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Wild Times

Okay, taking a break before diving back in to work.

I didn’t make myself a bento for today and was regretting it, but disciplined myself to make a nice, veggie-stuffed wrap for lunch rather than grab something — not that I have much in the way of bags of easy-to-grab food in the house but fruit, anyway.  (Confession:  Bento are at least in part laziness.  I prefer to make it easy to eat properly).

It’s warmed up nicely outside, and it feels like summer.  But it does make me want to be lazy and take a nap.  Unfortunately, I have way the devil too much work to do and really shouldn’t even be writing this entry.  I’m doing it to reboot my brain.   All I can say is that I’m happy that my projects are on relatively interesting subjects.

My cat is trying to inform me that I’m deficient in my petting duties by sitting on the arm of my chair and looking pitiful.  I suppose I should not whine too much about work.  I’m not in a cube farm, fergossake, and I doubt many offices would permit me that most necessary of writing materials, a cat to paw at your hand when it wants love or curl up at your feet while working.

Ahh, the exciting times of the self-employed writer.

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Sea Kittens and Oberserving Nature

First off, I think PETA’s leadership is crazy.  But, apparently they have enough money to keep a state park open.  I have to wonder what rich nutjobs give these people money.

I’m all for animals under human care being humanely treated.  I also know what it would do to the price of meat.  I’m okay with that, but I’m not struggling as much as some, am a good cook even with vegetarian dishes, and really couldn’t give a damn if domestic species of animals die out or not. Die out, you ask?  If we all went vegan, where would be the incentive to keep these expensive and expensive to care for animals?  Holsteins didn’t evolve in nature, friends, and need specific care.  Many domestic species either can’t survive in the wild or would be damn dangerous to let loose if they can.  Go up against a wild pig unarmed sometime. If you survive, you’ll only do it once.  And I don’t think you’ll feel quite as warm and fuzzy about Wilbur any more.

Have these people ever seen an animal hunt?  For that matter, have they ever really watched cats that they want to rename fish “sea kittens” to produce some kind of emotive response in people?  Cats are sadistic little monsters.  I’ve taken mice away from my cats and put them out of their misery because the squeaking got to be too much for me.  greendalekgreendalek did the same with a dove, once, because the cat had spent about fifteen minutes crippling it and then toying with it.  It was awful.

I won’t go into the ethics of eating meat, because I’ve not examined the logical arguments for and against. Logical, not emotive.  The poor fuzzy animals approach doesn’t work on me when there are human beings under conditions just as bad if not worse.   I know I feel physically better and healthier when I eat a diet of primarily meat and produce (not grains).  That doesn’t leave much room for the vegan diet.  I realize that doesn’t touch the arguments about a living thing having to die for me to feel energetic and healthy, but I’ll be blunt. People die for those cheap clothes you’re wearing, too.  I find that a bigger concern.

And that’s where it comes down to for me.  While the ecosystem needs to be cared for so we don’t foul our own nest, I do think sentient, thinking beings are more important than non-sentient, thinking beings.  (Hey, hadda throw that in there.  Science fiction fan and all).

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Travel Bento

The point of bento is, of course, to have a meal on the go.  I made these because the man of the house is going to be taking a very long car trip and I wanted him to have decent food without having to grab crap at a fuel-n-feed.  Yes, it’s a convenient hobby!  I made these bento specifically as finger-food so that he wouldn’t have to worry about a fork or chopsticks if he ate while driving.

When I do my bento class, I’ll probably discuss the convenience of travel bento in general.  If I take a train trip, I almost always take a bento along.  Many bento enthusiasts take them on airplanes (no liquidy food, of course, but what I did here would get by more than fine!) or family outings.  Picnic bento are a tradition in Japan –usually the family meal is packed in a large single box, though, rather than these little individual boxes.  When I took my children out to the pool not too long ago, we’d intended to make a day of it, so of course I made bento for all of us.  I find them fantastic for day trips as well as longer travel.

The real beauty and convenience of a bento won’t hit you until you hold one in your hand.  They’re small.  A bento large enough for my lunch is about as large on top as the palm of my hand and fits in my purse with the greatest of ease.  Those three bento, packed up with their lids on, fit in my backpack with room to spare for sunscreen, towels, a picnic blanket and cans of soda with no problem at all.  For a longer trip, you can make meal bento and snack bento that have great meals, but take up considerably less space than traditional sandwiches and chips.  It’s the compactness that makes them so delightfully convenient for travel.  The boxes I use fit inside each other when they’re done so that after you’ve eaten, they take up even less space.

Even though they’re small, it’s a tasty, satisfying, filling meal.  Part of the satisfaction comes in because a well-made bento has a variety of tastes in it.  Notice even in these completely non-classical bento there are little bits and tastes of lots of different foods.    When you eat a meal with that level of variety, you find your pleasure in the meal is increased as well as your level of satisfaction.

Of course, travel food has plenty of solutions and options, but I find the bento one of the better ones to save time, money and get better food than you’re likely to be able to get on the road.

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Tell Me a Story

I don’t like sitcoms in general. It’s not that I’ve no sense of humor at all.  I do. It’s very small, harsh and (as one friend put it) sanguine.

But another reason I generally don’t like sitcoms is that they’re weak, very weak, on what I go to almost any art for.

Tell me a story.

No matter what else, I need a story to engage my mind and emotions.  My tastes in this are pretty child-like.  When I want a story, I want interesting characters, a good guy, a bad guy, a concrete problem for the good guy to solve, a bad guy who has a real motivation for thwarting the good guy, and if the story is long, I want a certain development and learning in at least the main character over a period of time.  Ideally, the lessons the main character learns should be those lessons that contribute to him solving the problem.

I loved the first movie Highlander.  I hated the rest of the franchise with a bitter passion.  The story had been told and it was just capitalizing on a franchise.  (Obviously my tastes in this sort of thing aren’t common, or it wouldn’t have made the money it did).

I don’t watch television because in general TV shows are not set up to have a concrete story arch.  You have to leave it open for them to continue potentially indefinitely.  Of course, there are exceptions.  Many Doctor Who episodes work around this pretty well, with several episodes telling a discrete story.   Avatar: The Last Airbender did a brilliant job with the storytelling, but it did have a definite end. (Notice that a lot of the stuff I like is written for children).   If that were the norm for television, I’d have TV, I really would.

I liked The Incredible Hulk TV series pretty well.  It also was very strong on storytelling.  Thing is, a series of short stories under a single premise does have its limits.

It’s not that I don’t ever like series, or a series of stories set around a single character or premise.  I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan, and I really enjoyed the Callahans stories.  I have to admit that I lost a bit of interest after Callahan’s Secret, even though I really did love the characters.  I’ve read every single Discworld novel and short story so far published.  I’ve read all the books Heinlein ever published.   But out of the thousands of books I have read in my life, getting into a series is the exception rather than the rule.  Mists of Avalon was amazing.  All the tie-ins?  Blegh.

I hate movie sequels as a rule, unless it was a story told over several movies.

I know from a marketing perspective, the success of the Discworld Series, the Star Trek franchise and many, many other series that have generated a fandom cause producers and publishers to look for The Next Big Franchise.  It’s where the money is.  I understand that.

But my inner three year old is plumped down on a pillow with a frown and a pout saying, “Tell me a story!“

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All Summer in a Day

When I was in the fourth grade, my reading book had two science fiction stories — “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury and “The Fun They Had” by Issac Asimov.

I’ve been thinking about the first story quite a bit lately, as it’s been raining so much.  I’m beginning to feel like the protagonist, who is slowly going crazy because of the rain.

But these two stories also trigger a thought.  How many people got into science fiction because of stories they read in school?  Probably few people older than I am, as the genre was considered beneath contempt by many educators before I started going to school.  In Stranger in a Strange Land, there’s this throw-away line about a character having read War of the Worlds in school, “same as everybody”.  When the book was first published, I am sure it was meant to be a least a little absurd. And yet, my fifth grade teacher, who read aloud to the class quite a bit, read A Wrinkle in Time to the class.  When I was in 10th grade, I was actually able to take a whole unit in spec-fic.  We read Dune, and A Canticle for Leibowitz (Hey, it was still the Cold War).  I’m trying to remember others, but I can’t.

If you’re over 35 or so, did you ever encounter science fiction as part of your school curriculum?

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Are Bento Really Cheaper?

I was going over some prices trying to decide if bento are really cheaper than bringing a more standard lunch.  It will quickly become obvious that a bento is much cheaper than going out for lunch, even getting fast food!

After talking with a friend of mine and doing some research for a class I want to do, I sat down with some of my old receipts and started pricing out bento I have actually made.  The prices involve the food alone.  I don’t count the cost of plates for dinner and if you’re buying hundreds of dollars in bento equipment, you have no-one but yourself to blame.   My stash cost a LOT less than that. Just sayin’.

So, on to the food.  A really cheap bento might cost me a buck.  I only did that once, and it wasn’t as balanced as I like.  The most expensive one I’ve actually made cost $1.76, and was using some pre-packaged food.  The average amount I usually spend on food for a bento is somewhere around $1.25.  While it’s not at the dollar a meal food stamp level, I’m fortunate enough not to have to go there right now.  I consider spending a buck and a quarter on a meal completely acceptable.  I was not necessarily going for the cheapest meal I could make in making these things, but just buying meat cheaply and not sweating anything otherwise.

It’s cheaper than a school lunch ($2.35 at my son’s school).

So what about the classic fruit and a sandwich?

It depends.   Right now, a bananna and peanut butter sandwhich is pricing out at about $0.73.  More expensive fruit, and a sandwich with lunch meat and veggies is going to run you closer to $1.75.  That’s still hardly bank-breaking, though close to my most expensive bento.  For an  entire working month, that bento is going to come out as ten dollars cheaper, if you’re bringing the apple and lunch meat sandwich with veggies.  Start throwing in chips and the price goes up a little.  I have no idea what chips cost.  I don’t buy them.

Leftovers?

That’s also going to depend on what you usually eat.  For my household, it would be comperable to my usual bento.

If you’re buying lunch, you’re probably spending at least five dollars a day doing it.  So, the takeaway here is that bringing your lunch is astronomically cheaper. Bento is just a fairly frugal hobby if you do it right.

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Bad Mama Bento

Bad Mama BentoI’m a Bad Mama.  The stuff in the top tier are some sort of pseudo-food pizza pocket thingies you make in the toaster oven.

However, since my son just completed the best school year of his life, topping it off with the best report card he’s ever gotten, I think he can have a pizza pocket lunch for his last day at school, don’t you?

Many of us in the bento maker community do get a bit self-congratulatory about our healthy lunches.  To be honest, a desire to eat healthily is a driving factor for many people who make bento in the US.  It doesn’t have to be.  You can put M&Ms in a bento (and I just realized I’m going to have to repack this lunch, as I’d promised my son a Lindt truffle in his lunch for tomorrow), you can put in fried processed food.  You can put anything into a bento.

But that’s the real beauty of bento making — its flexibility.  Sure, sure, for the most part people who make ’em try to give some attention to making sure that there are lots of colors in the veggies (ensuring a good nutritional variety), and generally don’t use a lot of pre-packaged stuff.  But you really could cut up a twinkie, and arrange it sushi-like in one of the tiers if your heart so desired.

In fact, I would totally make these Twinkie sushi as a snack bento if it were something Really Special, like a long trip, or… say trying to convert my little nephews to the joy of bento so they’ll whine for them and drive my brother crazy.

Though with my luck, and knowing  my seafood-loving little bro, they’re already into the real thing.

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Push Reel Mower and Being the Designated Control Freak

My household, when we moved to our present home, did not own a lawnmower.  The man of the house, who claimed the job of mowing the lawn as his, decided he wanted a push reel mower.  Me?

I figured this fell under the role of Designated Control Freak (or DCF).  He wanted to be The Mower of the Lawn, he could get whatever he wanted to accomplish the job.  It seemed a bit goofy to me, but since it wasn’t my problem, I didn’t figure I needed a say.

Well, it was a few years before I used it.  You see, it took that long before the lawn got too high for me to want to tolerate, so of course that made me the lawn DCF.  (The usual lawn DCF being in the throes of an insanely busy work schedule).  I hauled it out without much enthusiasm, but with great curiosity, as I’d never tried it before.  Since it was a gadget rather than a big, indimidating noisy machine like the snow blower, I figured it was worth a go.

I found out something.  Push reel mowers are fun!  They do make a low-level rattling noise, and there is an art to keeping the blades spinning to get the appropriate cut, but they’re more fun than the gas thing I occasionally used as a kid. (My theory is that like the man of the house here, my father liked mowing the lawn, so I was rarely asked to do it).

We got one mostly because they’re cheap to buy, they don’t use gas, so they’re cheap to use, and they’re not noisy.  While yes yes yes, they’re pretty environmentally sound, the choice was more about saving money than saving the environment.  Though as I often maintain, conservation and such is often the more economical way to go.

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Being an Athlete


I was called athletic today.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love being called that. Tickles the hell out of me. But I really don’t see myself that way.  Yeah, yeah, I know, what else does being an athlete require but spending some time on a sport on a regular basis?

I’ve mused on this before, but I still haven’t internalized the idea that I wanted to — that being an athlete merely requires something physical you love and do on a relatively frequent basis.  I mean, I just swam over a mile today!

Am I a great athlete?  No.  Am I even a fast swimmer?  Hell, no!

I think part of it is that I do sometimes slog through a swim.  Goodness knows I did today.  I was constantly telling myself, “C’mon.  You decided to put in a 2,000 today.  Just keep doing it.  You’ve got one more length in you.”   This was not one of those glorious swims where I feel like a god. (Though I like those a lot better).

Now, a lot of why I’m doing the 50 mile swim is because I’ll get a t-shirt at the end of it that I intend to wear when I’m working the front desk at the gym.  So very often women built like me are scared to come to the gym.  They’re scared their goals won’t be listened to.  They’re scared of being judged.  The gym I go to is about getting moving on a regular basis and not about getting down to 12% body fat, but there are gyms that feel otherwise about it, and goodness knows that can put someone off.

Although maybe I’ll be taking away hope when I prove that exercise doesn’t automagically make you skinny.  Who knows?

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Swimming and Athletic Performance


I got called a fish today. I was absurdly pleased. What was cool about it to me was that it was by someone who has decided to train for a triathlon. For those of you who’ve done a tri, we’re definitely talking Clydesdale1 here.

The guy is not particularly a skilled swimmer, but I’ve seen him swim and have seen him move on dryland.  He’s got good body control, so I don’t think it’s going to take too long for him to relax enough for him to get his form down.   What pleased me so was that this muscular, athletic man tried my sport, has seen me perform, and respects what I do.  In truth, he’ll soon outpace me.    I been swimming seriously for about three years, and consider it a great swim if I can do 2,000 in under 50 minutes.  He’s already doing a 1,000 in half an hour, just a few weeks into training.  Though I did make a snarky crack that I was not going to let him beat me swimming, he’s gonna get a lot faster than ever I can.

It means a lot to me as a heavy woman to be respected for athletic stuff, especially when it’s not framed in terms of what it makes me look like, but performance.

1This is a category for men over 200 lbs. They may be fat, or just big, heavy and muscular. This guy is big, heavy and muscular, and truly rather reminiscent of a draft horse in power.  The female equivalent is called an Athena.  I think the weight cutoff is something like 145.