Melt Down

Years ago I spent two weeks in what they call, “Bush Alaska.”  An area that is all tundra, forty miles from the Bering Sea.  The town of Bethel is on the banks of the Kuskokwim River and has no trees and lots of big mosquitoes.  The only way to get there is by plane or boat, and I would not recommended it as a vacation destination.

The town was settled in 1884 by Moravian missionaries and grew into a support center for 50 some villages along the river. It is now a town of 5,000.  It’s usually 50 below zero in winter, and can get down to 110 below, which will kill you. The summers are only a few months long, with a rare high of 70 degrees.  Being blessed with a sunny day in the summer, also means getting cursed by the dust coming off the roads, because only seven of their twenty miles of roads are paved.  It’s not fun being covered in dust.

The whole reason I went there was to visit my husband.  Kory volunteered six weeks of his time that summer as a construction supervisor, building a house for the Director of Christian Education for the Alaskan Moravian Church.  I found the way they build houses up there to be quite interesting.

Bethel, and much of Alaska, sits atop perma-frost tundra.  The ground, two feet down, is frozen solid year round.  In the summer, just the top layer melts and boots are a necessity to go for a walk, as every step sinks into the muck.  Boardwalks are all over town, as the muck gets pretty deep.

Before they build a house, they set 20 foot posts down 16 feet into the perma-frost for the foundation, then lay beams across the posts, and build the house up from there. They need four to five feet of space between the house and the ground it sits on, otherwise the constant contact with the heat from the house would melt the perma-frost and the house would sink into the muck. The buffer zone under the foundation is crutial.  The very thought of that turned my mind toward motherhood.

The way I figure it, every mother is the “foundation” of the home.  She’s pretty much the one that holds things together and keeps track of details, but just like the houses in Bethel, she’s not meant to be in constant contact with everything or surely there will be a melt-down. This is why mothers need a break – a buffer zone - whether it’s just a cup of coffee with a friend, a trip to the spa, or a weekend away. 

I remembered these houses in Bethel this past week as I was trying to figure out how to propose to my husband the fact a girlfriend called to ask if I wanted to go with her to Jamaica.  I implied if a melt-down is going to happen, it’s best done on a warm beach far from home. 

The Challenge

I took up “The Challenge” presented in The Engine 2 Diet by Rip Esselstyn several weeks back by going fat free vegan for 28 days, just to see how I felt by simply changing what I ate.  The challenge was actually more than just eating plant-based foods, it also included exercise and giving up things like coffee, sugar and white flour. 

Wondering exactly what does make a person feel better, in particular, me, I decided to modify the challenge a bit so I could zero in on which element of these radical changes has the biggest impact.  I was sure if I ate healthier and exercised, I’d feel better, so I split it up and just did the diet part first.

The book claimed that my cholesterol levels would decrease, so I had my blood checked before the challenge began and again five weeks later.  I know exercise decreases cholesterol levels, so I was careful not to do any that crazy stuff during those weeks.

I’m happy to report that, just on diet change alone, my cholesterol number dropped 50 points - from 228 to 178.  My body also happened to drop nine pounds in the process, which is no small miracle, and a very pleasant side benefit.

Surprisingly, eating just plant-based foods kept me plenty full, so I never went hungry nor felt deprived. I was amazed that sugar cravings never kicked in and the lack of caffeine never give me a headache.  I felt perfectly content, if not a bit smug, throughout my initial test. 

I’m cooking fat free vegan for my husband anyway, just to keep the man alive, since his arteries seem to clog up at the mere sight of fatty foods.  But for me, this was just a little scientific experiment to see what would happen if I stayed on his diet.

The hardest part of the whole challenge was eating out.  Even when we ordered things with no added oils, our wishes weren’t always met.  I’d say 95% of the time, I was true to the diet limitations, but the few times I had no control over it, I ate the food anyway.  I stayed away from all dairy, sweets, and animals though.  We were in Southern California for a week during this time period and were rewarded with several amazing vegan restaurant options.  What a treat.

I do feel more energetic than when I started, and I joked that the measurement I’d use to see if I felt “better” would be that I’d actually pick something up if I dropped it.  Since phase one ended, my son has constantly dropped things in front of me, just to see what I’d do.  I’m not sure if it’s the food I’m eating, or the fact there’s nine less pounds between me and the floor, but I certainly don’t hesitate to pick things up.

Now comes phase two of the challenge – to actually do some exercise while maintaining the diet.  Who knows what the future holds.

My Bathrobe

The cold snap we had last week was a good excuse to stay in my bathrobe.  It’s just so darn cuddly and warm, and the thought of having to get dressed never seemed like a good one.  I’ll use any excuse I can find, as I don’t own any clothes that are as comfortable as my full length, long sleeved, polar fleece, snap-up bathrobe.   There’s freedom in that thing.

I’ve worn far too many items of clothing that drain all my brainpower.  If there’s a pinch somewhere, or the waist isn’t sitting just right, or the tag makes my back itch, it’s all I can think about and my brain gets totally focused on that one little irritant and I lose track of all other thoughts.  I’m so much more creative when my clothes don’t cause a distraction.  I now understand why my grandma wore a moo-moo around all day, as it just makes sense.  To heck with fashion or making a statement, we just want comfort.

I’m not sure men have the same problem with clothes that we women do.  Men’s clothes are honestly sized so they just walk in, buy their clothes down to the half-inch neck size and walk out.  They don’t even need to try things on.  Women’s clothes, on the other hand, are never measured the same, nor cut the same, nor fit the same.  It’s a necessity to try on clothes as the sizing labels are never believable.  Some clothing manufacturers found they sold more clothes by marking their size 16 as 14 so women felt better about wearing a smaller size.  Are we really that vain?

I love that we live in the Northwest where what we wear isn’t a major concern.  I have to say though, when I’m out in public and see people wearing pajama bottoms, I think we’ve gone a little too far, but at least we aren’t as uptight as those in other parts of America. 

I was talking to a young woman that spent her first year of college in Chicago but dropped out because she couldn’t stand the “culture” there. “They were just so uptight about everything,” she said, “especially clothes.”  The few times she wore sweat pants to class, people gave her a rather puzzled look then with a nervous smile said things like, “Good for you,” as if she were bucking some seriously ingrained clothing norms.

I’ve long ago given up any sense of style or desire to be a fashionista in the wardrobe department.  All I care about is being comfortable, even if it means not wearing a bra because the constant itch from the straps drive me nuts.  I recently got rid of some pants that just never felt right and seemed to put me in a bad mood when I wore them.  They gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “crabby pants.”  

I wonder how many disputes might be solved in this world if people just showed up in their bathrobes.  

Money

Even though my son is homeschooled, I now must “outsource” all his education as he has surpassed my abilities to teach him anything.  Because I’m not the one dishing out his grades, I decided to pay him for his performance in that area.  The semester just ended, and it cost me a pretty penny.

We’ve never paid Kaleb for doing chores, as no one pays me when I do them.  Life is never going to be free from chores so I figured it would send the wrong message.  Grades, on the other hand, are worth paying for.  It seems to me they are the closest thing to having a job, since they reflect hard work.  Besides, even if I pay hundreds of dollars every year for good grades, I may not have to pay as much for college if he then qualifies for scholarships. Sometimes I think his motivation isn’t so much to get straight A’s, as it is to break the bank.

Since Kaleb was young, we established a money management system where he only gets to spend twenty-five percent of what he gets – whether it’s from gifts, work, or grades.  All his money has to be divided into fourths. He gives away one quarter of his cash, saves a quarter for a car, college, or something in the near future and invests a quarter in something he can’t touch until he’s at least 50.  I figure his generation will never see Social Security so he has to start early, saving for retirement.  He’s now reached the thousand dollar mark in his savings account, and his investment portfolio is quite diverse – everything from savings bonds, stocks and foreign currency to precious metals and gems.  He lost a bundle in the stock market when Washington Mutual went belly up, but it was a good lesson to learn at such a young age.  There are no guarantees.

Money is one of those things people tend to not want to talk about, but I think it’s such a disservice to our kids if we don’t.  We keep a pretty tight household budget and the question often comes up as to how we will pay for something.  When we go on vacations, we sometimes have to make tough decisions in order to stay on budget. 

Kaleb has learned how to budget.  Before he even gets money in hand, he’s figured out how he will spend nearly every dollar he’ll receive.  He moans about the fact he can only spend twenty five percent, yet I point out that no adults I know have that much of their paycheck available for free spending.  Get used to it. 

The only downside to this whole money management system is when our car was dirty one day I offered to pay him five bucks if he’d wash it.  He figured out he’d only get to spend $1.25 of it, so he declined.  

It appears my system isn’t accomplishing all that I’d hoped in teaching him about hard work.

Storage

My husband, Kory, can fix or build anything just using materials he has lying around.  I often refer to him as “MacGyver,” the character on TV years ago that seemed like he was able to build nuclear bombs out of bubble gum and paperclips.  It’s like that with Kory.

When Kaleb was a year old and Christmas was approaching, Kory went down to his workshop in the basement and whipped up one of the coolest rocking horses I’ve seen.  He used lumber he’d rescued from another project, made the saddle out of an old tool belt, and frayed the mane and tail from rope that was lying around.  It’s a work of art. 

Our bathroom now has a marble floor because Kory rescued those heavy slabs from the dumpster years ago on a job he was working in downtown Seattle. 

Kaleb now has a cool zip line using cables Kory was given after he helped reroof the Kingdome.

Kory also built Kaleb a pretty cool two-story playhouse, fashioned after a Norwegian “stabbur” (storage shed), with trees he’d scrounged from windfall.  Same thing with the log cabin style bed he made for Kaleb for his second Christmas.

This is the upside of Kory’s special “gift.”  The downside, of course, is storage.  That man won’t part with a thing if he thinks it will come in handy someday. 

If there’s ever an argument in our house, it usually revolves around storage.  I have the closets upstairs packed to the rafters with holiday decorations, crafts, photo albums and what-not’s, but if I dare bring a box of anything down to the basement, all the love my husband feels for me gets lost in the panic that arises in him that I might be infringing on some of his storage space.

I point out that he not only has the basement, but the entire double car garage, which we had to build an addition on to just for lawn care items because they wouldn’t fit in the garage.  I also remind him that he has the whole shed we built, and it’s lean-to, where we were supposed to stack firewood, but now is full of larger pieces of building material he doesn’t want to get wet.  Then we had to rainproof under the deck so he could slide lumber under there because he ran out of space in the garage and shed.  It never ends with him and his lumber hoarding.  But I try not to complain, because he actually does use the materials, and he is a very handy guy to have around.

Kory is very pleased with himself when he can build something that costs him nothing.  He gets a good laugh out of the whole “green” movement where we’re supposed to reduce, reuse, recycle.  It’s now politically correct to do what he’s been doing his entire life.  The difference is he doesn’t do it to be politically correct, he does it because he’s cheap and he won’t part with a buck.