Tag Archives: 40×40

If a tree falls and no one posts about it on Facebook, does it mean it really fell?

4 Feb

Image Source: http://media1.annabrixthomsen.com/2012/07/If_a_tree_falls_in_the_woods377Detail.png

Two weeks ago, I entered Facebook Silence. Or at least, that’s what I called it when I decided there was no time like the present to tackle the “Two weeks without Facebook” challenge from my 40×40 list.

For people who don’t have Facebook, that entry probably earned an eyeroll. But for those of us who check Facebook multiple times daily and feel like it’s our connection to people outside our immediate sightline? It seemed daunting.

I’ll admit, if I hadn’t deleted the Facebook app off my iPhone, I would’ve blown my resolution the day I started. I posted my intention to go dormant on a Sunday night, then – when I woke on Monday – I started my lazy wake-up routine. I don’t run my furnace at night, so I wake to chilly air and usually spend a bit of time lounging in my bed, reviewing emails on my phone before I can muster the courage to run to the shower. If it’s really cold, I’ll buy more time by flipping over to Facebook to see what people posted while I was sleeping.

That Monday, it was exceptionally cold, so when I finished the emails, I instinctively went to check Facebook. But my smart self had remove the app from my phone before I went to bed. Instead of a blue square icon, my phone simply had a blank space glaring at me. I briefly wondered what I’d committed to. Then I wondered if my Facebook usage bordered on an addiction. Then I showered. Image Source: http://media02.hongkiat.com/facebook-addiction-signs/facebook-addict.jpg

That first day was a series of realizations… not only that I used Facebook as a crutch on cold mornings, but also that I’ve become accustomed to checking it quickly as a way of mentally shifting gears between projects at work. More than once, I found myself landing on the login page, catching myself before I entered my credentials.

I hadn’t declared an outright ban on all social media, however, so I’d dip into Twitter daily and post something. I’ve never been much of a tweeter, and this two week period helped me figure out why: Facebook feels like more of a conversation. Twitter seems like a bunch of people just blurting things and occasionally responding to each other. Perhaps a bit like a Tourrettes conference. Also? It turns out I enjoy the photos people post on Facebook – even if they’re usually of children.

So while I bounced over to Twitter periodically, I’d wager that it held my attention for no more than five minutes a day. It kind of makes me wonder why I have four Twitter accounts. (I guess I did a land-grab early on? Beats me.)

I will say that this experiment DID help me reclaim a staggering amount of free time, so I definitely plan to restrict my Facebook usage moving forward. But I also found that I missed out on key events and had to learn about them second-hand, which I didn’t like.

Thankfully, Alan texted me when my friend announced the birth of her baby via Facebook. And it was from overhearing people in my office talking that I realized one of my work friends was stuck on a bus in Atlanta for 24 hours because of the snow storm. Trade-offs, I guess.

In any case, it was liberating to unshackle myself from Mark Zuckerberg’s three-legged race for a week. And it was a stroke of genius that my dormant period coincided with the Super Bowl. Because who has time for that?

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Have I mentioned? I happen to like walking tours.

2 Feb

Image Source: http://www.freetoursbyfoot.com/washington-dc-tours

While you were at the gym, honoring your New Year’s Resolution, I was quietly tackling a couple more items on my 40×40 list. In this week’s update:

#7 – Take an official walking tour of DC. 

…

This weekend I took my first ever guided walking tour of DC. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that I love DC and I love walking tours. I’ve just never made time to play tourist in my own city. Coming out of two weeks of near-zero temperatures, today’s balmy 52˚ forecast made me think the timing was right for a walking tour. And it was.

I joined DC by Foot for a “pay what you want” walking tour of the National Mall. I was hoping for a neighborhood tour, but they run a limited schedule during the winter, so the Mall was the only real option that worked with my schedule.

I’ve logged many hours on the Mall doing things that most tourists would find pretty cool – attending the Library of Congress’s Book Festival, playing kickball, watching a kite festival, enjoying Screen on the Green movies, witnessing presidential inaugurations, rallying against the Keystone XL pipeline – so I was worried I’d find the tour a bit disappointing.

Fortunately, I was wrong.

Image Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fb/Jefferson_Pier_and_Washington_Monument.jpgThere were two things I saw on this tour that I had never noticed before: One was was the Jefferson Pier. It’s a small marker just west of the Washington Monument, indicating the original intended location of the Washington Monument – AND the prime meridian that L’Enfant proposed. Interestingly, while the meridian idea never took off, apparently whenever NASA measures distance in the universe, they use the Jefferson Pier marker as the starting place. Pretty cool.

The other thing I’d not noticed: The “graffiti” on the back of the WWII Memorial: Kilroy was here. Although I was familiar with the expression, I hadn’t heard the story of its suspected origin before.

Legend has it, prior to WWII James Kilroy was a rivet inspector in a shipyard in Massachusetts. At the end of each shift, he scribbled “Kilroy was here” to indicate where he’d left off. During the war, sailors started finding this phrase all over their ships – and when they compared notes with other sailors, they found that Kilroy had been there, too. Since it seemed Kilroy was inexplicably omnipresent, people took up scrawling the phrase wherever they went, helping Kilroy cover the globe – and bathroom stalls.

In any case, pretty cool that it became so linked with WWII, that it’s there, etched on the back of this memorial.

Pretty much.

Pretty much.

In addition to the knowledge I picked up along the way, I enjoyed a few of the unscripted aspects of the tour. For example, when we kicked off, at the highly trafficked corner of 15th and Constitution, our guide made a point of saying that was usually the noisiest place on the tour. His words must have jinxed us – because for the rest of the tour, we had hundreds of Canadian Canada Geese pass over us, honking more fervently than the DC drivers.

[Note: My original post called them Canadian Geese, but my dad, the ornithologist, told me I’d made one of the most common mistakes in birding. Apparently they’re Canada Geese. I don’t even want to figure out the mechanics of this grammatically.]

And when we were standing by the Washington Monument, a young guy walking by interrupted our tour to ask , “Do you know how many flags there are circling the monument?”

“Fifty,” our guide answered confidently.

“Really?” the guy asked, “Because I heard it was like 54 or something – the states and the territories?”

“Nope,” our guide said. “I’ve counted them.” The guy thanked him and started to walk away. Our guide continued, “Do you know what the other question I get here a lot is?” The guy shook his head. “How do they get them to all fly in the same direction?” our guide offered.

The guy stopped and stared and shook his head. “Whoa – you’re right. Now that I look at them, they ARE all going in the same direction… why is that?”

“The wind,” our guide said. The guy smacked his head. “You got me! Man!”

And that’s why you should always join the tour and pay what you can. Otherwise, you’ll be shamed.

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Did someone call me chicken?

7 Jan

Image Source: http://www.disneymike.com/blog/whole_chicken.jpg

Since everyone just made New Year’s Resolutions and is constantly posting about their progress on Facebook (good job – you joined a gym!) I’m going to share a progress update from MY mini-bucket list for the year, which I kicked off on my birthday back in October.

One of the items was to roast a whole chicken. I know, especially for someone who cooks as much (and I’d like to think as well) as I do, roasting a bird should be old hat. Yet despite the fact that I routinely make roasts, when I made my list I had never dealt with an entire bird.

Two reasons: CAVITY and GIBLETS.

Just thinking about a chicken’s “cavity” reminds me of the metaphor Chris Farley trotted out in Tommy Boy: I can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking my head up a bull’s ass, but I’d rather take a butcher’s word for it.

You understand now, right?

Image Source: Maxine from HallmarkSomething about watching my hand disappear into a chicken, unsure if “giblets” await, makes me a bit queasy. Maybe I’d be more comfortable with a turkey, where I could open that sucker up and get a good look before losing my elbow to it?

And the word GIBLETS? That just implies that you aren’t even dealing with real anatomical parts – it’s more like a bag of mystery parts that have no real anatomical names. As in: This grab-bag contains one ovary, half a liver, four inches of intestines, a spleen-ish looking item and what might be a fallopian tube.

Now that I think about it, maybe I’m scarred from the Thanksgiving when I was in college and the house of guys living next door to us invited my roommates and me over for dinner. The meal itself was great, but I still remember opening our back door that morning to find what we thought was a severed penis on our stoop. (It was during the height of Lorena Bobbitt and in my defense, none of us knew what a turkey neck looked like.)

In any case, I bit the bullet and decided to make a chicken for our New Year’s Eve dinner this year. I thought it would be nice to ring in the year with one more item crossed off my bucket list. As it turns out, I got lucky with the bird – it was organic and the giblets were already removed so the cavity was as clean and smooth and vacant as the Capitol Rotunda on Christmas Day.

That hurdle crossed, I got to the fun part: seasoning the bird. The Thanksgiving turkey that my friend Lisa had made was so addictive that I decided to take a page from her book and prep my chicken with bacon butter.

Here’s the recipe if you want to make chicken that’s like crack. In a food processor, combine until it’s a smooth paste:

    • Fresh thyme
    • Fresh rosemary
    • Fresh sage
    • 3 cloves of garlic
    • Cooked bacon (I used six strips of center-cut)
    • 3 T. Butter (room temp)

Anywhere I could work the skin loose, I slid in a thin layer of this butter. Then I rubbed the entire outside with it before salting and peppering. I stuck half a lemon and a whole bulb of garlic in the (once-scary but now benign) cavity, then criss-crossed the legs and tied them in place like a proper lady to make sure nothing slid out during the roasting. Then I stuck the whole thing on a roasting rack on top of sliced onions.

While it was cooking, I made myself a toasted roll – and spread it with bacon butter. Then I made mashed potatoes – and added some bacon butter. And when it came time to sauté the green beans? You guessed it.

Basically, the entire meal was an ode to bacon butter.

I wish I would’ve taken a photo of the final result for this post because it did Norman Rockwell proud. I mean, that bird was golden and glowing and tasted as fantastic as it looked. I just can’t believe it took me almost half a lifetime to attempt it.

Now if only I can find a restaurant that makes bacon butter sushi…

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Progress and pool drains.

3 Dec

Image Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5d/Mountain_Dew_sign_Tonto_Arizona.jpg

I’ve been making good progress on my 40×40 list.

In case you’re keeping tabs, I haven’t consumed a single Mountain Dew of any variety since October 30. Oddly, I also find that I’m now less interested in Nascar and have started questioning the wisdom of allowing cousins to marry.

At this rate, Miss Moneypenny’s brown snaggletooth will practically straighten itself and people won’t think they’re entering West Virginia when they cross my threshold. Might be time to start a meth lab, just to maintain appearances around here.

[I joke, but my sister once lived across the street from a house that functioned as a meth lab and had no idea. The DEA has created a registry of homes that functioned as clandestine labs. Probably worth reviewing if you’re hunting for a home. Screwy as it sounds, realtors don’t have to disclose a home’s illicit history – even if it can make you sick. How was THAT for random?]

Screen Shot 2013-12-01 at 9.03.47 PM

Back to my 40×40 list… I’ve been making good progress on my commitment to swim 50 miles this year. I already have 7 miles under my belt, and – aside from the first one, which was UGLY – it’s just like riding a bike. Except without the wheels and handlebars.

I find that my mind wanders when I’m cranking out laps, and I think of the weirdest things. That bike analogy wasn’t even one of them, until I considered what it would be like to swim while wearing a bike helmet.

This weekend I had a lane that is lined with four drains along the bottom. It made me think of childhood, and the oft-repeated warnings to, “Never sit on the pool drain or you will have your intestines pulled out of your ass.” I’m not the only person who heard that line, right?

As I counted my laps and stared at the drains, it struck me as an urban legend. So when I got home, I googled “death by pool drain intestines.” Brace yourself: It is actually a real thing. Wow. Just – terrifying.

On a related note – related to swimming, not intestinal loss – I had a weird experience when I went to the pool on Saturday. All the lanes were occupied, so I sized them up, trying to determine where I’d have the best luck sharing. I felt like Goldilocks as I observed the swimmers: that one’s too fast… that one’s too slow… that one’s too sloppy…

I finally found one who seemed to be, “just right.” Unfortunately, he must not have thought so, because when I approached him and asked to share his lane, he got all huffy and moved to a new lane so he was sharing with someone and I had his old lane to myself. Confused about what happened, I said, “Hey – sorry – didn’t mean to run you out of your lane.”

To which he barked, “We wouldn’t be compatible.”

I was taken aback because I wasn’t sure what he was basing that on. At that point, he hadn’t seen me do anything. I shrugged and started my laps, keeping one eye trained on his workout to see what he had meant.

I was never able to figure it out, so I can only surmise that he thought I was seeking a dick-free lane. And I guess he was right.

Next time, I’ll make sure I’m sporting one of these awesome swim caps from Kiefer.com so I know why he’s judging me:

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40 x 40: Progress & Failures.

11 Nov
Wine country

Heaven on Earth: Sonoma.

It’s been almost two weeks since my birthday and already I need to update my 40×40 list – partially to mark my progress and partially to amend my list since I’ve already screwed up. (Too bad one of my items wasn’t to cultivate a practice of “self-forgiveness,” because I could totally check that box while blowing off the more difficult things on my list. Next year…)

So here are the updates – mainly to keep myself honest:

#9: Explore wine country with Alan. CHECK. You’re read about our adventures in Carmel, Monterey, and Hearst Castle – but we spent the last five days tooling through Paso Robles, Napa and Sonoma. I’ll blog about it soon, but the trip was all that I’d hoped for when I added it to this list.

#19: See the sunset over the Pacific. CHECK. Did this not once, not twice, but THREE times in the last week. Who’s a lucky girl?

© 2013 pithypants.com

Please note the Spartan t-shirt – worn the day we beat the Wolverines.

#10: Completely avoid Diet Dew every day for one month. IN MOTION. It hasn’t been a month since my birthday yet, so it’d be impossible to achieve this one, but I’m off to a good start. I’ve gone 13 days without a Dew. And I really had to avoid temptation on our trip because one of our B&B hosts had even stocked our mini-fridge with a can of Diet Dew for me.

#26: Review the books I read on Amazon. IN MOTION. I’ve actually taken this a step further – I’m reviewing EVERYTHING. This might be one of those unhealthy manifestations of my compulsive personality, because I’ve already earned a “Top Reviewer” badge on TripAdvisor – and I just started reviewing things a week ago. If there’s a “stalker” badge, I might earn that soon.

#27: Swim 50 miles. IN MOTION. I snuck in two miles before we left for vacation. Snuck might be a bad word choice, because there’s really nothing sneaky about flailing around in the pool, gasping for breath as you count laps and pray the lifeguard won’t need to intervene.

#23: Write 50,000 words toward my next novel. UMMM. I’d planned to do this by participating in NaNoWriMo (kind of like Movember, but instead of growing a mustache, you write a book – potentially as embarrassing, but not quite as creepy – unless it’s about mustaches). As it turns out, that was a horrible thing to attempt when starting a vacation. I found that I wanted to write blogs and jot notes about our vacation, so we’re going to need to revisit this one.

#33: Do an inversion every single day. UMMM. I’m amending this one. It should say, “Develop a daily inversion practice.” Because that’s the end goal, and it is REALLY HARD to remember to do something every day, cold turkey. Especially when you’re staying in a hotel and you really don’t want to put your head remotely close to the carpet.

So that’s my progress. And before you judge: How are your New Year’s Resolutions going? That’s what I thought.

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