Tag: vegan

The Wandering Hermit: Justin & the 10-Day Meal Plan Plan

   30 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Justin & the 10-Day Meal Plan Plan

I’m starting to feel a bit better.  I was reluctant to wake up this morning, but I still just did it anyway.  I’ve got some yard work to do this morning, but I think I might try to get some extra sleep this afternoon.  I have a lot to do this week and I want to make sure I’m fully over whatever has been keeping me lethargic lately.

Justin has decided to do a 10 day diet.  He wants to start on the first.  I think that’s great for him.  He struggles with the permanence of a new way of eating, but he knows he can handle a 10-day diet.  And when that’s over, I think he’ll give himself a few days to go back to normal and then he might resume the 10-day plan as a more permanent situation.  I had been trying to help him do some planning that included all of the things he likes, but that wasn’t working.  He found creative ways to go around the plan and sneak in hundreds of unaccounted calories.  He needs something far more strict.  He is also working uphill a little since one of his medications causes weight gain.  It used to be easy for him to stay thin.  Now he has to work at it, and I think adjusting to that is frustrating.  I totally understand that.  Since he’s doing something strict, I’ll probably be tightening up my own eating for the month.  And I love that.  I’ve gotten a little lazy about food; I’m still basically eating the same way, but I’ve found myself forgetting to record things.  Part of that is that I had started using Cronometer, but I’m back to writing everything down.  I am far more mindful about my diet when I’ve written it all down as I eat it.  Cronometer is a great tool and I still use it for planning out Justin’s meals for the week, but for myself it quickly became a crutch and an excuse.

[Walk #106]

The Wandering Hermit: The Scissortails Exist for Themselves

   18 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: The Scissortails Exist for Themselves

The wind blew like an hyper child this morning.  There were gusts that caught me by surprise almost enough to cause me to lose my footing.  I love the wind, but something about the warm air moving that quickly unnerves me a little bit.  I think it’s possibly just the knowledge of the extreme heat to come, or maybe there is something inherently mischievous about warm winds, a sentience I can perceive.  I prefer a bit of cool air rushing at me.

During my walk I could hear the scissortails chirping in the field on the south side of the road, and my instinct was to say to myself Oh! the scissortails are serenading me on my walk. But then I remembered Alfred Russel Wallace in Papua New Guinea.  He had seen the many species commonly known as birds of paradise and remarked:

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course year by year of being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness—to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty.  Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy.  It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.  This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.  Many of them have no relation to him.  The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyment, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.” (from The Malay Archipelago, 1869)

I thought of that and how these Texas birds of paradise have no use of me, no urge to sing for me.  In fact, on many mornings they might wish I would not disturb their courtships, and they would be correct.  They are a decent enough example of a bird that is not necessarily harmed to a great degree by the presence of humans, but neither are they particularly helped.  I’ve adopted the image of a scissortail as part of my own business because it is a part of the place where I live, a native part of the ecosystem—evolved to thrive here, and I have a lot of respect for that.  So, it’s lovely to hear them chirp to one another at dawn, but I should know my place and stay in it.

My pace continues to improve.  During the second mile of this morning’s walk, I was just under 20 minutes per mile, which is my quickest yet.  I was stomping down the street for sure, but I never felt like I was overdoing it or racing.  I just felt confident in my stride and walked as quickly as I was comfortable.  I went to Brush Creek Rd & back, an the only issue with that route is how flat it is, the flattest of my paths.  It’s hard to get my heart rate up consistently on the one, but I didn’t have that issue this morning.  I thought I had; the strong winds kept my shirt dry, so I was surprised when I finished to see that my heart rate was about the same as yesterday’s when I was just drenched in sweat.  That quick pace probably helped.  

Protein shakes.  What do I do with a protein shake.  So, Justin doesn’t love vegetables as much as I do, so an easy way to address that has been to add protein shakes to his daily meal plans.  He seems to enjoy them.  But I’ve been trying to have them as well (because I won’t ask him to do anything in a meal plan that I won’t do) and I cannot seem to get them to taste quite right… or maybe this is what they always taste like and I just can’t handle it.  I enjoy premade things like Soylent or similar products, but mixing protein powder just doesn’t do it for me.  I want it to do more for me though, so I’m going to keep trying to find ways to make it work.

[Walk #93]

The Wandering Hermit: Geri & The Economy

   7 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Geri & The Economy

It was an absolutely perfect morning for a nice walk.  That said, I did have some trouble getting going.  I actually woke up thinking I might just do indoor aerobics today, which would honestly not be a bad idea, but I’m not sure it needs to replace a morning walk, so I told myself as much and decided that if I was going to do aerobics today, I needed to get in one mile as well.  That was all just fine until I had walked about half a mile, at which time I was warmed up and decided to get both miles in anyway.  And that was a good decision.  The temperature was excellent.

Brad texted me last night; Geri, a friend of mine is in the hospital.  He says she has pneumonia and a shattered wrist.  I’d like more details, but I worry about her; I’ve always worried about her.  I worked with her when I was in high school, and we attended the same church congregation.  My brother Brad eventually married into a family that she was also married into, so he gets updates on the goings-on as part of updates about his ex-wife’s (and now his children’s) family.  I need to go visit. 

I’m increasingly eager to get moved, to move on, to find a new place and way of being.  This will sound like I’m being down on myself, but I don’t think that’s the case.  It’s been so long since I had money that I don’t even understand what to do with it.  Whenever I see other people out and about, my first thought tends to hinge on that person’s relative financial security compared to mine.  And I think I sometimes get frustrated with people who talk about how bad things are for them and their families, especially when they have a home, they have food, access to clean water, the ability to buy essentials, and usually they have a car and a smartphone and spend a bit of money dining out.  I’m not saying they shouldn’t have any of the things they have or not spend money the way they want to spend it.  But I do think we have such a comfortable situation that people have started to mistake a reduction in comfort as discomfort.  It just isn’t.  Not having the excess you once did is probably just fine.  I’m also not really saying that I have it bad.  I don’t have an income, but I do get a small amount of money through some passive means and even I have a smartphone, a home, food, access to clear water, and the ability to buy the essentials.  I just don’t live under the delusion that I am living in poverty.  

[Walk #82] 

Mindful Musings: Their Ecosystem

While I was doing my meditation, I kept getting the thought in my head: “This is their ecosystem, this is their ecosystem, this is their ecosystem….”  On and on and on…. I know it seems a little cliché and silly, but it did come out of my own head.  I feel that way a lot living where I do, plopped like a bag of sand in the middle of so many creatures homes; their ancestral lands.