A Few Deep Breaths

I’ve been back to my yoga practice for three weeks now and just don’t know how I could have been away so long. It’s been keeping me sane through the crazy winter weather we’ve been having in our little corner of the Blue Ridge. (We had two mini-snowstorms last week and we’re now bracing for another two-footer). I’m starting out with a basic program from the Sivananda guide, which covers the essential asanas. I have to say I had forgotten how amazing it feels to spend a few minutes upside down every day…

I’ve had an on-again/off-again relationship with yoga for …whoa...almost 20 years. I started practicing in New Orleans in my early 20s. I had graduated from college and was hanging around the Crescent City living with a musician in a boho flat on lower Magazine, waiting tables at a trendy French restau and trying to figure out what to do with my life. The BF and I were looking for some kind of joint activity and found the treasure that is Alvina’s yoga studio on Oak Street (uptown-one of my very favorite streets in the world). I worked evenings so I bought a monthly pass and went to class almost every day. I remember Alvina as an amazing teacher and an amazing presence. According to her website, she has now set up a studio in San Miguel de Allende Mexico. Of course, I am now fantasizing about going down there for a retreat…

Anyway, I eventually decided to take off for Paris, where I led a very un-yogic existence and, sadly, did not practice at all. After Paris had worn me out, I came back to Virginia for a couple years and found another great teacher, Denise. But I abandoned my practice once again when I got restless and moved to NYC. Five years later when Christian convinced me to move back to VA, one of the first things I did was sign up for classes with Denise. I eventually got a job at the French Embassy in DC. Hated the job and the commute but loved the rockin’ yoga classes with Alex at lunchtime several times a week. I practiced regularly during and between both pregnancies but kinda let things kind of fizzle again after Co was born. By that time, I had quit working, and the economic slowdown hit us big time, and we started cutting out luxuries. My yoga and tennis classes went the way of our Netflix subscription (sniff). I occasionally practiced at home, but eventually succumbed to inertia and stopped altogether.

Then a little bitty glimmer of light appeared: my friend Jess (whom I had met in one of Denise’s classes) and I found out about a free yoga happy hour offered by one of the newer studios in the area. One Friday a month, they offer an hour of yoga followed by wine and cheese. We like to joke that our guru would not approve of the post-yoga alcohol consumption (booze is considered tamasic, meaning that it saps your energy, clouds reasoning and creates dark emotions and is pretty much a no-no) but we have a blast. The teachers are pretty good at this place…and did I mention it’s free?

But it became clear to me that once a month is just not enough. So I’ve been unrolling my sticky mat early in the morning or during quiet time in the afternoon. I’m pretty rusty but getting back into the swing of things. One of the important concepts in yoga is that you’re not supposed to judge other people (which I’m pretty good at). You are also not supposed to judge yourself (which I’m pretty bad at). So I’ll go ahead and say that my wheel pose, in particular, is pretty feeble. I was always a champion back bender. I’ve always used it as an expression of joy and used to do it as a party trick (it’s been a while). But these days it’s a struggle to push myself up and can only hold for a few seconds til my arms give out. Determined to keep practicing til it feels the way it used to (or something like the way it used to). So, look for me to start doing backbends on the playground this spring...

Too Much Pork for Just One Fork

Some of you may recall my earlier post about my mother in law and her fondness for canned food products. I may have neglected to mention her other enduring passion: mass produced cured meats. I am fairly sure she’s keeping Hillshire Farm in business.

She has a big thing for kielbasa. That stuff has seriously got to be one of the vilest substances on the planet (right up there with Capri Sun). I refuse to eat it and absolutely will not feed it to my kids. I shudder to think of the random animal parts they’ve thrown in there, along with chemicals, soy and way too much salt. Whenever a package comes into the house, I usually suggest that we just get rid of it. Then the ever lovin’ tells me we can’t just waste it and that he’ll take care of it. So it sits in the back of the fridge for months until he winds up cooking it some night (usually well past the expiration date) when I’m out of the house.

I should note that I’m not anti processed meat entirely. I’m totally down with bacon, for example. We don’t eat it every day or anything, but it has a special glorified place in this family--nitrates be damned.

I’ve been fascinated to note the maple bacon doughnut craze that seems to be sweeping the nation (or at least the really cool places). People keep putting posts up on facebook about them. I have yet to sample one of these babies but it really does seem to be quite the phenomenon. Here’s a bacon blogger on Anthony Bourdain’s visit to Voodoo Doughnut in Portland. And this site is insane. They’ve got the chocolate glazed maple bacon doughnut, plus bacon caramel corn and a bacon and chicken narwhal that’s pretty cute. Of course, the doughnuts also have their own entry on Wiki if you want some background. And remember last year when they came out with scientific proof that bacon cures hangovers? An old friend of mine from New Orleans writes a brilliant and widely read blog about his exploits as an English teacher in Russia and more recently the Middle East. His recent post on the politics of pork in the classroom was pretty good. At least there’s no booze available either so I imagine it's a little easier to keep the bacon jones in check...

Out of the Woodwork

The upside of old houses is supposed to be character. I have to say that most of the character I could very easily do without. However, our wacky little farmhouse does have certain very charming features, and among my favorites are the knots in the wood. We pick out shapes in the floor planks and beams like we sometimes do with clouds. As a toddler, Henry identified one knot in the hallway as an airplane. Coco has recently discovered a rabbit in one of the exposed beams above her changing table. She kept talking about a bunny, and I thought she was referring to one of her toys. Then I finally looked up and saw the light. A dark spot became an eye and a groove became an ear. Amazing.


It’s also giving me a much needed upper arm workout since my 30 pounder insists on touching the rabbit’s eye and/or ear (usually several times) as soon as she wakes up in the morning, before nap and before bed…

I so often use this space to vent about the anxieties and frustrations of parenthood, but the joys really do abound. Like hearing Co’s little voice as she discovers the wonders of the English language. She’s rocking the complete sentences now as in, “Little duck is smiling.” And the little hopping dance she does around the house is impossibly cute. Hank is heading toward 5 with all kinds of really sweet Christopher Robin-y questions and observations. Very sincere, mostly, but he’s also making goofy jokes and playing with words. One of my cousins likes to say that God makes kids cute so we won’t kill them. I remember reading Natalie Angier’s piece a few years ago on the role of cuteness in evolution. The gist is basically the same…

At Least Nobody's Puking...

Coming off a week of mid-January misery around here. We were beset by a double whammy of pink eye and something H1N1-ish, which struck all of us except for Christian who is fairly sure he had already been swined and has been mercifully immune to the latest round.

The flu, which my kids were over in a few days, won’t let go of me. I’m winding up a week of sweaty, feverish nights and achy, sluggish days. Just when I start to feel better and think the end is in sight, another round of chills and a pounding headache move in. Meanwhile, the house gets dirtier and dirtier and I feel guiltier and guiltier about having no energy or inclination to play with my kids. I’ve been uncharacteristically quick to throw on a video and (more characteristically) extremely snappish. Coco has been a total pill lately, a combination, I think, of having been sick herself and of just being two. I yelled at her other day and made her cry, which didn’t necessarily feel good although it did feel kind of cathartic (to me, I mean. I’m sure it just felt shitty to her). On top of all this, I’m still dealing with some residual post partum…um…pelvic floor issues which means that while I’m hacking up a lung I’m also, occasionally, peeing my pants just a little which is awfully annoying as one can imagine.

Then there’s the pink eye thing. Those who have experienced the joys of conjunctivitis know that the cure is a week of eye drops (I’m pretty sure it’s hydrochloric acid) three times a day. Hank was pretty valiant about the whole thing, but the little girl fought us every step of the way--flailing, kicking, screaming. It took both parents to administer the treatment—usually me holding her down while papa hit her with the poison. On top of this, my personal physician (that would be my little sis) told me not to wear contacts during eye drop week. This wouldn’t have been a huge problem except for the fact that Henry broke my glasses at some point last year so I’ve been wearing a pair of Christian’s goofy specs from the eighties for most of the week. So not only did I feel like hell, I looked like a total dumbass.

My mental state is tenuous even in the best of health, and the exhaustion of being sick and taking care of sick children has pretty much turned me into a total basket case. Every time I hear something about Haiti on the radio I start crying into my chicken soup (that would be Rachael Ray’s chicken soup w/ extra garlic btw). Of course I also start crying for no reason at all, so I can’t even use the excuse that I’m particularly sensitive to the tragedy of current events.

Anyway, I’ve determined that the only cure is rest (yeah right), tea with honey and yoga. I started the new year off determined to revive my once flourishing home practice and was off to a good start until I was sidelined by . Now that I can manage to hold my head up and breathe through one nostril, it’s time to hit the mat again and shake this thing. Kapala bati, here I come.

Rohmer RIP

Was just talking about Eric Rohmer (my very favorite cinéaste) in my last post, and now he’s gone and died. Nor necessarily surprising since he was 89 but a great loss nonetheless. I’ve been a fan since I saw Le Rayon Vert somewhere in the early 90s. Got to see a zillion of his movies in 2000 or so when Film Forum had a retrospective. I’d hit the theater after work every night (with or without friends) and stay for a double feature. I swear it was one of the best weeks of my life.

His movies aren’t for everyone (including, it would seem, my husband). They’re heavy on dialogue and light on plot and are, in my humble opinion, utterly brilliant. This is clearly a guy who loves women, and his heroines are always fascinating. I must say I’ve always thought I’d make a great Rohmer heroine…I have a couple of his better known works (Ma Nuit Chez Maude and Claire’s Knee) in my collection. But Le Rayon Vert has always been my fave. Also really loved the ones in the Four Seasons series…. Haven’t seen his last movie which came out in 2007 but it’s on request at the library. We’ll have to watch that one with a bottle of champagne…

Bambi Béarnaise

Yes, I have finally established my pioneer wife cred, bitten the bullet and cooked up some of the deer meat that’s been sitting in our freezer for the past year.

Here’s the story: the ever lovin’ isn’t much of a hunter (though he does like to talk about it…) but there are a few guys who have permission to hunt on our property. They brought us a few frozen hunks of various descriptions last year at the end of the season. I smiled, promptly stuck it in the freezer and have been wishing ever since that it would just go away. I’ve been unwilling to throw it out but afraid (on several levels) to cook/eat/serve it to my kids. But Christian has been begging me to cook it, and I came to the conclusion that we had better use it up before 2010 in case the hunters show up with another offering later this winter. So we did a roast in the crockpot a few weeks ago, cooked up a large pot of chili during the blizzard, and roasted a nut crusted tenderloin the other day with pretty good results.

The truth is, I have mixed feelings about meat in general. This despite the fact that some of my favorite memories involve the consumption of large quantities of animal flesh. Most of these took place in France, I should note. Like three consecutive days of foie gras and duck breasts in Armagnac. And those fabulous saucissons I had with a winemaker and his wife outside of Perpignan, followed by a fascinating discussion of the importance of butchers in provincial life (apparently, a subpar boucher can be a death sentence to a French village). The French and their meat…I always think of the scene in Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert (one of my all time faves) where flaky but lovable heroine tries to explain her vegetarianism to a bunch of rowdy French meat eaters.

Anyway, I manage to suppress my concerns about industrially raised meat every time I go to Costco. I try to get hormone free/organic meats when I can, but find that is sometimes cost prohibitive. I generally find raw meat disgusting (even the grass fed, locally raised stuff), and I tend to get a little paranoid about foodborne pathogens. Christian has friends who are raw vegans, and we’ve discussed going that route at some point. But that would be way down the road. I know there are some who would disagree, but I really do think little kids need to eat meat.

So, for now at least, we’re confirmed omnivores. But the venison thing still had me a little freaked out. I’ve eaten deer meat on a handful of occasions but have never prepared it myself and was preoccupied with concerns about diseases from eating wild animals, gaminess (although, now that I think about it, I’m really not exactly sure what that means…) or at the very least freezer burn. Then there are the redneck associations I couldn’t shake.

Anyway, with some encouragement from my globetrotting, PhD friend/neighbor who regularly dines on venison killed and cooked up by her mountain man, I finally decided to take the plunge. I wasn’t swooning or anything, but it has all been fairly tasty and certainly edible. Besides, isn’t this exactly the kind of local, free-range meat we’re supposed to be eating? And of course, everything tastes better when it’s free.

Home for the Holidays

New Year’s Day, and we were awakened before dawn by a boisterous toddler, which makes me very glad we decided to forgo the champagne and get to bed early. It’s been two weeks since the "blizzard" of 09. The snow is pretty much gone thanks to a warm wind around Christmas, but the sense of cabin fever remains. The weather’s been cold and drizzly for the most part—not so propitious for a forced march. There’s been plenty of scrapping and screaming going on around here (not just the kids I’m talking about either). Mama’s been pretty snappish for most of the week, thanks in part to a chest cold that seems to have moved to my head. On the upside, I’m still alive, still married, and everyone’s relatively healthy. Plus we got a heating oil delivery the other day so we should be warm for the rest of the winter.

Trying to take advantage of the indoor scene by doing some hearty winter cooking. Have been giving my kitchenaid and my beloved dutch oven a workout. Let’s see, for Christmas dinner there were my usual fabulous vegetables (roasted Brussels, sweet potato gratin and a butternut squash dish) plus a roasted turkey breast and stuffing. We had one of my sisters and her crew over plus some old friends who live in Baltimore and some holiday orphans they brought along. I swear every holiday meal should involve a few strangers—keeps things from getting boring. The Baltimore crowd comprises a bunch of musicians and we were rockin the carols into the evening ending up with the 12 Days of Christmas (my late father’s favorite). Very merry.

We’re gearing up for our traditional New Year’s Day meal: pork loin, black eyed peas and greens, with hopes that prosperity will ensue. Kept it cozy during the week between holidays with some yummy soups (carrot ginger, split pea), roasted root vegetables, kickass braised chicken thighs and lots of homemade bread. And then there’s the venison…