meanderings: February 2010

Much more on: Buoyant Life. Articles about living afloat around the world. Good for the soul. Check out the article on Cosmic Muffin, a floating home that was once flown by Howard Hughes: Just Another Plane Boat Muffin.

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Buoyant Life -- several articles in this new online magazine about living and traveling on water

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Between the Hours
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When I Was A Fish - Editor's Choice, Bewildering Stories, Third Quarterly Review, 2009

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Harvey Milk - Featured on homepage, The Queer Times, May 22, 2010
As I Was Dancing - Editor's Choice, Bewildering Stories, First Quarterly Review, 2008

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A Monday Night Ritual

(We've made quite a few of these since this one. But the regularity of the ritual was interrupted by Z's part-time job. Now it's more a sporadic thing. And it's not always omelets. The most recent dinner shared was French toast, made with tons of cinnamon, Challah, and agave instead of the customary gobs of maple syrup. Yum!)

We started this a few weeks ago. Monday nights, Z and I make an omelet, which we have with a salad and a glass or two of organic wine (usually red) that we drink from lovely gold-rimmed wine glasses (her Christmas gift to me a couple years ago). We eat by candlelight, share information and insights, laugh and giggle conspiratorially, and revel in the scrumptious flavors of our latest concoction. Each week the omelet is different, as is the wine. But the essentials remain the same. We use six eggs, but only 3 of the yolks. We add a bit of water to the mix, as well as lots of cayenne, red pepper flakes, and black pepper. It's the filling that changes each time. Bon appetit!

Omelet #1

Egg mixture
6 eggs
plenty of black pepper
plenty of red pepper flakes
plenty of cayenne

Filling
broccoli
cauliflower
red onion
low-fat Jarlsburg cheese
cherry tomatoes
canned tomoatoes
tarragon
mustard seeds
more black pepper

Crack open the eggs and put in a bowl, including only 3 of the 6 yolks. Add a few drops of water, black pepper, cayenne powder, and red pepper flakes. Mix vigourously and put aside.

Chop the vegetables into bite-size pieces (my daughter insists on this). Mince the onion. Cut as little as a handful of thin strips of cheese and put aside.

Saute the onion in some olive oil (we use organic; in fact we try to make all the ingredients organic all the time). Add the broccoli and cauliflower. Cover and allow to cook for a few minutes over low heat. Add pepper, mustard seeds, and tarragon, as well as the cherry tomatoes (halved). Cover for a few minutes, then remove from heat and pour into a bowl.

Add some oil to the saute pan, pour in the egg and cook until relatively firm. Fold in the vegetable mixture and strips of cheese. Cover for a few moments to allow the cheese to melt and the egg to puff.

Enjoy with a bottle of Malbec from Argentina and realize that this easy, delicious, and inexpensive meal is full of nutrition for your body and mind: Omega 3, beta-carotene, calcium, potassium, iron, vitamins C, A, and E. And that's only a sampling of the benefits.

yoga

Achieving the right balance between our left and right brains is a matter of shifting from one to the other, depending on what the moment requires. But our society--with its focus on speed, on information, on "being on top of things" puts a lot of false expectations/pressures on us that all too often result in an imbalanced state of mind. Way too much left brain, not enough right.

There are times when the left brain goes in automatic mode; we've been so swept into the realm of the right brain that we don't remember exactly how we got from our driveway to work. Operating with neural paths that have been paved so well, we don't need to "think" about it. But we need the left brain to take care of "business"--paying the rent, buying groceries, getting our cats to the vet, our children to school, etc. These things can "steal" from the right brain. Young children don't have that problem. They don't need to focus on the details of life. They're right brain creatures all the way. . .

Yoga helps move us to the realm of the right brain and turn off the switch to the left--for awhile. At minimum it's at least a shift in ratio of right to left (because it's not always an either or proposition--in fact--most often it's a combination. But which one dominates?

We need both side of our brain to stay alive. But I think most of us have lost the balance that was intended. Yoga helps get us back there. . .

meanderings

Monday, February 1, 2010

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