waltondammerung

Hats off!

I just finished making some hats for a friend's daughter and her soon-to-be-born little sister. I'm quite proud of them:

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. These hats are, indeed, pink. Now I just hope the doctor wasn't wrong about the baby being a girl.

Fall has come to the RC

The temperature dipped down into the 30's last night, the sun is going down when I leave work at 4:15, and the trees are starting to show off their hues of death, I mean, um, beautiful fall colors.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. That tree is, indeed, pink.

Waltondammerung diet

Eat too much yesterday? Try the Waltondammerung diet. First, get the flu for about two weeks. Then lie around doing nothing but watch movies and suck down Russian tea (made from my mom's recipe, which basically amounts to tea with lots of sugar and citrus juices). Voila! You will have lost 5-6 pounds in no time!

Testimonials:
"I've been trying to take off a few pounds for months! I went to the gym 3-4 times a week and ate nothing but lettuce, but I didn't lose any weight. I tried the Waltondammerung diet, and now I'm slimmer than a beef stick. Without the fat. Thanks, Waltondammerung! I'm never going to the gym again!"
--Amy X

Count your biscuits

My brother (or "brat", as he would be known in Russian) posted a comment about my recent post about Supersize Me that reminded me that, while I am very thankful for a great many things in my life, I do not mention them often enough. In particular, I am incredibly grateful for my parents and all that they have done for me. Our family was never wealthy. I think there may have even been times when we were downright poor by many standards, but I never felt it. Through careful budgeting and prioritizing, my parents made sure that we never felt need. I had violin lessons (and the rather expensive instruments to go with them) for 17 years. My violin has brought me many opportunities and immeasurable joy, from meeting the president of Guatemala to a tour of Europe in high school to eight years of teaching younger violinists to touching hearts and minds for God in the music ministries at all of churches I've attended.

The violin is just one example of the many things my parents introduced to my life, sometimes against my protests, that have had a bigger impact on my adult life than I could have guessed they would as a child. My parents did not push me into meaningless activities that just cluttered my life the way many parents do, but they were firm in encouraging me to pursue interests that built discipline and character. They have always expected a great deal from both my brother and I academically, but now I see that it was almost always just enough to keep us challenged. They never expected more than we could muster. When our schools did not keep us on our toes, Mom did. I have her to thank for my love of music and literature, and for knowing what it means to have a "jaundiced eye". My brother and I also owe our ability to read to Mom, since she homeschooled us each for a year in order to teach us to learn to read through phonics. My mom has always given us, our family, her best, and the best from someone as talented and intelligent as my mom is a pretty awe-inspiring thing. From my father, I learned the value of patience and unflinching love for humanity. His passion for children many people consider unteachable--sometimes even unloveable--and his unrelenting compassion for even the most stubborn co-workers and friends have demonstrated the love of God the Father carried out in the life of a man in the best way I can imagine.

I have only just begun my life as an adult. I don't even have children of my own yet, but I am already impressed, inspired, and challenged by the example my parents have set in faith, in marriage, and in parenthood. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

This is my hundredth post!

Everyone who reads this wins a free one-year subscription to Waltondammerung, complete with comment-posting privileges!

Orlando is so dreamy!

I just saw an ad for Ask Jeeves that listed their top celebrity searches:
Usher
Hilary Duff
Eminem
Orlando Bloom
Nelly
Beyonce
Lindsay Lohan

I wonder what the average age of an Ask Jeeves user is. Hehe.

Who really likes leftovers, anyway?

All of my loyal readers will soon be reaping the dubious benefits of my boredom from being sick with the flu for almost a week and a half now. Not only is my brain rebelling, keeping me awake at night even when I tell it I need to sleep for my health, but it has been pouring out copious amounts of delirious musings, such as the following additional thoughts on the documentary Supersize Me:

Director/eater Morgan Spurlock mentions at the beginning of the film that things have changed drastically since he was a child, when his mother made almost every meal at home and his family ate out only on special ocassions. An important observation, if you ask me, yet he neglected to pursue the idea at all. Sure, McDonald's food is bad, but what about the culture that creates the demand for fast food? Fast food wouldn't be around if there wasn't a demand for it. Sure, McDonald's has good advertising, but you can't attribute all of its sales to mass hypnosis. There must be some cultural force driving that demand that wasn't there 60 years ago, before McDonald's and all the other fast food franchises hit it big-time. Why don't we cook at home any more?

"Well," you might think, "Things are more fast-paced than they were back then. We're just busier." We don't really have any less time in the day than our grandparents did, though. We just spend it differently. We think we just don't have time to cook for ourselves and our families, say, but it has to be because we're doing something else. There are still 24 hours in the day.

Now I raise the question, and a few hackles with it: who used to do this almost mythological home cooking before the advent of fast food? It's not an unfair generalization to say that women did the vast majority of it. What if I said that women need to stay home and take care of their families instead of working full time, plus overtime?

I'm sure quite a few people would get really worked up and tell me I'm being anti-feminist and delete my blog from their bookmarked websites. (Quite a few being two or three, since my readership is about ten people, including comment spammers.) That only goes to prove the point I am about to make. Our society values money far above the health and well-being of its members, particularly its children. Even the idea that everyone must have a career in order to have a "sense of self" is based on the assumption that personal value is derived from one's ability to earn cold, hard cash. What does it say about our culture when we indicate that being a corporate lawyer is a much more valuable use of time than cooking at home to make sure that the food our children eat is not going to make them have serious health problems before they're 25? Or that any job at all is probably better than the odious task of staying at home to see to the nutritional, educational, and spiritual needs of our offspring?

The underlying problem behind fast food is not that McDonald's will do anything to make money. It is that we value our health and our children's health so little that we are willing to do almost anything (including eat at McDonald's-ugh!) to get rid of our own responsibility for it so we have just a little more time to make more money. (Yes, we're busy doing other things, too, but if you have a full-time job, that pretty much takes up the biggest chunk of your day, doesn't it? Quitting your weekly yoga class wouldn't really buy you enough time to make dinner every night.)

Near the end of Supersize Me, there's a segment bemoaning the state of school lunches. Kids line up every day for all varieties of fatty, nasty processed foods. Shots of kids eating heaps of french fries are interspersed with shots of school nutritionists saying that the kids generally choose to eat a healthy mixture of good food and junk food. The implication seems to be that the schools have fallen down on the job by not ensuring that these kids have healthier diets, and that kids have been brainwashed by fast food advertising to make poor choices. While I do not debate either of those points, I think Spurlock is missing the big picture here. What about the parents who can't find the 5 minutes it would take to pack healthy lunches for their kids? Or who let their kids grab a bag of chips for dinner and eat them in front of their favorite (advertisement-rich) television programs? How come no parents have said anything about the nutrition programs in these schools in the documentary, if they are so bad? Have they even bothered to ask what their kids are eating? Do parents really have the right to expect to be able to drop their kids off at 7:30 and completely forget about them until 4 pm, leaving everything in between to the teachers and school nutritionists, as the movie assumes that they do?

I do not mean to be overly critical of all families in which both parents work. I know it is often hard to make enough money to meet a family's basic needs with only one income. But there are needs that are not met only by money. A healthy diet is a case in point. You can't eat quick meals at restaurants or schools almost all the time and expect to have your nutritional needs met. Nutrition requires some time and effort, not to mention closer attention to individuals than a school nutritionist can provide. I honestly have no problem with two parents working, as long as those other needs are met. If a child's health or education or behavior is suffering because her parents spend too much time at work, maybe it's time to rethink what "enough" money is. You would be surprised at what you can do without. I know quite a few working-class families who live on one income. In Southern California, no less. (Hey, it's expensive here!)

While fast food is really, really bad, it meets a need embedded in our cultural values. Fast food may be a major immediate cause of the obesity epidemic, but both fast food and obesity are symptoms of our culture's underlying priorities. As long as we value our jobs over the health and well-being of ourselves and our families, as long as we only give important needs like nutrition only the time and energy that's left over at the end of the day, McDonald's will be here to stay.

Question of the day?

I have learned of a new store (well, new to me) called HENRY'S MARKETPLACE!!!! (You have to imagine the name echoing dramatically in the still air all by yourself.) Not only does this wonderful place have a LARGE organic produce section (unheard of between October and April for those of us in the Inland Empire) that puts Trader Joe's to SHAME, but I have heard that this marvellous place has wasabi peas! No longer will I envy friends who live near Whole Foods! Nay, they have not the peas of wasabi that only seem to clear sinus congestion but still have the taste of ambrosia!

I have not yet made my pilgrimage to this Mecca of healthy living and tasty eating, since I have been sick and confined to my couch. I have been thinking about it, though, and it made me wonder about a few things. When organic produce farmers use manure to fertilize their crops, is it the remains of organic fodder shed by a free range cow? The Organic Trade Association says nothing on the matter. COULD THERE BE BGH IN MY WASABI PEAS?!?

The hidden cost of health care

I've had the flu all week, and Josh had it before me. Total number of days at least one of us has been sick so far? Eight. How much have we spent on video rentals? At least $30. That's $30 not covered by my insurance. I think the government needs to pay for it.

Supersize me

Josh and I were both home sick yesterday with the flu. Among the various other exciting things we did to entertain ourselves--like making oatmeal--we watched Supersize Me. If I ever really had much of a desire to eat at McDo, as the French call it, it is entirely gone. Of course, I've only eaten there twice in the last 8 or so years, and that was because I was on a business trip and the two people I was with absolutely insisted on it. Blech. Forget how bad it is for you, the food just tastes nasty. Which makes me wonder--who watched Supersize Me, and how many of them eat at Mickey D's anyway? My guess is that a lot of the independent film crowd is vegetarian or slow-foodian or refuses to eat at chain restaurants. Good movie, but the poor guy may just be preaching to the choir.

Bruce Mee

I got this crazy cool T-shirt last weekend:

'Nough said.

MUST FILL BLANK VOID

Ugh. I've been a bit busy lately, can you tell?

glog

Did you know that Google has a blog?