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Adult swim, part II.

Jamie asked me to write about taking adult swim lessons.

Here's where I wrote about the year of lessons I took from my local YMCA.

After a while, I figured it was time to start learning and improving on my own. Continuing...

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All along, while I had been taking lessons from the instructors at the YMCA, I had been thinking: "Finally, I know how to swim laps. When I begin my next pregnancy, I'll stay strong and healthy by swimming laps every week. Maybe twice a week."

Soon after I decided to quit lessons and just swim on my own, I became pregnant with my third baby. I started out excited, and in those early weeks I plunged eagerly into the pool, secretly smiling and thinking about the little one who would soon be swimming inside me.

And then the first trimester hit me like a truck, and I spent every spare minute, for approximately 19 weeks, either sleeping or wishing I was sleeping.

Didn't even dip a toe in the pool. Mark took the older one to swim lessons by himself. I stayed home with the toddler. It was one of those long and grueling pregnancies, and the burst of energy never seemed to come. I never went back to the pool, even at the end.

Looking back on it, I wish I had dragged myself there anyway. I know now (after a fourth pregnancy) that swimming can be easy and relaxing, that the buoyancy of the water is a blessed relief from the weight of a swollen abdomen, that even a little large-muscle movement can restore a sense of total mental balance. At the time, it just seemed too hard. And that was more about my inexperience with regular exercise than it was about the pregnancy. I still thought of getting up and moving as something I ought to do rather than something I wanted to do, and that meant I was eager for an excuse to stay on the couch. Pregnancy was a great excuse. Nobody would blame me for sleeping all day. All pregnancy long.

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If you have been following my blog for a while, particularly if you are one of the people who followed me when it briefly became a Weight Loss Blog, you know that I gave birth to that daughter in mid-2006.

And you know my New Year's resolution for 2008 -- once my daughter was no longer a tiny baby -- was to start swimming twice a week.

And you know that I kept that resolution.

And you know that this is how I learned to embrace regular exercise instead of couch potatoship.

And you know that this was a transforming experience.

I still had a lot of learning to do about swimming, particularly the breaststroke, but I didn't think that any more lessons would help. So I turned to the Internet and to books.

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The first really helpful Internet resource I found was a trove of articles on the website of H2Ouston Swims, a USMS masters swimming club in Houston, TX. It contained so much information I was almost overwhelmed, but I read lots of it, took some notes, and tried some of the drills.

Probably the most useful concept I learned from the articles was the skill of "sculling." (The series entitled "Get a Better Grip!" talks about this.) It has to do with angling your hands to act as "propeller blades" as they move through the water, and how that ties into the arm strokes. (I wrote briefly about it here.)

Just as important as the skill itself was the revelation that I needed to take these movements into my mind and think about them -- in particular, I needed to read about them as described by a skilled writer. The real-life instruction in the pool was helpful to a point, but I needed to take the skills apart, analyze them, realize what each motion accomplished as part of the stroke, and then put them back together the way they were supposed to go. Once I understood how the arm motions and leg motions work together to cause body rotation -- how the rotation itself provides some of the propulsion -- how the relative position of the two arms during the catch can create more or less drag in the water -- then I found I felt stronger, purposeful, confident. As if I could choose how to make my body work. More in control.

In February of that year I ordered two books about swimming. One of them, I realized later, was written by the H2Ouston Swims coach. The other was a begin-at-the-beginning how-to-swim instructional manual. I used the latter one to teach myself, finally, how to swim the breaststroke. (The crucial mental breakthrough? I stopped trying to pull-breathe-kick-glide, and started thinking of it as kick-glide-pull-breathe. For some reason, that made my brain much happier and I became instantly able to integrate the pieces of the stroke together. I have never had anyone evaluate my breaststroke to tell me if I am doing it all wrong, but it seems to work, so I am kind of afraid to ask.)

The workouts in my books were too long for me to start, so I went online looking for short swimming workouts. I found these at BeginnerTriathlete.com. That website had a set of beginning swimming workouts that started at 400 meters (for me, 400 yards, since my pool isn't metric). Let me just point out that there are not many published workouts at under 1000 yards. But 400 yards is only 8 times across the pool. That is a nice, easy way to start out -- and if you can't do 400 yards yet, it won't be long before you can work your way up to it. Highly recommended. Even better, the workouts come in three kinds: endurance, form, and speed. I mostly did the endurance and form workouts, since I only had two swims per week, but I did occasionally dip into the speed workouts.

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I kept swimming, and later running too. All through my fourth pregnancy (until I worried about turning the baby breech in late pregnancy) I swam twice a week. I couldn't wait until I could get back in the pool at six weeks postpartum. Unless I have a sinus infection or lack pool access for some reason, I never go more than a week or so without craving the water.

I have played around with hand paddles, with lap counters. I have been through at least half a dozen swimsuits. These days I follow a minimalist, 1650-yard workout that requires little thought and takes a bit more than 45 minutes:

• 300 yard warmup: 2 laps pulling, 2 laps kicking, 2 laps backstroke
• 400 yards freestyle, 100 yards breaststroke
• 300 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
• 200 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
• 100 yards freestyle
• 150 yard cooldown: 1 lap backstroke, 1 lap kicking, 1 lap pulling

I am too busy right now to think about improving, so this is my holding pattern. I only have one goal, which is to get it reliably below 45 minutes -- an average of 1 minute 22 seconds per lap. The warmup and breaststroke are much slower than that, so I need to speed my freestyle up considerably to break that.

 

One of my greatest pleasures comes weekly when I bring my now-six-year-old daughter to her swim lesson. Her lesson is 40 minutes, so I can almost get my whole workout in while she swims. When she is done, she patters over to the end of the lane where I am finishing up, sits down and dangles her feet in the water, and taps me on the hand when I arrive at the wall. "Can I swim with you?" she asks, and if the pool is not too crowded and no one is sharing the lane, I say "Yes" and she hops in with me. I tow her to the midline and back, nodding approvingly at her paddling form, grinning and clapping when she shows me how she has learned to dive to the bottom or to float on her back.

 

She cannot remember a time when I wasn't a swimmer, every week stuffing my hair under a cap and jumping right into the cold pool without hesitation or shudder. Every one of her lessons have been, for her, learning to do something she sees me do all the time.

Adult swim.

I wonder if the reason I'm having trouble writing blog posts lately is that my two older sons have started setting an alarm so they can be downstairs playing Minecraft before I wake up.  Even though, as the parent, I technically have the right to say "Begone, wretches!" and shoo them away so I can sit down with my coffee, I tend instead to wander off to the schoolroom for my iPad and settle down in the rocking chair with it.  And although I can blog from my iPad, it's not quite as comfortable.  On marginal mornings this might just be enough to destroy the muse.

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Jamie asked me yesterday if I would write about swim lessons, so I will.

I was made to have a few sessions of swimming lessons as a child, which left me able to mess around in a pool without drowning.  And that was good enough for me until after I'd had two babies.  

Back when my oldest was three and my second was a baby, we had a family membership at the YMCA.  I was sporadically lifting weights and using an exercise bike, Mark was running, and we were putting the three-year-old in swimming lessons for the first time.  As I brought him to the pool and picked him up afterward, I would watch swimmers swimming laps, literally something I had never done for fun or exercise.  

Swimming seemed to me a magical, mythical exercise.  It seems so difficult to arrange, all that changing and showering.  And there is the mysterious lap etiquette by which three or more swimmers can share a lane without hating each other, despite not being able to rely on eye contact because of their otherworldly goggles.  And I heard that it requires inhuman acts, like getting up early in the morning (isn't that what swimmers do?  swim early in the morning?) and possibly going outside with your hair wet in January.  Also, I didn't know any swimmers.  I just saw them in the locker room, peeling off their caps and heading for the shower as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

I found myself, though, saying to people over and over again:  "Oh, I lifted weights during my pregnancies... as long as I could... but I kind of wish I could swim better, so I could try swimming during my next one.  I can't really swim though."  I said it to H. often enough that one day she said to me, "Well, why don't you just take lessons then?"

And after a while I thought:  Indeed -- why not?  We were going to the YMCA at least once a week anyway.  I could have a swimming lesson and Mark could make sure the kids were settled (the one-year-old did not always like staying in the YMCA child care).  It would be a real once-a-week appointment to get some exercise, if nothing else.  I asked Mark if he could commit to it, and he happily agreed, and so I picked up a schedule for swimming lessons at the front desk.

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At the time, the YMCA had two kinds of adult swim lessons:  the one for people who are uncomfortable or fearful in the water, today called Basic Water Adjustment, and the one for people who aren't afraid of the water and who have some ability to maneuver around in it.  I was the latter kind, so that's what I signed up for.  Today that class is called Stroke Development.

I dug in my out-of-season clothes and found a swimsuit.  I didn't have goggles or a swim cap, so I didn't bring any.  I changed self-consciously in the locker room -- not because I was unused to changing, but because I was unused to putting on a swimsuit.  I felt that everybody could tell that I was not really a swimmer.  (Imposter syndrome had, apparently, followed me home from graduate school.) 

 

There were two other adults in my first class, both women.  The instructor was a woman who also taught children's lessons; I had seen her in the pool when I brought my four-year-old to the pool deck.  The first thing she asked us to do was to swim from the middle of the pool (just before the bottom started sloping down towards the deep end) to the shallow-end wall so that she could see what skills we already had.  

From that ten-yard swim, the instructor could learn that I remembered some of my childhood lessons:  I could put my head in the water, and I had the basic idea of what a front crawl should look like.

 But I learned something even MORE important:  this department-store swimsuit was not going to cut it.  I do not remember much from that first lesson except that I spent it alternately trying to follow the instructor's instructions and trying to stuff myself back into my suit.

(Perhaps the imposter syndrome was, er, truthful in this case.)

One week later I appeared at the swimming lesson with a brand new Speedo suit from the local sporting goods store.  Also a pair of goggles, which I did not know how to adjust.  Things went better after that.

+ + +

I took swim lessons from the YMCA for a year.  By the end of that year I had a passable front crawl and backstroke.  I had had three different instructors.  They had all tried to teach me breaststroke, and I could do each of the pieces (pull, breathe, kick, glide) but I could not put them together more than three times in a row before getting mixed up and decaying into thrashing and sinking.   I also gave up on learning flip-turns after it became clear that I always came off the wall pointed downwards, which hurts the ears in the deep end and the head in the shallow end.  

But I was now able to swim laps, which I'd always wanted to do.  It was time for me to start practicing and learning on my own. 

.... and I think I'll write about that in another post.

Beer for beginners, part VI: Belgian witbier.

(part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V)

I can't decide whether it's apropos or just silly that I am simultaneously working on one series about college and another about beer.

At any rate, I finally finished all the witbier that I bought the last time I was in a nice big beer store, and I'm ready to comment on it.

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Belgian wheat beer, a.k.a. witbier, a.k.a. bière blanche, is similar to German hefeweizen except it is typically less hoppy and a little lighter, and it is brewed with citrus peel and spices such as coriander.  I have had some mass-produced American versions (Blue Moon, which is really a Coors beer, is the most famous), and found them drinkable; Mark generally turned up his nose at the idea of spiced beer.

Garrett Oliver recommends drinking witbier with salads of all sorts, especially those with citrusy vinaigrettes.  This seemed so odd that I was eager to get started, especially back in the heat of August.

I picked up a six-pack of Hoegaarden Original White Ale first.  Hoegaarden is pretty easy to find in the U. S., it seems.  We had the first bottle with a homemade Caesar salad, which worked great, actually.   The beer had a lemony kick to it.  

For some reason, as I put my nose into the glass and inhaled, I was transported back to the scent of beer from my childhood.  I haven't the foggiest idea which of the adults around me, if any, would have been drinking wheat beer or spiced beer when I was a little girl; maybe it was just that its pale crisp scent reminded me of whatever pale yellow beers were around in Southwestern Ohio at the time.  I have no explanation for that one.  I may have to ask my dad.

I liked the Hoegaarden a lot.  Here is where I have to admit -- in case you can't tell already -- I actually kind of like pale yellow beer.  No, I'm not a fan of Miller or Bud, but I have been known to suck back a Corona with my enchiladas from time to time.  This beer was light and crisp, so you could drink it cold and have it be refreshing; but the spices were present, along with an obvious citrusy tang.  It really did go with the salad, garlic and parmesan and all.

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The second beer I tried was Ommegang Witte, an American witbier from New York State.  The first time I had it was all by itself, and I noted:  "Very boring and flat."

But the second time I had it, I was eating crackers and herb cheese spread and buttered asparagus tips (it was lunch), and I noted "Pretty good!"

So I have decided that this is a good rule for witbier:   Do not drink a witbier without food unless you know it.

Or, I guess, unless you are thirsty and hot.  It'd probably be good then.

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The third witbier I tried was a large-format bottle of Dogfish Head Namaste.  The bagger at the large foodie supermarket in Ohio where I bought it got all excited about my cart full of beer (witbiers and stouts) and told me I had excellent taste (duh, everything I was buying was on recommendation), and got even MORE excited when one of the beers was the Dogfish Head.  He really talked it up.  Now that I think about it, maybe he was trying to hit on me.  But that's neither here nor there, because I decided that the Dogfish Head was another BORING beer.  That is all that I wrote in my notebook:  BORING, double underlined, like the Ommegang was before I had it with some food.  Only I was having the Dogfish Head with food.  And it was so boring I didn't bother to write down what food it was.

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And the fourth one I tried just the other day:  Epic Brewing Co. Wit Beer out of Salt Lake City.  I had only a single large-format bottle to try, but after we finished it I wished I had more.  This beer pleased both me and Mark, because while it was nicely spiced, it had a more pungent hoppiness than the other Belgians we had been drinking.  That hop bitterness, plus the lemony crispness, was perfect for the evening's dinner.  We were having a light supper of French bread and salad -- a "BLT salad" with, well, lots of bacon and lettuce and tomato, plus red onion and cucumber, tossed in a creamy avocado-lime-basil dressing.

(This recipe is close, except WTF?  Only four slices of bacon?  I used half a pound.)  

Bitter, hop-dominant beers are supposed to be good with rich, fatty food, while the witbier is supposed to be great with all things citrus-vinaigrette, and so this hoppier-than-usual witbier was really quite perfect with a fatty avocado-lime dressing and all that crunchy bacon.  I would happily buy it again, and pour it at a party, and the thing I would serve it with would be a giant bowl of guacamole and some good salty tortilla chips.  I bet it would be good with tabbouli, too.  If there was bacon in it.  And I bet it would be good with something quiche-like, too.

All in all, though, the Hoegaarden will probably be my go-to witbier, because it's easy to find and not terribly expensive (the Epic Wit Beer is a limited edition beer that is produced in rotation).  The style really does work with citrusy salads, and since I love citrusy salads, I think we'll be having Belgian wheat beer again.

The invisible hand.

Some time ago I quit the treadmill and started running around the indoor track that circles the upper half of the basketball court at the Y.

I'm not sure why I suddenly got so tired of the treadmill. Maybe because it is impossible to escape the television completely. Maybe it was the demoralizing effect of the digits slowly ticking away the miles or time elapsed; I found myself always wishing I'd brought a sticky-note to cover up my progress. Maybe it was all the people around that I couldn't quite tune out. Or maybe it was the view through the window -- not a bad view, of a residential cross-street -- but a view that rarely changed, except for the snow cover giving way to foliage and later taking over again. Or perhaps, after having a taste of running outside, around the lakes, I just couldn't stand running in place anymore, and running around a bare room seemed like an improvement.

At first I took my iPod with me, and had five different running playlists cued up all ready to go. But after a while I stopped taking that, too. I don't want to hear music; I want to hear my footfalls, so I can work on correcting them. I want to hear my own breathing and feel the goosebumps from the air-conditioned chill give way to warmth, flushing, sweat. I think I am tired of trying to distract myself from the running. I am trying to be fully present in it instead, to feel the aching muscles, to force my mind to deal with the urge to stop instead of just wishing it away and pretending it isn't there.

Sometimes i have no choice but to think about running. But occasionally I get a surprising pay off.

This evening I was running laps and using my swimming lap counter -- it's a one-button, finger-ring style -- to check my speed on each lap. In the previous two weeks I had swum 5 times, but not gone for a run at all, and I was feeling rusty -- and the times showed it. Each lap around the gym is 1/18 of a mile, and my training pace on a treadmill is around 9:50, so I like to see times between 30 and 33 seconds. I was seeing 35--37-second laps. Not so good.

As I chugged along, endlessly circling, I thought back to the running clinic I attended in December 2010, the one where I learned forefoot running. I tried to remember what I learned from watching the before-and-after videos of myself. One of the form corrections that comes along with the switch from a heel strike to a forefoot or midfoot strike is in lean -- runners with a heel strike tend to lean back as they run, while runs with a forefoot strike tend to be straight-backed or lean forward. The more you lean forward when you have a forefoot strike, the faster you tend to go. It doesn't work that way with a heel strike.

If you have never learned forefoot running (sometimes called the pose method), here is something you can try to give you an idea of how the leaning thing works. Stand up, either barefoot or in running shoes. If you are indoors face a direction that gives you enough room to take several steps without tripping over something or walking into a wall. Now start jogging gently in place. If you are a fairly normal person, you will find that you naturally choose a forefoot-strike to do this: the first part of your foot to touch the ground is somewhere in the front half of your foot. Your heel might come down and "kiss" the ground at the end of its descent, or it might not. But you are certainly not hitting the ground with your heel and using your heel to absorb the impact of your weight coming down on the floor, the way you do when you walk, or the way many people do when they run in cushiony running shoes.

Still jogging? Okay, here is the second part of the demonstration. While you're jogging in place, lean your body slightly forward. What happened?

What happened to me, when the instructor in my running clinic taught me to do this, is that I rocketed forward -- running a few steps (before hitting the wall) with a natural forefoot strike. You don't have to work to bring your legs far forward of your body and to push against the ground; you just have to let gravity pull you down and allow your legs to prevent you from tipping all the way over. It is a very natural and instinctive motion.

Although It does take reprogramming and practice to adopt forefoot striking as a training stride, that short demonstration gets across how leaning forward is related to speed. The more you lean, the faster you go. I you lean so far that your legs can't keep up, you fall, of course, so it isn't a magic formula or anything. You still need to be strong and move your legs fast. But it is kind of a form check.

As I remembered this, I noticed that as I ran around the gym, I tended to focus my eyes on the wall across from me. The track is a rounded-off rectangle, so I'd be staring at the telephone pole through the window... then turn and stare at the water fountain... then turn and stare at the church steeple through the oth window... then the banner with donors' names... then the telephone pole again.

I tried keeping my neck and back aligned and tipping my body ever so slightly forward. Now I was focusing on the floor a few yards ahead of my toes. I concentrated on that moving point, dancing away from me along the seam in the flooring, and ran one lap, and checked my lap counter: 30 seconds.

Really? I checked it again: 30. I ran another lap: 31. And another: 29. I almost couldn't believe it. Before this, it had taken real effort to push myself to go faster, if I wanted to see lap times consistently under 34 seconds. This didn't feel more tiring at all. I just had to remember to tip ever so slightly forward.

As I circled around and around, though, it did start to wear on me mentally. I found that if I stopped concentrating on the slight forward lean, it went away. I really had to keep it front and center in my attention, carefully hold it, so it would not slip. After a while I started to feel as if there was an invisible hand between my shoulder blades, pressing slightly but firmly, and always just at the threshold of knocking me off balance. I found that if I vividly imagined that there really was a hand pressing me, it was easier to maintain my pace.

It wasn't that I actually had the sensation of a physical pressure on my back in that spot. It was more that I started to feel irritated by it. After awhile I wanted to turn around and snap, "WILL you STOP pushing me?!" to the owner of the invisible hand invading my personal space.

But of course there was no one but me, running all by myself in the upper half of the gym, my peripheral vision only occasionally interrupted by a lone basketball rebounding off the backboards just below the track.

I discovered something today. It is possible to make a gain in training that cannot be taken away even by weeks of inactivity. This is something I learned with my brain, you know, from information I picked up back in my running clinic. I think I will remember it: tip a little forward, gain a little efficient speed. It can be hard to keep all the different form tweaks active in mind at the same time, of course; practice can move that kind of skill out of the brain and into the muscles. But still, the understanding remains, and can't be lost -- if I take pains to write about it, that is.

____________

(disclaimer: do not switch abruptly from heel striking to forefoot running without doing some research to avoid injury, and consider working with a personal trainer. I do not think the lean-forward tip will work for runners who use a heel-striking stride instead of a forefoot-striking stride.)

 

 

Beer for beginners, part II.

part I is here.

So one of the first things I did as I read through The Brewmaster's Table, taking notes, was to try to get a handle on the "family tree" of beers, so to speak -- all the classifications and sub classifications.

It started out fairly simple, with the world of Lambic:

Then things got a little more interesting, when I turned to the chapter on Wheat Beer:

But then I turned to the chapter on the British Ale Tradition, and my family tree sprouted suckers all over the place:

 

Let's just say that things didn't get any simpler when I got to Belgium. I have a few more pages like this.

This was all very overwhelming. I got myself a lab notebook:

I made myself a little Beerwatching List, so I could check off each variety as we tried at least one bottle of each:

But it was still kind of overwhelming, with 59 different kinds of beer, and that doesn't even count the fact that you can generally buy more than one brewery's version of each sort of beer.

Clearly I needed to prioritize.

After fussing around a bit considering what made the most sense (start with easy-to-find and move towards rarer? Tote the notebook to restaurants and order the most obscure draft beer on the menu every time? Geographical organization?) I decided to start with the most useful beers, by which I mean the beers that were listed in the book as being quite versatile and going with a lot of different kinds of food. Theoretically, from among that set we would find something that we wanted to keep in the fridge all the time.

The Brewmaster's Table has a handy lookup table to answer the question, "What should I drink with my food?" Conversely, one can use this really cool pairing chart to answers the inverse question, "What should I eat with my beer?" Turning back and forth between the two and taking notes, I came up with the following list of "Beers that supposedly go with lots of stuff:"

1. Hefeweizen
2. English-style porter
3. Belgian saison
4. Pilsner
5. Helles
6. Vienna lager
7. American pale ale
8. American amber lager
9. Altbier

Ah, nine. What a nice short list to start with. Much better than 59.

 

Mind you, these aren't "beers that go with everything," they are just "beers that showed up a lot in the list of food pairings." Whatever. I went with it.

 

Tune in next time and I will regale you with Adventures in Hefeweizen. Hint for fellow northern plains staters: Not at all like Leinie's Honey Weiss.

 

A whole post on half sandwiches.

Part of the New Year's gluttony roundup.

+  +  +

So I have this problem:  I don't actually need very many calories per day.  This means that I should have smaller portions than are typically served.  Logically, then, I should not eat all of most sandwiches, which are standardized to maintain (or, realistically, to fatten) a person much larger than me.  And yet, the sandwich is a sort of a quantized food.  Except in restaurants that do the half-sandwich, cup-of-soup lunch thing, you generally get an integer of sandwiches on your plate.  And there's a strong visual cue there that says "eat the whole thing."

For a little while, in trying to maintain my new weight, I was  trying out sandwiches that promised to be low in calories.  Take the Subway "fresh fit menu," for example.  I happen to like turkey, so I thought:  Well, maybe I will go ahead and have all of a nominally-six-inch turkey sub, with lots of pickles and hot peppers and spinach on it.  Indeed, as fast food goes, it's pretty good.  Truthfully, though, I probably would have been more satisfied with half a nominally-six-inch Spicy Italian loaded with cheese and oil.  Fat is satiating, after all.

But the real problem with the whole six-inch sub is that it is huge-looking; it reinforces the habit that says it's normal and good for me to eat huge-looking sandwiches; and next time I meet a huge sandwich, it might not be as innocuous as turkey on wheat.  Given that many restaurant sandwiches are huge-looking because they are, in fact, huge, it is a much better strategy for me, the terminally calorically challenged, to default to half sandwiches.

But when I started off on a mission to eat only half sandwiches, I was forced to probe my emotional obstacles to restrained eating yet again, and I discovered this: 

I have serious reservations about eating only half of a sandwich.

Even if the sandwich is twice as big as what I actually want to eat, I am disturbed by the asymmetry of the undertaking.

The data suggests that aspect ratio matters.  I don't mind so much if the sandwich is long and skinny (aspect ratio >> 1), so that by cutting it in half it is transformed into two sandwiches that are still long and skinny (aspect ratio reduced, but still noticeably > 1).  

Take a submarine sandwich, for example, such as the nominally eight-inch versions produced by Milio's, which delivers to my house.

  A nominally eight-inch sub (and yes, that is not half a sandwich already, that is a whole sandwich; a sixteen-inch sub counts as two sandwiches, I don't care how many calories you are allowed to eat per day) is pretty skinny and long (actually it's more than eight inches), and even after you cut it in half it's still longer than it is wide.  It is still, in other words, sub-shaped.  It has preserved the essence of sub-sandwich-hood.  I can eat it and say, "This is a sub."  I am supported in this intuitive conclusion by inductive reasoning:  if there are sixteen-inch subs, and there are eight-inch subs, then logically there should be no reason why there cannot be a nominally four-inch sub, and so on and so on -- too bad this name is already taken.

So I don't have any problems with those.

And I don't have too much trouble with wrapping up half of a sandwich made on wide-pan bread that is wider than it ought to be.  Such sandwiches usually arrive already cut in half, the better to artfully arrange the halves so that they are embracing a cup of soup or a bowl of salad or perhaps a pile of potato chips.  There, you're taking an aspect ratio that is approximately 2 and reducing it to approximately 1, which is really the appropriate aspect ratio for food that comes between sliced bread.

 So easy just to wrap up one of those halves and take it home.

But I find I have this horrible resistance to, for example, half cheeseburgers.  Now I love a good cheeseburger as much as anyone, and I'm not very fond of little cheeseburgers.  When I want a cheeseburger, I don't want the kid's-menu version.  I want a thick medium-rare patty and a lot of lettuce and tomato and pickles and mayo and maybe some bacon.  I would rather have half a grownup cheeseburger than all of a kids' cheeseburger...

... at least till it is time to cut my big grownup cheeseburger in half.  And then I am daunted by the prospect of sawing to pieces something so beautiful and complete, the Platonic ideal of a sandwich in all its circular perfection.   I just know that the tomatoes and lettuce will slip to one side, lubricated by the mayonnaise, and the bun will be shredded to crumbs, and I'll be left picking through the pickles and trying to distribute them equitably between two sort-of semicircular half-patties, no longer crisp all around a lacy edge, rapidly cooling and drying out as the juices run all out of the center, its tender pink cross-sectional area now exposed to the ambient environment, and to the disapproving eyes of any nearby E. coli researchers.

This is where Mark points out to me, "You never have any trouble eating the second half of a whole cheeseburger."  

(Too, too true.  But cheeseburgers are about love and geometry, not reason and rhetoric.)

+ + +

N. B.:   The above rant also applies to bagels.

+ + +

And then there's the prospect of making one's own half sandwiches from scratch, by which I mean cutting a slice of bread in half and then putting the fillings on one half and topping it with the other half slice of bread.  Do I even need to explain why this is so abhorrent?

Nigel Tufnel can do it for me:

It's okay to make a whole sandwich and cut it in half and share the other half with someone.  But if there is no someone in sight, I have to make a half sandwich.  And that is just wrong.  Perhaps if I laid in a store of frilly-ended wooden picks.

+ + +

Mark:  "Perhaps if it is the aspect ratio that bothers you, you should cut circles out of the middle of your sandwiches with a cutter, and eat those."

Me:  "Ummmm... I can't drive and calculate at the same time... what's the diameter of a circle that is half the area of a square of side 1?"

Mark (pulls out iPhone, calculates):  "Approximately zero point eight."

Me:  "So I could eat a half sandwich that looks round if I cut off the edges, a tenth of the width on each side, and trimmed the corners, and only ate the middle."

Mark:  "Sure, why wouldn't that work?"

Me:  "Mark, I already eat all the children's sandwich crusts.  What makes you think I will be able to resist my own?  Duh."

+ + +

So this month, I decided to try to beat my irrational resistance to half sandwiches by making and ordering a lot of half sandwiches.

 My first homemade half sandwich was a grilled ham and brie on pumpernickel rye with wedges of green apple melted inside it.  There was no hope of getting anyone else in the family to share this with me, so I was unwilling to grill a normal sandwich and cut it in half.  Nor did I wish to waste brie.  So I carefully took half a slice of bread, cut the rectangular way (since the cross-section of my brie was rectangular) and folded up the ham, a little more deftly than Nigel up there.  I kept the ham from unfolding by weighting it down with the three little pieces of brie.  Then I propped my apple slices among them, and balanced the other half-slice of pumpernickel on top, and smacked it down with my spatula when it threatened to topple over.  How am I going to butter the bottom of this mess? I wondered, but then remembered that I could put butter on the skillet instead.  Somehow I managed to transport the whole topheavy mess to the skillet where it sizzled away, and by employing tongs as well as spatula I managed to turn it over to brown on the other side, only having to stuff one stray piece of apple back in between the chinks.

Once the sandwich had cooled it was pleasant and fragrant as any whole sandwich, and of course the brie had fused it all together so it didn't want to come unfolded anymore.  So that was a success story, though not without its trials.

+ + + 

It has been slightly easier navigating restaurants, where I vowed to order sandwiches and only eat half until I had firmly established the half-sandwich habit.  

Along the way I amended the rules somewhat:  some naturally-small sandwiches, such as gourmet sliders or Skyline chili dogs, can count as halves (at least if normal people might ordinarily eat two or more of them).    

But most of the time I stuck to it.  On a recent road trip, I asked for my Subway six-inch Italian BMT to be cut in half, and I put the other half in front of the baby, who likes salami.  I asked for a plastic knife at Chick-Fil-A and bisected my #1, hiding one half in the foil-and-paper sack (after harvesting the pickles from it) and consuming the other with a side salad.  Once the sandwiches were safely gone, I found, I no longer felt anxious about their aspect ratios.  

With practice, and a lot of sandwiches, I am optimistic that I will beat this thing.  I'm learning all the time, and that gives me hope.  The other day, at "Moe's Almost World Famous Diner" in Osseo, WI with the kids (en route from Madison), I ordered a patty melt.  

What a revelation:  A patty melt is a cheeseburger on square bread that comes already cut in half!  And here I have been eating patty melts on occasion my whole life, and never noticed that they break the don't-cut-a-cheeseburger principle, and they still taste good.

I gave the other half to the baby (yes, it was cooked through, I checked), and I ate my half patty melt, savoring the taste of triumph.

And the entire basket of fries, too.

Guess I'll have to work on that next time.

Quick-takes style, Marian consecration edition.

1

I'm doing this seven quick takes thing because of my weird blogger's block.  I'm not actually going to bother with Mr. Linky.   Incidentally, another reader emailed me and said that she felt oddly introspective while doing the 33-day Montfortian consecration, and so it rang true that I am having trouble writing while doing it.

2

But this seems kind of strange to me, because (what with school starting and all) I can only do a wussy version of the consecration prep.  There's a little bit of reading, and a couple of prayers, both grabbed whenever I have time; a different focus in my spontaneous prayer throughout the day; a general attempt to turn from "the spirit of the world;" and I'm noticing more  frequently how often I screw up and prove myself a very worldly person.  The Montfort subroutine is running in the background of my real life.  Hasn't crashed the system yet.  

I'm aiming for Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, Oct. 7, or more likely, the next day, which is a Saturday when I can attend Mass and go to Confession.

3

After I read St. Louis de Montfort's True Devotion to Mary, I felt unsatisfied.  All the people who'd told me about it claimed it was this amazing, mindblowing work, but it didn't really ring with me.  Really, except for the explanation of the consecration itself, it all just seemed like a repeating string of assertions about Mary, little of which were new to me (but maybe they were new to the people he was writing to back then?) and none of which were backed up by any arguments that weren't themselves simple assertions.

"God in these times wishes his Blessed Mother to be more known, loved, and honoured than she has ever been."  Okay -- how do you know?  Why particularly in these times?  "God the Son imparted to his mother all that he gained by his life and death, namely, his infinite merits and his eminent virtues."  Where does that come from?  How do we know this?  

I think it is meant to be inspirational writing, rather than thought-provoking writing, and I am peculiarly un-susceptible to inspirational stuff.  

And lookie here what I found:

"Were I speaking to the so-called intellectuals of today, I would prove at great length by quoting Latin texts taken from Scripture and the Fathers of the Church all that I am now stating so simply.  I could also instance solid proofs... But I am speaking mainly for the poor and simple who have more good will and faith than the common run of scholars.  As they believe more simply and more  meritoriously, let me merely state the truth to them quite plainly."

Well, there's my problem.  I believe complexly and not quite so meritoriously, I guess.   Let me hope I can glorify God in my infirmity.

 

4

On the other hand, the idea of the consecration itself was thought-provoking and interesting.  So I went looking for more modern writers, less concerned about writing simply and plainly.  And I found a gem of an online book:  Mary in Our Life, by Rev. William C. Most.  It was written in the 1950s. The link goes to a table of contents that links to all the chapters, online, for free.  Much more my kind of "inspirational" writing.

5

This is the kind of Marian writing that makes the tops of Protestants' heads blow off.  The word "Co-Redemptrix" is bandied about, for example.  And as I read it, I found myself struggling with some of the concepts, precisely because of the Protestant, anti-Marian influence in American Christian culture.  It was very edifying, because intellectually, Father Most's arguments make a great deal of sense to me.  And yet the logical conclusion of his arguments suggests an attitude toward the Blessed Virgin that feels radical to me.  Deep down, it seems, I feel a sort of repulsion against fully embracing the idea of Mary as intercessor, which as I search my history seems can only have come from contact with American Protestantism.  I didn't even realize that I felt that internal repulsion until reading Fr. Most's arguments forced me to confront it.

 

6

At the same time, it's exciting to have read this, because it's the first time in a long while that I have had a theological concept of any kind to grapple with in a radically new way.  I think it's funny that the concept itself isn't particularly new, and is even uber-traditional.  But it's really blown my mind and I still have a lot to think about.

(And yes, I could write more details, but I am having trouble expressing them.)

 

7

Meanwhile, all sorts of odd little messages from outside seem to be finding their way to me, encouraging me to keep on with the Consecration such as I can.  I'm aware that human beings are great at finding patterns where really there is only random noise, and that it's unsurprising that if I'm thinking Marian thoughts, I would see signs everywhere (such as, having just prayed for discernment about whether to make the consecration, being handed a business card 15 minutes later, on which was printed a call to people to make a Marian consecration!  That was a fun example).

It's time for me to get back to work, and writing this has exhausted my creativity.  Have a great Friday!

Conflict.

Typing feels like moving through wet sludge this week.  I'm going to try to get this post out, though, while the middle kids are decompressing with some cartoons, the oldest is finishing his mechanics assignment (think punctuation, not wrenches), and the baby is sleeping.  I mixed myself a rum and coke before I sat down, hoping that the combination of caffeine and relaxant will generate a little fluency.  *slurp*  Let's see.

I don't know why, but I have had little desire to write this week.  Many ideas, little desire.  Could be the early days of school; lots to do, less time.  Could be that I have decided to embark on the consecration I mentioned a few days ago (thanks to those of you who emailed me and commented -- it was very helpful).  On that, I've had a number of thoughts I've wanted to share, but had difficulty putting into words.  This probably isn't the post for it.  I will write about it.  I want to write about it.  Somehow I keep abandoning the posts after two or three sentences.

The kids are pushing back at me as we get started with school.  Except for coschooling, which is so far fine, my days are so much less than I want them to be.  If only there were enough of me to go around.  If only I had enough energy at the end of the day to greet "Can I watch videos now?!?" with anything other than relief.   I have made sure that my day's schedule includes a block of time spent one-on-one with each school-aged child.  That's an improvement over last year.  Now if I could just get the others to stop interrupting.  

And why so much drama?  Why so much wailing about what there is to do and how long it will take?  Why not just sit down and do the damn stuff?  

I'd better shut up on that last point, lest I have to take my own advice.

All right, I think I'm done venting.  I just wanted to keep the blog from going blank.  

Yesterday I went for a swim at the end of the day, and thought furiously as I plowed back and forth across the pool.  I just need to discern what I'm supposed to be doing, I thought, figure out how best to allocate the limited resource that is me.  An answer floated back to me as I touched the side of the pool:  No, it is much simpler than that; I just have to do what I can and do it in love.  If I don't know how to do that, I have to ask for the grace to do it, and trust that it will be enough.  It makes sense, but I wonder what it would feel like; I don't think I have ever tried.

Hot.

You can gauge how crafty I am ("not very") by the execution of this play stove I made today for the 17-month-old, but I did think it was a pretty creative idea that used a kid-table we already had and some remnants from the fabric store.

I would like you to know that this stove is SO REALISTIC that I really burned myself on it.

Mark was skeptical that the baby would  recognize the faux-electric-burners, as we have a gas stove, but indeed he immediately identified them as HOT and started putting pans on them.

So, that was what I did with my summer Friday morning.  What about you?

Pondering a recipe-roundup: empty cupboard meals.

I've been bouncing around the idea of trying to host a recipe roundup, once or twice a month.  (You know the drill -- write a recipe post, send me the link, I'll put it all together into a post.)  But I've been searching for a theme that hasn't been done to death.

Today I think I might have hit upon it.  What do you think about an "empty cupboard" roundup?  I'm not sure how often -- once a month or biweekly -- and it doesn't lend itself to an alliterative name, maybe you all could help me with that -- but here's what I'm thinking:

The idea is to write a post about what you managed to throw together the night before you go grocery shopping.  What can you make from your pantry staples?   It's easy to eat fresh, local, seasonal, interesting, and impressively right after you come back from the farmer's market (or the co-op -- or even the SuperValu).  What can you do at the end of the week, from your leftovers, odds and ends, and emergency rations?  What have you got to choose from?  What did you decide to make and why?

Here's an example from today.  I'm pretty good about meal planning, but I often leave the last couple of days blank because I know I'll have things to use up; on the other hand, sometimes we eat up all the leftovers and I have to get suddenly creative.  I'm about to leave to go grocery shopping right after I finish this post.

Before dinner, the only fresh veg I had in the fridge was a bunch of broccoli (and it was starting to look a little sorry, so raw was out).  No fresh fruit left except some wrinkly apples, an orange, and a lemon.  We had some leftover enchiladas and arroz con pollo, but we were kind of tired of both and needed a break (it'll still be good for lunch tomorrow).  

So I made this:

• Grilled Meatloaf (double onion, since I had no green pepper -- there's always ground beef in my freezer)
• Steamed broccoli with a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil
• Plain Fordhook lima beans cooked from frozen -- just a little salt and pepper
• A can of cut beets, drained and briefly marinated in a dressing of orange juice, balsamic vinegar, and fennel seeds
• Homemade bread and butter.
• Oh yeah, and rum and coke for the grownups.  (Hence the need for me to churn out a couple of blog posts before I go shopping)

I think it turned out pretty great, and not bad for a day when I didn't know what I was going to make until about three-thirty.

Anyway, what would you say to having a roundup on a semi-regular basis?  I think it would be a nice way to explore our creativity, celebrate frugality, and get over some of our hangups about appearing as if we only occasionally rely on convenience foods.  Also share some ideas.  And even if your answer is something like, "frozen pizza -- again," well, why not fess up?  If you had an ice-cold beer on the side, you could at least tell us about that.  In fact, I'll make one of the rules be you have to tell the whole meal, not just one interesting recipe.

What say you?  How often?  Which day of the week (or month)?  And furthermore, what should I call it?