Ecuador Part 2- the rest of the country

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Ecuador, the first two weeks with Grace

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Happy Birthday Abby

Today is the 22nd day of the 2nd month.  I have always enjoyed numbers, not math so much but numbers yes.  With only 10 digits, patterns are certain to emerge when you look at the numbers in your life.   My sister would insist at this moment that I remind everyone that zero is a number.  Now that I have entered the world of computer science I can attest to the importance of the zero :)  I have had a streak of 3s and 7s for my addresses- 173, 7307, 1713...  I am attuned to looking for the patterns after working with the late and great Dr. Brian Kaye.  He was a founding contributor to chaos and fractal mathematics and I am sure I will say more about him another day.  

Abby's birthday is 2-22 and she is a twin.  I am sad to say her twin brother is no longer in this dimension and I am sure that today has been bittersweet ever since.  Abby is one of the most resilient people I know having lived many lives with many new beginnings.  She has been a constant source of inspiration and appreciation for my photography and being.  I love her laugh and her outgoing nature.  When you are around Abby you cannot help but smile!  She is the only person I know who might be more curious than me and she is never afraid to ask a question, of anyone.  We have had some great adventures together in FLA and TX.  I miss her so.  
Happy Birthday my beautiful friend, I hope you have an outstanding day filled with love, peace, joy and light. 

the kitchen sink

My mum can create something out of nothing, well not nothing, but that woman can look into the pantry and freezer and figure out a yummy and nourishing meal at any moment.  I am blessed to have been influenced by this creativity.  I didn't even realize it until someone pointed it out to me.  Adam joked the other day about recycling a terrible steak I had cooked.  You are not going to make a soup or lunch out of that? he asked as I stood over the trash can hesitant to scrape my plate into it.  

Both of my families come from hard work and an attitude of DIY.  Scotch, Dutch, misers, thrifty, prudent, frugal... call it what you will, I didn't realize the behaviours even had names as I grew up.  I would watch in horror as people threw out the rest of dinner or friends trashed paper that had only been written on one side.  I have been known to get quite upset over letting a bunch of asparagus go bad in the refrigerator.  

I encourage you to cruise your food stock every morning.  

Here are some things I keep in mind-

- look at your fresh produce EVERY day.  If something looks like it might be going bad then cook it.  Boil it or blanch it then put it back in the fridge.  Who knew that you could mush cooked radishes in with your boiled potatoes?  You can get another week of storage by cooking.

- keep wraps or tortillas around.  Left overs + some lettuce and salad dressing can make a yummy wrap.  Rice, beans + meat = burrito.  Veg + cheese + meat if you need = quesadillas.
Layer tortillas and left overs, cover with soup or sauce, bake and you have left over lasagna.

- keep spring roll wraps around.  Just about any vegetable can go into a spring roll and they are fun to make.

- keep pizza dough ingredients on hand. You can put many many things on or in pizza crust.  You don't need cheese, or official pizza sauce and it doesn't even need to be flat, you can roll stuff up in it.  

- my sister would remind me that you can make a casserole or goulash at any moment if you add noodles and a soup to well, whatever fits in the pot.

- use a sharpie to write the open date on jars and containers when you open them.  Things like stock, salsa, half used spaghetti sauce can linger in the fridge.  The date should remind you to use them up.

- if you cannot compost, keep your vegetable scraps, skins, ends, and stalks in a bag in your freezer.  Keep adding to the bag instead of the garbage.  You can make a tasty vegetable stock from those scraps by boiling them with water.  I add them to the chicken stock I make from the chicken bones I keep.  The freezer is an amazing tool.

Try to identify the anchor ingredient, this should be the thing that is going to spoil if you do not use it.  Could be a sauce, veg, meat, left overs, bread, and begin to build from there.  Do not forget that you can have multiple courses at any meal if you are worried about quantity.  
How you put ingredients together is up to your taste.  If you don't try you will never know if you could take that terribly dry roast beef and slow cook it with some curry for a great Indian meal ( I had so much beef left that I rinsed the curry sauce off and made an enchilada lasagna out of it!)  Creativity in the kitchen takes time to develop and you may have to choke some things down but you have done yourself a real service, You have not wasted FOOD.

I force this creative process every month as we "eat the house down".  I refuse to go to the store until the cupboards and fridge are just about empty.  I am incredibly fortunate that Adam is a good sport about my substitutions.  Last night we had spring rolls to finish off the rest of the fresh veggies, you wont find the recipe anywhere, they had a little bit of everything - everything but the kitchen sink.



  

Celebration of Same

I don't have kids but almost everyone I know does.  I get to do a lot of objective observation and my friends and family have humored me often and have honored me with their time to listen thoughtfully to my ideas.  This particular observation extends well beyond kid-dom but I think it is where it begins.  

You are so stubborn, just like your father.  Your eyes are so beautiful, just like your mothers.  You need to behave more like your friends. You put your milk on the same shelf I do. 

I hear these statements of sameness often.  Sometimes celebrated but often noted.  I rarely hear the same enthusiasm for a recognized difference.  

I like to refer to the writings of other authors when they have already said it well.

"With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else.  We try to please Mom and Dad, we try to please the teachers at school, we try to please the church, and so we start acting.  We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected.  The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough.  Eventually we become someone that we are not.  We become a copy of Mamma's beliefs, Daddy's beliefs, society's beliefs, and religion's beliefs." ~The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (1997)

I recognize that we often believe things are easier when we are all the same, we are not made uncomfortable, we are not challenged.  If we surround ourselves with sameness that is all that will result, more of the same.  We elected a president who used the simple campaign slogan "Change", it is obvious that Americans are looking for change.  Perhaps we could all start at home and stop breeding the same.  

 

Firsty- Thirsty for Firsts

Yep, I am one of those persons that make up words.  I get it from my Grampie, my mums dad... I believed the turn signal in the car was actually called the doodleflapper because of him.  

I am thirsty for firsts and consequently I invite challenge into my life.

The couple Adam and I shared the gondola with at Keystone yesterday told me I was brave when we revealed that it was my inaugural run on a snowboard.  I have skied for 20 years now and after hearing so much about how comfy the gear was and how zen the ride is I decided that I should learn. 
Brave huh? They knew that it was going to hurt.  I had been repeatedly warned that I was going to fall, that it was going to be often and that I would want to give up. I looked at the couple with pity, they were not much older than I, had they already given up?  Had they already stopped falling? stopped hurting?  Had they already learned everything? Perhaps they are simply afraid.  Afraid of a little instability, a little unknown, a little bruising, afraid of a little fear...  

Life is long, learn much.
Cuze if you aint learnin you aint livin.

I'll be headed back out as soon as I can sit on my right ass cheek again, ready to fall, ready to hurt, ready to learn. Forever firsty.

Deflowering

I have avoided this.  I have avoided some aspects of our technology rich world.  I have stayed on my island, refusing to participate, developing this idea that tech is evil.  Then a book comes along, a well thought argument presented in a fashion that I simply cannot ignore. 

“The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is – not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footsteps on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one's own life, in a less dramatic way.” 
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

So here I am, transcending, embracing all that current technology has to offer.  I played monopoly with my nieces via Google Hangout on Christmas Day.  Some folks out there have a really harsh view on what technology "is doing" to communication.  After helping her with school work I told my oldest niece that learning to write script was totally useless, what she needed to do was learn how to type.  What she writes on a piece of paper is viewable by few, what she types could be viewed by millions. So here I am, transcending, putting away my pen and paper, taking my own advice.  

Perhaps you will find my island interesting.

Cherie