Category: July 2018

Keto

Keto. Sounds to me like a cute name for a dog. Kai, Rosie, Kira, Keto…but no. It’s actually a nickname for a diet. I first heard of the ketogenic diet years ago, when I was researching autism and read that it sometimes helps with autism symptoms. I believe it was originally primarily used as a last-ditch method to help control severe seizures.

Back in the day, when I first heard about it, it was characterized as “difficult” and even “dangerous”, so I was reluctant to consider giving it a try. Plus, we didn’t used to know that migraines might be a form of seizures. So I didn’t have as much reason to try it.

Recently a friend of mine was talking about being on the keto diet for seizures and it got me thinking that maybe I should look into it. Apparently it’s now used not only for seizures and autism, it’s also used for auto-immune diseases and diabetes. Well, hmmm. Given that ALL of those things are in my family, maybe it is worth a try.

Wikipedia says, “The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that in medicine is used primarily to treat difficult-to-control epilepsy in children. The diet forces the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates.”

That info is a bit outdated. (And why only children?) After doing a little bit of googling, I discovered that a lot of adults are on the keto diet for a variety of health reasons. And keto is now a fad diet for weight loss. There’s a few horror stories out there, but it seems safe enough if you know what you are doing and don’t go crazy with it. I consulted with my sister, Emily, (who is a doctor), and got the thumbs up. So here I go!

My goal is a limit of 25 grams of carbohydrates per day, plus enough fat to maintain my weight, and not too much protein. Just a quick check – I think you all know the difference between a carb and a calorie. Calories are energy units, and I don’t intend to cut down on calories because I’m not trying to lose weight. Carbohydrates (carbs) are organic compounds (sugars and starches) that can be broken down to produce energy. Fat can also be broken down to produce energy (and so can protein). In this case, I want most of my energy to be coming from an intake of fat, rather than an intake of carbs.

There are a couple of reasons why I will be trying to avoid too much protein as well as strictly limiting carbs. The first is, protein can be hard on the body, starting with constipation and moving on from there (or not moving on from there, as the case may be, lol). Also it’s easy to accidentally eat excess protein when cutting out carbs and increasing fat because it’s hard to get enough fat without too much protein.

Eating lots of fat sounds easy until you think about how we tend to eat fat in our culture. We eat fat with sugar (ice cream, mmmm), with grain (cake & donuts! cheese and crackers! peanut butter & jelly sandwiches! grilled cheese!) and with protein (hamburgers, steak and bacon, yum, yum.)

With keto, you can’t eat your fat with sugar or grains, so that leaves eating it with proteins or…vegetables! (Buttered spinach! Whoo-hooo! – or maybe not so much.) Do you see now why it would be easy to quickly end up eating tons of protein? Because it’s hard to eat enough vegetables! Most people like proteins better than vegetables. I sure do.

My objective in life has become figuring out new and exciting ways to eat fat-on-vegetables. I’m not going to bother tracking my fat intake. I’ll just eat as much as I reasonably can. I also won’t track protein. I’ll just try to keep my protein intake down to roughly to where it used to be (realistically, it will be somewhat higher, so I’ll be pushing down on the amount of protein, trying not to eat too much of it). It’s the carbs I’ll be tracking and strictly limiting.

25 grams of carbs per day. This does not mean I can actually eat a little sugar or grain or potato or beans. Nope. I’m going to be struggling to stay under my carb limit just by eating my vegetables and fat. Did you know there are 6 grams of carbs in a single carrot? You actually get to subtract out the grams of fiber to equal your final carb count, but still, carrots have a surprising amount of starches and sugars.

And for example, my favorite kind of jerky has zero sugar. It’s just meat, red chile, salt and garlic (a lot of red chile, it’s the best!). But it still has 1 gram of carbs per every oz. Not a lot, but where does that carb even come from?

Here’s what I won’t be eating on this diet:

  • grains of any sort (bread, rice, pasta, tortillas, etc.)
  • beans and legumes
  • tree nuts
  • root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, etc.)
  • sugar of any sort (this cuts out fruit). A caveat – I can eat very small amounts of low-sugar, high-fiber fruits, like berries. But I mean SMALL amounts. Like 5 blueberries.

I’ll also have to carefully track the carbs in foods that aren’t usually considered carb foods. For example, there are 8 grams of carbs in 6 oz of plain yogurt. Like, why? I think it would be from the sugars naturally occurring in milk? Or maybe most plain yogurts are sweetened. Time to read the labels!

Here’s what I’m eating today:

Breakfast was shredded cabbage with coconut cream and pepitas (shelled pumpkin or squash seeds). I’m estimating 8 grams of carbs in breakfast. Where? Well, there’s a trace amount of shredded carrot in the Trader Joe’s package of shredded green cabbage (along with small amounts of purple cabbage). The little bits of carrot and purple cabbage are presumably for color. Total carbs for the shredded cabbage is 6 g. The pepitas are lower carb than tree nuts, but they’re still 34 grams of carbs per cup. So I used just a little sprinkling of them. And then I topped it with what I thought was a generous amount of coconut cream, but I’m realizing I need to re-evaluate and significantly increase what “generous amount of cream” means.

Lunch is a large amount of  raw baby spinach-chard-kale mix, with my choice of fatty stuff on top (olives, avocado, sausage or bacon, etc.). Cheese is good, but constipating (see earlier paragraph about too much proteins). The salad is then doused with generous amounts of olive oil. I’m also re-evaluating upwards my concept of what a “generous” amount of olive oil is.

Today’s snack was unsweetened cream cheese wrapped in lettuce (3.5 grams carbs per 85 grams cream cheese, not bad). Except I didn’t actually eat that much cream cheese. I’m quickly getting to the point where I’m tired of fats. Unfortunately I forgot to bring to work my snack of “pancakes” I made last night with coconut flour, with which I’m hoping to trick myself into thinking I’m eating carbs when I’m not. Coconut flour has some carbs, but not much. It’s mostly fat and fiber. I figure I can get away with 2 tablespoons of coconut flour per day.

There are test strips available to test whether your body is in ketosis or not, which I plan to buy. My friend (and others on the internet) say they can tell by feel when they switch to ketosis, but either I haven’t switched yet, or I haven’t learned how to tell. I only started on Friday (sort of) and yesterday for reals. By “sort of”, I mean all except the cantaloupe (Wait, is that really how you spell cantaloupe? That’s nuts. Apparently I’ve been spelling it wrong on my grocery list for 30 years until now the right way looks wrong.)  Anyway, right before I decided to start my new diet, I had bought an expensive, organic, perfectly ripe cantaloupe. And darn it if I wasn’t going to eat that thing!

As you’ve probably figured out, this whole project is a big nuisance and a lot of time and effort. I’m also still trying to eat mostly organic. So I’ve got to find, and pay for, and figure out how to cook with, gourmet foods such as organic coconut flour.

John has agreed to go on the diet with me when we’re together, which is usually just the weekends. So it shouldn’t be very hard for him, except I’m not up for going out to restaurants yet. I can’t even think right now about eating out or traveling. One thing at a time – I’ll give it a try and see if it even helps at all.

 

 

 

Our storm

Here’s a video I took Monday evening while standing with a group of about 15 other shoppers in the exit of the local Albertsons. I had just purchased a cake for my coworker’s birthday the next day.

In New Mexico it can rain hard, but is usually over in about 10 minutes. So we are accustomed to just staying put and waiting it out. But this time it showed no sign of slowing down, and the water was rising. And the hail was getting bigger.

Eventually I put the cake on my head and dashed out there. For a moment I couldn’t remember where my car was. And it was hard to see anything. This is not the time to forget where you parked! I imagined everyone standing at the door of the grocery store, watching me dash around in circles in the downpour with a cake on my head. Too bad I don’t have a video of that!

Then came the crazy drive home. I only live a few blocks from the Albertsons, but a big arroyo is between me and the store. All the water from our side of town was rushing through the streets toward that arroyo. My house is only yards from the arroyo – the houses across the street from me are along the arroyo. There was so much water in the air and on the road that I couldn’t even see how deep the water was. I was just stupid-lucky to get home with my car intact.

We had 3.5 inches of rain in 2 hours, which is considered a 1000 year flood. It’s also 1/4 of our average total rainfall for a whole year.

Here’s photos of the water rising in my backyard.

There’s a retention pond a few feet from my house. This photo is taken from my dining room window and it was getting dark, so it’s not a very good photo. The pond was completely full of water and overflowing into my front yard.

In addition to all the water, the storm was extremely loud. I have several skylights and the hail just hammered them. Hail and debris was being thrown against the house.

And then the lightening started.

The lightning worsened until it was continual, with cracks of thunder overlapping each other, making it impossible to even know which thunderclap was from which lightning strike. That’s why I didn’t go take a video of the arroyo. I figured someone else would do it, and sure enough, they did.

This is the arroyo that is less than one block from me. I jog there every week and I’ve never seen any water in it since I moved in last December. (John found this video on youtube. I didn’t take this one!)

Here’s the same arroyo, dry the next morning when I went out to go jogging.

Here’s my house the next morning, splattered with bits of leaves. The wind, rain, and hail shredded the vegetation.

I only ended up with a little bit of water in my master bedroom closet. Some of my coworkers had flooding across their entire first floor of their house. So I was lucky given how close I am to the arroyo.

High and mostly dry:

I’m also one block down from the rodeo grounds. Mud and big clots of horse manure washed into my neighborhood streets.

Luckily my house is a few feet higher than the street, and I didn’t get any horse shit in my yard or in my house! 😛

Have I been ignoring you?

Here’s something John and I discovered. If you’re one of those who have signed up to get an email when I post something, you might then be tempted to reply to that email with your comments to me. It will even look like it goes to “Turning51”. However, it actually goes to a wordpress “no reply” box (ie. it goes nowhere). I’ll never get it. And I don’t know of a way to change that so I would get it.

So if you want to send me comments, you have to send them to my regular email address. I believe all my readers are friends and family, so you should have my email. If not, I guess you can google search me out – I’m sure it’s super easy to figure out who I am.

Santa Fe backyard progress

Sometimes I wonder why in the world John and I work so hard; both with difficult jobs, and I still have a couple coaching clients, and managing our rentals ourselves, and the never ending house projects. But then I look around at the accomplishments and in that moment, it seems worth it.

Here are before and after shots of the backyard at Santa Fe. Although I have to admit that going from winter to summer helped a lot. It wasn’t all our doing!

I also have some larger bushes I’ll add here:

And I’ll plant herbs here in this fantastic raised planter – where Kai can’t pee on them 😛

How our thinking patterns influence our feelings and behavior

First of all, my apologies, this is roughly written. I don’t have time to polish it right now. Someone wants it, so I’m going to go ahead and post it. I may rework it later, but by that time you guys will have already read it (or not read it, as the case may be). Anyway, here it is in draft form.

HOW OUR THINKING PATTERNS INFLUENCE OUR BEHAVIOR

I’m going to start with a few basic premises. Our thoughts impact our emotions. Our thoughts and corresponding emotions together, impact our decisions and our subsequent behavior. Our thoughts can be analyzed and changed to be more useful, although most people don’t know how to do this in any kind of coherent manner.

For example, imagine your brain said, “I’m great at my job! I’m the best employee they’ve got!” What are the resulting emotions? Contentment or happiness, confidence or pride.

What are the likely decisions that come out of that thought-emotion combination? The willingness to get up out of bed and go to work in the morning is one useful result. Also the willingness to try new things at work, to take risks, and to take on daunting tasks.

What about results that are less useful? A person who is thinking they are great at their job might not dedicate very much effort into improving their skills. They may also seem arrogant or unhelpful to their coworkers.

Imagine your brain said, “I’m terrible at my job.” What are the resulting emotions? Discouragement, anxiety.

What are the likely decisions from this thinking pattern and resulting emotions? This employee may not take on hard tasks, may call in sick more often, would not apply for a promotion.

Now think about the likely future of an employee who is saying to herself, “I’m terrible at my job, but I can learn to be great at it.” That person may be held back somewhat by her lack of confidence, but she will still probably make progress.

How about an employee who is saying to himself, “I’m good at many aspects of my job, but here are some things I can do better.” That employee is going to perform well and improve – regardless of how good he ACTUALLY is at his job – he will improve.

Now imagine an employee who is saying to himself, “I’m terrible at my job and I’m never going to be any good at it or anything else in my career. I’m at a dead end, it’s too late, I’m on the wrong path, my resume is screwed.” If he’s telling himself that, he has no motivation to actually change things for the better, because he will lack hope and vision.

You may be wondering, “But what if it’s true?” One of the key things to realize, is our own thoughts appear to us to be indisputably true. But what is truth? Are we good employees or bad ones? Obviously, each one of us is great at some things in our jobs, and not so great at some other things. There are probably things we really suck at.

Our thoughts almost always have a grain of truth to them. But we tend to polarize and simplify and come to overgeneralized and overreaching conclusions.

  • I’m terrible at my job…therefore I’m never going to make very much money.
  • I’m great at my job…therefore I don’t have to work very hard.
  • I’m great at my job and those assholes aren’t treating me fairly.
  • I’m terrible at my job and no wonder no one likes me.

The reality is, that every single one of us has had something like those 4 thoughts (and many others) during the course of our careers. There’s some truth in those thoughts – and there’s a lot of truth outside of those thoughts.

THE MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES OF TRUTH

What’s truth? Truth would take an entire book, an entire set of encyclopedias, to describe accurately. All we have is fleeting perspectives. Which perspectives are going to be most useful to you right now?

Differing perspectives are more or less useful during different stages of an endeavor. As an example, let’s look at the typical stages in a project.

The first stage of a project is about information gathering. That takes a certain type of curiosity, tenacity and willingness to listen to things that don’t make sense. Useful thinking patterns during this stage are thoughts like, “I should look into that”, and “I wonder what might be behind that?” Thinking patterns that are not useful in this stage sound like, “No way, that’s wrong”, “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.”

The second stage, before embarking on a project, is often brainstorming. In this stage, it’s very useful to optimistically consider all different kinds of crazy ideas. Thinking patterns that are useful in the brainstorming phase sound like, “We could…” “It might…”, “And also…” also very useful during the brainstorming phase are curious & open questions, “What if…?”, “How about…?”

Thinking patterns that are not useful in the brainstorming phase are, “It’s never going to work because…” That thinking pattern IS useful in other stages, but not in this phase. That’s because thinking patterns like, “it won’t work”, shut down ideas before they are fully explored. Even if it isn’t a good idea, there’s probably some reason why your brain thought of it. There’s probably something useful in that idea – some value to be explored.

After the listening & information gathering stage, and after the brainstorming stage, is the problem solving stage. This is where most technical people are most comfortable. Now is the time to allow thoughts like, “That may not work because…”, and “Here’s the risks in that option…”

Thinking patterns that are not useful during the problem-solving stage is anything that demands a perfect solution. If your brain is demanding a perfect solution, you will be stuck and unable to move forward. Most complex situations do not have perfect solutions. Downsides and risks need to be evaluated, and mitigated to the extent possible.

Sometimes people react to getting stuck by getting cynical. Another unhelpful reaction is to blame oneself or others for the situation that has no easy, perfect answer.

Useful thinking patterns during the problem solving stage are, “Do I need more information?”, “This is probably the best option,”, “We can give it a try.” “Let’s also have a Plan B.”

Next is implementation. This is when you make your sales pitch, go to the interview or go out and run the race. Now is the time to boost your confidence as high as possible. You do not want to indulge in self-criticism or blame at this time. Give yourself the locker room pep talk about how great you are and how everyone loves you, and head out there and nail it.

WE CAN CHANGE OUR THINKING PATTERNS

You may be wondering – If thinking patterns are so important, how do you change them? It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

First, become familiar with your own specific thinking patterns that sabotage yourself. For example, if you’re feeling sad, take a moment to notice what you are thinking. If you’re failing to get yourself up off the couch to go exercise, what are you thinking? If you’re reaching for the ice cream you told yourself you weren’t going to eat, what is going through your mind in that moment?

Start noticing the types of thinking patterns you have, and the impact they have on your emotions and your behavior.

Let’s imagine you’ve identified the negative thinking pattern of, “It’s not good enough” or “I’m not good enough”. First, acknowledge the grain of truth in that thought. Most of our thinking patterns have a little bit of truth in them. In this case, the grain of truth is yes, you can legitimately call anything “not good enough” because nothing out there in our real world is ideal. Not you, not me, not our boss, not our bank account.

The next step is to come up with a more moderate statement, one that also has truth in it. Most of our distorted thinking patterns are polarized. It’s useful to come up with more nuanced statements. “Yes, it could be better, but I may be at the point of diminishing returns, and I may want to use my time and money elsewhere.”

Once you have a list of your common distorted thinking patterns, and a corresponding list of more moderate, nuanced statements, start trying to catch the distortions and correct them. It can be hard to remember to notice them. You also may find a lot of internal resistance to changing them when you do notice them. We are all very attached to our perspectives!

But the more familiar you become with the common types of thinking patterns, the easier it will be for you to take a step outside yourself and notice your own thinking.

“SHOULD” STATEMENTS

For example, it’s useful to notice “should” statements. Whenever we think that somebody “should” be doing something different, or something “should” be some other way, or that we “should have” done something different, or someone “ought” to be different, we are going to feel a certain amount of anger. Regardless of whether you show the anger or even notice it in yourself, “should” statements cause anger. When that anger is directed toward yourself, “I should have…”, then your emotion may not feel exactly like anger. It may feel more like guilt or anxiety.

“Should” statements aren’t always bad. Anger and guilt aren’t always bad. They can be motivators. But in general, it is risky and has long-term negative consequences if you use anger, guilt, fear, or anxiety as motivators for very often, or very long. It’s much more useful to motivate yourself and others using positive values of caring or sense of accomplishment, then it is to motivate through fear of failure or other threats.

It’s true that fear and those other negative emotions can be very effective short-term motivators. So they are tempting to use. They can get your butt up off that couch, or make you reach for the phone to make that hard call. But if you regularly use them as your primary source of motivation, you will end up demotivated in the long run. You will end up discouraged and cynical and then it will be even harder for you to motivate yourself. This can become a self-perpetuating cycle.

SETTING ASIDE BLAME AND GOING FORWARD

Another common unhelpful thinking pattern is regretting the past, and assigning blame for what’s been done. Assigning blame (to yourself and to others) is not usually very useful. Occasionally it can be useful as a learning experience so you don’t repeat the mistake. But it’s not a useful place to spend a lot of time.

Refocus to the present and the future. For example, “Ok, I was treated badly. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, it messed me up, but here I am. What’s my best path forward, given what I have right here, right now, today?”

Or similarly, if it was your own fault, “Ok, I messed up. I am where I am. What do I need to learn or to do differently, to keep from making that mistake again? How can I remedy or rectify the mess I made? Given where I am now, what’s the best possible outcome and how do I get there?”

It really doesn’t matter who messed up, or what wasn’t right or wasn’t fair. What matters more is, what can you do now, to have the best possible outcome going forward, for yourself and for others?

 

 

 

A spider; living the dream

A spider is living in my bathroom sink. Luckily, I have another bathroom sink. It’s just as good as that one. That one with the spider in it.

When I first saw the little spider I figured it would quickly disappear. That’s what spiders do. They suddenly appear. They suddenly disappear. You never see them again. Which is fine with me. My dreams do that too – appear and disappear – like they were never there.

But this spider is always there. Right out in the open! Glaring in full miniature spider-ish-ness on the white porcelain. Why doesn’t he go hide somewhere?

You probably think he’s dead. But he’s not curled up. And sometimes when I get home, he’s in a different part of the sink. But still aways in full sight. As if he isn’t a spider. As if I didn’t have spider-squashing abilities. Oh, I do.

I’m a talented woman. Spider smashing isn’t even one of my more remarkable skills. Unless you’re a spider. Then my powers would be truly remarkable.

Why is this spider still alive, then? I was just lazy the first time, and curious now that it’s been awhile. How long will he be there? What will he eat? What is he doing? Why doesn’t he go off into spider holes and do spider things?

I let a day pass and then another, curious about the strange phenomenon of the spider-in-the-sink. I checked on him regularly. And wondered. Still? Why?

By the 4th day I had concocted an imaginary explanation to that question. Here was a spider who, obviously, has found his dream home beyond all expectations. He won the lottery of life. This privileged spider, with a huge, shiny white porcelain expanse all to himself. Imagining himself to be as safe and secure as no other spider has ever been in someone’s bathroom sink.

I imagined that his sink was to him like a picture of a home for sale in Messinia, Greece, that I recently cut out of a magazine. Because it was beautiful. Simple. And entirely unobtainable.

This spider, the luckiest of creatures, briefly living a completely unobtainable life.

On Friday afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave to spend the weekend in Placitas, I went to tell the spider good-bye. I knew that if he were still there when I returned on Monday I’d have to evict him for failure to pay rent on his beautiful porcelain home. But he was already gone. He must of known it’s never good to overstay your welcome, particularly when you’re a spider.

Feelings and Finances

Feelings and finances – two topics Americans tend to avoid. I’m more comfortable with these topics than most, probably because I’m a life coach, and we can’t very well have meaningful coaching conversations about life goals without including feelings and finances.

For some time now, John and I have been practicing an exercise designed to help us be more aware of our feelings (our own, and each other’s). Feelings are very important because they influence our decisions without us even realizing it.

Step One is to notice our feelings. This is harder than in sounds! In order to help notice our feelings, John and I have taught ourselves to randomly, occasionally, ask each other what we are feeling. We don’t say, “How are you feeling?” because it’s too easy to reply, “fine” or “good”, which is meaningless. Instead we ask, “What are you feeling?”, and we expect a description of emotions in reply. It took us a long time to train ourselves to do this, but now that we have, it’s proven to be very useful.

This morning, before we had really gotten into the chores for the day, John asked me what I was feeling. I thought for a minute (because it wasn’t obvious) and I finally said, “Poorer.” Now strictly speaking, “poorer” isn’t a basic emotion like happiness, fear, etc. But it is an emotion-laden perspective. I have sometimes recently felt less wealthy than I used to feel, and I happened to have been feeling it at that moment when he asked.

Step Two is to refrain from judging the feeling. There is a tendency to immediately label all feelings, perspectives, situations, etc. as good or bad. “Poorer” sounds bad, like a complaint (and who likes a complainer?). But it may not actually be a complaint. I may actually find it to be a relief to feel poorer! Wealth, and the handling of wealth, takes a lot of time and responsibility. Sometimes John and I both just wish for a simpler life. Also the sense of being “poorer” may help me keep my Amazon purchases in check (LOL).

Step Three is to refrain from arguing the feeling away. Trying to immediately invalidate the feeling is particularly common once we’ve judged it as “bad.” We all want to be cheered up, right? So that’s one big reason to refrain from judging the feeling as good or bad. It’s not useful to immediately dismiss the feeling as a “bad” one that we “shouldn’t” feel and try to stop feeling that way.

Even once we successfully refrain from judging the feeling as good or bad, we still may want to argue that feeling away. Why? Because logically, I’m not actually poorer. John and I are both very logical people, and we have a tendency to want to correct our feelings with logic. Sometimes that correction is useful. For example, if I was, over a period of time, getting depressed because I felt “poorer”, but I was not actually poorer, then it might be very useful to use logic to argue myself out of the perspective of “poorer”.

But before I thoughtlessly try to reason myself out of the feeling, I should look at what ways the feeling could be valid or useful. Let’s start with the word “poorer”. First thing to note is that feeling “poorer” is not the same as being “poor”. Those are quite different concepts. It would be hard to take my feeling seriously without the distinction, because no, I’m not poor. But I am currently living as if I were poorer than I used to live, therefore, I do feel poorer.

Step Four is exploring what can be learned from the feeling. Rather than trying to immediately bump myself out of that illogical, potentially negative feeling, it would be more useful to look at what I can learn from it. Why do I feel poorer? Is it useful for me to feel poorer? What decisions would I make differently because I feel poorer? Would those decisions be better decisions if I didn’t feel poorer?

Let’s start with “why”. Why do I feel poorer?  I believe the reason I feel poorer is because of the way John and I currently have the logistics of our living situation and financials set up. I am mostly living in a small townhome – which I like a lot and suits me well – no complaints. But it is significantly more modest than the spectacular house we had in California.

Secondly, because of the way (for convenience) that we handle money, my state income is essentially being required to pay for the Santa Fe mortgage and utilities, my clothing, food, gas, all our joint Amazon purchases, and also the remodel projects at the Santa Fe townhome. All these expenses are coming out of just my state job income, which is barely enough – or not enough – to cover all that. It feels as if I’m supporting myself and I’m not coming out ahead. It doesn’t help that my income is noticeably less than I made at Sandia, as well as being a lot less than John makes.

John’s income is mostly going to remodel costs at the Placitas house. Of course I own that house too, but I feel like it’s his house, not mine. I’ve been trying to change that perspective, but so far I’ve failed to convince my subconscious that his house is our house. For example, I’ve been trying to train myself not to call it “his” house. Despite the fact that he bought it 20 years ago, lived there for a decade before he even met me, and I’ve never actually lived there full time, and I still don’t. And, we decided not to do the big remodel plans that he and I designed together last year because it cost too much. So now he’s just getting some necessary stuff done as he can, which increases my sense that it’s just his house. He says he’s willing to sell it, and I’m sure he is. Except that’s not actually what we’re doing. What we’re actually doing is putting tens of thousands of dollars into a house that I am not committed to and don’t feel like I own.

One thing we did this weekend that should help a lot, is we created a joint list of priorities for the Placitas house. We listed everything that either one of us thinks needs done (blinds installed, cabinet handles installed, trees planted, roof sealed, new furnace, etc.). And then we each prioritized each of the items (there are over 50 items, yeah, that’s a whole other issue).

Now we’re going to take turns implementing our priorities. First we’ll do one person’s #1 priority, then we’ll do the other person’s #1 priority. Then we’ll do the first person’s #2 priority and then the second person’s #2 priority, etc.  This helps us both a lot. It helps keep him from feeling like he’s working really hard doing only what I want, trying (futilely it seems) to keep me happy about that house, which puts him in a bad spot because I’m not happy about that house right now.

Alternating priorities also helps keep me from feeling like he’s just prioritizing things however he wants to. Now every-other project is my priority! It’s going to be way easier for me to feel happy about this house now that it’s easier for me to see that my priorities are being given equal treatment. And maybe they always were, but now I know they are. I feel it!

Step Five is deciding whether or not I actually want to try to change the feeling of “poorer”. The way John and I are currently compartmentalizing our finances, and our living arrangements, probably explains why I might be feeling poorer. What about the usefulness of feeling poorer? Do I actually want to try to change that feeling?

I’ve noticed that when large amounts of money are coming in (and going out), I start feeling comfortable with large amounts of money moving around. Now that I’m working on a daily basis with a smaller amount going in and going out (the Santa Fe portion), smaller amounts of money seem like “a lot.” Is $300 a lot of money? Yes. But is it really, really a lot of money? What about $3,000? If I’m in middle of negotiating the purchase or sale of a house, I’m not going to worry about $3,000. But if I just spent $3,000 on a brick patio for the Santa Fe backyard, how am I going to pay my Santa Fe mortgage that month? Suddenly $3,000 is a budget-destroying amount. It’s all rather relative.

Is it useful for me to start thinking that $300 (or $3,000) is “a lot”, imagining that it is a bigger sum than I used to imagine it is? Possibly. The shift in perspective may help me not spend frivolously on yet another pair of shoes. But if I get too tightwad, then I’m going to resent John’s trip to Africa (for example).

So is it useful for me to feel poorer? In general it’s useful to be realistic or even a little bit pessimistic about finances in order to not overspend on consumer items. It also could be useful to encourage me to think about ways to increase income (I could coach more clients, I could get a roommate, I could rent the Santa Fe house and commute instead, I could get a job that paid more at LANL or Sandia, etc.)

Another way the feeling of “poorer” could be useful is to help illuminate and fix inequalities in the way John and I are currently handling our time and money. For example, the remodel prioritization exercise we just did will help a lot. But what about sending the kids some money for their education? Should that really come out of my state salary? Are we sure about that? It’s something to consider.

Step Six is changing the feeling. Once I’ve explored the potential usefulness of a feeling, and decided that I want to change it – how do I? There’s several ways to approach changing a feeling. I could repeatedly remind myself that the feeling is inaccurate (reassure myself that I’m not actually poorer). This would need to be done myself (not coming from others or pushed onto me by others), in a supportive and non-critical manner, using concepts that I genuinely believe (rote and empty affirmations don’t work).

Or I could work on changing the situations in my life that are making me feel poorer. For example, you may be wondering why we don’t just lump all our money together, and we probably should. But having our finances somewhat separate is probably helping me tolerate the huge amount that’s being spent on the house in Placitas, because I don’t really see it as my money.

For example, when we had the leak last Saturday, I called our new handyman. John called a professional plumbing company. The professional plumbing company beat the handyman out there by two hours. And they cost us several hundred dollars more than the handyman would have cost. Oh well, it’s his house and his money. Or is it?

And then there’s the issue of which bank. LOL, there’s always a funny side to these things. Putting all our money together would require agreeing on a bank. John is very loyal to his company’s credit union, but I’m not impressed with their lack of online and mobile capabilities. They’re in the stone ages. And their security system is draconian. They once reduced me to tears after I endured standing out in the freezing cold, arguing with them over the phone for an entire hour when I was trying to buy a gift in Albuquerque Old Town at Christmas time, and I’m just not ever giving them my business again.

Except I’m the one who makes sure the bills are paid (including the ones paid by his account) so I have to deal with his bank on a regular basis anyway. It’s pretty funny when you think about it. Two stubbornly independent people with separate bank accounts purely because we can’t agree on which bank. Like, just pick one already!

John is a fair and generous person, and I’m confident we’ll work these things out. But we wouldn’t necessarily have thought about and talked about potential inequalities in our current situation if I hadn’t noticed and expressed that I was feeling poorer.

Because I realized I was feeling poorer, we’ve been able to take concrete steps to help me feel like the Placitas house is mine too. And because we’re aware that I’m feeling poorer, we can continue to take proactive steps to make sure that we are making joint decisions about how we spend our money. And maybe a certain amount of feeling poorer is good for me!

Another interesting thing is, John accurately predicted some of this. When I was first looking for a house in Santa Fe, I was looking at more expensive houses equivalent to our house in Placitas. But then I decided to buy a small townhome for much less money. John was concerned that I wouldn’t be happy with it in the long run. I really like the townhome, and am relieved that I didn’t take on a bigger mortgage. I don’t have any regrets at all. But he was right. I do feel poorer because of it.

You see how useful and interesting emotions can be – even negative and illogical ones – if you take the time to think about them.

So now why do I feel like I just wanna buy another pair of shoes?!?

Kayaks

Ignoring for a moment the irony of a dusty kayak sitting amongst the cactus…

And ignoring for a moment the incongruence of kayaks in a living room…

Let’s talk kayaks.

There comes a time in every marriage, where a tandem is just not going to cut it any longer. Not only did it come time for us to each have our own boat, it had gone beyond matchy-matchy. We no longer even want the same kind of kayak. It was time to choose our own kayaks, using our own criteria.

Guess whose is whose? Right.

And if you’re wondering what that miniature-phallic looking thing in the middle of John’s kayak is…so was I. Turns out it’s to hold a fishing pole. The equal-but-opposite notch in mine is to hold a water bottle and provide a drain hole. uh-hu.

Fishing? Yep, in case you didn’t already know, John and I aren’t whitewater types. We paddle flat water, slowly. He trails a line, and I don’t do much of anything at all.

Here’s me feeling stupid, sitting in a kayak in a living room. With paddles.

But John wanted the picture to illustrate how very small my new kayak is. It’s only 30 lbs! I can drag it anywhere all by myself!

Here’s our blow-up kayak. Even though it’s a tandem, it’s my favorite of our kayaks, because IT FITS IN A SUITCASE. Seriously. This photo was taken in Mexico.

In addition to the stunning white sand and our wonderful transportable kayak, there were also naked women on that beach (young American hippies). They asked us to bring the shells they had found back to their camp in our kayak, because they had swum over and had no way to carry them back. John took it in stride and pretended they were not naked, and carefully loaded their shells into the kayak. Good old Minnesota politeness in any situation, lol! (Although he sent me to deliver the shells after we got to the other shore.)

Here’s some more random kayak pictures, because, kayaks! These kayaks were all rented on location.

Hawaii:

Florida:

Florida:

Japan:

Japan:

Reprint from the Economist

A beautifully written tribute.

https://www.economist.com/obituary/2018/06/02/lini-puthussery-died-of-the-nipah-virus-on-may-21st

Treating a mystery 

Lini Puthussery, a nurse in Kerala, died of the Nipah virus on May 21st, aged 28

WHEN the patient was admitted at the end of April, Lini Puthussery was starting her night shift. He was a young man of 26, bearded, and with his hair fashionably swept back from his forehead. His name was Mohamed Sadiq, from Changaroth panchayat. The symptoms were fever and difficulty breathing, which struck her as unusual, even then. But her job was to care for him, so she gave him fluids and paracetamol, changed his sweaty clothes and sheets, and sat up with him all night long.

She had been working seven months on contract at the Perambra Taluk hospital, in the countryside outside Kozhikode (once Calicut). The place had been upgraded from a community health centre a decade ago, but was still short of doctors and specialists. Difficult cases had to go to Kozhikode, 50km away. Not many people filled the beds, but every day 1,000 or so queued at the outpatient counter or at the pharmacy. The noisy crowd still milled there when she arrived for night shifts.

The journey from her home village of Chempanoda by bus was slow but beautiful, across fresh-flowing rivers, through groves of areca-nut and rubber trees and past wooded hills. The Western Ghats towered to the east and, in the evenings, took the light of the sun. The place was not quite paradise, because from time to time farmers gathered outside the village office to protest when their land was misclassified as protected forest and their claims to ownership were rebuffed. In 2017 a farmer hanged himself there. Yet apart from those things it was a quiet, green place, with her parents, aunts and cousins all close by.

As a daily-wage nurse, she worked flexible hours. That suited her, because she had her two small boys, five-year-old Rithul and two-year-old Sidharth, to look after. Her husband, Sajeesh, had been away for five years, working as an accountant for a small firm in Bahrain. He returned a few times a year, and they spoke every day on the phone. Many Keralans worked in the Gulf. It was more lucrative than staying at home, and meant in Lini’s case that they could afford their one-storey brick house, with a small terraced garden, looking over open pasture. They took proud pictures of themselves outside it.

Sajeesh had tried to get a family visa, but Lini hadn’t wanted to go unless she could get a nursing job there first. She loved her work too much. Nonetheless she kept dreaming of the Gulf as a magical place, telling Rithul all the time that if he studied well, he could go there like his father. And she would not have minded more money. In her spare time she was busy improving her knowledge, to be eligible for a permanent government nursing job. She had filled a large black hard-bound book with neatly underlined entries in English, rather than her native Malayalam, on diseases and their treatments. Her notes, however, did not seem to cover what Sadiq had.

She and her colleagues called it “the mystery disease”. In a few days he had died of it. She cried a lot, not out of fear, but because she had taken such complete care of him. The story came out slowly. Sadiq had gone to clean a disused well with his elder brother Saliah. Their parents had just bought a new house and the brothers, who also worked in the Gulf, had come back to help. The well was deep, and as they went down into it they disturbed so many bats that they gave up the job in horror.

Those bats were the clue. They had either infected the water, or had bitten and infected the mangoes that grew round it. On May 21st officials from the Health Department, the Forestry Department, the Regional Diagnostic Laboratory and the Animal Husbandry Department caught a bat for testing and sealed the well with nets. By then, Saliah and his aunt Mariumma were dead too: not of Japanese encephalitis or some strain of malaria, as the doctors kept guessing, but (it turned out) of Nipah virus, which had appeared only once before in India. It was fatal in 70% of cases.

For the virus to spread between humans, contact had to be intensive and direct. That was exactly what Lini, with her tireless nursing, had provided. On May 16th she felt feverish, but insisted to Sajeesh that she would go to work because “lots of patients are there”, as always. When she grew worse, she checked herself into a hospital in Kozhikode and asked to be quarantined. Sajeesh flew back from Bahrain to find her barely conscious. She left him a note, partly in Malayalam and partly in English, which he folded away inside the cover of his phone.

Sajeeshetta, am almost on the way. I don’t think I will be able to see you again. Sorry. Please take good care of our children. Poor Kunju [Sidharth], please take him to the Gulf with you. Don’t stay single like our father. Plz. With lots of love, Umma

By the end of May the outbreak was not yet contained. At the hospital in Perambra, Lini’s colleagues now wore protective coats, gloves and masks. Their patients, however, had fled from the waiting rooms and even from their beds. In Changaroth panchayat half the houses were left empty. On social media, rumours still swirled. Nipah had not spread from bats. It had come in with migrants. Perhaps—some said—it had even come in from Lini’s wonderland of possibility and opportunity, across the Arabian Sea.