A Lesbian Avoids Boob(tube)s and Carpal Tunnel

OR

Reasons To Toss The TV and Slow The High Speed Internet

It's not often that I make new friends. Clearly chick flicks lied to me and moving to a big city doesn't automatically convert you into a wealthy socialite. I have no ritzy magazine job writing scathing reviews of designer clothes (although I'm sure my convenience store uniform deserves one). I don't have huge parties with blaring music and hors d'oeuvres. I certainly don't go out pub-hopping on a regular basis, because neither my wallet nor liver can handle it. It's a mystery to me how a young woman is supposed to meet people outside work or school. If there's a Lifehack for that, I'd like to know.

We made a lot of cookies that night.

I remember a night in December a few years back where a friend from Montréal and I were baking shortbread cookies (she was baking; I was staying far away from the stove as possible for fear of somehow goofing up the food). We were just getting into the dark and dry cold of the 2010 Labrador winter, and the house was dead quiet save for the wind outside. The rest of our Katimafamily were out taking walks together; we'd all decided to get to know one another, and had partnered up and dedicated an hour to our pair, learning all about their lives outside our six month program. This may be just my brain pulling a hipster move and filtering the crap out of the picture in my mind, but the memory of that holiday season is one of the most rich and sweetest in my life. The house was lit with blinding, mismatched lamps. A plastic tree with paper decorations glimmered next to the couch with no legs. The walls were plastered with homemade posters talking about feelings and needs, held with green tape. Our kitchen always smelled like fresh bread, but tonight it was white with flour and the air was sweet with sugar. Kate was screaming.

My compliments for having the best reaction to my fourteen-year hobby ever. It definitely made me feel like I had something to be proud of. At the prompt of, "Tell me something about yourself," I had informed my now dear friend that I was a black belt in karate, casually, as was my personality at the time. She had complimented my nonchalance with an over the top, "OH MY GOD. NO WAY. YOU ARE? I TOTALLY DIDN'T EXPECT THAT," and told the seven other members of our group immediately after they returned from their walks, their faces flushed pink with cold and boots half off their feet.

Those rare few times I do meet new people, they often have a reaction similar to Kate's when GF or I inform them that we don't have a television - by which we actually mean we don't have a cable subscription. Our secondhand television, which is much newer at ten years old than our original thirdhand television, is used for movies and video games alone. We have no Netflix subscription. No satellite or cable connections. No gaming consoles newer than a Playstation 2. Most times it sits dark in our living room.

I once listened in on a conversation about trashy reality shows my aunts were having. That was one of the last times I was in "Grandma's house", a now-sold three-level treasure perched on a hill in the prickly grass of a quiet Cape Breton village. The building was buzzing with after-dinner conversation, and the TV blared from the room adjacent to us. All around me teaspoons clinked against glasses and women relayed their daily rituals. Far from serene stories of bubble baths and wine, these were re-tellings of long days at stressful jobs, finished with a late supper and terrible television shows "just for something to watch". The episodes were awful, they assured each other - overdramatic, scripted, and a waste of airtime, but they all watched these shows religiously, my mother included.

There's nothing wrong with a couple of guilty pleasure television shows. Sometimes you need a dumb video or two to distract yourself from a stressful day. I've been personally re-watching Cardcaptor Sakura through Youtube. My mom likes soap operas. Famous health bloggers like Jess Ainscough waste brain cells on shows like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. But with the way people react to my lack of screen-watching, you'd think avoiding a daily service to the boob tube was sacrilege.

"How do you go without a TV? I couldn't do it!"
"It's not that expensive! They have student discounts!"
"No television at all?"
"You should check if someone left the cable intact in your apartment!"

Neither GF nor I find our lives lacking anything because we can't watch TV. In fact, we're both glad it's stayed out of our budget. Student discounts or no, $100+ a month is a lot of hard-earned cash to be shelling out "just for something to watch". If we could specifically choose the two channels we have any interest in (Discovery and History, and maybe TLC because GF likes dumb shows about dramatic girls picking out wedding dresses), I'm sure a couple dollars would be worth the education. But to use precious daylight staring at a box that takes thirty minutes out of every hour to try and sell me things and the other thirty insulting my intelligence, and to pay huge sums of money for the privilege of letting it do so...?

We once had a month of free cable from our internet provider. I don't think I've ever talked to GF less, even when we were four provinces and six months apart.

Everywhere we go in this high-tech world we're exposed to screens of some sort. Whether you're one of those folks who can't tear their eyes away from your cell phones (what on earth are you looking at that's so interesting?) or someone like me, whose job involves a touchscreen computer all day, almost everyone in the developed world is constantly straining their eyes to stare at pixels in one way or another. As you can imagine, this is terrible for our eyesight. Ever notice how many more people have glasses now then when you were a kid? We're an entire generation suffering from nearsightedness and problems focusing. (Also, if you're cell phone addicted, you probably have hypertension in your neck.)

According to BBM Canada, Canadians spend up to thirty hours a week watching television. That's thirty hours of sitting around doing nothing except maybe eating. Eyes get strained, brains get fried, and nobody has anything interesting to say in a conversation that begins with, "So what have you been up to?" If you used those thirty hours a week to, say, go running, you'd be booking it five hours a day and be both ridiculously physically healthy and ridiculously mentally unhealthy at the same time. So that's a bad example. But if you could take those thirty hours and divvy them up - use them to read a good book, go somewhere fun, cook a healthy meal, hang out with a friend, play pretend with your kids, et cetera, et cetera, just pick up a women's magazine and they'll give you ideas. I'm sure we all realize that thirty hours a week is a huge waste of lifespan, and although I'm sure not everyone dedicates that much time to their TV, it's no stretch to say we all watch much too much of it. If you died today, would you feel like you'd really lived, when a fifth of your life was spent watching teenagers in too much makeup scream at each other?

The Katimavik program was completely, thankfully, free of a television, and I've been without one since I moved away from my parents in 2011. When you don't have total anytime access to the world of the telly, the times you do watch become that much more memorable. GF and I recall dates and events based on what movies we saw in theatres in what month. Playing video games I haven't since last December fill me with holiday fuzzy feelings of nostalgia. When I was in Labrador, watching Miracle On 34th Street in a little private room with my nine closest friends at the time was an event we looked forward to all month, and a chance to spend time together laughing, instead of mindlessly eating out of the same chip bowl and calling it a date.

When I want to watch a specific show, I look it up on the internet or rent it from the library. With a computer, I've found no need for television. This said, I know I spend too much time mindlessly surfing the web - some days, and I know I'm not alone in this, I'll realize that I've been scrolling my way through endless pages of GIFs for hours and learning nothing of interest. My relay of the day to GF when she comes home from school is a repetitive cycle of, "So I saw this thing on somebody's Tumblr..."

I've decided it has to stop. This is the 21st century, and of course I can't avoid technology, but a woman in her twenties should not have blood clots in her legs from sitting too much (which I'm sure I'm heading towards, being as there are days I can hardly remember standing). I've decided to lessen my use of the Web-connected boob tube with exceptions for homework and blogging, which I do rough drafts of on paper. I tend to start getting sleepy as soon as it gets dark outside, so I'm restricting my internet surfing until after eight at night, so that I can spend my daylight soaking up Vitamin D and enjoying our short fall season (and working on my self-inflicted Autumn Squash Challenge - more on that later).

True, we can't all pull away from the technology of necessity, but consider giving yourself a break from those screens around you. Find something creative to do. Bake. This is the season for it. Write. Do your homework. Draw. Nap. Walk. Phone. Hang out. Find something to do that fills your day with memorable things beyond a funny cat video. Make your days last. Remember when you were a kid, and the days felt like forever? Aim for that.

In closing,

1) Baby steps. Take them. You don't have to toss out your television or bar the family from their video games, but maybe tell the kids they have to play outside for the day on the promise that you'll all watch a movie or play a game together at night.

2)  Mom had a set of rules when my sister and I were kids that I've stuck to my entire life: when you have guests, you leave the computer alone. No video game unless they're two-player. No TV until you've been outside for a while (and absolutely, positively no television in the dining room or your bedrooms). Stick to this and you'll find your days become a lot longer and your conversations a lot more personal. Avoid tech when you've got a friend over. They came here for you, not your entertainment systems.

3) But seriously, what's so interesting about your cell phones?

With whirs and buzzing and a couple clicks,
- Leah

The Human Lawnmower: A Grimm Fairytale For Baby Plants

OR

Growing Greens For The Lazy, Cheap, and Yardless

Alfalfa sprout salad

"It was a bright and sunny morning," said the Kalanchoe ominously (or would have if it had vocal chords), "just like this one." The African Violets nodded earnestly in agreement. (They could also have been swaying in the wind - it's hard to tell with Violets.) The Kalanchoe waved his branches as if warding off evil and loomed over the jar before him. Tiny sproutlings quivered in his vision, tightly packed as a yard of clover. 

"Little sprouts like you sat her not long ago... but that day they disappeared, and I never saw them again."

"What happened to them?!" shouted one of the taller seedlings, leaning forward. The Kalanchoe eyed him pitifully, noting the flush of chlorophyll in his newly formed leaves and knowing the same fate was to befall him soon. The table began to shake as monster footsteps drew near.

"The Sprout Eater."

Has anyone noticed how short lettuce season is? I mean, if you shop at a grocery store or eat other salad greens more resilient to cold then probably not, but the natural Canadian season for lettuce is only a few months long. We hardly start enjoying fruit salads before it's on to the cob salads and then pumpkin and whoops it's snowing you missed it. From the first of September this year our temperatures took a nosedive and parts of the country have already experienced frost and snow. Poor, gentle lettuce doesn't have a hope in Nunatsiavut of surviving very long up here (unless you're Niki Jabbour and make cold frames for the little guys).

When you're a stickler like me and picky about where your grocery store produce comes from, lettuce is basically a no-go in everything but peak season. I've made a rule of not buying anything from outside my country that can be grown in my country. So avocados and citrus fruit are an exotic treat, but berries or veggies from the States are forbidden. It's no 100-mile diet, but it's a small reduction in my carbon footprint that's not hard to maintain. Even GF's on board with it. The warm fuzzies of buying "local" turn into a pain in the butt, though, when I really crave something I can't get, like lettuce in the winter. It's all from California, and generally looks like hell (sorry).

Sprouted alfalfa seeds

Enter the horrific sprout-eater story. If that didn't make a crazy, "I only eat food that fell from the tree," fruititarian out of someone I'll be surprised. GF was actually alarmed when she realized what I'd become. I've been growing baby plants, letting them think their life's adventure was just beginning, then eating them by the bowlful just as they turned green. I've become an infant plant murderer.

Like my mother, many of you may have alarm bells ringing in your heads at the word "sprouts". Images of yellowy, bean-like plants in plastic containers with warning of E. coli may be flashing in front of your mind's eye. A boy in my elementary school, bless him, used to eat those pale plants by the handful, and my fellow students used to tease him endlessly about them (while eating their oh-so-healthy Lunchables). His mother was onto something, though, and obviously ahead of her time in the holistic world, if not quite on the right track. I urge anyone wasting money on these supermarket bean sprouts to hear me out, and anyone unfamiliar with all this baby plant consumption to relax about all the germs.

Sprouts are the beautiful little beginnings of edible plants, and they are both delicious and cheap. They're made by soaking raw seeds, nuts, or grains periodically in water over a few days and lettings the baby plants hidden inside those shells to start to grow before mercilessly snatching away their life once they're a few hours/days old. Sprouts are hailed for being full of enzymes, antioxidants, and amazing, life-saving chlorophyll (plant blood, rich with magnesium). They are by far one of the most raw, pure sources of sunlight we can pump into our bodies, and they make a lovely (if a bit different) replacement for lettuce in a salad.

This being said, a supermarket sprout is pale (although those kind of sprouts are anyway), dry, and probably a few weeks dead before you buy them, therefore those lovely perks that make sprout-eating worthwhile are completely null and void in those yellow bean sticks. Plus they've been sitting around in stagnant water for a while, so E. coli has time to multiply. Yum yum. Sprouting at home ensures you're getting the benefits of living, germ-free plants, while saving money and experiencing a bit of variety, should you so choose. It's ridiculously easy to grow sprouts - you need no special equipment, no particular heat, no parental supervision, and no yard or balcony. You don't even need a south-facing window. 

Sunflower seeds, pepitas, buckwheat, chia,
mung beans, adzuki beans, spelt, alfalfa,
teff, amaranth
(All bought for UNDER $10)

As a general rule, you can sprout all seeds, most nuts, lentils, chickpeas, adzuki and mung beans. You can find specifications of what sprouts best and how long they need to do so (like on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ) all over the internet, but I mostly just avoid large beans and eat'm when they're green.

A good starting bean for sprouting are lentils. To be honest, I've never actually sprouted lentils, but where most other sprout seeds can be hard to find outside of a health or specialty store, lentils (or chickpeas) can be bought dry in bags at the local supermarket. Grab a small handful of beans (they're going to expand to about 8x their size) and dump them in a glass jar. Most people use mason jars, but I've got washed out salsa containers, and a glass cup would be okay, too. A clear plastic cup might work, but I haven't tried. You want something that will allow the seeds light and create a little greenhouse effect. Over the lip of the jar you'll need some sort of mesh to hold the beans in but filter water out. I use some muslin cloth I found in the sewing scraps. Many people use a plastic or metal wire screen. Again, your call. Stretch your barrier over the top of the jar and grab something to hold it in place - I use rubber bands or hair elastics. Fill your jar with water and let your beans soak for a while. Like with the ingredients in a stock, the bigger your seeds, the longer you should soak them. Alfalfa seeds take four or so hours, lentils maybe five or six. I usually just let them go until the water looks cloudy. Sometimes overnight.

Soaking alfalfa seeds

Once your seeds have had a good bath, drain all the water, rinse them, then find a place where you can sit them to dip-dry. The water needs to seep out and the sprouts need to breathe, so don't put them face down on a plate or anything. I put mine on the lip of a soup cup at an angle, but you can flip yours fully upside down as long as they're on a dish drainer or something equally elevated and holey. They don't need to be in the sun right away - for mung beans, some folks suggest they should never be in light. You can let them grow on your kitchen counter, if you want. Just poke them in the sun during their last day so they start making that beautiful chlorophyll and turn green.

Now comes the easy part. Let the sprouts do their thing. Rinse them at least once a day (twice, once in the morning and once at night, is usually recommended, but ain't nobody got time for that) and eat them when they've got decently long tails on them or are turning green (again, the amount of time you let them grow for depends on the type of plant; consult the Google). Lentils should be eaten before they grow leaves. You can eat the seed husks or rinse them off. It's totally personal preference. Use them on/as salad, top a burger, dehydrate them and use them in bread, throw some in a casserole, whatever. Generally you should avoid cooking sprouts, though, because putting any sort of baby in an oven is guaranteed to kill off anything you like about them.

Spelt and adzuki beans sprouting
(Kalanchoe in the background)

Important things to note!

1) As a VERY IMPORTANT NOTE, you can sprout kidney beans (and it's cousins, like navy, pinto, and black beans), but you HAVE TO COOK THEM. This does kill off enzymes, but eating big beans raw, especially kidney beans, will make you violently ill. They're poisonous. Sprouting and then cooking beans of any sort, though, makes them much easier for our bodies to digest by turning their complex carbohydrates into simpler ones and making their nutrients more bio-available. If you're prone to gas when you eat beans, sprouting them beforehand will more than likely prevent that. 

2) Always get your sprout seeds from a food store, NOT a gardening store, where they may be cheaper but coated in pesticides/herbicides. Even if they're organic, it's a much safer bet to find some at food-grade. 

3) As anyone who clicked on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ link may have noticed, some people drain their sprout jars and then leave them right side up to grow. You can do this too, but I suggest the face-down method because it ensures there's no water pooling at the bottom of your container for mold to grow in.

Jar-sprouted teff. Bad idea.

4) Some very small or gelatinous seeds, like teff or chia, can't really be grown in jars. For those you need to use the toss-them-on-a-plate-and-attack-them-with-a-spray-bottle method, which I haven't tried. I did try doing the teff-in-a-jar method, though, and it just got moldy and attracted fruit flies. Alfalfa seeds are probably the smallest you should go with jar sprouting.

5) I use the green-tinted water the sprouts drip off to water my other plants, and they seem to love it. Good (cannibalistic?) sprout food for all!

Sun-filled and growing,

- Leah

Recipe: Herbed Croutons

OR

Salad Toppings From Bread Heels: A Story of Seagull Deprivation

Have you ever been to one of those really ritzy home decor stores? You know, the kind that're usually privately-owned and tucked into some secluded corner of a city? They sell dishware and tablecloths, as well as beautiful, unique pieces like bronze chandeliers, abstract art, and tablecloths made of the Golden Fleece. The few times I've been in one of these places (wondering what it's like to drop a couple hundred dollars on an ugly horse sculpture without being intoxicated beyond intelligent thought), GF has pointed out objects so ridiculously silly and expensive that neither of us can wrap our heads around them. For example, one Christmastime we saw a silver bonsai tree in a store window downtown I would call "the minimalist style of today's high-class urbanite" in that it was all branches and sparkled something fierce. We were struck both by how pretty and how audacious it was to be asking $200 for something we could make with a walk in the woods and a can of glitter paint. A few months later GF saw spindly silver (it's the "in" colour) decorations that were equally pretty and equally expensive, and was so enraptured with them that she went to the Dollar Store, bought foam and paint, and made duplicates for a fraction of the price. We now have six sparkling silver carbon atoms hanging from our living room ceiling.

I love grocery shopping. I take to it like some girls do to shopping for clothes or makeup. Be it at the local supermarket, farm market, or convenience store, I get a huge thrill out of picking out food. I love trying to figure out what my most cost-efficient option is. I love filling up carts and baskets. I even love paying for it (gives me that accomplished feeling). I get the warm fuzzies from shopping for necessities. I am totally for hire if somebody wants me to grocery shop for them. Dream job, I'm telling you.

What I don't especially love when I'm shopping is finding pre-fab food I could make myself. I get that convenience is king for most people, but who doesn't have time to make mashed potatoes? It's just silly and a little bit frustrating, in a way. Why would I pay three dollars more for something that would take three minutes to do myself? (That would be an excellent job, too. A dollar a minute? Talk about rolling in the dough - pun intended.) There are some things I absolutely refuse to buy just because the Average Joe could make it in under ten minutes. Ready-for-baking tinfoil-wrapped potatoes, pre-layered salsa chip dips, pre-cut vegetables of any kind, salad kits, and pre-seasoned meats top the list.

Also, croutons.

Like with her ingenious crafting, GF has become a pro at mimicking recipes on cookbook pages, meal boxes, and sample tables. I'd like to say she's the art girl and I'm the inventive chef, but this is real life and I've long since accepted that the only things I'm especially good at cooking are pasta (which is bad for me in large quantities) and quiche (which I should really make more of, but responsible eggs are expensive). Still, I'm quick to learn, so when GF showed me how to make real croutons from scratch, well... I actually promptly forgot, and will probably get the finer details wrong the next eight or so times I make them. But I promise I got her to double-check this recipe before I posted it.

Croutons (and for that matter, stuffing, but I'll pick on Stove Top another day) are stupid easy to make. In the same way I can't fathom spending $400 on carbon atoms for my ceiling, I likewise can't reason why anyone would spend $3 on a salad topping. Croutons are entirely made of stale bread. Birds don't pay to eat your hot dog bun ends - why are you paying to eat overcooked bread heels? Croutons sit in the same boat soup stock does; they're made of scraps.

To make croutons, stop feeding birds. It's bad for them anyway. Hoard your bread heels, broken toast pieces, freezer-burnt slider buns, and the cheesebread logs your cousin brought for tea. Pop them in the freezer in a Ziploc bag next to your stock chunks. When you need them, yank'm out of the cold, preheat your over to 325F (so they can witness their impending doom), cube/rip them up, dump them in a bowl, add enough vegetable oil to coat them, douse them in spices (we usually use garlic powder and Italian seasoning), then sprawl the oily nibs on a cookie sheet ("Draw me like one of your French breads!") and cook them for about fifteen minutes, until they're toasty and brown.

Or, if you're me, put them in the oven, forget about them, cook them for too long, eat the black ones, and save the nice bits for your girlfriend.

Oops.

 Summing it up:

 1)
- Save up bread scraps and freeze until needed
- Preheat oven to 325F
- Rip or cut bread chunks into bite-sized pieces
- Place breadcrumbs in a bowl and coat with vegetable oil
- Add seasoning (garlic powder/Italian spices/whatever)
- Spread on cookie sheet
- Bake for 15 minutes, give or take, until they're golden brown
- Eat

 2) We have sparkley silver carbon atoms on our ceiling and GF is very proud.

 Cheaply crunching,
 - Leah

Why Hippies Rule My Bathroom

OR

Saving Water: A Guide For The Non-Squeamish

Ahh, that quote is so awkward it's almost cute. "If it's yellow, let it mellow." What does that mean, anyway? "Mellow" has long since left our vocabulary in urban North America. Am I meant to let the contents of my bowels chill out? Relax? Is it an implication that they're getting high? Do I grab a joint from one of the late-night teenagers in Victoria Park and chuck it in the toilet?

As scandalous as this might sound, I've been following the "yellow mellow" rule for four years now. When I was living in Labrador with a houseful of teenagers, it occurred to me how much water we were wasting on a daily basis. Nine people going to the bathroom up to six times a day went through a lot of eleven-litre (three gallon) flushes. I brought it up in one of our quaint Katimavik meetings and we all agreed to follow the slogan for the sake of the environment (and to prevent our old toilet from leaking due to overuse). 

The Great Lakes

For those of you who don't know, the ditty goes, "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down," which means exactly what it sounds like. Bodily liquids stay in the toilet until someone does a #2 and flushes it all away. It was a saying apparently invented by a Californian politician in the 1970's to promote water conservation. There's a huge debate (which you can find through Google if you care enough to look) about whether or not being selective about your flushes is worth the effort or just weird and hippie-ish, but I prefer like to err on the side of caution in a world where huge quantities (2.5 billion litres) of the freshwater Great Lakes are disappearing every day.

Somehow, GF and I both continued to follow this "yellow mellow" slogan when we moved in together, even though we'd never conversed about it. It's become an unsaid rule. Granted, that rule is ignored when we have guests, because - despite urine being completely sterile - a bowlful of yellow water comes off as a little unsanitary. (Additionally, the con side of the "is it worth it?" argument says that urine sitting in the bowl can dirty your toilet faster, but if you're keeping hydrated, your piss should be both almost clear and less acidic, so it shouldn't be all that corrosive or smelly.) Being as we don't have a fancy low-flow or duel-flush toilet, we're probably saving something like 110 litres of freshwater per day. That's over 40,000 litres (10,500 gallons) of perfectly good drinking water a year.

We're in an apartment building, so we don't pay for our water. Most people with houses do, however. For those people, there is a very small incentive to flushing less when you're charged for it; lowering the amount of flushes can save you anywhere from $10 to $80 a year, depending on how many people you live with. So there's that. But mostly there's a responsibility we're all saddled with, in this world of climate change, to preserve energy. You might walk to work to save gas and turn of the lights in rooms you're not using, but if you're going to the bathroom often you're sending a hundred litres or more to sewage plants every day to be purified, which takes shit-tons of electricity. It's kind of a silly thing to do, when urine really doesn't need much to be turned back into water. 

If you can't deal with the idea of leaving your waste in the throne for everyone to see, consider putting bottles full of rocks or a couple bricks (wrapped in a plastic bag so they don't disintegrate and hurt the plumbing) in the back tank. This will take up space and prevent your toilet from using as much water. The older your toilet is, the more water you'll be saving.

Why should we bother?

1) There are droughts all over the world, and you have water. Be responsible about it. We're all in this together, like it or not.

2) You (should) turn off the water when you brush your teeth/wash your hands, don't you? Why not cut back on something that takes x10 the energy and resources?

Sloshingly, 

- Leah

Red Light, Green Light, Abs of Steel

OR

How To Gain Muscle Mass By Sitting In Your Car

When I was younger, I used to do 100 crunches before bed every night. Why? Somewhere along the line of my maturing I got into the notion that I should try to be the most fit I could be (a good habit to get back into, really), so I made an effort to eat well and do at least a little bit of exercise each day. Doing crunches was absolutely a pain sometimes - if I'd had a workout earlier that day, or if I was already comfy in bed, the last thing I wanted to do was haul my ass off the mattress and try to brain myself with my knees. But 99% of the time I'd get up and do it. I had no one to answer to but myself, and I told Me that if I wasn't going to take up running (cardio is the bane of my physical existence), the least I could do it flail on the floor for a couple minutes per night.

Expectedly, I did build some strong abdominals. Along the way, I also discovered the lazy man's trick to building up lower tummy muscles without looking like a doofus. I sat up.

Somebody once told me a story about this really fat elementary school teacher. The lady sat pin-straight at her desk and had the funniest looking gut; her stomach was flat, but every other part of her body was flabby. It confused the heck out of the kids in her class, because she was completely nonathletic, but had abs of steel. You see where I'm going with this.

I was reminded of this trick while riding the bus not long ago. I wouldn't suggest it for anyone driving (because you should be focusing on the road, so put the damn cell phone away before you kill someone), but I used to do it all the time as a passenger. It works all the lower muscles of your abdomen, as well as your thighs and back muscles. You won't get short of breath or (probably) sweat. Best of all, instead of looking silly and having to wear gym clothes, you can do this in fancy or everyday clothes and you'll actually look classy.

Source

Sit down.

Doesn't matter where you put your feet or arms, so long as you're not leaning on anything. Now straighten your back - not to the point where you feel like a human two-by-four, but straight enough that you can imagine your vertebrae sitting on top of each other. If you feel like you're craning your shoulders or hips into some bird-like position, cut it out. Just relax.

You know how when a bus slides to a halt the people on it go round and round shift forwards? Or how you slide backwards when your car's going up a hill or around a wide turn? That force is what you're going to work against. It is your invisible set of dumbbells. Pick a neutral spot where you can sit comfortably. Generally I try to make sure my back is at least a few inches away from the back of the chair. Anytime you feel those invisible dumbbells pulling you backwards or to the side, resist them. Don't lean, but do your best to stay in that neutral spot. You'll feel everything from your calves to neck flex, but especially your lower tummy and crotch muscles.

I won't make any concrete promises - "You'll gain X amount of abs in X number of weeks!" - but  this is way less work than Kegal exercises and I know from experience that if you do this every time you're in a moving vehicle, plus mind your posture whenever you sit, you'll gain a pretty excellent gut from it.

Now about those crunches.

Remember:

1) Relax, but sit up straight. Pretend your spine is threaded through a string attached to the ceiling (eww). Fight vehicle momentum!

2) Kegals are good for you even though I pick on them.

Flexing impressively,
-Leah

If I Lived In Manitoba I'd Make Red River Jokes

OR

Dealing With "That Time of The Month" in Cheaper and Greener Ways

Being a queer and gender-fluid woman, I like to try to write and speak inclusively. Despite the fact that I still can't seem to get a grip on alternative pronouns, if you were born a dude but you're actually a chick, or don't accept/fit the gender binary, that's totally cool with me (we should hang out sometime). This being said:

THOSE OF YOU WHO DO NOT HAVE BODILY PARTS (besides noses) THAT LEAK BLOOD EVERY MONTH OR SO ARE EXCUSED. YOU MAY GO. FEEL FREE TO RUN TO ANOTHER ROOM, CLOSE YOUR EYES, BLAST LOUD MUSIC, AND PLUG YOUR EARS WHILE SINGING "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Everybody else, get cozy. Today's post is personal.

Ladies, gentlemen, persons, we're all familiar with That Time of The Month. Aunt Flo. Shark Week. The Monthly Gift. Whatever other stupidly quaint names some goof thought up to make our periods easier to explain during the equally quaintly-named "The Talk". 99.9% of us detest the inconvenience, mess, pain, and awkward moments where we have to politely convey why we can't have sex with our significant others or go swimming with our prepubescent best friends. The other .1% are lying.

Periods mess a person up. Folks experiencing "that time of the month" pop ibuprofen like it's candy, wear the most ugly, slouchy sweatpants in public, eat comfort foods with complete disregard for their health, and explode into tears at otherwise relaxed disagreements. They carry bags filled with an arsenal of "napkins" and wear them with a pride comparable to that of an adult in diapers.

Then there are the commercials. Even outside Shark Week their cheerfulness is agitating. Who wears white bikinis during their period? What stagnant vampire of a woman bleeds blue? How come there's never a hazard alert on the ad, like with American drug commercials? "WARNING: sanitary napkins come wrapped in plastic that crinkles with a deafening sound comparable a forbidden midnight snack Cheetos bag and may be as obnoxiously coloured as a windbreaker from the 1980's. Do not store in small pockets or purses unless you wish to alert everyone who walks behind you of your condition. May cause discomfort, irritability, embarrassment, and possibly shame. Use as directed."

In a sense it's kind of cool - we can sync up with the moon and each other and have a Shark Week Team Marathon. Ancient cultures had goddesses and special prayers and ceremonies for when their young women had their first period. For a whole week (and sometimes a week before and after) you can eat whatever you want with reckless abandon and receive pity instead of judgement. You can... umm...

The cons outweigh the pros, obviously. 

One of the worst parts is "cleaning up the mess", so to speak. Tampons are tricky to master, impossible to get out, and leave room for mortifying "There is a string coming out of your bathing suit in this photo," moments (and let's not forget the bread mold story). Pads are about as close to Pampers as a teenager wants to get; they're bulky, smelly, and prone to leaks, plus they keep you from being certain kinds of physically active and can make it sound like you're carrying a garbage bag between your legs. 

Then there's the waste. Twenty billion pads, tampons, and applicators are sent to the landfill each year in North America alone. A single person will throw out, give or take, sixteen-thousand eight hundred menstrual products in their lifetime. Even if you were the most hippie hippie to ever hippie but still used conventional pads/liners/tampons, you'd be a huge hand in the destruction of the planet's resources. That's fun to think about.

Now the good news! I'm going to introduce you to two products that have saved me close to $200CND since this time last year and completely spared me the crinkling, leaking, and embarrassing photo ops of the two most common options, and they are the Divacup and cloth pads. (I sound like a bad internet scam. Sorry.)

The Divacup

The Divacup* is a little bell-shaped piece of silicone that admittedly is a little intimidating at first glance ("Will this even fit in me?"), but it is the single best thing I have ever invested $40 in. Like a tampon, it scoots up inside your vagina and vacuum-seals itself in place to catch all the blood. You pull it out with your fingers and empty the contents into a toilet every few hours, then you rinse/wash it and pop it back inside. That's it. No crinkles or applicators or risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome. It doesn't contain any weird PVC, plastic, BPA, or latex. While the website recommends you change your cup every year or so, these things can actually last up to ten years. On a low-flow day, it can stay inside you for up to twelve hours. All sports are accessible (although I've heard that advanced yoga poses can undo the vacuum seal). It is, by far, the most comfortable thing I've ever used for Aunt Flo's visit. I've actually forgotten it's in there multiple times. You can run around naked if you want, and nobody's able to tell you're on your monthly (though I really don't suggest you run around in the nude, at least not in public).

The only downside I've experienced thus far is that the little thing tends to be uncomfortable when you've got super bad cramps. There's just not enough space for all those Kegals plus a rubber cup. 

That's where the pads come in. In the same way that cloth diapers are suddenly in style, so should be cloth pads. You can get fancy organic name-brand versions like Lunapads, but there are cheaper ones sold in stores like Venus Envy and tons of people sell them on Etsy, too. If you're really gutsy or can't afford to buy them, you can make them yourself. There are tutorials and patterns all over the internet. I put in a weak attempt once using fleece, but didn't have the drive to try until I succeeded in something that wasn't bulky, so I just saved up and bought mine from a lady in the States who uses the money for her son's college fund.

Cloth pads are super cute, can be made to custom sizes, are washable, and breathe better than any regular pad. They can be folded up to look like a cloth wallet or something instead of sitting in your bag as a big obvious neon square. They're generally soft (kind of like wearing comfy crotch pajamas) and are free of weird chemical absorbing agents. They work just as well as the conventional kind, and if you've ever gotten super itchy down below during your period, they're 90% likely to fix that. Cloth pads too can last for ten years or longer, depending on how well you take care of them.

The adorable cloth pads and liners I got in the mail!

Both of these items look like big expenses up front, and for someone living paycheck-to-paycheck, they are. But in the long run these initial $40 and $70 investments can save you thousands of dollars and tons of waste. I highly, highly suggest you pick up a Divacup or equivalent menstrual cup and some cloth pad liners/pads. They have totally changed how I and my shark brain-shaped ovaries (I bet you were wondering where "Shark Week" came from) see each other.

On the other hand, there are people who just can't deal with a cup of their own blood or washing pads. That's okay. There are still cleaner options for those of you who were affected by the "hippiest hippie" comment. Organic, chemical-free, and unbleached tampons and disposable pads exist - take a look around! You'll be saving precious resources and sparing yourself crotch-exposure to really unhealthy irritants.

Just think:

1) A $40 menstrual cup or $70 set of cloth pads can save you an average of almost $200 a year (estimating $10/month for pads and $6/month for liners)!

2) Cloth diapers make for less diaper rash in babies. Cloth pads... well, you get the idea. 

3) I CAN'T EVEN EXPRESS HOW COMFORTABLE DIVACUPS ARE.

Awkwardly,

-Leah

*There are actually many different brands of menstrual cups, and they range in price and time period of usefulness. Some are only good for one shot (what's the point?), while others are made to last for years. I suggest the Divacup because it's the only one I've tried and it's the most widely available. You can order it online or buy it in local stores. Venus Envy and Pete's Frootique both carry them.

A Note On Orts

OR

Wasting Not When You're Already Wasting Not

Don't you just hate when people give you conflicting messages? I know I do. "We really want you to get an education!" say the universities, "But we're going to charge you thousands of dollars to do so!" or, "As a charity, we want to provide the funds to help these unfortunate people live/heal," say the TV ads, "But we're going to keep 89% of the money we get for advertising!" Mixed messages are frustrating because they're oxymoronic; you tell me to do one thing, but then tell me something that is the complete opposite, yet you say both are true? What do you mean?

Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a hypocrite and a wee bit forgetful. Today, whilst making soup, I realized I'd forgot to mention something regarding the construction of stock, and wanted to reiterate so we were all on the same page. I'm about to deliver a few mixed messages of my own. (But I promise I'll try to make them clear.) Sorry.

Orts are an old 15th century English word for "morsels from a meal" or "scraps", the same things I've been telling you to scrounge whenever you can from other people's houses and your own finished meals. They are the bones, decorate pieces (lettuce leaves, parsley), vegetable tray and sandwich platter leftovers. They are the bits that nobody else knows what to do with, and plans to throw out. But we say "nay!" (I'm getting a little too into this old English crap, I think) and take them back to our own kitchens to construct new foods out of.

In my How To Make Stock post - which was not called that at all - I noted that my mother never cooks the meat (in animal-based soups) with the bones and cartilage while making broth. This is a tried-and-true method of keeping your meaty bits tasty. When you boil something, you suck all the nutrients and taste out of it and force them into the water like a bad swimming teacher. So if you boil the crap out of bones that still have the meat on them, strain the lot of it, then pick the meat off the bones and throw it back into the soup, the meat is going to be pretty tasteless. Therefore, if you're making a meat-based soup, always pick the good parts off before you cook the bones.

Now's where I contradict myself.

Exhibit A: Separated broth and chicken
 bones/sweet potato peelings

The other day I was at my parents and we had a roast chicken for dinner. Mom had already taken the majority of meat off the bird bones, and had no desire to make broth. "I can always go buy another bird," she said. Not all of us are that lucky. So I asked if I could have the orts of the meal - the chicken scraps. They sat in my freezer for a few days, then I cooked them up (along with some veggie scraps) and made myself a stock. Once I'd strained my finished stock, I realized the bones still had a fair bit of meat on them. Therefore I contradicted what I'd said a few posts ago, picked the meat off, and threw it back in the pot.

There is a reason for my madness. The meat may be mostly tasteless at this point, but it is still edible. I decided against using the potato peels (even though they're fine to eat once they've been cooked), but I saved the meat because it's crazy expensive, I wanted something to help fill up the pot, and it becomes one of the two main filling-bits in the soup as the main source of protein. (New potatoes were the main source of carbohydrates, if anyone was wondering.)

The short version:

Exhibit B: Chicken meat separated from the bones.

1) Keep the majority of your meat out of broth preparation, but if there's meat left on the bones you've boiled, pick it off and put it back in the pot.

2) Always take free leftover meat bits (if you include them in your diet). They are expensive, they contain useful nutrients, and these foods are too resource-intensive to be wasting. It takes much more food, oil, and energy to produce meat than it does for grains or plants. Chucking useful bits of meat into the trash is a middle-finger salute to the Earth and the poor animal that was dinner. (This being said, animal products, especially those raised the conventional way, can contain antibiotics, hormones, adrenaline, bacteria, and are harder than plants for your body to digest, which is why I stick to broths. They also leave an acidic residue in your alkaline intestinal tract. Go easy on the animal products for their health and yours.)

Controversially,
- Leah

Special GF Recipe: Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup

OR

The Three-Ingredient Autumn Dinner

(Being as GF now knows I've been writing about her - and she likes the alternate name, because it reminds her of Final Fantasy VIII - she's agreed to write recipes for my blog! This is good news for both you and I, because I can't cook well/don't measure with recipes and she's a cutie. This is one of my favourite soups she makes. It's super simple and is both light and filling. I've put it in a bottle and had it as a drink before for travel convenience. Adding the ginger in makes it to die for.)

(Sorry, I didn't have a photo of the soup from when it was last made.
This is it frozen.)

Hi everybody! GF here with on of my many delicious recipes! Today it's going to be a... drum-roll, please! Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup! Or SPACS! That sounded and looked better in my head. Don't care! Rolling with it!

So, to create your SPACS you'll need the following items:

- A big pot (or a small one. Depends how much soup you want.)

- 2 large bowls

- Large carrots (5-20, again depending how much soup you want.)

- 1-3 Large sweet potatoes (more soup = more potatoes)

- A small chunk of ginger root (optional - it's great for flus and colds and icky feels)

- Wooden spoon/plastic ladle

- Peeler and a knife

- 1L or 1-2 cans of stock (I usually use beef)

Now that you've assembled your stuff, we begin!

Step One: Peel your carrots and potatoes! If you're using it, peel a tiny chunk of ginger, too.

Step Two: Cut your vegetables into chunks! Small chunks are best. 

Step Three: Toss your vegetables (ginger too) into your pot and add water! You want the veggies to be totally covered with about a third more.

Step Four: Boil them babies! (Don't cover the pot!)

Step Five: When your carrots and potatoes are super soft (super duper soft) remove the pot from the heat. Carefully scoop the veggies into a large bowl. If you used ginger, that can go in your compost bin now. Pour the (now orange) water you boiled your stuff in into another large bowl. (Got that? One bowl has boiled veggies, the other has orange broth.)

Step Six: Pureé/mash your vegetables! It's easier to do in smaller amounts and with the leftover liquid. Scoop some of the orange broth into whatever you're using to mash or blend you veggies (blender, bowl) and then toss the smushed up stuff back into your pot!

Step Seven: Once your veggies have been turned to glop and are in your pot you can, should you wish, add some more of your broth - but not too much, because you're going to pour in the entire carton/cans of your liquid stock! All of it!

Step Eight: Gently heat and stir your soup for about 20 minutes, then serve! 

Bonus: your leftover carrot broth can now be stored and used as a soup base or cooking broth! Try using it to cook your Rice and Lentils instead of just plain water. Yum!

(P.S:

1) There are such things as rainbow carrots. That was terrible English. Feel free to use purple, yellow, or white carrots (not parsnips, although I'm sure they'd be yummy) in place of orange ones for this recipe! Your soup might have more of a brown colour, bit it'll still taste the same - and it'll have the added benefits of different phytonutrients!

2) You don't have to have a big, powerful Vita-mix to make cream soups - we use a little Magic Bullet. A potato masher also works, although it'll be chunkier.)

Enjoy!

- GF (and Leah)