bearing blog

Chicago itinerary.

Since someone asked:

Drove to Chicago and stayed overnight in Matteson, IL, a southern suburb.  I took the ME line into the city the next morning.

I dropped my bag off at my hotel, the W in the Loop.  (Hey,  I was treating myself.)  I went through Hotwire -- if I'd had more say in where I went I'd have chosen a hotel with a pool, but the W was otherwise just fine.  And Hotwire got me a pretty good price.  Still not cheap, but discounted anyway.  Then I walked around, waiting for the art museum to open.  I got a flyer from some guy at a street corner that advertised a $5.99 breakfast special, found the place (Ronny's Steakhouse) and had a perfectly serviceable eggs over easy with Polish sausage. 

I'm going to fill in my art museum visit in another post.  I was there from 10 till about 3, including lunch in the garden restaurant (New Mexico sparkling rosé, seared ahi tuna salad over Asian greens with black sesame cream cracker, lemon panna cotta with blueberry compote).  I really love going to a museum when there's no time pressure.  I must say, though, I was standing in the exhibit of contemporary Chinese woodblock printings atbout 2:45 when quite suddenly my brain became full and I had to flee.  I'm not kidding, I went as fast as I could toward the nearest exit.  Sunlight!  Air!  Art-free environment!  Help!  I went straight back to the hotel and lay down on the bed with the TV on (food network) for a couple of hours.

I went out for another walk, not looking for anything in particular, and then came back to the hotel...

"One for lunch, ma'am?"

Four of the loveliest words in the English language, if you ask me.

I'm in Chicago.

All by myself.

A few weeks ago after Mark got back from a day of rock climbing that he'd tagged on to a business trip, I was fantasizing out loud about going away for a weekend.  Staying in a nice hotel, ordering room service, walking around, eating lunch by myself with a book, having a drink in the hotel bar, going to a museum and taking as much time as I wanted, etc.  And Mark said, "You know, you could do that if you wanted to."

I could?

"Sure, I can manage the kids for a couple of days by myself.  MJ's almost two, she'll be okay for a day or two without you.  If she asks for milk I'll make her a chocolate shake or something."

The idea that I could go away for a weekend by myself without any of the kids had completely dropped off my radar.  I just hadn't thought about it at all.

In the end I chose to be gone only one night. (After all, I don't want MJ to wean or anything.)  And I'm gone right now!  I'm blogging from the hotel business center on my way out to dinner.

Today I spent FIVE HOURS in the Art Institute of Chicago.  (And yes, Margaret, I did pay a nice long visit to the Seurat.)  I had lunch in the garden restaurant.  I sent a text message to my husband along the lines of "Sitting by reflecting pool w glass of bubbly.  Awaiting ahi tuna salad.  Love u!"  I thought I might take out my book and read, but I was so giddy just sitting there in the sun-filled courtyard, looking around at all the people (I was the only one there by myself), that I didn't need it.

I took a bunch of notes about the paintings and works I especially liked, but I lost my notes.  Sorry!  

Ah well, I'm getting hungry.  Time for that dinner, and that drink at the bar.

Family visit.

Jenn of breed 'em and weep has to take her two little girls along with her to the gynecologist. 

I summon the test subjects. “Girls, I have to go to the GYNECOLOGIST tomorrow. She’s a doctor who delivers babies and takes care of GIRL PARTS. She will look at my GIRL PARTS. Do you want to be in the room when she looks, or do you want to be outside with the nurses?”

“IN THE ROOM!” shrieks Hattie Bella, thrilled.

“Uh, can I think about it?” says Sophie.

“Sure,” I say. “It’s just a normal routine thing, she just has to check—”

“Your VAGINA?” asks Sophie, wrinkling her nose slightly.

“Yes,” I say, trying to sound feminine-tastic and empowered and empowering. “My VAGINA.”

“OH MY GOSH! SHE’S GOING TO LOOK IN YOUR VAGINA??? WHERE WE CAME FROM???” hollers Hattie. Now the neighbors know where we will be on Tuesday morning, or they are calling Child Protective Services. “DOES SHE KNOW YOU NEARLY POOPED ME IN THE POTTY WHEN I WAS BORN???”

 

Definitely worth reading.

Stepping lightly on the planet.

Mark was telling me over bedtime snack about an energy-efficiency presentation he'd been to at work the other day.  "I had to leave just as they were getting to the buy-local part," he said, as he cut an apple into quarters, "or I would have offered my opinion on eliminating the environmental costs of  food transportation."

"What's that?"

"Well," he said, spreading peanut butter on a chunk of apple, "depending on how you figure it out, adding up all the carbon emissions from food transportation in the U.S., that's only 12 percent of the total carbon emissions from food.  Production of food emits far, far more carbon than driving it around does.  So what you're eating matters a lot more than where it came from."

"Twelve percent isn't nothing.  We could still bring it down a bit, couldn't we?"

"Well, yeah, maybe by a couple of percent.  It won't really make much of a dent.  And it's kind of complicated because you've got to figure out where you're going to get all the different things you want to eat, or what to substitute for them."

"And if it's not ordinary grocery store stuff, you have to drive all over the place trying to find them all," I mused, thinking of my weekly drive out to Wayzata to pick up the local-organic-grass-fed-milk for my family and Hannah's.

"Yeah, and when you bring food-preservation into the picture you're stuck trying to make complicated calculations about the relative energy costs of steel-can manufacturing versus keeping frozen stuff cold, yadda yadda yadda.  But," he continued, gesturing with his peanut butter knife, "I can tell you what you can do, one very simple thing, that will make a dent in your food-related carbon footprint that is equivalent to having all the food you eat grown and produced at your very doorstep."

"What's that?"

"Eat twelve percent less."

"Um..."

"Twelve percent less.  Across the board."

"Calories, or volume, or what?"

He shrugged.  "Doesn't matter all that much.  Let's just say, mass or volume, twelve percent less of everything you normally eat, just eat twelve percent less of it."

"So if I normally eat a cup of rice, I should eat seven-eighths of a cup of rice."

"Yup.  Do that with everything you eat, it's the same impact as if you eliminated all the transportation costs of your food."

"Hmm.  Consume less by consuming less.  A radical idea."

"It's kind of like eating less meat by eating less meat.  Or saving money by buying less stuff.  You know, instead of 'the more you buy the more you save.'"

"Hmm.  It's not for everyone, I suppose, but if I went outside and looked around, I think I'd come to the conclusion that it would be a good choice for a lot of people."

"Yes.  Of course, fat people are carbon sinks, so there's that, but I think the total carbon balance still comes out positive if they just eat less."

"Talk about going on an energy diet."

My neighbors are having a party.

They have a mariachi band.

Oscar is standing on a step stool craning to peer over the fence.  He reports back that they are all dressed in black and that they have a horn, a squeezy thing (accordion, I'm guessing), and a guitar.

They're pretty good.  Think I'll break out the chips and salsa.

Bento.

Blogs are so fun.  Today I discovered that someone adapted my recipe for forgotten sweet potato pie by making it into a tartlet to put in a bento box.

I had never before discovered there was a bentosphere, but there you go.

Minor milestone; and the hidden advantage of being a dumpy, sedentary high school kid.

Mary Jane is 22 months old.  This morning I stepped on the scale and saw the same number I saw the day that I learned I was pregnant with her.

It's about time, hm.

About eight of the 21 extra pounds I still had after I gave birth to MJ (counting from eight weeks postpartum, by which time the extra water weight ought to have been shed) came off "on their own" over the first year, and then for a long time I was steady.  I think upping the swimming to twice a week made a pretty big difference.  Doing that made me a little more motivated to practice some portion control, which I've been meaning to do, since MJ's recently cut her nursing back to only 2-3 times a day.  Some combination of the extra exercise and fewer calories is doing something; over the last six weeks or so I dropped 13 pounds. 

(Nobody is allowed to make any comments about how it must be time to have another baby.)

Feels pretty good, but I think I need to go buy myself some new pants.  I kind of want to wait a little bit, though, and see if any more weight comes off.  I'm still 10 pounds shy of moving from BMI-overweight to BMI-normal.  

Speaking of physical fitness. My husband Mark was a track and field guy in high school, has always been more or less pretty fit and never overweight, periodically would run or lift weights for exercise in college, tries to keep in shape so he can ski as much as he can in the winter, runs a 5k now and then, recently took up rock climbing and weight training for that too.  

We were talking the other night about getting older -- he can feel it now some.  He's 35 (I'm turning 34 this fall), and for him the muscle soreness takes longer to go away, the joints are a little stiffer, etc. 

In a way, I have a sort of advantage over him.  I was, erm, not a track and field person in high school.  I was about as dumpy and sedentary as I could be.  I was incompetent and frequently humiliated in gym class.  My family made fun of me for being clumsy and awkward.  At seventeen, I never rode a bike, I couldn't swim, I was much heavier than I am now, I couldn't really climb more than a couple flights of stairs without getting out of breath.  All that lasted until well after I finished college.  Since then, and especially since I went home to raise my kids, I've found plenty of physical activities I enjoy. And so as the years have gone by, I've pretty much gotten fitter and fitter, healthier and healthier.  (Discounting fluctuations from my three pregnancies.) I feel better now than I did when I was seventeen.    Every year I am setting new records.  Getting older, for me, at least from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, has been getting better.  

Not that I want to endorse being dumpy and sedentary in high school.  But it has been wonderful to discover I didn't have to stay that way.

Swimming with structure.

After I started swimming twice a week, I quickly got bored with just going back and forth for 30-40 minutes and went looking for some pre-planned workouts in the hope that it would make the swimming more interesting.  It did!  It helps a lot to have several different parts, each with their own discrete goals.   Instead of thinking, "OK, when can I stop this?" I find myself thinking, "Hey!  I'm on my last lap!  How'd that happen?" 

 A triathlete friend asked me today about how I structure my swim workouts.  I'm flattered, seeing as how I've never competed in a triathlon and it's not exactly one of my goals (for now; I'm saving it for if I need a motivation jumpstart in the future). I'll share my resources here, with the caveat that I really don't know whether the structure I'm following is particularly good or particularly bad.  Probably some serious swimmer out there could suggest some better ideas.

First off, the three information sources I've been using to try and wrap my head around how to swim better.  I think I mentioned them in an earlier post but they bear repeating.

Two useful books have been Fitness Swimming by Emmett Hines and Swimming for Total Fitness by Jane Katz.  If you click on those Amazon links and scroll down to "Customers who bought this item also bought..." I think you will find a number of other books that look pretty good.  Don't take my word on which books to buy or borrow; read the customer reviews and decide which sounds good to you.  The third resource for me has been the articles at H2ouston Swims, a Masters swimming program in Houston, Texas. 

Now, what are the specific workouts I am using right now?  I got them from a useful site called beginnertriathlete.com, where you can find some true-beginner swim workouts, with workouts as short as 400 yards (or meters, whatever your pool is measured in).  The writer of the article was in the same boat (cough) as I:

When I got back into the pool to start training for triathlons (after a substantial fourteen year break from lap swimming) I found a few “beginner” workouts online and, without stopping to consider how much my abilities may have declined in those fourteen years, I headed to the pool for a 1600m workout. I found that I could barely swim 50m continuously – including recovery time I was swimming between 4:00-5:00 per 100m! ...Realizing that this was probably not going to be the path to improving my swimming; mainly since I could not complete the shortest set  (100m) in the workout; I went back online. I assumed that in my ignorance (or overconfidence in my swimming abilities) I had missed the secret stash of true beginner workouts. But after several more searches, I still had trouble finding any workout that was not over 1200-1600m.

...However, over time some of my online searches paid off and that, combined with suggestions from the forums here at BT, finally started to yield some improvement.

The workouts that are included are by no means my own – I am only attempting to compile a number of my favorite workouts so that you do not have to waste as much time as I did finding workouts that would work for your swim level. These workouts are all designed for beginners and range in length from 400m to 1200m – hopefully providing some useful workouts until you are able to tackle the 2000m+ workouts that are easily found online. These workouts are not designed to take the place of a coach or masters swim class; rather, they should help on the days when you have to figure out your own workout.

Even at the beginning I was fit enough to complete the 100-yd sets, but I swam pretty slowly to begin with.  So I started with the 400-m workout (really it was 400 yds at my local Y) and quickly worked that up to the 800-yd workout by substituting longer sets for shorter ones here and there.  For a while, swimming 800 yds used up the full 40 minutes I can allot for my workout.  As I get a bit faster and more efficient I am lengthening the workout gradually.  I now swim 950 yds in 30-35 minutes and spend the final 5 minutes stretching. 

Incidentally, I swim the whole thing in the front crawl, except I sometimes do the kicking drills on my back because it's easier to breathe.   My current goal is to swim 1200 yards in 40 minutes.   When I reach that goal, I plan to reward myself with a set of swimming lessons or maybe a private stroke clinic.  I still haven't gotten the hang of the breaststroke!  But I'm glad I've spent all the time on the front crawl because I can tell that I've gotten a LOT better at it.

If you go to the workout links, you'll see that there are three workouts (endurance, form, and speed) for each of three workout lengths (400, 800, 1200)(yards or meters).  I only do the endurance and form workouts because I only swim twice a week.  I've increased the 800-yd workouts to 950 yds as follows:

 - for endurance, add another 100-yd set to the middle of the ladder and change the 2x25 sets in the drill to 3x25

 - for form, increase the 3x50 swim to 6x50 or 3x100.

First they came for the ---holes, but I was not an ---hole.

Anthony Furey writing in Canada's National Post:

Compare that [Bill C-10, which would allow government to decide what film productions receive certain tax credits, and which has inspired much public outcry] to what could happen if a human rights tribunal decides against [magazine] Maclean's [for publishing Mark Steyn's opinions regarding Islam]: It could order the private magazine to publish material and images against its editors' wishes. Let me repeat that: The state will order Maclean's to publish something it does not want to publish. Isn't that what China does? So why don't ear-to-the-ground, free speech-loving Canadian artists denounce it?

At a trendy Toronto Annex watering hole, I recently posed this question to a lead scion of the left. Without hesitation he said, "Because Mark Steyn's an ---hole." "That may be," I responded. "He may also be right-wing, and you may be left-wing. But those are very poor reasons to deny a person or group their Charter rights." The fellow conceded my point, but I could sense he didn't understand how easily he could come to find himself in the same position in the near future.

Disturbingly common, this blind spot -- glee that some rule or another is being used against the other people, without even the most self-serving awareness "Hey, in a different political climate, this rule might be used against me too!"  I can't decide if it's a failure of empathy, of logic, or of long-term thinking.