I am always oscillating in the summer. Should I treat it like a vacation, in which I can take the time to linger over an extra cup of coffee and a 9x9 KenKen? Or should I treat it like the Getting Stuff Done window in which I have enough space in my head to deal with complicated tasks?
Tuesday was a Getting Stuff Done kind of day, in which I dealt with a dozen different annoyances and loose ends. But then on Wednesday I was tired, and today I was still tired. I have done a bunch of KenKens instead of following up on the annoyances and loose ends.
I have discovered over the years that produce makes me productive. The single biggest determinant of my ability to be happily engaged with the attention-sucking stuff in my life is a diet in which my vegetable consumption dwarfs my simple carb consumption.
Fourteen years ago I blogged about my first Vegetable Project. I had 20 pounds of baby weight to lose and I resolved that I would address the problem with vegetables. It was a pretty simple plan: five servings of vegetables and a gallon of water every day, with no refined sugar. (I was tandem-nursing my two youngest children in a minimally air-conditioned house, which is why my water consumption was so high.) In 30 days I lost 13 pounds and, to my surprise, found myself full of zip and determination.
In the years since then I have tried a whole bunch of different food strategies -- ten rounds of the Whole 30 and a number of variations thereupon. But you know, the original Vegetable Project offered the benefits of simplicity and sustainability; the Whole 30 is neither simple nor sustainable. And here is a weird downside to the Whole 30: it makes me so eager to Get Stuff Done that I become impatient with the people in my life who are less focused on ticking to-do list boxes. So my plan is to Eat All The Vegetables (and none of the sugar), and see what happens.
So many things have changed since I wrote those first Vegetable Project posts. The baby I was snuggling that summer is now a teenager, though he is still curled up right next to me as I write this post. In the middle of that month I wrote a post that got way more attention than expected -- thousands of hits and dozens of comments. In those days I thought I wanted more traffic, but then I got a taste of the wackadoodlery that ensues when you get more traffic. Nooooo thank you on the traffic!
I do miss the way people would read a long post in 2005, and write something thoughtful about it instead of reading the first sentence and posting a .gif in response. I am reading Mark Shea's By What Authority, first written in the late 90s, in which he talks about the potential of the internet to educate and unify. I did not foresee its potential to dumb down and polarize.
Today I got an email that was intended for Melanie of The Wine Dark Sea, complimenting her on her lovely blog but sent to my email address. It made me wonder if the author had some sort of ongoing address/content mismatch-- perhaps she sent an email to Melanie about Mrs. Darwin, and an email to Mrs. Darwin about me.
Hmm, the later parts of this post don't have much to do with the beginning of this post. I will now tie them together: blogging = GOOD. Vegetables = ALSO GOOD. Refined carbohydrates and mean people on the internet = NOT GOOD. Vegetable updates to follow soon! The end!
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