Eating on $5 a Day - Monday

My friend Felicia and I have challenged ourselves to spend no more than $5 per day per person on food this week. I'm up for the challenge!

Here are copies of my grocery receipts, just for the record.

Here's today's food:

Breakfast
6 oz. glass of OJ w/calcium .33
1/2 cup of organic yogurt .31
1/4 cup of organic granola .19
1/2 huge banana .13
Coffee w/organic soy creamer .39
Total: $1.35

Wordless Wednesday

Biophilia

"...I think we have a further obligation. It is to develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be done to the land not so that people can survive, but so that a relatively few people can amass wealth." -- Barry Lopez

Meditating about meditation

"We are in fact, not physical beings who have a spiritual life, but spiritual beings who have a physical life." -- Paul Townsend

New start

I've given up on the whole Yankee in the South idea for this blog. I never kept up with it in the first place, plus I've lived here for almost 18 years, so the novelty has worn off.


My current project will be to chronicle my attempt to live a healthy, balanced life, in tune with the seasons and in synchrony with nature (we'll see how that turns out!), while my husband tries to convince me that we should have macaroni and cheese for dinner every night of the week.

First story in this vein--I love Teavana. I went to the store in Park Plaza Mall for the first time last weekend, and spent way too much money. How could I not? They had so many great teas! Plus I bought another matcha bowl, and a cute tea set with a retro-looking bird pattern.

Anyway, green tea is healthy, so it was a good thing.

If you've ever been to Teavana, you might think the tea is way too expensive--$8 to $22 for just 2 oz.? No way, right? Well, I figured it out, per cup, and it's actually cheaper than boxed tea in bags.

If you look at a box of tea in your cupboard, you'll see it only contains between 1.25 and 1.5 oz of tea in the whole box, with 15 to 20 tea bags. Let's say, for the sake of this argument, that you bought your box of tea at a health food store, for the bargain price of $4 for 18 bags. (I'm using a box of Yogi Tea that I actually bought at Whole Foods as the example.) That works out to about 22 cents per cup.

Now, let's say you also bought 2 oz. of loose tea from pricey Teavana for $12. First off, by doing the math, you'll see that 2 oz. will make 24 cups of tea, as compared to 18 from that 1.5 oz box. BUT, most of the tea for sale at Teavana can be brewed up to three times if you store it in the fridge (for up to 24 hours) after you brew it the first time. So, if you drink tea regularly, every day, you will get 72 cups of tea out of that 2 oz., which works out to approximately 16 cents per cup. Ta-da! Your husband can't get mad when you explain that you actually saved money by buying tea that costs $96 per pound!


Just don't buy a whole pound at once, because you'll probably never use it all before it gets stale.

To be clear, I do not work for Teavana. I was really only trying to justify my purchase, after the fact, and the justification came out so well in my favor, that I had to share, in case anyone else needs some tea-habit support.

Happy sipping!

Daily Little Rock-ing on Tour: Route 66, Day 1

We did not have a laptop with us after all, so now I'll try to go back and re-create the trip.

Saturday, May 12, 2007: From Little Rock, AR, to Oklahoma City, OK, where we picked up Route 66 to Amarillo, TX

This stretch goes through a lot of farmland.

Our maps and directions on where to find and follow Route 66 weren't that great, so we did a lot of turning around on this day. We drove back and forth on one stretch of road three times before being able to figure out where Route 66 picked up on the other side of a highway that crossed it. It looked like some new road construction had taken place since our maps were printed, Good thing it was pretty here!

This is a 28-span bridge we crossed in Oklahoma, after driving around for a while looking for the road.

Windmills in Oklahoma, closing in on the Texas border. Both of the above photos were taken from a moving car. We had stopped a lot earlier, not realizing we would be eating up a lot of time getting lost. ;)

On this day, when we turned around on a side street one of the many times we couldn't find the road, a pack of barking dogs chased us back to the highway. Little did we know at the time, but packs of barking dogs would be a recurring theme on our trip.

Linda didn't get out of the car too much the first day, since she became convinced before we even started the trip that she would be bitten by a rattlesnake. We saw bees, packs of dogs, a couple roadrunners, one antelope, and a slew of farm animals, but no rattlesnakes. In fact, the only snakes we ever saw were smooshed ones in the road.

Tags: Route 66, Travel, Road Trip

Daily Little Rock-ing on Tour

Starting Saturday, Daily Little Rock-ing will hit the road -- the Mother Road, that is.

Assuming the laptop-borrowing situation does not fall through and  Internet access is available, updates will be made from various points on Route 66, between Oklahoma City and Santa Monica.

Yes, I realize I haven't updated in more than a year. Eh, so what? Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

Tags: travel, Route 66, Little Rock, Arkansas

Home opener

Did everyone go to the home opening game for the Travs? Yes, they lost, but it was still a great game! If you like the Travelers, you should check out the best Travs blog on the Web: Travelerocity. Go take a look, even though the blogger hasn't returned the favor by adding a link to my blog (but has no problem e-mailing me "friendly" reminders to update!)

 

Another one bites the dust

These are scans of manipulated Polaroid SX-70 prints. The first photo was taken/manipulated about two weeks ago. The second one was done a couple of years ago. Polaroid has stopped making SX-70 film, so whatever is on the market now is all that is left. No more photo-squishing fun for me! If anyone finds any boxes/cartons/crates of SX-70 anywhere, let me know!

No observations, astute or otherwise, today. Just something I've been debating with myself: Is Pee Wee Herman scarier as a doll, or as a live human?

Ice, ice everywhere but nary a chunk to keep my food cold

I'm sure everyone has stopped checking for entries here (all three people who ever read this blog), but surprise! Here I am again.

I cheated with the photo above--it is not from the most recent Little Rock "ice storm;" it's from 2000, when we really had some ice.

And on that note...a little bit of advice for Little Rock drivers (except me, of course): If you don't know how to drive on ice, STAY HOME. Thank you.

Now, I should explain that icy roads in Little Rock are a lot more dangerous than icy roads in Peabody, Mass., because in Peabody, the sand trucks are eventually going to come along and soon you'll be driving on brown mush instead of ice. Here, if you don't see a sand truck ahead of you, and there isn't one looming in your rearview mirror, ain't none coming.

Oh, I saw a couple of the trucks driving down the street when the sleet started late Friday/early Saturday, but they weren't spewing any sand out the back. I don't know what they were doing. Enjoying the scenery, I guess.

If you live in Little Rock and only drive on ice once every two to three years, yet absolutely insist on going out to get that six-pack of PBR you forgot when you went out for bread-milk-eggs-and-oh-yeah-corndogs-will-be-yummy-when-we're-iced-in,heed this advice:

1. If you're going to brake, brake to slow down before you get to the ice. Brakes don't work on ice. You slide.

2. If you're already sliding on ice, don't step on the gas. Acceleration doesn't work on ice. You slide more.

3. If you have 4-wheel-drive, practice when it's warm and sunny, so you'll know what to do when it's icy.

4. If you own a pick-up or SUV, stay home so you don't wreck my car with it.

I couldn't believe the first winter I was here and we got, oh, 8 inches of snow. I was driving to work and saw all these abandoned pick-up trucks slid off the side of the road; so many that I thought it must be a joke or some kind of Southern "yay it's snowing" tradition. Nope. The drivers just didn't know what they were doing. You don't even want to hear about the SUV's I've seen flipped upside down.

Shouldn't natural selection have killed off all these people by now?

So, in other exciting news, my refrigerator quit working today. I have all my food in two friends' refrigerator/freezers until it is repaired. Which is funny, because it's been warm all winter until this weekend, when it actually dropped below freezing. Yet my freezer won't keep anything colder than 50. I realize I could just put everything in my car and it would stay chilled, but who wants to drive around with a grocery store in the back seat?

Oh, what wonders will tomorrow bring?

Infrared

I wish they had "sleepy" listed as a mood, because that's what I'm feeling right now.

I'm taking an infrared photography workshop at the Arts Center. The photo above is of a little shack behind a burned-out nursing home on Highway 5, going toward Hot Springs. The photo needs some work (haven't been to the darkroom yet, just scanned the negative), but I still like the way it looks. I think I'll need to burn a few more rolls of film before I start to get the hang of this.

 

White Christmas (almost)

It's actually snowing two days before Christmas. In Little Rock!

As soon as it started, everybody downtown decided they needed to leave work and go home. They got in their cars, and it was worse than rush hour traffic. It took people 20 minutes to drive 4 blocks, and 2 hours to drive 3 miles. They probably bought the stores out of bread and milk, too, for a 3-inch snow that'll be gone tomorrow.

On days like this (and there aren't many) I'm glad I live a four-minute walk from where I work!

Race for the Cure

This photo is from last Saturday's Race for the Cure in Little Rock. It had been raining, so there weren't as many people as last year, but still a lot. The view is right after the start line on Broadway, heading toward the Broadway bridge over to North Little Rock. Even with fewer walkers, it still took an hour and a half to go a measley 5k. That's some slow walking, people!

Pine Bluff Film Festival

Visited lovely Pine Bluff, Ark., last night. First we went to dinner, and saw a woman wearing fur-lined boots with her mini skirt and bare legs. Let me remind you that September in Arkansas, and especially in Pine Bluff, is about the same weather as late July/early August in Massachusetts. Not cold enough for fur-lined anything. I suppose some people would disagree.

Anyway, then we went to the Pine Bluff Film Festival and saw Thoroughly Modern Millie, followed by an interview with Carol Channing. She's still funny and told a bunch of hilarious stories.

After the interview, Ms. Channing (who is 83, by the way!) performed some songs from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Hello, Dolly. That's her wearing the red suit and pigtails in the photos above. She even did a little dance with her husband, Harry.

The theater, an old, somewhat-restored one, only held 180 people and it was packed--we sat 3 rows from the back. By the time we waited in line to get our programs autographed and our photos taken, then made the drive back to Little Rock, it was 2 a.m. I was ready to just fall into bed and go to sleep, but no...Sydney had left a little present on the bed. Two yummy fur balls in a puddle of puke that soaked all the way through to the mattress. That was a fun mess to clean up in the wee hours of the morning!

 

Long time, no journaling

Well, I never did put up those photos of Bourbon St., did I? Basically, I just had my friend Linda take pictures of me with every "interesting" person I could find.

The above photo is of the Little Rock skyline as seen from across the Arkansas River, in North Little Rock, which I took last week. I figured, I started this journal with a Little Rock cityscape, I might as well re-start it with one, too.

I'm going to try to keep this up now. Really.

Tomorrow I go to Pine Bluff for the old movie festival. We're just going to see one movie, though, and hoepfully get our pictures taken with Carol Channing. I'm bringing my camera, anyway. We'll see what happens.

Mardi Gras

Went to New Orleans last weekend, for Mardi Gras. I drove down there Friday with my friend Linda, who is from New Orleans, and we came back Tuesday. Free room and board--her brother and sister-in-law live there and were kind enough to invite us to stay at their VERY nice house.

Basically everybody goes to all the parades to get beads, which the people riding on the floats throw to the audience. I don't know why anyone wants beads, but I came home with a bag full of them anyway. They make good cat toys at least.

For the kids, families have these ladders with a big seat on top, so the kids can sit up higher and have a chance of catching some beads. A lot of people (not just the kids) dress up in costumes too, but more so on the actual Mardi Gras day than on the weekend before.

The parades, which went all day every day that we were there, had performers and high school bands marching between the big floats. A variety of people watch the parades, from little babies in strollers to grandparents in lawn chairs. And they all want beads, doubloons, or other "throws." I still don't understand why people want that stuff, but they do. Some people even buy houses or rent apartments specifically because the building is along a parade route, and they watch from their balconies.

The best thing was, it was about 70 degrees out, and the trees already had buds on them. Then I came back to Little Rock, and it snowed again yesterday. Blech.

Next entry--Bourbon Street.

Winter finally showed up

Yep, our one week of winter has hit. It snowed today, a whole two inches, and I saw people walking down to the hill with cardboard boxes to use as sleds. That's the Little Rock version of a Flexible Flyer--open up a cardboard box so it's flat, and try to slide down a hill on it. The snow was so wet, I can't imagine they even made it to the bottom of the hill before the thing fell apart. I tried to take some photos of it, but they came out blurry--I guess I was laughing too hard.

Too Hot for January

It's 76 degrees out today. On January third. Now you know why there are no snow plows in Little Rock.

The "happy" fellow in the picture above is the guy who sits next to me at work. He's been working at the newspaper since 1956, or thereabout. Don't let this happen to you.

I tried to make the picture look like a comic book page, but I think I just succeeded in making it look like there was something wrong with the camera. Oh well.

Happy New Year

Finally, I'm able to update this! Geez, I don't know if it was my computer or AOL, but I couldn't update the normal way, then all of a sudden it started working again.

So, my goal for the lovely new year is to get all my photos organized. This entails scanning in old photos for which I have no negatives, sanning old negs for which I have no photos, sorting through all the photos and negs I do have, and getting a grip on all my digital stuff. So far, I'm up to 1972. Ha!

The photo above is one of the ones I don't have a negative for, that I'm trying to restore. As you can see, the emulsion is turning yellow and disappearing, not to mention the cracks and specks. If you click over to photo number two, you can see what I've done so far. Which isn't much, I know. But I have the rest of the year to finish it, right?  :)

So, did everyone eat their black-eyed peas for good luck today?

What? You don't know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, it's a southern thing. Something about confederate soldiers only having black-eyed peas to eat or something. Seeing how the war turned out for them, I don't exactly understand where the good luck part comes in. I've heard some people put a dime in the peas, and whomever is served the dime has extra-good luck. If he doesn't choke on it, that is.

Pass the hog-jowls, Jim-Bob, I'm hungry.

Well, the journal website doesn't seem to be working very well tonight, so I'm having to add this little message via AIM. Maybe everything will be working properly tomorrow. I'll update as soon as I can, I promise!