Rebecca Homecca

We have been so busy with summer activities and kitchen remodeling that I only made it to the gym twice in as many weeks. Even though I certainly burned my share of calories on dumpster day, it’s still not good.

Especially since the summer activities all seem to revolve around food I really shouldn’t be eating.

Exercising once a week does not work when you are trying to lower your blood pressure. So some genius (me) thought it would be a grand idea to get up early and go walking before work.

That way if there are evening activities, I would still get my physical activity quota in. If there is not an activity (like tonight) I get a bonus work out in.

And I’m not like a fitness guru or anything, but I think twice in one day will give better results than twice in two weeks. They might want to do a study about it, it’s just a theory.

Even though I am not really awake yet, the morning walking is quite pleasant. The only ones up are the frogs and birds, both welcoming the day with their songs. A few early rising deer crossed my path this morning.

I only see one car the entire time. Which is really nice because our roads are dirt, narrow, and people drive to fast.

Strangely, there are fewer bugs as well. It seems all the late night buzzing around makes them sleep in.

Yesterday it had rained a little before I headed out.  Something about the rain makes everything look greener and the bark of the trees is almost black. I love the woods in the rain.

It’s also much cooler in the morning than in the evening when we used to walk (before I started going to the air conditioned gym), making for a easier go of it.

This morning I had company as hubs decided to get up with me and rumor has it, he is planning on going again tomorrow.

Where did the week go? These four day work weeks are AWESOME.

Seemed like we had something going on every minute after work (between filling a dumpster and hauling wet boxes out of the basement) so it went by extra fast this week.

The weekend does not show any signs of slowing down either. We have errands in the morning, then hopefully working on the pantry project some more, followed up by meeting friends for dinner and a baseball game.

I’m tired already just talking about it!

In other news, I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingslover on the computer.

Did you know you can rent books from the library on your computer (or Ipad or Kindle if you are fancy like that) for FREE? It’s true. You can rent audio books too.

Isn’t the library awesome?

But I digress…

I’m not sure if I misunderstood or if they billed it wrong, but I thought AVM was about eating locally for a year. And I guess technically it was. But really it was more about growing your own food in your garden and raising your own animals to eat.

Remember when I mentioned I wanted to write a book about being a lazy environmentalist? Well this is the opposite of that.

Aside from the fact that not many people live on small farms in the middle of no where, most people have JOBS and the work involved in there endeavor was over the top at best.

It wasn’t all bad, there was some good info in there (especially if you are new to the slow food movement or whatever you want to call it).

I particularly enjoyed the recipes. They are simple, with few ingredients, and supposedly don’t take much time. I am not, however, going to bake my own bread EVERYDAY.

The other thing that bothered me about this book isn’t it didn’t have a clear path. It was part memoir, part cookbook, part encyclopedia (remember those? that is where we got information before Al Gore invented the internet) and part, well I don’t know what. It was all over the place.  I skipped whole sections because I’ve watch Food Inc and King Corn and don’t need to be convinced to eat locally, I just want to know how to do it better or easier.

I was really hoping it was more about shopping than farming. I was looking for some insight into the struggles with finding local foods and how to over come them. I guess the answer is in moving to a farm and doing it yourself?

BUZZ! Wrong Answer, try again.

Meanwhile, we ate good local stuff tonight. The farmer hooked us up with some green & yellow beans, summer squash, broccoli, and beets. Their neighbor brought over some extra zucchini for everybody too (if you’ve ever grown zucchini, you know there is ALWAYS extra).

Seems I am all about the ALL CAPS tonight. Hubs said I was sassy tonight. Guess so.

or should I say GUESS SO.

It has been a crazy week. We decided to start a new project in the kitchen, so we’ve been working on that (and subsequently trashing the house). We also making preparations for the upcoming long weekend (yeah!).

So tonight I drove around looking for shelves to match existing cabinets (apparently whitewash has fallen out of favor) and an automatic cat feeder that doesn’t cost more than the cats.

No luck on either account.

I can get said cat feeder from Amazon, but I no longer have time for Amazon. And unfortunately we have a kitty who thinks she needs to eat until she throws up. I won’t mention any names, but let’s just say she’s the one with the tail.

As a result of all this business I have not been doing well with the no salt diet. And lets face it, a long holiday weekend with the fam will not likely be filled with low salt dining.

I see Pizza Sam’s with ham in my future, not to mention hot dogs on the grill. So I guess you could say this Independence Day I will be celebrating independence from salt free living.

Come Tuesday though I have to get back on the wagon. Want to keep those numbers coming down (BP and weight!)

We are at a little bit of a standstill on the kitchen project as we are calling in a contractor to do part of it. So right now we are in construction disaster zone purgatory. I hate to clean up too much just for them to come in a coat the place with drywall dust, but we might have to depending on when he can come.

I can’t wait for my new pantry. A girl needs good storage you know.  And the best part is, this was all previously wasted space getting a new life as an awesome pantry!

We are in strawberry season here in Michigan. So would someone please explain to me why the grocery store had a big ol pile of strawberries from California.

This was the first thing that I saw as I came into the store and it really irritated me.

Then I go to the tomato area and it doesn’t say which state they are from just USA and MEXICO.

On the same bin.

Both countries, one bin. What if I don’t want Mexico tomatoes?

Why did I not just go to the farmers market on Saturday like I planned? Oh that’s right, because I was in my jammies until noon…

To add insult to injury they stopped carrying individual things of Stoneyfield yogurt. They only have big tubs of plain and vanilla. Which is just not as convenient.

So I bought a big tub of plain and am going to add my own MICHIGAN strawberries. They got all kinds of yogurt up there with high fructose corn syrup and aspartame, but if you just want YOGURT, mix your own.

I had this big idea for a book. So far all I have is a title. The Lazy Environmentalist.

What does that have to do with the grocery store? Simple, I am all about doing the right thing, but why does it have to be so inconvenient sometimes? Let’s face it, we all very busy lazy. If it’s too much of a pain in the rear, we aren’t going to do it.

I haven’t written said book yet, on account of the being so, you know, busy…

I am so sick of eating salads I would sooner be punched in the face by a head of iceberg lettuce than eat another one. So I decided I would make myself a sandwich for lunch today.

Even though bread is not really recommended, sometimes, a girl just needs some bread.

Since I have forever been banned from all forms of lunch meat (I miss you Jimmy John), I made myself a tomato, swiss cheese (the only cheese on the approved list btw) sandwich with 1 spinach leaf and some sliced red pepper on a hamburger bun.

I considered mashing some avacado to use a a spread in lieu of Mayo (condiments are all pretty much on the d-list) but decided that was entirely too complicated and instead packed a spoonfull (literally a spoonful) of hummus to spread on the aforementioned bun.

It was not nearly as satisfying as it sounds.

I think it would have been better had I been able to toast or grill said sandwich panini style. Somehow having it hot would seem less lame.

I had some carrots and apple on the side and strawberries for dessert.

Oh and lets not forget the beverage of choice, water. I usually have no problem drinking water all day. However, since I gave up coffee (I miss you too and don’t appreciate you wafting your fabulous smell at me in the morning), water is all I drink (or occasional milk) and it is not as enjoyable as it once was.

Somehow starting the day with a different beverage made water less boring. Now it’s just boring. I know I could switch to decaf but as the barista says when I order skinny-decaf lattes “why bother”…

To add insult to salad related injury, we picked up our veggies from the farmer today and we have an insanity amount of lettuce. If you did not know that insanity was a measurement, you have not seen all of my lettuce.

The other day hubs went and picked up our veggies from the CSA farm that we joined. We got a boat load of Asparagus, some Swiss Chard, and Spinach.

We have never had Swiss Chard and weren’t quite sure what to do with it. But the Farmer said he used it in salads, so we tried that last night along with the Spinach. I was afraid it would be one of those bitter greens you always get in your salad at fancy restaurants. But it and the Spinach were both very lettuce-y tasting. So the Chard is a keeper.

We had salads with some leftover chicken that I grilled the day before, some hummus and grilled pita bread and grilled Asparagus.

We have had Asparagus before in restaurants and have not been fans up to this point. I had read about grilling it, and thought that sounded like it might be good. I saw some suggestions on how to grill it and went with the lemon, olive oil, thyme recipe.

I left it on the grill a little (ok a lot) too long, so it was a bit charred (aka burnt) but other than that, it wasn’t terrible. Hubs even ate his whole serving.  I think the lemon helped a lot with the flavor. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite thing ever, but we won’t have to give it all away either.

We will be giving some away, because he gave us a double share of that. And we are only two people, and we don’t want our pee to stink.

So far so good with the veggies from the farm. We are trying new things and even hubs is eating his veggies. I think we will both be getting healthier with our farm fresh produce!

I just got back from grocery shopping and it took sweet forever. A while ago we decided to try and avoid high fructose corn syrup because even though the commercials tell you it is fine in moderation, it is in practically everything and therefore difficult to moderate. I have also been on the look out for hydrogenated oils.

Basically, the less ingredients the better, and hopefully most of those are food products and not chemicals.

So now that I am all high blood pressure-y, I am trying to cut out the salt (and avoid being on medication). So I am spending insane amounts of time label reading.

I was just starting to get an approved list  (stored in my brain) of products with out HFCS & Hydros and now I have to read those all again to check the salt.

And in case you were wondering (and I know you were!), tortillas have a ridiculous amount of salt.

I had kind of thought I could cook some what regularly, just don’t add any salt. Turns out it isn’t as easy as all that.

I found a wheat bread that meets all the criteria and it’s all natural. So that’s good. I was beginning to think I was going to be cut off from bread all together.

And that would be an absolute tragedy.

I found out that blueberry yogurt has less sodium than strawberry. Why? Who knows.

An added bonus is that our trash should be less, because if it comes out of a box, can or any other package, I probably can’t eat it.

A couple of weeks ago during the sermon our minister brought up gossip. Normally when I hear someone preach about gossip it’s about talking about someone or what to do if someone wants to tell you some gossip. But he brought up gossip magazines and the like.

I don’t get any gossip magazines, but I do have E! online and People Online on my My Yahoo page. Which I read everyday.

I though, I should probably not read those.

But come Monday I left them on my page, with the reasoning that I like to see American Idol & Grey’s Anatomy “news”. Which isn’t really gossip.

Of course, it’s not like those are the only two things they talk about on those sights and even just reading the headlines, you can get most of the gossip that is going on with Sandra & Jesse or Lindsay.

Then I started thinking about Beth Moore’s fruit. And I thought, is reading this really making good fruit?

No. It’s not.

So I finally deleted it off my page.

Now in full disclosure, I was able to put on there the Watch with Kristin section from E! on line that only talks about TV show stuff and not the personal lives of the stars. So I can still get the scoop on my shows.

Is that good fruit or bad fruit? I don’t know. But it’s a step in the right direction. Like Beth says, it takes time to produce fruit so, we’ll decide on that later.

Saturday’s Beth Moore lesson continued on that tree theme, but in a little bit different way.

We were in Matthew talking about recognizing trees by what kind of fruit they bear.

Basically, look at things in your life and see what kind of fruit they are bearing. If it is an activity that bears good fruit, feed that and nurture that. If it bears bad fruit, starve that and kill it.

The other point of this that I thought was good, was that it takes time to bear fruit. So something might seem like good fruit at first, but it isn’t because it hasn’t had the time to make any fruit. Given some time, it may turn out that thing may actually be producing bad fruit.

Is this making any sense or are you just getting hungry for some apples?

Well, it makes sense in my head. I guess that’s why Beth Moore gets paid and I do this for free.

If what you are doing is good, good things will come from it. If it is not good, bad things will come from it.

Well, I guess I could have just said that in the first place.

The other part of this lesson is that our personal fruit, the fruit we will bare, comes from what we store up. What we take in. If we are not taking in good things, we will not produce good fruit.

And that bad fruit will come out, it will show itself to others. You can only hold on to false front for so long before what is in your heart comes out. Or maybe we don’t even put up a false front and just spread our bad fruit around.

The same is true for baring good fruit. If you are storing up good things, if that is what is in your heart, people will see that too.

Those are the things I took away from the conference. I’m sure all 7200 of us would have different posts about it.

Beth Moore had said that when she was studying and working on what to talk about at our conference, she kept coming across these passages that involved trees in some fashion. They stuck out to her and when Travis called her to see what the plan was, she told him it was going to have something to do with trees. He was kind of like, Um…OK…

So before they headed to Michigan she did some research about our state. She said she knew about all the economic trouble we were having just from watching the news. But what she didn’t know was that 50% of our state is covered in trees and we are one of the biggest growers of Christmas trees.

So she called Travis back and told him, These Michigan people, they know trees.

So that was our theme. Trees.

The first part we talked about was from Judges, and how we have a need to ruled over and sometimes we try to find things other than God that rules over us.

She talked about The Olive Tree, The Fig Tree, The Vine, and The Thornbush and what those things might represent in our lives. Things that we look to to rule over us.

When she got to the thornbush, it started to hit home. She mentioned that it could be any number of things, this thornbush. It could be anger towards someone, it could be just being in a bad situation, like a bad job or something else that just takes over our life.

Wait back up…a bad job that takes over our life…
Been there.

When I was at my old job it was not a good situation and it was taking over my life. It was affecting parts of my life that had nothing to do with that job. It was ruling over me.

Which is why I left. When people ask me how my new job is going, I tell them not only is my job going well, my whole life is better.

Not coincidentally we have started going to church regularly again too. That was by no means the only thing affecting that situation. But I can tell you, I was so exhausted from dealing with that job that I didn’t have the energy for another thing.  At that time church just seemed like another thing I would have to do. Another thing I would have to deal with.

But once I was could see straight and didn’t have that negativity consuming my life, I wanted more positivity. I needed to find a church to go to every week.

That’s the thing negativity breeds more negativity and the same goes for positivity. But more on that later…