The Holy Grail of Chocolate Donut

I haven't written in a while, that much is clear. I'm both excited and challenged by the transition upon me at the moment. My current job is ending next week and I have nothing lined up. We have moved into our house and the lack of permanency, even after a month, is starting to gnaw at me a bit. I can't shake the feeling of "I should be doing more" or "we should be further along by now".

We're in month two and half of our vegan experiment. It's been hard. We're not experimenting with our cooking as much as we did with our first-time-around-vegan-month-challenge last year. We've been super busy. We've also let go just a bit by incorporating one dairy day into each month. I find myself wondering about the purpose of it all and what lessons I'm trying to reinforce for myself. What is the benefit and learning I intended when I first devised this idea in my mind?

But most of all I find myself fantasizing about two things: a springy donut with lots of chocolate frosting and a cheese pizza. It's marginally ridiculous how much I cannot get these two dangerous foods off my mind. I wonder...have I lifted these silly things up on a pedestal? Is not eating them and desiring them making them too huge? If I allowed myself to eat it, after having learned lessons of moderation in the past two months, would I be able to enact those lessons?

I'm also toying with the idea of amending the experiment further. If we eat vegan all week and allow ourselves one dairy treat each week would the spirit of the experiment remain the same? Would that teach me more...aka reward for healthy behavior? Or would that be giving up?

It's all so ambiguous when I've set the parameters and they feel fluid. And what is my purpose in this whole thing? And what would "failing" really mean if I continued improving my health? Without a true sense of vegan purpose like "I won't eat this because it's harming animals", its hard to find my bearings sometimes. I don't want to feel like I've given up or that I've failed. But truth be told, the experiment is difficult within our social confines.

So, I'm discerning what I want to do and searching for the why.

Beautiful Little Surprises

Over the past few weeks we've had a lot going on in the garden. Since it's all new to us we've decided to sit back and watch for the season, then decide what additions or changes we want to make next year. So lots of shots of flowers with just a few others thrown in for good measure:


My hunk of a man lazing on our little porch with a fav Montana beer.


Hydrangea bush.


Pretty blue flowers.


Something that looks like a dahlia but climbs on a vine.


Wisteria.


Honeysuckle.


Spray roses.


Not sure and a pretty little pink flower that was a gift from my aunt and uncle.


Miss Kim's lilac bushes, very fragrant.


Wild strawberry flower.


Holly bush berries.


Hawthorne tree with flowers. The birdies love the little berries from this tree.


Walking path to our patio surrounded by wild thyme ground cover.


Vegan chipotle field roast "sausages" with wild picked asparagus. Yes, Ryan's been out in the Racine County ditches with a knife cutting these bad boys down. They are yummy!

An Adventurous Squirrel

Today is records day for Ry, which means it's his last partial day of school where he turns in his grades and keys. We had made a pact to get up very early (think 5:15 am), enjoy our coffee together and do some laundry. Needless to say, that did not happen. I set our alarm to NPR and Ry snoozed it for two hours. I can hardly fault him because I don't think I really even heard it at all until about 7am.

After we finally got up, we sat at our kitchen table looking out the picture window with our coffee. Our neighbors Dick and Dolores come home every day at about 7:45, which leads me to believe that they go to daily mass, probably at Blessed Sacrament, just around the corner on Oklahoma. They are super cute old people and every time we see them Ry makes a comment about how we'll be like that some day. We watched Dolores pick up sticks from the yard that must have come down in the litany of rainstorms we've endured over the past week.

She went inside and Ry pointed out a squirrel scaling the brick wall of the attached garage on our other neighbor's house across the street. They've got a little hexagon venting window high up above the garage door with a hole in the screen. Ry said, they better watch out or they're gonna end up with squirrels in their garage loft. Sure enough, we watched the agile thing do a straight vertical climb and head for the window like he had sonar. Pretty quickly he was in the rim of the window, they we saw him peak his head in the screen hole. Next thing we knew, he climbed right in until all we could see was the tip of his tail sticking out of the hole and the shadow of him behind the screen. He got stuck between the wooden slats and ultimately didn't get inside, but what a close call. We decided we'll have to let them know next time we see the occupants coming and going. What a great little piece of free entertainment for the morning!

Also, supposedly (according to our goofy dog-walking neighbor who repeatedly sings her dogs' names at top volume as she walks them up and down the street) there was a coyote in her backyard at 1pm in the afternoon yesterday. Our neighborhood is just teeming with wildlife.

A Strange Thing Happened On The Way To The Internet

We've been in the house over a week now and we are barely settled. Boxes are sitting in random rooms still packed, black garbage bags are still hanging up with our clothes in them in various closets and we are missing a bunch of stuff. I only hope that as we unpack, box by box, we will recover our treasures (e.g. my work calendar and pictures from my European travels). I took the first two days after we moved off of work and was able to get the kitchen situated. This may sound like an easy task but I discovered we own a gagillion-million kitchen items - I think more than your average family. The upside of this is that I was able to wash them all in our dishwasher! You can't hear it but I'm exclaiming with glee :) And put them all away with cabinets and drawers to spare. We've been able to cook and sleep in our own bed, even if everything else is a mess. I already made a bean & barley vegetable soup, Ry's baked his first loaf of bread today and we've been feasting on fresh cut found wild asparagus. The chaos makes me anxious but so does the thought of unpacking it. So, I'm trying to tell myself we've got lots more time. Way more than the two days we had to pack up our apartment.

We went a total of about five days without Internet access and we're still without a TV. It was the most amazing thing, I felt pretty quiet in my head and enjoyed the lack of ever present contact. Ry and I sat out on our porch talking for hours, went to bed early and didn't worry about the fact that we weren't hyper-connected. So as you can see, we are back to the Internet. But I think we're soon making the move to a Mac desktop, which means we won't be able to take our computers to bed with us or have to compete for each other's attention because we're looking at some stupid thing or another.

There's a lot I could say about the baby bunny that lives in our yard, the wisteria and honeysuckle blooming, our mini drain backup after the big rainstorm Sunday, all of the wonderful visitors we've had (who remind me every day that living in a residence hall is a huge social barrier, even if I wanted to believe it wasn't), drinking "augmaritas" (thanks Jon) on our back patio, the man who sits under a bush on his lawn with his Shelty dog across the street, our other police officer neighbor who comes home for lunch in the paddy wagon, trying to buy our washer and dryer but forgetting our wallets at home, or the old dog across the street who sounds like a horse when he barks, but that's about all I'm going to say. It's been nice so far.

The other thing I want to say is a big thank you to everyone that helped us move. I was humbled that nine people came to help us and worked so hard. I owe you one - to everyone! Thank you Dad, Mom & Greta (awesome food!), Jon, Angel, Chris, Kelley, Greg, Renee, Colin, and Nate. I was especially humbled that so many of my co-workers came to help. It reminds me that we have a bond greater than your average work relationships create (a.k.a. smarter than the average bear! Ry doesn't get the reference). We are like a little res life family :) So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone that contributed something. We would not have been able to finish packing or move without your help.

Photos to come. My laptop is on the fritz and I can't find our card reader. But don't worry, I'm still taking them.