Sourdough Bread

Mmmmm. Bread. Bonnie and I have been trying to save money, and one big expense has been our grocery/food budget. We've slowly started bringing it down with a variety of tactics, but one thing that has been driving both of us nuts is the price of bread. Your options seem to be either cheap ($1 per loaf) bread that has no taste or substance, or expensive ($2 or $2.50 up to $4) bread that tastes good but kills the wallet.

No more I say! We decided to start making our own bread, and since we didn't want to spend an exorbitant amount on yeast (it really adds up when you're using it two or three times a week), we decided to make sourdough. Best decision ever. The sourdough bread that we make at home tastes better than the expensive stuff, and costs less than the cheap stuff. My math says that it costs us about $0.25 per loaf with sourdough. In addition, we've also made some sourdough pizza crusts with the starter that you'd normally discard, so that has saved us even more. Honestly, if you're willing to put in a little time and effort with the sourdough, you can save a lot of money every month. So today I'm grateful for sourdough. It's seriously the best.

Cheap Books

The Bloomington Library had a sale on books this weekend. Bonnie and I spent about 5 dollars. We got a couple of large hardback books, and about 15 children's book for Lydia (10 cents each. woot). Bonnie and I both enjoy reading, so any time we can get books for cheap we always try to grab some.

I suppose in a broader sense I'm grateful for books and the joy that I've gotten over the years from my love of reading. I'm grateful that I was raised in a family that read, and I'm grateful that I learned to read early (well before preschool). Bonnie and I have four bookshelves in our living room, and we have frequently gotten the comment from people that they love the way that our books look. It seems to be a design thing for them. These people never comment on what books we have, just that we have and display books. And honestly they never seem to consider that the books might be more than just nice decor for us. I'm grateful that the books on our shelves are more than just nice to look at. They're something that we use and treasure.

Seeds (Did you know that they actually grow?)

Bonnie and I have been wanting to try growing some of our own food for a while now, but we've always lived in apartments. Of course we know that people use planters an grow stuff in their windows, but we've just never been good at that sort of thing. Well, we decided to give it a try this year, so we bought some pots and a planter. We decided to grow things straight from seed, instead of buying the already started plants.

Now, I've studied biology quite a bit. I was planning on going to medical school, so I took a lot of science courses during my undergrad. I understand how seeds work and how they grow. Intellectually I grasp the concept of how they work, but when Bonnie and I saw how small the seeds actually were, we both looked at each other not quite believing that they'd actually grow. Well on Saturday I went up to water the things, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but some tiny green shoots and something that rhymes with appear.

I guess it's a human thing that even though you intellectually know something is true, it can be hard to act on that knowledge without your own experience. Well, if you haven't heard it already, I can tell you that seeds actually do grow, and I'm grateful for that.

Hidden Treasures of Knowledge, Part Deux

So yesterday I was talking about being a vegetarian. Here is why the specifically has made me grateful. Let me start with the Word of Wisdom. There is a promise at the end of it:

"And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones;

"And shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures;
"And shall run and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint."

Pretty straightforward, right? Basically you'll be blessed both body and mind. This story is how I realized some of that being fulfilled. My family came to visit in February, and my Grandma's (we call her Gran, which I will use from now on) favorite thing that she ate while she here was Steak & Shake. If you don't already know, it's basically a chain restaurant. It's kind of a diner place, so it falls somewhere between Wendy's and Olive Garden in price and quality. Probably closer to the Wendy's end of the spectrum.

Gran is a very generous person, and I am her favorite grandchild (due to singing at her retirement community almost every month for a couple of years). She was incredibly kind and gave Bonnie and me some money to go out to Steak & Shake (since I hadn't been able to go because of rehearsal I think) to celebrate the anniversary of our engagement in March. We hadn't gotten the chance to go yet, but decided to go on Friday night.

Since she had specified how we were to use the gift, we decided to suspend our vegetarian restrictions and just eat meat for the meal. I think we were both excited to have some meat, since it had been a few weeks, and we both agreed that the food tasted really great. It was amazing while we were eating it, but as soon as we got most of the way through the meal, we both realized that we had stopped enjoying it quite so much.

Here's the problem: when you're eating vegetarian, most everything is really light. For some reason you don't feel compelled to have these out-of-control proportions. In addition, you just feel really good. I can't explain it, but it just feels like everything is working well in your body. You don't feel heavy. After that meal though, both of us felt really heavy sluggish. You might say that it's because our bodies weren't used to having much meat anymore, but we both distinctly remembered the feeling we were having. It was the feeling we used to use to gauge when to stop eating. We used to eat with that feeling as a goal. Now it had just become unpleasant. It's not that we don't like meat anymore, it's just that we've learned how to control ourselves, and more importantly we understand why it's important to eat meat "sparingly."

Before I go on too much about this, I do want to say one more time how much I appreciate the gift that Gran gave to me and Bonnie. She went and really enjoyed herself and wanted us to have the same great experience. To be honest we did have a great time going out to eat together and having a date. I don't want to take anything away from the gift we were given. I'm not critiquing the gift. I just wanted to share something about the realizations that Bonnie and I had while we were out to eat. I could have just as easily have happened at a backyard barbecue or a pizza party, it just happened to occur here. Now back to the meat of the post.

I'm sitting here writing this on Friday at 1:00 am (so I guess it's actually Saturday). I ate hours ago and I still feel like there is a great brick sitting inside me. Eating vegetarian actually makes you feel better. So, for this whole weekend I'm grateful for hidden treasures of knowledge. Had I not felt inspired to try cutting meat out of my diet while the weather is warm, I would never have known how good you can feel by eating more healthy and by following the Word of Wisdom more closely.

Hidden Treasures of Knowledge

Look at me! Three posts in a row! It's a three-peat, though probably not the most impressive one in history. So this post has a bit of a back story (is that hyphenated?) to it. My wife and I were reading the Doctrine and Covenants a few months ago (if I haven't already mentioned it, we're Mormons). We consider the Doctrine and Covenants to be scripture, like the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Anyway, back to the story, we were reading what we call the Word of Wisdom. It's basically the reason that Mormons don't drink coffee or alcohol, don't smoke, and don't do drugs. There are lots of don't but there are also some important do's there. Here is the section that caught our eye:

And again, verily I say unto you, all wholesome herbs God hath ordained for the constitution, nature, and use of man—
Every herb in the season thereof, and every fruit in the season thereof; all these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving.

Okay, pretty good so far. Use fruits, vegetables, and wholesome herbs.

Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly;

Alright, meat is there for the use of man, but you should use it sparingly. Now here is where I usually stopped paying attention, but there is a little more on the subject of meat in the next verse.

And it is pleasing unto me that they should not be used, only in times of winter, or of cold, or famine.

Hmmm. Okay, so if I read that right, the Lord says that it's better if you don't eat meat, except in more extreme circumstances. So we read this, and neither of us were particularly happy about it, since we both love meat. We were both raised in families where dinner was based around the meat. We frequently say things like "everything's better with bacon." Regardless of all of that, we both read that and felt like we should try to live a little closer to what that said. With that in mind, we decided to try being seasonal vegetarians.

We read this in the middle of winter, so we figured that we had some time to gather some good vegetarian recipes and figure out how to do it healthily, but more quickly than we expected our meat days ran out. We actually built up to it slowly so that by the time that our official day came we were already basically eating vegetarian anyway. Honestly it has gone really well, much better than I expected. Regardless, we are several weeks into the experiment and we are loving it.

I was going to tell this whole story in one post, but I hate massive walls of text, so I'll pick this up tomorrow. Just remember these things: Word of Wisdom, we like meat, we are now vegetarian, and the youtube video is rabbits eating because I knew a guy who referred to all vegetables with disdain as "rabbit food."

Weather

So, an amazing thing happened. I actually got to walk around without my coat. I know, it's amazing. Seriously though, weather is just a cool thing. I'm amazed that the planet is able to keep itself in perfect balance between hot and cold. The Earth is the perfect distance from the sun, it revolves and rotates at the right speeds so that we get day and night, summer and winter. And while it can get uncomfortably hot or cold, it never really gets out of the range that humans can't find a way to live there. The world is pretty amazing when you think about it.

I'm a slackface...

But I'm getting back on the wagon here. Yes, it's been a few weeks since my last post. I kept thinking about the blog, but I was really sick and was having trouble being grateful. Remember how I said I'm a bit of an ingrate? Yeah, that's pretty much true. Anyway, here is a new post for today where I recommit myself to doing this.

I'm grateful today that I went to a University that has a high standard of morality. I attended BYU for my undergrad, and as they were just eliminated from the NCAA tournament, let me take a moment to say that I'm glad they stuck by their guns on the Brandon Davies issue. Considering how close the game was, I feel like BYU had a very good chance of pulling out a victory if they had Davies playing, but at BYU it's more important to do the right thing than to get money or national acclaim. I'm proud to come from that culture, which is so radically different than other places. Way to go BYU.

Sesame Street

When I was not a parent, I often listened to and cared what experts said about raising your children. Now I know that it's more about experimenting and finding something that works. And by "works" I mean "will get you through the next month, or week, or day, ...or 10 minutes." One thing that experts say is that you should absolutely not let your kids see television until they are at least 2 years old. From what I can gather from the way that things are presented to me, if Lydia looks at a tv before she turns two, her eyes will never focus properly, she'll lose the ability to have normal face-to-face interactions with others, and she'll essentially be destined for a life on the streets because of my bad parenting.

Now Lydia has had a bad cold for the past day or two, meaning that she's miserable and she spends a lot of time screaming, crying, and wiping snot all over her face and hair. And also our clothes. This is where Sesame Street comes in. You can get all sorts of clips and songs on the internet, and when I put her in my lap and turn on Sesame Street, suddenly she is happy and smiling. She even danced along to some of the songs. So thank you Sesame Street for getting us through at least an hour or two of a long day, even though she is not two yet. Hopefully my child can still be a productive member of society.

Passionate, Knowlegeable Teachers

Today I'm grateful for teachers who are passionate and knowledgeable about what they do. You need to have both of course. Teachers with only one or the other come off as foolish or inaccessible. The first kind can't teach you, and you won't learn from the second.

But you occasionally get a teacher who has both of those things, and those are the teachers you remember. For instance my seventh grade English teacher was like that. I always liked her, and I remember complaining the next year to her about how I disliked my eighth grade English teacher. I had a variety of hard-hitting criticism for her (as only a teenager can have) and specifically mentioned that I hated the books we were studying. We weren't even doing a Shakespeare that year. She then said that if I were interested, she would be happy to discuss a Shakespeare of my choosing with me during some of her lunch breaks. I took her up on that and had a great time reading and talking about Hamlet with her.

Another example, of all the classes that I have ever taken in school, I consider my organic chemistry classes in college to be easily one of the top three best courses I could have taken. My teacher had such an innovative way of presenting the material that I still retain much of what I learned in that class. He focused on making sure that we understood the concepts that we needed, not on memorization. Often he actively discouraged memorization saying that if we learned and internalized the concept then we would be able to figure out the specifics of a problem. He practiced this philosophy on his tests; on the last page of the exam there would be a large, intricate problem using the concepts that we were taught, but often applying them in a totally new way. You would have to spend the bulk of the time in the test just trying to understand and apply what you'd learned to the new content you were looking at. Now, this may sound like he's being too hard or cruel, after the test on his own time, he would meet with each student in the class personally (offering to give you some bonus points if you came to see him so that nearly everyone did) and go over the test question by question making sure that you had the concepts firmly in your mind. That is why he was a great teacher, he expected a lot out of you, but he did everything in his power to make sure that you could achieve that.

Finally for the last example (there are many more, but this post is getting to be too long already), we have my Song Literature teacher. I would consider him both a mentor and a colleague at this point in my studies, but just today I was standing around on campus and he walked by. He stopped and we had an excellent discussion on performance and style in Neapolitan song, as well as the use of portamento and appoggiatura in Mozart. You may or may not care about these things, but the fact that he was willing to spend time with me out of class and talk about a subject that I am interested in was very meaningful to me and got me thinking about some of my other favorite teachers.

So today I am grateful for the teachers who have had an impact on me.

New Music

Right now I'm part of IU's Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Now, if you know me well, you also know that I'm frequently less than thrilled with one thing or another about the choir. In fact we have a few weeks off from choir right now and I'm really enjoying it. But even though I gripe about it, the reality is that much of the music that we've done I've actually enjoyed.

I'm also in rehearsals for Vincent, a new opera commissioned by IU, so I'll be part of a world premier, which is pretty cool. Vincent is another thing a little bit like CVE. I'll gripe about it, but it's growing on me. I think I'll actually enjoy it more and more as time goes on.

So today I'm grateful for new music. Sometimes it's weird, sometimes it sounds horrible, sometimes the composers don't know anything about healthy writing for the voice. Sometimes you have to make ridiculous noises and call it art. But sometimes the composers and performers find something new, something exciting, and ultimately something meaningful and touching.

Third Time's the Charm

This is not a recommendation of this brownie mix. I just liked the picture, though now that I look at the recipe, the mix doesn't look too bad either. I mean, I has more sugar than flour, and it has more than two cups of cocoa. Win.

This is my first post on this blog, but I've previously started two other blogs, which are now basically defunct. The first one was just a collection of thoughts and things I found on the internet. It also included long posts and explanations about a few things that I had strong opinions about at the time. Considering that I'm both somewhat flaky and somewhat unwilling to open myself up completely in writing, that blog was doomed from the beginning.

The second blog that I started was dedicated to writing about death knights in World of Warcraft. There is a serious lack of good death knight blogs, which frequently means that there is a serious lack of good death knights in the game. Regardless, I lost interest in that (the blog, not the game) so that is just sitting there as well.

In the name of full disclosure there have been two other attempts, but those were so short that I don't really count them. Besides, if I titled this post "fifth time's the charm," it would look even worse than it already does.

So here is the plan: I'm a bit of an ingrate. I'd like to change that. The plan is to hop on here every day or so and just take a minute to find something to be grateful about that day. As my English teachers used to say, I should show, not tell you things, so I'll make this entry number one.

Today I am grateful for brownies. My wife and I are trying to be healthier in life, so we've been eating less meat, more fruits and vegetables, fewer sweets, etc. I made some vegetarian stir fry for dinner tonight (which was surprisingly good), and then I had to go to rehearsal for several hours after that. When I got home my wife threw some brownies in the oven so that she could take some to a friend who she'd been meaning to bring something to. Of course she didn't bring the whole pan, so we happily ruined our healthy eating for the day and gorged ourselves on brownies. They hit the spot for me (I have a bad habit of getting a midnight snack). So in conclusion, brownies=awesome.