OTTO’S TOY

If you have ever been into a pet store, and specifically went to the dog section, you have probably seen a toy that is a stuffed animal but instead of having regular stuffing, it has an empty water bottle.  Dogs like the crunchy sound of an empty water bottle.  In the store I frequently shop for Otto’s things, these can cost about $10 bucks.  And I have purchased 2 of them.   After about 2-3 months of pretty frequent and rough playing, the toys finally died.  Meaning they were ripped apart and could not be sewn back together.  Well, after the death of the 2^nd toy, I decided to make one for Otto using one of Caleb’s old t-shirts.  I cut out part of the torso, knotted one end and went to sewing.  Before sewing up the opposite end, inserted the empty water bottle.

The toy turned out ugly and my sewing skills need some work, but all in all it worked out quite well.  It withstood tug-of wars, fetch and chase.  Since the fabric of this shirt was old, the fabric itself got some tears in it pretty easily and quickly.  But my design (the sections I sewed together and knotted) held up quite well.  So despite its ugliness and the fabric ripping after the 3^rd day of play, my design worked quite well.  And for that, I am a little proud.  J

Here are some pics of putting it together, the finished thing and Otto playing with it.

HIKING

We really enjoy being outdoors, hiking through woods and seeing nature.  It is such a beautiful place to be.  This weekend we are outdoors quite a bit.  Yesterday we walked at the Chattahoochee River State Park for 5 miles and today we went to Sweetwater Creek State Park for 3 miles.  After doing both, we quickly realized we are ‘flat-landers.’  By that I mean, we much prefer walking on flat land as opposed to trekking up steep hills.  The Chattahoochee path we walked was level, read, easy; the Sweetwater path we chose was difficult and felt mountainous at times.  At the top of a couple of strenuous hills, we decided to stop and have a look at nature.  Having a ‘look at nature’ was not a euphemism for stopping to catch our breath and rest.  Wink wink. ;-)

Here are some pictures of our walk today.  Otto had fun playing in the water.  After the walk, he was as tired as us.  We were tired but quite happy.  Love walking through the woods!

FOOD – IT’S GOOD FOR YOU

Could I have made a more obvious statement about food than the one in the post title?  :-P

Anyway, lately I have been trying to lose weight and eat more healthfully.  I pack a lunch nearly every day of the work week of every week of every month of every year for about 6 years for hubby and I.  (If anyone wants to calculate that, go ahead as I would like to have a dime for every one of them!)  But it has really been on my conscious lately to eat better and definitely eat in moderation; though come Friday or Saturday night, the careful eating goes right out the window, crashes and burns.  The older I get the more easily the fat packs on and the more difficult it is to shed.  (If our bodies were really intelligently designed, then why can’t we tasty, salty, sugary, high-fat foods that we all love and enjoy and still be slender, well-muscled and in good shape?  I ask that sarcastically of course.  Maybe.)  I know I need to take better care of my body especially if I want to live to my 90s.  Granted, I realize that an incalculable number of things can go wrong and prevent that from happening, but if things go as planned, I will be an awesome, funny, cool old woman who people still want to hang with.  So I have to eat better. 

Hubby and I are now counting calories for most meals.  Honestly I hated, I mean truly hated, the idea of counting calories.  I don't think I can accurately express my level of hatred-ness of this idea without using expletives.  It seemed completely tedious, aggravating and a time waster.  In reality it is a time-consumer and tedious, but not aggravating.  After seeing results of counting calories, I am super happy that we are doing this now.  It actually WORKS!!!  I am much more conscientious of the food I consume and don’t want more than I can work off – except for the 1 or 2 cheat weekly meals that I need to keep me sane.  (Obviously we exercise too.  I mean our dog is not going to walk himself.  haha!)

Back to the lunches.  For a while, I ate a salad for lunch every day for about 4 weeks and it was delicious.  Then I got tired of it and moved on to other foods, about as equally healthy.  The salad I thought was awesome.  It had iceberg lettuce, spinach sometimes, beans, cauliflower, cucumber, carrots, mushrooms, bell pepper and dried cranberries.  Basically veggies with a little bit of lettuce.  It was truly tasty; I actually looked forward to eating my salad.  I was excited about lunch and not because I was hungry!  I used a Caesar Vinaigrette dressing by Kraft for my dressing and it was delicious.  But after about 4 weeks of salad I was ready to move on to other foods. (pic of the salad below).   Now I make a wrap, have fresh veggies (with awesome hummus), cuties and string cheese for lunch.  This particular lunch is less than 600 calories.  Love it!  I will be an armchair nutritionist and say this and the salad are really nutritious and healthy meals to have.

So here’s to many good, nourishing meals!  And the night (or two) of wine!

                                     

                                          salad components

Powerhouse Women

ADVENTUROUS, INDEPENDENT, EMPOWERED, TAKE CHARGE, KICK-ASS-AND-TAKE-NAMES-LATER WOMEN (some in books)

Lately I have been going through a phase in which I read books, fiction and non-fiction, about women who are strong in who they are as individuals, don’t let their pasts define who they are in the present tense of the books and, most importantly to me anyways, are not wimpy.

Throughout my childhood and teen years, I recall watching many movies and tv shows with my parents, the majority of them being of the western genre, where so many female characters were wimpy, useless and likely to get themselves killed if they acted like frightened children.  I usually always hated them and don’t recall reading any books in my teen years or adulthood in which the women were in which the women were written to be unequal and inferior to men.  For the most part, in the books with lead female characters that I am drawn to, the women are strong, smart, work successfully in a ‘man’s’ world, daring and don’t back down from a fight.
One female character that has long been a favorite of mine is Scarlett O’hara.  Of course by the time the sequel to “Gone With The Wind” was written, she was Scarlett O’hara-Hamilton-Kennedy-Butler, because she was a woman who went after what she wanted and used men to get there.  I loved Scarlett and still do.  I have in the past heard her described as money-hungry bitch and she may have been, at times.  But there is much more to her character than just that description.   She was incredibly smart, business-savvy, bucked normal social conventions, didn’t always depend on men to secure her place in life or have financial security and didn’t worry what society in general thought of her.  For these reasons and more, I love her character.

I really enjoy reading books, whether auto/biographical or fictitious, where the women take risks, are bold, adventurous, spirited, courageous, determined and fun.

Here are some of the books I have read lately that had these kinds of women in them:

The Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels (fiction), War Brides by Helen Bryan (based on historical facts), Eighty Days: Nelly Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman (non-fiction),   Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman and Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman by Alice Steinbach (autobiographies), and Mama Moon (True, inspirational story of courage, love & triumph!) by Susan Gayle (biography)

It has been a while since I read Mama Moon, but it was about a poor immigrant from the Asian continent (sorry, I forget the country), who labored tremendously to get herself out of her destitute situation and raised a family, all the while just being grateful to be in a country with so many opportunities for work and bettering your life.  There were many times she could have thrown in the towel and gave up, but that was not her.  Quitting was not in this woman’s blood.  She worked on well into her retirement years, worked through and survived cancer, and endured a few unfortunate business decisions and in the end made something of herself.   Mama Moon wanted to be an inspiration to all around her and definitely lived the old adage “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

The books I have read by Alice Steinbach show her to be a woman of strength, adventure, loves to learn and wants as much out of her life as she can get.  She travels to various countries to learn something about their cultures and embraces any bumps she finds along the road.  These bumps in her path allow her to learn from experience and maybe even have a different experience than what she planned.  I admire her willingness to travel for educational reasons.  It is great to immerse yourself in another culture as much as you can to see how others live, to open up any closed minds and eradicate old prejudices.

To prevent this entry from being exceedingly long, I will not summarize the other books, but if you have time or the interest, I would recommend reading them.

This entry was born because lately I have been casually considering some of the hardships past women were put through because of men and the battles they had to face to show these insulting, selfish, demanding and power-hungry men that women are much more qualified for work and success than just cooking and cleaning.  We still have to fight these battles, though on a much smaller scale fortunately.  One example of my casual consideration is this:  when we all went to vote last November, I really felt that it was my duty to vote, not only because it is a civic right, but because of the past, courageous and fearless women who fought, were beaten and jailed for, this most basic of citizen rights.  We all deserve to have our opinions count in these matters.  *Let me just clarify that I have voted in several previous elections since turning 18, but this was the first time I really felt the great struggles of past women’s rights activists so we could vote.  And I felt proud that I could/can vote because of those strong women.*

So to these women and others I am thankful.  I am thankful for the stories written about real and fictitious women.  I am thankful that many women of prior centuries blazed a trail for recent generations of women to able to work in jobs traditionally held by men, give the opportunities for higher education, give the option to have the men stay home and cook, clean and raise the kids and to remind us to never give up and keep moving forward.  I hope stories of these real and imagined women never stop being told and written.