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?