* Pebbles & Sunshine *

(Or, Joyce Becomes A Bookselling Monster!)

It all started last week, when I finally got around to listing some books for sale on Amazon. These were good books, beautiful books, that I bought in a a fit of passion, only to eventually succumb to buyer’s remorse. For many months, I kept them on my shelf, admiring the shiny cover, smiling over glossy pages, knowing I should recoup my losses, yet unwilling to let go. But finally the guilt of watching my husband lug 150 pounds of books up to our third floor apartment overcame my bibliophile defenses. I love my husband very much (more than my books, really); I love his back too. And so I determined to get the dirty job done.

After a few weeks of procrastination, I set up my seller’s account and started putting up books. After agonizing over beloved (but rarely-used) volumes and discarding the titles that were selling so low it wasn’t worth the effort (my threshold was $5), I ended up with nine respectable listings. Then I sat back for what I expected would be a long wait. I figured I would sell one every two weeks or so — every week when things were going fast, perhaps only one a month when things were slow — and my eventual hope was to be rid of half by the end of our six month lease. The leftovers would undergo judgment at that time and either be kept or somehow discarded.

Well, I woke up the next day and found that no fewer than SIX bulky volumes had sold in the night. SIX! Shocked would hardly begin to describe it. With only a tenuous grasp of where I could print out packing slips (we don’t have a printer) and a vague idea where the post office was, I set out, a large bag of books under each arm. My first stop was the library, where I’d noticed a “First 10 pages free” sign on the printer. Well just my luck, it was Thursday, the Farmer’s Market in Los Alamos. That meant all the parking lots were packed with cars, forcing me to improvise. Not thinking, I parked in a narrow lane and upon returning found myself squarely blocked by an SUV and a big red truck. Now, since low-carbing, my constitution has been stronger (if not exactly iron), so instead of panicking, I gulped, got into the car, and proceeded for several minutes to drive fruitlessly forwards two feet, backwards two feet, forwards two feet, backwards two feet, to the grave stares of many passersby. I thought about calling my husband, or perhaps even my Mommy in Missouri, but alas I didn’t have my phone. (Sigh.) Finally, I summoned my courage, revved the car over the curb, and made my escape (missing the SUV on my right by about two inches and the large decorative rock on my left by maybe a bit less). After that, I merely needed to execute a hair-raising 20-point U-turn in another tiny alleyway and I was free. I drove home shaking, called my husband hysterically, pulled myself together, and headed to the post office.

After half an hour of frantic sorting and letting people pass me in line, I finally had my six books shipped. I arrived home, exhausted … to find another one had sold. (!@%*$!) Five days later, I shipped my ninth book. Wow. I don’t know whether to laugh hysterically for joy or laugh hysterically in agony. (Both maybe.) Why, I could almost quit my day job.

Speaking of which, I have one now! More on that later …

I’ve heard the new fad in pop psychology is to interpret everything in terms of hardwired gender differences. No doubt this is a lashback to the era when people were supposed to be born completely malleable, and like any lashback, it will be carried too far and inspire yet other lashbacks. So I realize it’s not the complete answer.

Nevertheless, I’m a big believer. And after having great success with our diet, my husband and I are always putting on our Paleo Paradigm Glasses to see whether they shed light on anything else. I had them on one fine morning when it finally hit me why women are pathologically addicted to shopping: It’s our gathering instinct way back from our hunter-gatherer days! It suddenly seemed so obvious. We’d done it every day for millions of years. Of course it’d be ingrained in our nature!

To test my hypothesis, I grabbed a bowl and headed out to forage some berries … and did I have a blast! I came back with a delicious snack, a feeling of peace, and (most importantly) an antidote to my perpetual itch to shop. Not bad for one morning’s work!

I followed my nose a little further and found that the same line of reasoning explains a lot about men too. Haven’t you ever wondered how men can walk straight into a store, buy what they came for, and leave without so much as a sidelong glance at anything else? (All those beautiful rows of merchandise, waiting to be foraged …) Men also like first-person shoot-em-ups, chasing women (but not necessarily keeping them), and anything that can be used as a weapon (chain saws, firearms, power tools, paintball guns). Men are hunters. No wonder we don’t get each other. :)

All this further ties in with something I read in Why Gender Matters: Men’s eyes are hardwired to see motion, while women are better with color and texture. This makes complete sense: Hunters must chase running prey, while gatherers have to accurately identify edible and poisonous foodstuffs. Naturally, we would have developed these respective qualities during our three-million-year evolution.

Anyway, I’m sure many smarter people have already “discovered” this, but I’m still proud for coming up with it all by myself. :)

I’ve FINALLY figured it out!

Six months ago, I woke up with severe abdominal cramps that I assumed was food poisoning, maybe from eating out the night before. I thought “It happens” and shrugged it off. But after that, every few weeks my stomach would cramp up after a meal and leave me groaning for hours. It seemed completely arbitrary. Sometimes it was chicken, sometimes beef, sometimes well-cooked, sometimes nearly raw; but the crazy thing was, I could eat the exact same stuff other days and be fine. I was totally mystified, especially since my stomach has always been pretty hardy.

But I caught it in the act last night. This time, when my phantom came, all I’d had to eat was a few bites of a mushroom and shrimp stir-fry, made with pre-cooked shrimp no less. I knew it couldn’t be the shrimp because I’d eaten out of that very bag many times before without ill consequence. So I got suspicious: Was it the mushrooms?

Spencer and I put our heads together and sure enough, here’s a list of Major Incidents and what we could remember about the meal that caused them:

1. Steak salad, can’t remember the contents. Can’t even remember the name of the restaurant. It was somewhere in Burbank.
2. The Iron Skillet: Chopped sirloin steak, rare, topped with swiss cheese, mushrooms, and onions.
3. A supermarket meal: Rotisserie chicken, a peach, a tomato, two raw mushrooms, proscuitto, and Muenster cheese.
4. The next day. Lunch at the Loteria: Scrambled eggs and shredded beef. I also ate intermittently from our grocery bag, which still contained many mushrooms. My stomach hurt all day with a major showdown in the evening.
5. Fuddrucker’s: Ground beef burger with guacamole, mushrooms, and bacon.
6. Shrimp and mushroom stir-fry in olive oil, seasoned with coriander, garlic, and salt.

You can see why for the longest time, I thought it was the meat — the mushrooms usually accompany a steak or burger.

Now to be fair, I’ve had many minor stomachaches in addition to the big nasty ones, and I can also remember several other times when I ate mushrooms, but I can’t say for sure whether the mushroom-eating and stomachaches line up. So it’s still just a hypothesis. But until something solidly refutes it, I’m going to stay well away from the little buggers!

Anyway, I looked it up and the term is mushroom intolerance. It’s not an allergy because it doesn’t involve the immune system — if it did, I’d be vomiting, my throat would be swelling shut, and I’d be in a real pickle. But it’s just an awful stomachache (mild by comparison, eh?). Of course, I still haven’t the faintest why this is all happening. I’ve been eating mushrooms all my life. It’s not like I took a long break or anything; I ate them regularly right up to the point when all this started. Maybe that first incident really was food poisoning and it messed something up in my stomach. That would make more sense than my body suddenly boycotting mushrooms. But I’ve not had trouble with anything else, including very rare meat. From all the hubbub about cooking your meat lately, you’d think that raw meat would be the first thing to trigger stomach issues. But nope. Just mushrooms. Weird huh?

So now I feel like my gastrointestinal tract is conspiring against me. First carbs, then mushrooms. Pretty soon, I’ll have to subsist on a diet of ribeye steak and butter. (Actually, that sounds really good. Mmm.)

I’m an avid crafter, and I’ve heard that there’s a lot of disdain in the art community for crafters. I admit that I have to laugh a little. See, I could be an artist but I don’t really want to. Why? There’s something in me that balks at creating something whose sole purpose is to be admired from afar. To me, something is so much more beautiful if it has a practical use. Let me explain a little.

First of all, it’s a fine line between the two. Certainly, when imbued with creative energy, crafting becomes an art. Similarly, every art can sink into routine mediocrity, making it a craft (Thomas Kinkade comes to mind, lol). However, there’s one one thing that distinguishes traditional crafts from arts: Crafts have been made into an exact science. So long as you follow the directions, you’ll come out with something acceptable, if not very unique. This lack of originality is what makes artists scoff at crafters. To them, art is something bigger, something containing a piece of the human spirit that created it. I absolutely respect this view — I love art and I think that on the whole it enhances human civilization (though some individual works really make you wonder).

But at heart, I’m a crafter and I think the case for crafting is rather more compelling. See, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that there’s a reason why some ancient pursuits were made into a science and others weren’t: They were useful. What does a painting or a steel-and-glass sculpture do for the basic human needs of food, shelter, and clothing? Not nearly as much as an afghan or sweater.

In other words, the crafts of today are the arts that our ancestors considered so important to their well-being, they formalized them for posterity. From that viewpoint, I think crafting is the more meritorious of the two, don’t you? :)

Hello, I’m back! I know, two months with nary a peep from me … It’s been absolutely hectic: We’ve been through 2 moves and 5 business trips over the last two months. But we’re better now.

I’m dubbing this the “I Never Thought This Would Happen” post because that’s exactly what’s going on in my life. The first “I Never Thought” event is that we’ve moved again! Our stop in Belen turned out to be a short one (two months) during which Spencer took a new job in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Los Alamos is a charming little town up in the Jemez mountains about an hour north of Santa Fe. I didn’t like it at first, dismayed by the utter lack of good shopping, eateries, and general city comfort; but it wasn’t long before the little town stole my heart. First of all, the surrounding area is breathtakingly beautiful. There’s a gorgeous canyon right in our backyard and hiking trails around every bend, Bandelier National Park a few miles south and the Jemez mountains a few miles north. Second, once you adjust to the rustic atmosphere, the town is incredibly inviting. The streets and sidewalks are well-paved and filled with friendly passerby, the lampposts are adorned with flowers baskets, and the historic center of town boasts a beautiful park with a small lake and fountain. And because town is so small, all kinds of stuff such as the swimming pool, movie theater, and Spencer’s workplace are all within walking distance. If we do ever get bored, Santa Fe and all its artsy glamour is a mere hour away.

So in short, I’m so excited to be here! I guess I’m just a country person at heart. It’s so nice to be out of the city!

Anyway, on to other exciting parts of my life …

I’m down to 128 pounds! Isn’t that something? It’s been over a half decade since I’ve been this light. What can I say? I never thought that would happen again.

People are already starting to ask me when I’m going to stop losing weight. That’s a tricky question to answer for two reasons. First, I don’t actually have a concrete number in mind. My intention was always to look slender, not to hit some miracle weight; and the more I lose, the more I’m realizing just how small my bone structure is. Even 27 pounds later, I’m still nowhere close. I find it amusing that many people don’t believe I’m still fat. (I guess that means I look decent in my clothes!) Short of presenting them with my naked profile, I don’t know how to show them how much extra I’ve got. I mean, I still can’t find my ribcage! :) So I know I’m not done yet.

Where do I think I’ll end up? Judging from my progress over the last 27 pounds, my guess is 105 pounds. That’s way lower than I had originally thought, but I’m having to adjust my expectations. I say expectations and not goals because it’s become clear to me that I have little direct control over how much I lose and how fast. I feed my body the right foods, and it decides where it wants to end up. (That’s the second reason why it’s hard to tell when I’m going to stop losing weight: It’s not up to me!) I do have some hopes though: 115 by the end of the year, then down to 105 in due time. But again, the number’s just the benchmark. Once I look in the mirror and like what I see, I’m happy!

(I’ll have to laugh if I actually end up at 105. See, a few years back I read this dating book from the 1950’s, and it told me I should weigh 105 pounds. I practically howled in disbelief; I’d not been 105 pounds since I was 10 years old! But then I never thought I’d clear 130 again either, and here I am. So who knows? It’s a weird world!)

Sort of related to my losing weight: I’m becoming a running addict! Just take a moment to absorb that … Me, Joyce, who couldn’t walk a quarter mile four years ago; who was so ill at age 17 that her 50-year-old father had to drag her around a mostly-flat half-mile trail … I’m running! WOW. (Needless to say, this is another thing I never thought would happen.) I started about a month ago, following a most excellent Couch-to-5K plan I found online. This is my fifth week, but due to travel, womanly issues, and some minor joint pain, I’m still on week 3 of the plan. And not only do I not hate it, but I think I’m actually hooked. It’s like a drug: If I don’t run, I’m edgy and irritable all day; if I do, I’m as sweet as pie. Who would’ve thought I’d become an exercise junkie? LOL!

I’ll see if I can put up some pictures of our new place soon. I’m still figuring out all this blogging stuff. :)