My Life – Page 11 – Her Green Life

Cuivre River camping trip

After our “adults only” camping trip last fall, we decided to venture into “camping with a toddler” this spring. The idea of joining the Missouri Mycological Society’s (MOMs) “Morel Madness” weekend spurred the trip, but their gathering was closer to Kansas City than to St. Louis this year, and I wanted something a bit closer to home, as well as something we could do on our own schedule.

Enter Cuivre River State Park, the site of last year’s “Morel Madness,” conveniently located about ninety minutes from home. (For those not from the StL area, the common/local pronunciation of this state park name is “Quiver” River, no doubt a horrible bastardization of the French word for copper, for which the park/river is named.) The park was lovely — nice campground, well-maintained hiking trails (well, the little we saw of them), and many areas nicely cleared from recent-ish controlled burns.

When we camped last fall, I remarked on the lack of space in the car for Gabriel. It wasn’t any different this time, especially with the addition of a third sleeping bag — we just smushed everything in more.

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I’m afraid in the not-too-distant future, we’ll need to borrow or rent a larger vehicle for camping trips.

After getting stuck in Friday afternoon traffic on the way out of St. Louis, we were extra glad we’d reserved a campsite ahead of time (there were actually plenty of vacant sites when we arrived, but it was one less worry), and we arrived in time to pitch a tent, start a fire, eat dinner, and roast marshmallows for s’mores.

The afternoons and evenings were warm, but the mornings start out a bit chilly, and, after enjoying Friday night, Sir spent a good deal of Saturday morning requesting Baba’s (grandma’s) house. He started Saturday with a 2+ hour sleep debt, having both taken over an hour to fall asleep (due to light and noise at the campground) and woken early. Le sigh.

We explained that we’d be staying at the campground another day, and made plans to take a hike. You know, just a couple of miles. With a toddler.

We chose a 4.75-mile loop trail, planning to alternate between Gabriel walking and riding in the backpack child carrier. Hiking was not particularly to Sir’s liking. Over the course of two hours, we heard, “Why going on hike? Me not want hike,” on almost constant repeat.

He didn’t really want to walk, but carrying 36+ pounds of squirmy toddler in the back pack was no picnic.

Especially when he realized he could stand on the frame. This made it more comfortable for Sir, but far less comfortable for the bearer. (This hiking pack is one of those items that seemed like a good idea, but that, in retrospect, we’ve rarely used. It takes up a lot of space, and, except for the sweaty factor, a basic baby carrier, like the Ergo, works just as well, and is much more comfortable.)

Fortunately, the loop we chose had a cut-off option, making it about half the total distance (a bit over two miles). If we had had to cover the entire 4.75 miles, we’d probably still be out on that trail!

It was a near thing, but all three of us made it back to the car, and, subsequently, to the campsite, for some much-needed lunch and rest time.

After our morning hiking experience, we kept the afternoon low-key, honoring Sir’s request to visit the play ground. That evening, we built a nice fire and enjoyed grilled bread and cheese sandwiches, plus more s’mores.

Saturday night’s bedtime was much like Friday’s. It took a long time and required one of us staying in the tent with Sir until he fell asleep.

Our overall campsite conditions were made a bit better by the departure of our Friday night “neighbors,” who were exceeding their campsite occupancy limit and showed little concern for campground quiet hours. We also scoped out some campsites that might be better situated for quiet (the site I picked, which looked good online, actually had quite a bit of passing foot and vehicle traffic).

Noise level aside, two months away from the lightest day of the year, it’s pretty darn bright at 7:30pm in a tent. For future kid-camping, we decided late September would be ideal — similar temps to late April camping, but earlier nightfall.

Matthew couldn’t resist building one more fire on Sunday morning, and after breakfast, we had an Easter egg hunt.

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We decamped rather efficiently, and, after one last playground visit, returned home to recover. All-in-all, it was a successful first camping venture, but I’m glad to be [almost] unpacked, cleaned up, and back to normal sleep conditions.

Birthday, biking bodies, and a new doc in town

Let’s start with a mystery photo, shall we?

Make your guess now . . . and all will be revealed later.

Birthday
Early April through early May is a big birthday month in my family. This week we celebrated Matthew’s birthday with not one, but two, homemade pizza dinners (now Sir thinks we should have pizza for dinner every night), and two rounds of birthday cake.

I made a chocolate chip banana cake with peanut butter frosting. I used this recipe for the cake, omitting the orange zest and adding about 2/3 c. chocolate chips. The cake was not bad, but it seemed more banana bread than banana cake. I’m not exactly sure of the difference between the two, but it wasn’t quite what I was going for.

The frosting, however, definitely said “cake!” If you’re into peanut butter, you should definitely make this frosting (or perhaps not, as it may be hard to avoid eating the whole batch!). I started with this recipe, and made a couple of tweaks: 1) reduced peanut butter by 1/8 – 1/4 cup, 2) replaced the missing peanut butter with 1/8 – 1/4 cup plain, whole fat yogurt, 3) omitted the milk, 4) added 1 t. vanilla, 5) sifted the powdered sugar. It was tasting good and starting to come together, but an extra couple of minutes with the highest speed on the mixer really elevated this frosting to the light and airy level.

Then I got all fancy and melted chocolate to decorate the cake (I almost never bother with the “decoration” step, but I had fun here). Also, there is extra peanut butter frosting, to be eaten on chocolate graham crackers.

Nothing like a birthday to make us reflect on health, right?

Matthew’s Knee
After I wrote this post, Matthew saw an orthopedic specialist who ordered an MRI. The doctor expected to find some cartilage that needed to be removed, but the MRI came back clear, so instead of surgery, Matthew got physical therapy, aimed at correcting muscle imbalances in his leg that are making his knee cap rub when he bikes.

He has returned to biking, but the pain is not gone. Both the physical therapy (an hour of exercises ev.er.y day) and the warmer weather seem to help, but in all honesty, surgery to remove some deteriorated cartilage would likely have been a quicker fix.

He’s also experimenting with clipless pedals again, so he can balance his muscles while biking, by getting the “pull up” motion, as well as the “push down.” He used birthday money to purchase a pair of Keen cycling sandals, which, while not nearly as roomy as biking in Birks, have much more toe space than a standard bike shoe.

My Back
My back is my back. After two visits to a chiropractor (the first followed by intense neck pain, that I tried to attribute mainly to sleeping wrong), I’ve decided that is not the route for me. On the second visit, I gently mentioned the neck pain, not blaming her, but suggesting we stay away from that area.

This seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to me, given that the issue that brought me to her office was pain in the MIDDLE of my back. I mean, I know it’s all connected, but still. Unfortunately, this chiropractor (and I suspect most others would be similar) could NOT stay away from my neck, and my neck doesn’t seem to like chiropractic care.

I discovered that some sun salutations seem to help (if not cure) the pain, so I’m trying to do those daily, along with a few of my previous PT exercises. That’s the current plan, given that the pain, if annoying in duration, is usually quite minimal and doesn’t really limit my activities — I can live with it.

If it gets out of hand, I can always go see our new doctor . . . .

. . . . Dr. Gabe! He’s definitely into alternative healing; little pink super balls can work wonders, apparently. Or maybe he just has a healing smile!

And now, to return to our mystery photo . . . perhaps not all that mysterious — if you guessed winter squash, you get the honor of being correct! I love working with this variety of winter squash — a long, solid neck and very sweet flesh with a nice texture — and I loved how it looked on the tray after slicing.

Lo-Cal blogging?

I don’t often view HerGreenLife from the perspective of a reader. Usually, I’m here on the back end of things, but every now and then, I like to check in and see what you see.

When I scrolled through the home page this morning, something in my tag cloud (the menu on the right-hand side of the page) jumped out a me.

“Eat Lo-Cal?” What?!? Since when was low-calorie eating a prominent topic on my blog? Sure, I’m all about eating healthy, but “lo-cal” has never really been my thing. My cooking tends to be full of healthy ingredients (vegetables, whole grains, lean vegetarian protein), but I also don’t skimp on the fat (primarily olive oil and organic butter).

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the tag in question was “eat local,” hyphenated, as in “locally grown food,” and NOT “eat lo-cal.”

March was also not a “lo-cal” blogging month. In fact, I posted fifteen times this month, for an average of a post every two days, which is quite good.

HerGreenLife is on track to have the second best month ever (don’t think we’ll quite beat August 2012, but the month is not over yet!), in terms of page views, and knowing that, knowing that you are out there reading, encouraged me to keep writing. Thank you!

Hair removal — a self-conscious nonconformist’s perspective

A couple of weeks ago, a friend posted a link to this article, which looks at the history of female hair removal. The fact that women (in some cultures) have been conforming to this norm for hundreds of years, LONG before the body parts in question were visible in public, really made me question this practice. We spend untold hours, and significant money, removing hair from certain parts of our body — for what???

In truth, I’ve been questioning female hair removal for over four years now. Sometime not too long after I wrote this post, I gave up the razor.* (You know what’s WAY more environmentally friendly than minimizing water use while you shave? Not shaving at all!)

At that point, I’d been shaving my legs since sometime in middle school. Specifically, I was allowed to start shaving my legs after I wrote an essay for my mom explaining why I should be allowed to shave my legs (oh, the joys of being an oldest child!).

I guess it was convincing, because next thing you know, my 13-year-old self was emerging from the shower, blood dripping from multiple razor nicks along my calves. It seemed pointless to bandage all of the cuts, so instead I found a pair of old, knee-length socks and let those absorb the blood.

At some point thereafter, I expanded into other areas, shaving my under arms regularly and my bikini line as needed (i.e., if I was going to be wearing a swim suit).

While the leg shaving got better (i.e., I stopped emerging from the shower dripping blood), the under arm and bikini line shaving always led to painful, unsightly razor burn. Ultimately, I switched to smelly chemical depilators (e.g., Nair) for these areas. While these modern counterpoints to Renaissance-era hair removal may not contain arsenic, I doubt that the ingredients are particularly healthful.

And then I stopped. Kind-of. I want to be 100% comfortable in my unshaven body, to not feel self-conscious when summer roles around, but it’s not that easy.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t shaved my legs since the fall of 2009. While I’m sometimes self-conscious about the hair on my legs, I’m largely able to ignore it.

The underarm hair is another story entirely. Leaving it unshaven makes me feel extremely self-conscious when wearing something sleeveless in public (i.e., I’m standing there with my arms firmly glued to my sides, shoulders hunched, lest anyone catch a glimpse). Sometimes, I just can’t take it, that pressure to conform, and I cave and grab a razor (I discovered last summer that Matthew’s electric razor is a bit kinder, razor burn-wise, than a standard razor).

I want to be able to not shave and confidently, unashamedly raise my arms over my head, but, no. I want to NOT be tempted to spend hundreds of dollars on laser hair removal to permanently get rid of the “problem,” but I think about it sometimes.

Why are women expected to have smooth, hairless legs and arm pits, while men are not?

For awhile, my kind-of, sort-of justification for this double standard was that it is acceptable for women to wear clothing that leaves shoulders, and thus arm pits, as well as [some-of] the leg bare in many settings where men are expected to wear pants and shirts with sleeves (in fact, speaking of double standards, it is almost always unacceptable for men to wear sleeveless shirts, except perhaps in a gym setting, but I digress). Maybe, I thought, expectations for female hair removal were a cost of being “allowed” to wear certain styles of clothing that bared those body parts. But the article on the history of female hair removal, revealing that women who exclusively wore floor-length, long-sleeved were also worried about body hair, nicely turned that reasoning on its head.

So, I’m back to the why? Why do we stay chained to our razors (or Nair, or wax)? Why is there an entire AISLE at Target dedicated to female hair removal?

I suppose, in some ways, the latter question answers the former. Female hair removal is big business! As estimated here, an “average” woman (in the U.S., I’m assuming?) spends $10k on “shaving related products” over her lifetime. If we all tossed our razors tomorrow, somebody stands to lose a lot of money!

Big business aside, I’m guessing this started with Victorian (or other societal) ideals of cleanliness and femininity, wanting to remove something that is seen as primitive, dark, and/or unclean.

While there’s been some recent backlash against the trend of removing [almost all] pubic hair (see here and here), it doesn’t seem to be carrying over to hair removal for other body parts. Since we’re fighting hundreds of years of “tradition,” some very well-entrenched social norms, AND big business, I’m not sure it ever will.

Which means that I’ll continue to be a hesitant, sometimes self-conscious, non-conformist, who sometimes caves. Or, this blog post could go viral, reaching millions of women, and we could embrace our bodies, hair and all, and stick it to the hair-removal industry! One can always dream.

*In the interest of full disclosure, [mostly] giving up the razor was a lot easier to do from the comfort of a stable, long-term relationship, with a guy who pretty fully supports my hairy decision. I wish I could say I would have been brave enough and bold enough to do this as a single gal, but we’re back to those social norms and pressures . . . .

The house that was not

Remember that house I was excited about? Well, we made a bid on February 7th. On February 10th, when I was stuck in jury duty, we learned that the bank had accepted a different [higher] offer.

So that was that, and we were really okay with the outcome. Of course, we had checked the “Seller may hold [our] offer as a back-up to accepted offer,” box on the HUD contract form, so there was always the chance that something could fall through with the other buyers. Matthew more or less dismissed this possibility entirely. While I was not hoping for it, nor even consciously thinking about it, I also didn’t think the case was closed until we found out how much it the final selling price.

Last Friday, exactly four weeks after we placed our bid, our realtor contacted Matthew saying that the contract with the other buyer had, indeed, fallen through, and the house was ours if we wanted it. The timing seemed almost like fate — just when we decided we would be in this apartment for awhile, things shifted: 1) I finally took the moving boxes to the basement and 2) Matthew commented just the other week, when I bought furnace filters, that maybe we wouldn’t be here to use the second filter.

We more or less decided that it was a go, planning to meet with our realtor to walk through the house one more time on Saturday morning and then complete the paper work. We were going to buy a house. In the suburbs. Holy moly.

We both spent Friday night tossing and turning, getting very little sleep, in anticipation of the fact that we were really going to buy a house, with all of the good and not-so-good (hmm, we’re going to have to buy a lawn mower . . . and USE it) implications.

While the house appeared to be [close to] livable already, we already had a mile long (at least cost-wise) list of renovations/alterations to the property: tree removal (to improve sun for gardening) and possible terracing of the sloping yard, taking down a wall to open the kitchen to the front room, kitchen remodel, ripping out carpet and refinishing wood floors, installing a shed or lean-to for bike storage (no room for a garage), and possibly adding a door for direct access to the basement. Probably at least $30k of improvements.

(Of course, somewhere in the two hours of sleep that I manged to piece together that night, I managed to make my neck very angry. I spent the rest of the weekend in significant pain; pain that was undaunted by ice and ibuprofen.)

Saturday morning, we stopped by our credit union on the way to the house, to get a cashier’s check for the deposit we would submit with the contract. We got to ~~our~~ the house, and I started snapping pictures of the kitchen, so we could start planning the remodel.

We had already been through the house with Matthew’s mom and her partner (a restoration carpenter), but Matthew’s dad had yet to see it. When you’re making a decision/purchase as big as a house, the more eyes the better. As I finished up the kitchen pictures, Matthew’s dad and his wife arrived. And our “good enough; let’s do this” house started unraveling.

First, they noticed the musty smell and brought up mold concerns. Matthew and I both have very sensitive noses, and we had noticed this before, but, with our rose-colored glasses on, we attributed it to the house having been closed up for almost a year now.

Then, I noticed that the most recent visit recorded on the sign-in sheet had “water on floor” as the reason. I headed to the basement, which has some mostly finished space . . .

. . . and found these water stains. We had either missed them on our previous visits (would have been easy since the power was off and we were viewing by ~~flash~~ bike-light), or they were new.

Now, a little water in a basement is nothing new, but, since the upstairs living space is a bit cramped, we were planning to really use this downstairs [basement] area, as living space, not just storage. It prompted us to really look at things. While the house is not at THE lowest point on the block, it is not too far off. There has been, and will continue to be, significant water running across the property. Certainly not a cheap fix if possible at all.

We found possible evidence that the water pressure has caused recent shifting in the foundation, a big red flag.

And it all added up to this:

It seemed likely that there were significant issues that would cost significant money to fix/improve (if it was possible to do so at all).
With the offer we made, combined with the improvements we already planned, we did not feel like we could put more money into this house.
Because it is a foreclosure, we could not adjust our offer to offset these additional costs.

So, we followed our gut and walked away. While we feel we made the right decision, it still made for a rough Saturday, especially when combined with sleep deprivation, neck pain, and gray, chilly weather.

I admit to a temptation to call this whole thing off, and proclaim myself a renter for life. But, since we want a large garden where we live, along with some other benefits of home-ownership, we will dust ourselves off and continue this slow, plodding search.

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