Red Cedar

It’s a good thing I didn’t make any hard and fast new year’s resolutions this year or I’d already be disappointing myself with the fact that I am in bed with a very bad cold. A painful cold in fact, the kind that makes the throat and lungs groan with each sniffle and cough.

I haven’t been sick for over a year, and I’d forgotten how debilitating garden-variety illnesses can be, how quickly the body can be taken hostage by aches and exhaustion — but here I am, flat on my back on a day I am supposed to be working, listening to the rain on the skylights above me.

And I have to admit that even though I am physically uncomfortable, another part of me loves the indulgence of staying in bed for a day or two with books and music on my computer and a chance to practice some lying-down meditation as well. It doesn’t hurt that I have a clean and lovely room to rest in, plus my awesome nurse-husband who is not working until next week and is an awesome caretaker during these rare times of sickness.

At the moment, I am listening the album Light by Arvo Part, Gregorio Allegri & Veljo Thomas – and am wound up in two books: Denial of Death by Ernest Becker and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki which I will expound more on at a later date. Suffice to say for now that both books are offering me perspective on some of my current philosophical interests, which is deeply satisfying.

I have decided to start the new year on this blog by posting a series of meditative reflections that comprised my final paper for last semester – the work I completed while at Rivendell Retreat in the first week of December. Though I have not received my final grade on the paper, it feels like the time to release it into the wild with the hope that it provides some insight into what a very early meditative path looks like for someone who is fundamentally secular.

Though it’s not entirely related, this news item caught my eye this morning – and it’s this type of study that first piqued my interest in meditation when I was writing about neuroscience innovation in the winter/spring of 2013: Study reveals gene expression changes with meditation

Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to return to convalescing. Hope your holidays were great and you’re on good footing for the new year!

Having skipped December due to the erratic nature of holiday-eating, I am back with a month of meal-planning to kick off the new year!

Some of these recipes might *sound* elaborate, but for the most part they are not (and if they require more prep or cooking time I have scheduled them for weekends or will put ingredients together ahead of time). Meal plans help me to cook food that is healthier and more interesting, ensure variety in our diet, and cut way down on food waste. Additionally, planning has eliminated impulse food buys and cut the grocery bill in half (I notice a significant difference on weeks that I have a list in hand versus when I don’t).  If getting organized around after work dinners is a resolution for you – I highly recommend getting started – keeping your own schedule, food parameters and interests in mind.

In the last few weeks I’ve started using the site/app Pepperplate to collect and organize recipes as well as put them into a planner and create shopping lists. It takes some time to get set-up with the recipe collection, but once you get going, I can imagine this to be really helpful (I’m hoping by February I can do my entire month of meal planning using the site).

Here is what we are eating in January:

Wednesday: 1 Whatever is in the fridge and still edible when we get home from Victoria
Thursday: 2 Sweet Potato and Quinoa Salad, w/ grilled chicken breast
Friday: 3 Lentil Soup, w/bread & greens on the side
Saturday: 4 Portuguese Fish Supper
Sunday: 5 (Band Practice) Baked whole salmon, wild mushroom risotto, caesar salad
Monday: 6 Turkey Tetrazinni made with brown rice w/roasted vegetables
Tuesday: 7 Penne with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic, and White Beans w/cold sliced vegetables
Wednesday: 8 West African Peanut Soup with Chicken
Thursday: 9 Pork Chops with Fennel and Caper Sauce w/steamed green beans
Friday: 10 Leftovers
Saturday: 11 Venison Pot pie w/green salad
Sunday: 12 (Band Practice – Dinner TBD)
Monday: 13 Polenta Pizza with Spinach, Mushrooms, Bacon & Tomatoes w/
Tuesday: 14 Roasted Salmon with Shallot Grapefruit sauce w/steamed potatoes and carrots
Wednesday: 15 Pork Ragu w/green salad (cook pork shoulder on Monday in advance)
Thursday: 16 Red Lentil Curry w/brown basmati and cold sliced veggies
Friday: 17 Leftovers from earlier in the week
Saturday: 18 Out
Sunday: 19 (Band Practice) Chicken and Veggie Pot Pie
Monday: 20 Portuguese One Pot Chicken and Potatoes
Tuesday: 21 Skillet Gnocchi with Chard and White Beans w/sliced tomato salad (cook Barley for next night)
Wednesday: 22 Mushroom Barley Salad w/Grilled Italian Sausage
Thursday: 23 Leftovers
Friday: 24 Mexican Beans and Rice w/fresh chopped peppers, tomatoes, avocado
Saturday: 25 Seared Duck Breast with Amarula w/roasted yams and potatoes and green salad
Sunday: 26 (Band Practice – Dinner TBD)
Monday: 27 Turkey Rice Soup
Tuesday: 28 Pork and Plums w/spinach/walnut salad
Wednesday: 29 (Salon – Dinner for twenty) Vegetarian and Meat Lasagnas, Caesar Salad, Bread w pudding for dessert
Thursday: 30 Chinese Beef and Broccoli
Friday: 31 Leftovers from earlier in the week

Finally get to share the Christmas gifts I made this year — eight in total — which is less than I would have liked to accomplish (really wanted to make a sweater for my partner but that will have to be a birthday gift as well). Pretty happy with my first amigurumi critters (niece and nephew are getting those today) — looking forward to a lot more making in 2014!

It’s amazing how events overtake us towards the middle of December, isn’t it? I mean, just two weeks ago I was in the interior woods in -30 weather having a massive bonfire, and today I am sitting and fretting about getting the last Christmas present finished for my nephew and realizing that I haven’t even posted any photos of the Big Burn yet!

To recap (if you are not a regular reader): Me, my partner and two friends bought a very scraggly and sloped third of an acre in the interior of BC this past June. We are now working on getting it prepped to build a fairly rustic cabin (having nearly finished the outhouse this fall), which has involved a backhoe and a lot of hand clearing. This clearing and a collapsed cabin resulted in a monumental pile of debris which needed burning once there was enough snow on the ground…. and that happy event came together the first weekend of December.

To facilitate this massive fire, we cooked up a big pot of beans, bought a lot of beer  and diesel and invited several friends to join us – friends who were instrumental in helping keep the fire going in the cold. And wow, it was cold. So The Big Burncold that the beers we opened froze in our hands before we could finish drinking them! So cold that every time you stepped away from the fire the snot immediately froze in your nose!

But it was also clear, and not windy – which meant it was beautiful weather for a fire and even though some tree trunks caught a little bit, the frozen-ness of it all stopped the fire from spreading beyond its perimeter.

We are one more stage down on getting the lot prepped for clearing – now onto the paperwork for permits!

Since starting grad school I have fallen seriously out of practice with recreational reading. So out of practice that recently for a “light read” I picked up Albert Camus’ The Plague – an existential novel about a town quarantined due to the plague which serves as an allegory for all of life in the shadow of the certain death we all face. Yup. That’s some light reading right there.

It’s not like I have a bunch of fiction sitting on my “to-read” pile right now either. I stopped purchasing reading material some time ago in deference to the public library (cheaper! awesome selection! less wasteful!) – but school keeps getting in the way and, I have returned almost all my “fun” reading to the library on its return date, unread.

Thus it appears that I need to re-arm my personal library if I am to get any recreational reading in over the next semester of school. I feel out of touch on the fiction front these days but after asking my Facebook posse this is the list of books I’ve decided to read over the next couple of months:

• Wild, Cheryl Strayed (I started this Thursday and am loving it).
• A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
• The Orenda, Joseph Boyden
• The Luminaries,  Elaine Catton
• Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
• We are Water, Wally Lamb
• Tomato Red, Daniel Woodrell
• Longbourn, Jo Baker
• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
• The Circle, Dave Eggers
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

This list alone is one of the reasons I am glad not to be entering into sixty-hour weeks in 2014! The best thing about lapsing on the reading front is that now there are so many great books waiting for me. So although it is too early for new year’s resolutions – this list stands as some kind of commitment to myself, and my need for good literature in my life always.