Category: October2024

My version of Pico de Gallo has significantly less onion than what you usually find in the US supermarket versions. I also like the slight sweetness of a bit of fruit – it balances the heat of the pepper and sour of the lime – but fruit is not a traditional addition. What is traditional, however, is making this fresh relish with whatever the cook has on hand and feels like throwing in.

• 2 large tomatoes or 3-4 roma tomatoes, chopped
• 1 firm fruit (such as an apple, greenish nectarine, fuyu persimmon, or grapes), chopped
• 1 bell pepper, chopped (any color, I used red bell pepper in the batch in these photos)
• ½ fresh jalapeño pepper, finely chopped (can substitute other fresh hot pepper)
• 1 TBS red onion, finely chopped
• 1 green onion, finely chopped
• 1 TBS fresh cilantro, chopped
• Juice of 1 lime (approx 1 TBS)
• Salt to taste

Hot tip: don’t handle jalapeño with your bare hands and then wipe your eyes 🥵. Use gloves. Or if you’re lazy like me, just put a piece of paper towel between your fingers and the pepper while cutting it. Then don’t forget to wash your hands!

Serve chilled with chips, or as a salad topping, or on top of eggs or any Mexican dish such as burritos, enchiladas, tamales, etc. I recommend pairing with cottage cheese or sour cream or queso fresco (fresh cheese).

I like it in an omelette, but I think my favorite is to put it on rice cakes with cream cheese.

Language note: Pico de Gallo is a weird phrase. Pico translates literally as a small amount, or a peck or a bird beak. De Gallo means “of rooster”. There are several explanations on the internet having to do with idioms like “a pinch of” being similar to how a rooster’s beak pinches a small amount. The explanation that made most sense to me is to think of how chickens peck the ground, foraging little bits of this and that with their beak. Pico de Gallo is little bits of this and that. By the way, the words gallina and gallo generally refer to live hens and roosters, and the word pollo generally means chicken meat. So this isn’t little bits of chicken meat. This is yummy little chopped fresh bits to eat – like what a rooster would love to eat. And us too! (Except not the bugs, lol, nope.)

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Life Coaching for Neurodiverse Professionals

This post is by my sister Emily. Most of you know, she is an emergency room doctor and a mom of 4 young girls (Emily is nearly two decades younger than me). Here is her story about hatching baby ducklings.

I speciality ordered the duck eggs from a farm in Tennessee because I wanted this particular breed, dual purpose ducks that are calm and good with kids.

Duck eggs on arrival:

14 eggs arrived! Two were broken in transit, so 12 made it into my new incubator. 

Then after 10 days, you shine a light into the eggs called “candling” to see if they were fertilized. Only 7/12 were fertilized..no point incubating an unfertilized egg, so the rest were composted.

Then I started prepping their homemade brooder, this is iteration number three I think.

Here we go, this is the final DIY brooder.

I check frequently to make sure they are still growing.

Then I mark their air cell to make sure I have them positioned correctly for hatching.

You can see the little duck embryo moving inside! It’s called an internal pip where it breaks through into the inside air cell and starts to breathe before it breaks through the shell.

After it internally pips it only has 24 hours before it runs out of air and needs to break the external shell. I read that a lot of ducklings die this way if they aren’t able to do that first break, so at 18 hours I started making little safety holes in the eggs so none of them suffocated.

Only three of the seven had managed to break through the shell called the external pip.

24 hours later one of my eggs still hadn’t broken through the air cell.

I thought perhaps it had died, but then when I came home from work at midnight on Monday I saw a big bruise on the egg. I turned it over and saw that it managed to break through, but from the wrong side! It was completely upside down. And because of that it managed to break one of its own blood vessels and bleed everywhere. Duckie number one was going to become my patient.

The others all start to break through their top with my help.

You can see their little beaks breathing and chirping but they are not ready yet! They have to finish absorbing their yolk and the blood vessels need to recede so they can break out.

Rotating inside to get ready to push out:

Trying to break out:

At this point it is 2:00 am and I’m sitting in a chair in my nightgown in my bathroom.

He did it! Sometime around 4 am his peeping got louder because he was able to get his head free, and then he pushed himself out. 

This was the first ducky, number eight, and the remaining five healthy ones followed suit over the next 8 hours or so.

He’s trying to help.

And pretty soon it’s duckie mayhem in the incubator.

A couple still seem a little stuck, so I gently help those out too.

The first six are ready to go in their brooder!

And ducky number one got a very careful safety hole so I can watch his beak breathe, but I couldn’t make it bigger or he would bleed.

Number one still hasn’t made much progress.

I take a little shell off to check his yolk sac and blood vessels. Even though he’s now 12 hours behind the others, he’s still not ready yet. So I turn the incubator into his personal little hospital room.

Extra shell to protect the end I opened. 

Resting on a clean baby sock.

His breathing started to get really shallow. I decided to gently untwine his head so his breathing improved, but he still wasn’t ready to come out, so he gets a little hospital bed out of a plastic baby doorknob protector, and the sock is his pillow. This is probably at around 2:00 am last night, 24 hours since the first duckling fully hatched. 

Then I hear some louder peeping! He’s gotten himself out a few hours later. 

He’s really weak so I give him a little watermelon juice and water mixture for some sugar and electrolytes to try and perk him up.

I finally put him in the brooder with the others, and he’s in the back, snuggled up in the middle of the duck pile. 

Now I just have to make sure that this guy doesn’t get into my ducklings!

A couple of weeks ago he brought a robin in and eviscerated and defeathered it in my living room. 

So proud of his handiwork.

Turns out my nanny had accidentally left my door open so that’s how it happened. I had such a surprise when I came home from work.

Don’t worry, the duckies are protected behind three doors and a wire cage. I would lose my mind if the cat got the ducklings. They will be in the house for a while. And when they’re outside they’ll be fully penned/cooped because raccoons, foxes, coyotes and hawks could all take them out.

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Life Coaching for Neurodiverse Professionals

In my ignorance, I imagined the LDS church as being very patriarchal and not likely to vote for a female president. But in my ignorance, I could be wrong. Although I am not a Mormon myself, the following quotes recently hit my inbox and considering the source, I am confident of its authenticity:

“…the Worldwide Leadership of the Church, known as the First Presidency, offers the following guidance to its members…We urge Latter-day Saints to be active citizens . . . exercising their right to vote, and . . . always demonstrating Christlike love and civility in political discourse….We urge you to . . . study candidates carefully and vote for those who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation. Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on “tradition” without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed standards (see Doctrine and Covenants 98:10).” First Presidency Statement June 1, 2023.”

They don’t name a candidate, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. I applaud their flexibility and courage to cross party lines in service of their deeper values. The Mormons are a strong influence in all of the Intermountain West swing states like my own. In the past I have noted Mitt Romney’s courage (even though I don’t agree with him on many issues). Now I’m wondering if like-minded people right here in my own state could make or break this election.

On a related note, I think I’ve mentioned this group before, https://www.arizonarepublicanswhobelieve.org/

Thank you to all the courageous Republicans out there, willing to set aside tradition and habit and vote Democrat this time – for the good of our country. You are my heroes this year. And then hopefully the Republican party can pull itself away from the brink and offer some thoughtful candidates with integrity in the years to come. And maybe someday we can return the favor. Because we all are in this together.

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Life Coaching for Neurodiverse Professionals

Happy October! Today is also, I learned this morning, Rosh Hashanah. The internet says, “Literally meaning “Head of the Year,” Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the Jewish calendar. It begins a 10-day period of repentance and prayer which ends on Yom Kippur. We celebrate the holiday with services and apples dipped in honey to symbolize the hope for a sweet year to come.” I was told that it is not only the beginning of the year, but also celebrates the beginning of the universe. Well, that’s cool. Big Bang Day!

We are having record breaking heat in Tucson, so despite what the calendar says, it is still very much summertime here. I finally have a chance to sit down and blog a bit, because I had an unexpected cancellation of plans. Callan and Guen’s dog, Blue, is quite ill, so Callan was not able to fly down here to go backpacking with John and I this weekend. John and I have had a lot going on ourselves lately, so instead of going backpacking without Callan, we are rescheduling until next month. Hopefully it will still be warm enough to sleep on the ground in the beginning of November. Even Arizona gets cold in the mountains in the winter.

Now I have a whole weekend free to blog! Except not – I am rapidly filling my weekend. For example, just this morning my friend Dana invited me to go to a college volleyball game tomorrow. Not something I’d usually do – which is exactly why I decided to go. A new experience! I’m not much into sports usually, but I believe Dana went to Purdue on a volleyball scholarship, and was once a volleyball coach. So at least I’ll be going to see the game with an expert.

Then on Saturday I’m hoping to get a fountain installed in our backyard – we’ll see if John has time. Sunday it might be nice to drive into the mountains to hike, since we’re missing our backpacking trip. It is still too hot here to hike in the Tucson foothills – unless you like getting up earlier than I like to in the morning.

Although I missed quite a show early this morning at Sabino Canyon! Dana and her friends saw literally 20 or 30 coatis wander by. At first they saw one, and then two, and then they kept coming and kept coming! Big ones and little ones, all scampering by one or two at a time. They are fairly common here, but I haven’t seen one yet.

This movie may show up as just a blue or black square, but hit the play button anyway. It should show three little scampering coatis, first the mom, then a young one, then…wait…another youngster.

The internet says, “Females and their young form bands of 20 individuals or more, while adult males are solitary.” So the band that Dana saw this morning would be the moms and their young.

Looks like it was a beautiful trail too. It’s called Bluff Trail. I’ll have to check that one out!

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Life Coaching for Neurodiverse Professionals