Wednesday, September 8, 2010

being veggie?

Some quick thoughts on what is happening... we took a challenge to be veggie or mostly veggie for 21 days. I made veggie chilli yesterday but put a bit of leftover ground turkey in it. Breakfast was steelcut oatmeal with blueberries, bananas and walnuts, lunch was green apples with peanut butter. Tonight, green beans blanched with lemon juice and olive oil, raw white corn and roasted potatoes with a bit of seasoning on them. Cantaloupe for dessert. Leo was please, he loves roasted potatoes. Teresa was pleased, since she is no longer allergic to melon, it would seem. I was please that they were pleased. I ran into a nice lady at henry's who encouraged us to go raw if possible, and that eating more whole foods would help us tremendously. She said she had lost 20 lbs. on the raw diet and was really just trying to get her allergies under control.

Day 3 tomorrow! I am happy to do the change in diet. Maybe split pea soup for dinner?

Friday, September 3, 2010

ruminations on dogs

So we are going to be accepting a challenge to become vegetarians for 21 days on Sept. 6th. Since I knew we were going to be doing this (and yes, John knows. He actually suggested we go vegetarian for a week, so I know he is good for that amount of time) and Von's was having a sale on rib-eye, I decided to buy some at a good price. What does this have to do with our akita, Kit kat, you ask? I broiled them, and after John finished his (and yes, he chewed it down to the bone, so I guess he must have enjoyed it quite a bit) he gave the cooked bone to Kit kat, who promptly devoured as much of it as she could in as little time as possible. That was Thurs. On Fri. when she went out on her 1st walk of the day, she apparently had some digestive upset (this was told to me by Leo). On her early afternoon walk, she again had some problems. We left to go run some errands while John took an afternoon nap. He awoke to the dog, ahem, as he so aptly put it, "she exploded all over the carpet", which thankfully was a bit of an exaggeration. We ended up throwing out a small rug that was not salvageable, and used up some woolite carpet cleaner on the bit that got on the regular rug.

When we got home, she promptly went into barfing mode, whereupon we rushed her outside. She puked and then squatted some more. Ugh. Poor thing! A few hours later, she had the dry heaves from both ends.

What have I learned from this? No cooked bones and be extra careful with what we feed her. On the boat this would have been a disaster. Here on land, plenty of room to throw her outside. I take that back. On the boat, we would have thrown her on deck and cleaned it off with a bucket of salt water, but still... I am glad that we found out that she is not to be given bones here than on there!

I think about the boat about 10 times a day. What will we do when at anchor? How will school go? Can I fit some stuff on the Nook? What should we take as far as art supplies? What kind of vegetarian meals will I be making there on the boat in Central America? Who will we meet? How long will we be gone?

But lastly, what kind of dog food will I be able to find in the markets? (sighing and shaking my head ruefully)

Thursday, September 2, 2010

random thoughts

So I cannot believe that I have been ignoring this blog. John has been on me to make sure that I am writing, but would prefer that I do it for money. Yup, like there is all those jobs out there just waiting for me to fill columns worth of funny in their magazines/newspapers. Um, to put this politely, no. There is not.

However, I do agree with him that writing is a much better use of my time that watching re-runs of last seasons "Jersey Shore" or the reunion show of "Housewives of New Jersey", with all that antics that brings to mind.

We are back at the school year. We tried to take school to the beach and let the dog roam, but honestly, she just figures out that she (meaning the dog) can go as far as she likes and not be supervised at all. I get too nervous letting her out of my sight, and thus school was a wash yesterday. I would like to think that maybe, next time we take school to the beach, we will remember that the dog doesn't mind being on her leash all that much, once she has run about for a bit. I also realized that too much chicken jerky loses its hold over my dog. ack.

So to re-cap - we were going to go on the boat in Oct. but now John is heading over to Jordan for a couple of 5 wks. courses as a teacher of live transmission work (electricity) and he should be done in late Dec./early Jan. where we will either go and meet up with him and do the touristy things that people do over there in Amman (Jerash, the red sea, the dead sea, Jerusalem and Petra) OR we will just wait for him here and take off on the boat sometime after that.

Leo and Teresa are both back on the swim team for College area swim team (CAST) and he is now at level 2 and she is now at level 3. He is in 6th, and she is in 5th (as far as telling the general public). Math is going all right, reading is going all right. We want more science in our lives and more history and social studies. At least that is what I got from the conversation that the kids had with me yesterday on school. I am thinking that both of them are doing well in wanting Leo to sing and Teresa to do more ballet.

And of course, I need to start a new outline on my book and actually do some writing on it. Yup, right after I go to yoga. uh-huh.