Food!

No time for posting lately, wow. I should be better about this.
So, anyways, one Saturday morning last summer, I woke up at 7am and my right wrist and hand hurt REALLY BADLY. So badly that I took asprin (which I rarely do out of principle), wrapped it in an ace bandage, and had the fiancé drive me to urgent care when it opened at 8am.
On a Saturday.
They told me it wasn't broken and just badly bruised - let me just say I have NO idea how it happened but I have been known to sleepwalk when stressed. Perhaps I got into a tussle with the boogyman or something.
Anyways, I was up, it was 9am on a sunny Saturday morning, we were on the beltline - so I thought hell, why don't we go to the Farmer's Market downtown for the first time?
So we did, and spent oodles of money on yummy food.
This year there haven't been any bruised body parts to wake me up early on Saturday, and so we haven't gone to the market since then.
But Witty lent me her book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and reading it has totally changed my opinion on food and such. You need to read this book - I'm only halfway through and can't wait to see what else is in there!
1) The fiancé and I hit up the Hilldale market before work last Wednesday and we will continue to do so all summer on a weekly basis. We hope to buy ~75% of our food there instead of from the grocery store (at least in the summer).
2) Most wine/beer that I buy will now be Wollersheim or New Glarus - both this and #1 are to promote small, local businesses and reduce the shipping costs of food.
3) I ordered a kit to make your own mozzerella and hope to ease off my dependence of store-bought cheese (and if it works, this summer I'll have home-made mozzerella with tomatoes and basil grown on my own deck............heaven!).
4) For food bought at the grocery store, we will try to buy local/organic/etc.
I'm beginning to learn a lot more about sustainable living, and it all makes sense. I don't think I could do what Barbara Kingsolver did - eat only things that were produced near them - because I love things like fruit in the winter, I could never kill my own meat, and I don't know much about canning/preserving. Plus I just don't have time to maintain a whole garden and menagerie of animals.
However, there is a lot the average person can do without much effort to really change the way they eat and live to make this world a better place for small farms - who make the best food anyways.
I'm trying to get the fiancé on board. I think he is about halfway. I'll have to work harder to get him to explore this with me.
On another totally unrelated note, I FINALLY (pretty much) finished my scrapbook of the 10 day cruise that we took last October. It's really huge and I only have about 30 more minutes of work to do on it after I get what I need from the store - so yey!

Big weekend, at least mentally

This weekend was Fat Far, an event that occurs every year on Father's Day up in Chippewa Falls and consists of lots of people renting inner tubes and floating down a lazy river tied to their friends and coolers of beer.
So, for the second year in a row, 6 of us went up there and did this (this year we took 3 coolers of beer instead of 2 - never let it be said that we don't learn from our mistakes). We spent 2-3 hours floating and drinking and talking, which was fun all in all. Since I've found that I hate getting drunk when everyone else around me is drunk (Halloween on State Street, anyone?) I didn't drink much, which proved to be the best decision ever. Here's why:
1) I didn't wear my ankle brace - the river would have gotten it nasty (the river is DIRTY) and plus tan lines (or in my case, burn lines, sigh) suck
2) We floated by a large outcropping of rock that people were jumping off of because the river dropped off dramatically right off of it, so you could jump about 20 feet into the water
Well, if you know me, you know that's something I would have participated in in a heartbeat before the accident. I was more hestitant this time, espeically since I was sans brace, but after about 2 seconds I decided "Fuck it, I wanna *do* this kinda thing again" and so I scrambled off my inner tube, swam to the side of the river with 2 of the other guys, managed to clamber up the steep, rocky side with only minimal help, and then, with my friends screaming my name, finally jumped.
It was awesome.
It was the most liberating thing I've done in a long time.
Ok, sure, it's nothing like the 6 hours of cleaning I did last weekend. But I still feel like I accomplished more this weekend than I have in a while.

OMG first time for everything

So I slept pretty much all day Saturday since the fiancé was visiting a friend, and then on Sunday I actually got up before 9am (!!!!).
I fed the pets and then made coffee and cleaned, did the laundry, organized, did 2 loads of dishes, made a grocery list, cooked, and threw out so much stuff. It was great! The house looks amazing, but of course all of that took me like a full 6 hours to do and 4 cups of coffee (I was uber-caffeinated).
We even moved the small TV out of the living room, and cleaned off and put away the card table, and took the pillow off the easy chair. I put the walker and crutches away in the hall closet. Those were the last things hanging around as a reminder of the accident (except for my foot of course) and it was pretty damn refreshing to get those things put away.
This sort of thing happens once every 5 years or so, so I was freaking impressed with myself. I went through a bunch of drawers and chests and closets, and found a lot of remnents of my past, which I wanted to get rid of. I made a pile of stuff from an ex (shirts, childhood stuffed animal, class ring, etc) and will be mailing that stuff back to him. I threw away lots of old tickets and papers from past failed relationships. I just want to start over, move on from everything that went on in RI and from the accident this past January.
Maybe it's the spring cleaning bug that bit me, but I feel this need to just get EVERYTHING out of the house. I want to get down to the bare essentials and not get so bogged down with "stuff".
Though I want to hire a maid to come in monthly to just do the major stuff that I don't have the time to do - scrubbing the floors and dusting being the main things.
It'll be nice to come home for the next week while things are organized and clean. Which, of course, probably won't happen for another 5 years or so ;)

You'd think I'd be able to figure this out

This whole blogging thing confuses me. I have yet to understand how in the &#^@ to put up pictures. I shall have to bother one of the other girls sometime when we're both around a computer.
I also haven't spend much time trying to customize this blog, nor have I found out how to embed links into my posts. I'm probably thinking about it too much.
Suffice it to say, I hope to make this blog a bit more exciting once I have time.
I've been too busy. I spent the last Saturday in May recovering from a hangover induced by the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day on the Friday before. Then the Madison Marathon was on Sunday so I had to go see the fiancé finish his very first half-marathon, then go to his parents house *yippee*. Monday was a holiday but I spent it freaking out about what to wear at a customer site since I was flying out that afternoon. Nothing fits anymore since I lost so much damn weight from the accident, and since I can't wear high heels, that severly limits what shoes I can wear. All in all I think I ended up dressed decently. Though I did end up wearing sneakers on Thursday with my dress clothes. Oh well.
Friday night I don't think I did much, as I was tired, and Saturday night was spent celebrating Loud's birthday, which was much fun.
This week is more work and hopefully a relaxing weekend, then the week after that I'm traveling again.
Things have gotten a tad bit better at work, but I still feel like I'm trying to talk but no one is listening, which is quite frustrating. But I *heart* the paycheck.