I am very, very happy to tell you that one of my short stories will appear in Avery 7. The last time I had the pleasure of sharing this type of news with you was Fall 2005 when I got word that “go” had been accepted by failbetter.

Why such a long stretch between acceptances? Well…I’m a better novelist than short story writer. I need the room to spread out, to build up layers. It’s what works best for my voice most of the time, so it’s where I put my energy. I never sit down intending to write a short story. Every so often a story will just kind of…spill out when I sit down to write. And then I’ll spend the next year or so poking at it once in a while when I need a breather from whatever novel is in progress until the story either comes together or falls apart. Maybe once a year, if I’m lucky, a story will prove good enough to be submitted to literary magazines. And you know what? It’s hard to get a piece accepted by a good journal. (I’m picky about where I submit. It’s not like I have a ton of stories to put out there.)

So here I am, five and a half years between acceptances. It was totally worth the wait. Avery! Very exciting. It’s set to pub in early June. I’ll let you know when it’s available.

She must. Otherwise spring would be more springlike, wouldn’t it? The last two days have been lovely, sunny and warmish, but before that it was cold and rain and more cold and hail. Way more rain than we’re supposed to get even here. High winds tore down our cloches and two sowings of spring seeds drowned without that protection. Bah humbug.

I resowed a second time and the broccoli raab and lettuces are making a go of it, but the beets seem to have decided not to germinate at all. Again. I think I’m giving up on beets. I have yet to have any luck at all with them.

We’re having better luck with the plants I sowed in late summer and fall to overwinter and crop now. We’ve got purple sprouting broccoli, collards, two kinds of kale, spinach, and lettuce ready to eat now. Here was the harvest for dinner the other day:

Radishes, snow and snap peas, and spring spinach are all growing nicely, though a ways away from giving us food yet. The asparagus is coming up and the artichoke is coming back! That’s pretty damn exciting. Last winter my pet artichoke froze and died, so I’m thrilled to have this one sending its silvery spikes up now. It looks like an alien forcing its way out of the ground. I should head out there with the camera or something, hunh? Maybe I’ll do that later when the little lady wakes up from her nap.

Is it just us, or has the weather been weird everywhere? What’s going on in your garden?

Ladybug had her first birthday on March 31st. I didn’t manage to mark the occasion here because we were back east visiting family sans wireless. The lucky baby had two birthday parties, so she could celebrate with her New Jersey family and her NYC family. My amazingly talented sister-in-law took some photos at the Jersey party, on the actual birthday:

We had a wonderful visit, and got to see most of my family and a good part of Billy’s. The kids got to bond with their cousins. I even managed to steal away for a few hours to see some of my knitters, who I’ve missed awfully. The only downside to living in Portland is being so far away from the people we love, and then having to try to parcel out bits of our time on our short visits back east. Up to now I’ve been seeing one group of friends on one visit, another group on another, etc, but this lets so much time pass between each visit. I’ve got to find a better way of managing these trips, because I can’t keep letting three years pass between visits with my friends. And there are so many more who I didn’t get to see on this trip! I may just have to lure them out here to Portland one by one.

Okay, so we had a light frost last night and we could see our breath this morning when I took Thumper to school, but we got some of the spring seeds into the garden this weekend so doesn’t that kind of make it spring? A little bit?

I love sowing the spring garden. It’s the most hopeful act, poking those little seeds into the cold, wet dirt, trusting the ground will warm up soon enough that the seeds don’t just rot. I’ve been dreaming of snow peas and radishes since I planned the spring garden in January.

There was the usual child labor involved.

One raked:

The other supervised the sowing:

And Billy got more work handed to him than he bargained for. I kind of forgot that he couldn’t read my mind–or files on my computer that I didn’t show him–when I did that garden planning. We got out into the yard on Saturday and set to work and…oh…whoops! “Honey, didn’t I mention that I need you to rig up a new cloche to cover the big L-shaped back bed? It means carrots, beets, arugula, pac choi, and lettuces a full month earlier! Don’t you want that? You can’t tell me you don’t want that! How much work could it be?”

Yeah. So he had his hands full. He got it done, though, and with materials at hand. It wouldn’t be enough protection in the winter, but it will definitely fit the bill for the month or so we need it for spring plants.

Ladybug was happy to supervise for a while, but not for as long as it took to get all the seeds sown. (Billy’s the garden engineer and the soil-turner-overer, cover-crop-turner-underer. I’m the designated sower.) I managed to get all the carrots and beets in and half the arugula in under that cloched back L. I also got all the broccoli raab and the snow peas done, which is what I was sowing in those pictures. That bed is now cloched, for the benefit of the raab. That one already had the cloche structure, so no extra work there. The back bed closest to the house was sown with radishes–Cherry Belle and daikon. I left the middle third empty to do succession sowings of the Cherry Belles. They don’t need any protection.

I still need to get the rest of the arugula in, and the pac choi and the lettuces, all under that back cloche. Then I need to get spinach and more arugula sown, uncloched. And the snap peas.

The overwintered purple sprouting broccoli should start to crop soon, and the winter kale and collards plants are growing again. We ate the last of the cabbage last night. (It must be spring if we’ve finished all the cabbage, right?!) Looking forward to buying much less of our produce very soon.

I’m doing something different this season, which I wish I’d thought to do sooner. Rather than plant just for us and give some veggies away to neighbors when we’ve got way more than we need, I’ve planted extra rows of carrots and beets specifically to give away either to a food bank or to a person or family who needs it. I’m going to plant extra pac choi, lettuces, and peas as well. I’ll plant extra rows of several crops each season going forward to give away. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do so before.

From November 1988 to August 2010, I was a vegetarian. From June 1995 to somewhere in 2000—I can’t recall exactly—I was vegan. For two of those vegan years, I also avoided wheat and sugar. Sounds pretty healthy, right? Not so much. As a vegan I was skinny and tired. I bruised easily and caught any cold or flu that passed my way. I got weird skin rashes. A growing obsession with yogurt led to the end of the vegan years and my health got better.

I took this as proof that a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet was exactly right for me. I was pretty smug about it—was sure that my choices made me more or less cancer- and heart-attack-proof. Behold the Incredible Immortal Vegetarian! Oh, the blinding glow of her good health! Oh the stupefying wonder of her righteousness!

(Yeah. Aren’t smug vegetarians awesome? Having now been on the receiving end of vegetarian sanctimony as a newly minted omnivore, I’d like to take a moment to apologize for all the obnoxious things I said over the years about eating meat, and the even more obnoxious things I thought but didn’t dare say.)

This past summer I read some books and started rethinking my diet. It occurred to me for the first time that removing myself from my place in the food chain might not actually be the healthiest choice—that perhaps my body actually NEEDS meat to truly thrive. That was…confusing. It was threatening. It took several months before I was ready to admit I might want to change. I gave it a try, started to eat meat, and started to feel much, much better. I hadn’t known I was feeling poorly, but apparently I was. After feeling the way my body felt after eating animal flesh, I realized I’d been exhausted for years. Not to mention the constant, desperate hunger. The feeling of never, ever being sated, of never getting enough fat, enough energy… The random, free-floating anxiety. I’d been starving myself for twenty-two years.

Okay. My body needs meat. Now what?

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This bag, see?

What do you think? Momish?

I was in Goodwill the other day and I had a store credit to burn, and as I walked through the bag-and-shoes section to get to the bedding section (where one can occasionally score a handmade quilt for $14) it occurred to me that I haven’t carried a purse since I was thirteen years old. Somewhere around there I decided purses weren’t cool and switched over to a very, very cool Sesame Street lunchbox. (Yeah. I was THAT girl.) Then it was a series of backpacks and messenger bags and totes. There was a glorious turtle backpack bought for $3 at the Stuyvestant Town flea market in ’99 or thereabouts that I carried on my first date with Billy. It was a turtle shell, so I felt like a turtle when I wore it and this pleased me. (Why did this please me? That’s hard to explain.)

Billy hated that turtle backpack, though obviously it didn’t keep him from dating me and then marrying me. And as a show of my love for him, I donated it to the Salvation Army in the great stuff-editing that happened when we moved to Portland. (I still miss that damn backpack.) Billy hated that backpack because I would wear it when we went out. I didn’t have any purses, no nice, simple grown-up bags. This bothered him. He wouldn’t refuse to be seen with me with the turtle backpack. It just…bugged him. I can respect that. I guess.

So there I was in Goodwill and I saw a bag that I liked. An actual purse that I liked. And I had this store credit. And I thought, “Poor Billy has been so good and uncomplaining about the fact that I have met his colleagues and patients and friends and family carrying either a gray backpack or a blaze-orange Strand tote bag. I should get this bag so I can look a little more pulled together when the situation calls for it.” See how thoughtful I was? Nice, right? You all should have such a wife.

He got home that evening and I showed him the bag and told him why I got it. I was rather pleased with myself. And then the conversation went like this:

Billy: “Um…That’s a mom bag.”
Me: “I’m a mom. And what’s a mom bag?”
Billy: “Your mom would pick out something like that.”
Me: “My mom has good taste. What’s a mom bag?”
Billy: “It’s just not…sexy.”

Okay. So let’s set aside the fact that most of us moms became moms by HAVING SEX, so what is so unsexy about moms? We’ll just ignore that right now. But what is it that makes this bag unsexy? Is it because it’s practical? Because it will hold more than a lipstick (which I don’t wear) and a condom (which my tied tubes laugh at)? Is THAT it?

You know what, dear husband? I AM a mom. And we don’t go out without the kids right now because the baby is too young. So even when I need to look “pulled toegther” I need a bag that can hold at the very least:

two diapers
a sippy cup
a baggie of almonds for kiddo
a baggie of O’s for the baby
one apple for each of us
whatever small toy is most favored by each kid at any given moment
a washcloth
or two

And then MAYBE also, oh…I don’t know…my wallet, the camera, my phone. And some index cards and a pen in case I get an idea and actually have a free hand to jot it down.

Okay. So maybe it IS a mom bag. You know what? If “Mom Bag” = Practical, I’m okay with that. It’s a pretty good time in my life to be practical.

I’m all ready to go.

The baby recently grew into the robot vest I made for Kiddo when he was her age. (FYI: It’s my Blank Canvas Vest pattern, and the robot chart is included.) She couldn’t care less whether there’s a robot on it or not, but Kiddo certainly does. He wants it back, but won’t even fit over his head. So he’s requested a new one. A BETTER one than that old handmedown his sister has.

He’s had a vision of the perfect sweater vest, and nothing else will do: A robot on the front and stripes on the back. Same colors as his old one. It’s especially important that the robot have red eyes. Which is to say, stay tuned for actual knitting content around here in the coming weeks as I try to get the vest banged out before winter ends.

I got all worked up about those cholesterol numbers, then Holly commented on the previous post that she believed breastfeeding elevates cholesterol levels. So I did some googling, and you know what? She’s right. (My readers save the day again. I love you guys.)

A study published in JAMA showed that cholesterol levels are elevated in pregnant and lactating women, and recommends that doctors NOT check lipids in lactating patients.

This does not mean that I’m running out to gorge on ice cream. I’m still going to follow through with all those changes because it feels like the right way to take care of my body regardless of my cholesterol. And I’m not taking it to mean that I’m totally in the clear. All it means is that we have no way of knowing what my true cholesterol levels are until Ladybug weans. Thumper nursed until he was 3 years and three months old, so if she’s like her brother we’re looking at another two+ years before I could have an accurate cholesterol test. I’ve been pregnant and/or lactating since September 2005, so I may as well just call these numbers my version of normal for now.

I’m going to send the link to my doctor. But I’m also going to keep up the exercise and watch the food. I’ll take this little scare as the inspiration. Five pregnancies, two live births via c-section, a pretty serious diastasis that needs healing… Time to give this poor old body its strength back.

First, because it’s dull as dirt to listen to someone else go on about medical stuff and diet etc, here’s a picture of my kid feeding some ducks. (Because what’s more interesting than pictures of someone else’s kid feeding ducks?)

Those of you who’ve been around for a while, or who know me in the real world, may have noticed that I’m not so good with doing things halfway. It’s why my yarn stash grew to embarrassing proportions in the first year that I was knitting; why (well, part of why) I started baking and canning and from that decided that I needed to bake ALL of our bread and make ALL of our jam and pickles (I had to let go of that, thanks to Ms. Ladybug, but that’s angst for another day); why when I started eating meat again after twenty-two years I went from nibbling on a chicken leg one day to looking for pulled pork recipes the next.

Meat! I love meat! My brain feels better when I eat meat. My body feels better when I eat meat. But…now here’s a shocker…you can have too much of a good thing.

I know, right? I was shocked to hear that, too.

Yeah, so I had my annual checkup last week, and had a fasting blood draw. I was curious to see where my cholesterol levels would be now that I’m eating meat, but I wasn’t concerned. This past Sunday we went out for a crazily meat-heavy Balkan meal with friends and on the walk home I told Billy, “You know…I think I’m all set with meat for a while.” I felt heavy and slow. My energy felt all clogged up and gummy. Gross. When we got home I drew up the week’s meal plan to be mostly vegetarian and very heavy on raw vegetables. (I’ve been obsessed with raw kale and red cabbage salads all winter. Mmmmm….) I resolved to start juicing vegetables again, and to ask Norma about that Clean program she’s been doing, because I have a long and successful history of doing what Norma tells me to. (A detox isn’t a good idea while breastfeeding, but I’ve ordered the Clean book for some of the veggie smoothie recipes.)

The next day, Monday, I got the results of the bloodwork back. You know where this is going, right? High cholesterol. Like, alarmingly high. The breakdown:
Total: 241
Triglycerides: 94
HDL: 67
LDL: 167

So the triglycerides are normal and the HDL, the “good” cholesterol, is good. But the LDL, yeah…that should be under 130. When I got the results I thought I remembered my cholesterol always being fine before. I thought they’d checked it when I was pregnant last year when they did my CBC. Turns out that’s a different test that doesn’t include lipids, and so I don’t think my cholesterol has been checked in about a decade. So…it may very well be the meat, or it may be that it’s been creeping up for a few years. Either way, the numbers right now show that I’m not in balance.

(And yes, how meaningful or meaningless cholesterol is is totally up for debate right now, and I’ve read studies on both sides and let’s just say that I’m confused. And that my dad died of a heart attack at fifty with low cholesterol and my mom is doing just fine with high cholesterol, but still…)

Still around? You wonderful person. Here. Have another picture before we dive into my plan to get back into balance.

This duck was insanely beautiful from the front but it kept turning its head the moment I’d snap its photo. Still, I love the way it looks like it’s glowing here.

Okay, so back to my clogged up old bod. Bloodwork aside, the way I was feeling after that heavy meal on Sunday (and the eating that came before it in the past few weeks) tells me everything I need to know about how my choices are working out. If you ask me how my diet is, my first instinct is to say it’s great. I eat lots of fresh vegetables, eat grass-fed beef, pastured pork and eggs and dairy. And that’s true. But there are also the exceptions. Always the exceptions… Like the past three weeks when the kids were both sick and Billy and I were both sleep deprived and stressed and I was up super late every night working on a freelance job and too tired from that and from taking care of two sick kids to cook several nights each week and so there was pizza for dinner twice, and Burgerville for dinner twice (it may be local, sustainable, and not factory farmed, but it’s still fast food). And then there was the day I was feeling sorry for myself (just one day, Cari?) because I was tired and rundown from staying up late proofreading a really bad novel that will soon be published by a major house and already has a movie deal and WHYTHISBOOKANDNOTMINE?!?! and so I ate a whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s cheesecake brownie by myself because THAT’LL SHOW THEM! (Yeah, won’t they feel so bad for rejecting my novel when I’m fat and dead from a heart attack?). Exceptions. Otherwise my diet is exemplary.

Clearly the exceptions need to be managed. I do my best when I hold myself accountable, when I keep a food log so I can see exactly what I’m eating rather than kid myself about how good my diet is when really I’ve had ice cream twice in one week, steak for dinner and the leftovers for lunch the next day, followed by pizza with bacon and chicken and fucking cream sauce on Friday.

I’m only ten pounds over my fighting weight right now, but my body fat percentage (we’ve got one of those scales that measures that) is in the obese range. I didn’t exercise enough during my pregnancy with Ladybug, then couldn’t really exercise leading up to my surgery in December. I think the cholesterol numbers may have more to do with the fact that I’m totally unfit than anything else. That’s got me alarmed. With my family history, I need to take good care of the Big Machine, as Lizbon calls it. I started working out regularly again in mid-January and am determined to keep that going. How does a mom of two very young kids work out regularly? 30-Day Shred. I’m not a big exercise dvd fan, but this one is, honestly and truly, a lot of fun. And no matter how badly the baby is sleeping, or how tight my work deadline is, I can always find time for a twenty-minute workout. But that doesn’t mean I always do. I started out strong, doing it five nights a week, but in the same weeks that I found myself eating pizza with bacon and cream sauce and going out for fast food, I let too many workouts slip by too. Funny how those things go together, hunh?

So here’s the plan:

I will work out five nights a week. I’m saying it here so I can’t squirrel out of it. Feel free to bug me about it and hold me accountable. I think this is the most important part of the plan.

I’ve started keeping a food log again. I’m not limiting calories at all, because I’m breastfeeding, and because I don’t really need to lose weight. I’ll be using the log to see that I’m consistently making good food choices. I’m basing my choices on an anti-inflammation diet, because it just makes good sense to me, especially with my family history of heart disease and strokes. I use Fitday for logging, and for tracking my exercise, because it’s free.

I’ll limit red meat to once a week, and make sure it’s only the good grass-fed stuff we’ve got in the chest freezer. No more Burgerville, alas. (It’s probably the fries and shake that really got me, but I don’t need the bun or the mayo-based sauce either, do I?)

I don’t think meat is all of the problem here. I think it’s that I added meat to my diet without cutting back on the other dietary fat I was already taking in–namely dairy. I don’t do well on dairy. I know that. I feel so much better without it. But I LOVE dairy. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that cheese naturally contains an opiate-like chemical. I’m going to cut out cheese and milk; watch how much butter I cook with, though not eliminate it; and limit ice cream (oh, how I love ice cream!) to a special treat only once a month. No more pizza. I don’t do well with the cheese or the dough.

Yeah…about that dough. I know I get bloated and cranky when I eat too much wheat. It’s time I actually do something about that. No, I’m not going gluten-free. I am going to seriously limit how much flour I eat, though. So, limiting bread, pasta, baked goods. (Now I’m starting to panic. Limiting baked goods?! Oh god…)

I’ve been drinking a whole pot of decaf coffee a day because it’s decaf so “I can.” No, I can’t. That’s a hell of a lot of acid, plus I add whole milk to each cup. I’ll treat myself to a decaf Americano from time to time when I’m out and about, but at home I’m switching over to decaf green tea.

At least two kinds of vegetables on the table for every dinner. Vegetables with every lunch. An easy one, that we’re mostly doing already. To that I’m going to add one vegetable juice with ginger each day.

Sardines or herring three times a week. Mmm….herring and sardines…

I bought fish oil capsules months ago. Now I’m actually taking them.

Um…is that it? I think that’s it. That’s enough.

Have you had cholesterol issues? How are you dealing with them? I’m a bit spooked by those numbers and am open to advice.

This gardening thing…I can’t say I’ve quite got it all figured out just yet. Check back in about twenty years and I’ll probably have things pretty well worked out by then. See, when I sowed the seeds for the fall and winter garden back in mid July, I was confident that I had planned for a bounty of vegetables to carry us through the cold months. This would be the year when I didn’t have to buy a single vegetable.

Yeah. Bonus points for optimism, right? Or would that be hubris? Because we’ve been buying vegetables to supplement our meager harvests since December. (Possibly earlier. It’s all blurry now. I think I’ve blocked it out.) Last year was our first attempt at four-season gardening, and even with a severe freeze that killed off all the spinach and chard and mustards and all but one variety of kale, we came through the winter with more food in the garden than we could eat. The kale actually matured enough to go to seed. (And the flower buds were pretty tasty. Kind of like broccoli, which isn’t all that surprising since they’re cousins.)

When I planned for this winter, I added some variety that we missed last year in the form of collards, cabbage, and lettuces, and gave a hybrid broccoli a try, but I based the amounts on last year, because we’d had more than enough food. What did I forget? That I was pregnant last winter and the mere thought of strong-flavored vegetables (um…as in ALL winter greens) made me ill. On top of that, I didn’t have a lot of energy for cooking. We had a ton of kale left over at the end of the season because we barely ate from the garden.

It might have been helpful to remember this when I was planning for this year. As it is, we ate everything down to stubby little nubs by December. December and January are the dead months in the garden in our part of the world. Growth slows way down. So there’s been no regrowth on what we ate. It’s been cabbage and lettuce from the garden–though we’ve now eaten all the lettuce–and the rest has come from the store. (But oh man, what cabbage! It’s amazing! Sweet and spicy… Nothing at all like store-bought cabbage–even organic store-bought.)

Now that we’re in February the plants will start to grow again and hopefully the garden will be feeding us more and more until we get properly back on track in spring with the overwintered broccoli raabs, the asparagus, and the early peas and radishes.

I sorted through the seed packets tonight to see what I had held over from past seasons and what I needed to order. Cherry Belle radishes, Sorrento broccoli raab, Tyee spinach… Maybe this spring I’ll finally get it exactly right.