burning  a city block to the ground.

“That’s a ‘guy’ thing,” she would say.

Well, the rake couldn’t contain the blaze, a big sheet of wood didn’t smother the flames like I thought, so, luckily the hose was hooked up and I sprinted around the yard while Ainsley was asking over and over “what’d you do daddy?”

Then the damn water pressure was shit so I couldn’t stand in one place and do a backdraft imitation, I had to run around like an idiot to hose down a 400 square foot fire.

So yeah, I can knit…and I can burn, baby.

I fell on my ass and I’m going to write about it because that’s just how I am

I was going to reveal my new hobby this afternoon. That is, until I fell on my ass. Now I just feel like I need to write about my sore ass in hopes that the pain will ease.

It seems my new hobby is hurting myself. Three weeks ago, I knocked myself silly going up some steps. Today, I stood up to hang the cutting mat on its nail here in the office and, without looking or feeling behind me, I sat back down, but when my ass was parallel with the floor (where it normally meets fake leather and padding) it kept going all the way down to the concrete floor. Before today I would have guessed that my ass could withstand such an incident without much distress, but I’m feeling it in every step.

I may just have to make Jennifer look for visible signs of ass-damage, like bruising. An ass-massage is out of the question because I know that would hurt; just sitting here, I can feel ass-discomfort, so any kind of kneading-action would just be torture–ass torture.

This is a new personal record; I have used the word “ass” 10 times.

Writing about my sore ass (11 times) has NOT helped ease the pain. As soon as I hit publish on this ass-tastic (12 times) piece of writing, I’m off to find some ass-pillows (13 times) because I have to sit in this demonic chair (I’m convinced that it moved on its own as I was about to sit) to whip out 14 shirts before I can take an ice-cold ass-bath (to prevent swelling, of course…14).

ass. (15)

ass. (16)

The kids are away!

Oh yeah, this blog.

The kids were away this weekend, so it was just Jennifer and I sitting around staring at the walls thinking about how dang quiet a house can be. It’s very weird and somewhat uncomfortable. I haven’t seen them in close to 48 hours, but they’re due to be back this evening. Whew! What would I do without the little brats?! No, they’re not really brats.

Last night we ventured to the theater to see “The Reader.” We both liked it, but as I sit here, I realized that it didn’t make me cry; a movie that fails to move me to tears cannot be deemed a “great” movie. So it gets 4 stars from me. We also watched “Gran Torino.” I cried. Late last night we watched “Frozen River,” which was okay (no tears).

After the Kate Winslett movie ended, I said sarcastically to Jennifer “I didn’t know it was going to be a comedy” and she replied “I didn’t know it was going to be a porno.” Of course, it was neither, but her observation was closer to the truth. David Cross and Ralph Fiennes both played the character of Michael Berg: the former depicted the young Michael, the latter the “grown up” Michael. Kate Winslett, who won an Oscar for this role, portrayed Hanna Schmitz by herself. My only complaint about the movie was that David Cross looks nothing like Ralph Fiennes. Winslett was still recognizable under all the makeup, but done right, in such a crutual scene, I shouldn’t have been thinking about the two actors playing Michael Berg.

Saturday afternoon, we sat in Borders for an hour and a half reading. Yes, this is still one of my favorite things to do. Jennifer had a vanilla red tea soy latte and I had a medium dark roast coffee with a shot of soy milk. It cost nothing thanks to my stamp card and a coupon. Jennifer browsed a book on crotcheting and a cookbook, which we ended up buying, titled “The Joy of Vegan Baking.”

Normally, I read books on philosophy, psychology, Buddhism, or plain ol’ self-help books, but Saturday I looked at a–actually, I’m not going to type it. I need to dedicate an entire post on this, which is my new hobby and it’s kind of embarrassing.

Injury severity vs. resulting decibel level of scream

In the movie, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the title character pulls his sleeve up with a snarled face of pain, a la Rambo, to reveal a tiny scratch that he covers with a Hello Kitty Band-Aid, while muttering “Oh, that’s not too bad.”

My wife is Paul Blart.

Any type of injury—I’m using the word “injury” very loosely here—compels her to writhe on the floor in apparent pain as if a couple of Academy Award judges are peeking in the window looking to discover some new talent to throw in with the likes of Meryl Streep. Normally, when I hear a blood-curdling scream (perhaps a young damsel in distress) I am off like friggin’ Batman to save the poor, troubled thing.

At home when I hear Jennifer scream, I don’t cringe, blink, or flinch. I may even be deaf to the noise. Years ago, I would speed towards the distress—again like Batman—only to find a silly spider or something equally lame. The next time I jogged. After that, I walked leisurely to the noise, out of guilt, only to find the same. Now, like I said, it doesn’t register.

The subject has been raised because, in this regard, I am the opposite. I don’t like to disturb people. I don’t like to be noisy. When I enter my own house, I unconsciously sneak in. I’m sure the reason for this will ultimately come out in therapy some day, but for now, I don’t make a peep when I get hurt.

A few weeks ago, the stairs to our basement were torn out and rebuilt. The distance from the bottom step to the ceiling was decreased. A few nights ago, with an extra bounce in my step, I headed up the stairs only to feel what I first believed to be the house falling in on my head. After a painful second, I realized that the sky wasn’t falling and I was sitting on a step with my hand on my head, sensing the goose egg that was forming under my fingers.

It hurt like nothing has hurt in years. I sat there silently for twenty, maybe thirty seconds before finishing the trek up the steps, much slower this time. I walked into the kitchen and Paul Blart, without looking away from the laptop, said “What’d you do?” in a tone that was more like “What’d you do this time?”

She said the impact shook the floor. I can picture the scene if it had been her head. I’m not saying it’s better to keep quiet. In fact, it could save her life one day—or cost me mine. Still, I would like to propose a new household rule for sweet wife o’ mine: Don’t scream for me unless you have severed a limb.