Hacking it

I look around the perimeters of my cubicle into the windows of coworkers offices. It's depressing. As my higher-ups meet in secret, I always wonder if they talk about me, and I think back to what I might have done lately to upset the delicate balance in the office politics equilibrium.

Who hates me and would throw me under a bus at a moments notice? Who would go to bat for me when they aren't sure if I'm as right as I say I am? Who's on my side, or working in an interest that will keep me in the black?

I bet a lot of people think that working as a journalist (even though I am really not a journalist yet, although I secretly wish that people would consider me as one) that office politics and backstabbing would be less of an issue, if not marginal. I'm afraid that it's even moreso a problem. We operate in a public sphere, so perception is everything. I've found that there are some people that idolize the way others perceive them, and would sacrifice another person to that idol if necessary. That's just the way it is.

But even more discouraging is that I am uncertain whether or not I have the talent to do this. I don't know anymore. Am I leaning on my deaf ear more because I just can't produce? Am I making excuses for myself? Can I hack it?

I must've used the word "fair" around 40 kajillion times yesterday. "I'd rather be fair than want people to like me," I said. But that's not totally true. I've been careless. I've said things to people before I've had time to take them to heart, an advantage you have on the page but not socially. I've unintentionally singed a few bridges. If only I had the opportunity to proof my conversations prior to publication... alas.

All I can say is I'm sorry, but what's going unsaid is that I lack faith in myself. I make quick decisions every day that I constantly doubt. There is a three-person-deep backstop behind me that should absorb my crashes, but it fails me. Who do I have to blame but myself?

(sorry for being so cryptic, but that's just how it is.)

Family bonding

Last night as we finished dinner, which is consumed in front of the TV most days, the orange kitty snuck up into Dave's lap and perched on his stomach. Then, as if not wanting to be the odd-doggie-out, Fitzgerald sandwiched himself between Dave and I, and then began sniffing and nuzzling Orange, who shut his eyes tightly and pretended not to mind for the sake of his parents.

Dawsey, the other cat you don't see much of, has been reclining in various strange spots throughout the house. Last night she camped out to the side of the stove, lately she's been spotted in the shower, on the bathroom floor, in my closet, under the desk and behind the chairs in the living area. I suggested that it's because she's taking naps in all the places that she had been wanting to before we moved. Logical enough, right?

What lovely kids we have! Below are a couple of photos of our sole non-reclusive kitty, Mr. Orange.

And all I cooked was this cake.

It was a balls-to-the wall weekend for me and my sweetie pie. I made Angelfood cake in record time, despite my mother's skepticism. See for yourself:





I took that gorgeous, spongy creation to dinner at one of our friends' homes with some white wine macerated fruit. The lesser half of the spousal pair had made dinner, at great lengths, too. He made falafel, hummus, eggplant relish, an antipasti plate, tabbouleh and served it up with warm pita bread. Very tasty!

After dinner and conversation, which was repeatedly interrupted by an enormous and hyperactive border collie named Billy, we went home and crashed.

Saturday morning (i.e. mid afternoon) was a blur. We walked down to the local storefronts in Lakewood. Green Living is this great little shop that sells environmentally sustainable goods. We went to the local hardware store and bought two unfinished Adirondack chairs and some red enamel paint for them.

Then it twas off to the Rangers game against the Brewers. After a spectacular rally in the 9th inning, I practically bolted for the car so I could get home and catch up on my reading some more, and Dave wanted to pack for our move (WHAT A FREAK!).

Sunday was sedated, Dave went for a matinee movie and I took the dog out for a run, which he made halfway through before he petered out. I had to walk him home, and when I got back Dave had returned from the movies, so we both went out and ran together, which made me so freakin' hungry and tired. We were both starving, but we decided to go out to Home Depot and check out stuff for the new house.

By that time we were both about ready to consume each other. So we headed in the direction of Kalachandji's, which was open. Dave said that he didn't want to go into the restaurant all grubby after our run, so we went home and changed and went back to the restaurant. Best. Indian food. Ever. (at least in Dallas).

We came home in food comas, I pulled the linens off the drying line and Dave packed some more (FREAK!). Productive weekend, no?

Utterly embarassing

A lot of kids yearn to make a difference in the world, to have one of those rare opportunities to be heard by a global leader, to be understood by someone who has real power to affect change. I wonder how painful it is to be completely disregarded by that powerful leader. Want to know what it looks like? Here you go.

I have a lot of respect for Tony Blair, and although I'm unfamiliar with a lot of the intricacies of why he is so hated in Britain, he sure beats the hell out of President Bush. At least Tony Blair appears to care what the youth in this screwed up world have to say. At least he's not intently studying the nutrition facts on the back of a bag of candy. At least he looks like he's taking notes, instead of making sideways glaces at a girl who's pouring out her concerns and dreads as the state of the world she will inherit lies before her in ruin.

Only 600 more days until we elect a new president. I hope that we get it right this time.

while on the subject of food...

... I have to gush about the most perfect foods I've found lately:

1) Almond Breeze Unsweetened Vanilla almond milk: I love soymilk, and this is better WITH LESS THAN HALF THE CALORIES!








2) Fiber One Cereal: Lightly sweet, mixes with Almond Breeze or fat free yogurt for the perfect breakfast/snack!









3) Quaker 90 calories granola bars, Chocolate chunk: All the yumminess of a regular granola bar in a crazy-good snack-size bar, with chocolate chunks all over the place!

The perfect burrito bol

I don't get out much during the workday. I'm pretty much anchored to my desk, reading email and wasting my youth. So, on the rare occaison that I do take lunch, I make an insanely huge deal about it. I tell everyone on staff that I'll be out to lunch, and then I ask them if they want anything.

Originally, I was going to trot a short distance to a Subway sandwich shop and grab a low-cal, tasty sammich (6" turkey breast on wheat all the way with mustard). But then a co-worker asked if I wanted to go with her and her husband to Chipotle, which is a bit further, but not much.

Chipotle, which most people don't know is owned by McDonald's, has become the worldwide ambassador of the oversized burrito. Before Chipotle's genesis, though, Freebirds World Burrito dominated the Tex-Mex wrap-em-up market. Freebirds originated in College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University, my alma mater. Needless to say, I've always been a big Freebirds fan, and I guess I always will. But Chipotle has won me over where Freebirds couldn't: The Burrito Bol.

Now, the worst part of a burrito (at least the part that's worst for you) is the tortilla. The most fun thing about Freebirds is their selection of tasty tortillas, which are loaded with fat. This version of a burrito is best for those like me and my coworker that still dream of actually looking good in a swim suit.

How to build the perfect Chipotle Burrito Bol:

-Start with Rice. Always get the rice.
-Next, get both black and pinto beans.
-AVOID MEAT AT ALL COSTS!
-Then, add red salsa (just a smidge for the weenies).
-After that, pile on the pico de gallo (for those who don't know, it's a mixture of chopped tomato, onion and cilantro with lemon juice and black pepper).
-Then add lettuce and cheese.

You can add the fajita veggies insubstitution for one of the kinds of beans, but then you're missing out on lots of fiber and protein.

Anywho, this combination is filling, tastes AWESOME and has fewer fat and calories than any other selection on the menu. Take that!

Coo-kie? Me want Cookie!

Since the beginning of this year I've started to reform my commuting habits. I'm rising earlier to get to work in a timely fashion, and in order to do something good for the environment (and head off the unsightly sagging of my derrier) I'm taking the stairs up four floors to our offices every morning and descending them every afternoon.

For the past two weeks, though, it's been kind of a game of will. At the foot of the stairs there has been a massive chunk of a partially eaten cookie (oatmeal raisin from my observation). I know now that the stairs are serviced by our janitorial crew twice a month at most, because just this Monday the cookie had vanished. Either that or someone skipped breakfast and was desperate on their way up the stairs one morning (SWEAR TO GOD IT WASN'T ME!).

But really, the cookie's not the half of it. There's also a Ritz cracker sitting on top of an electrical box in the stairway, another victim of a misplaced, half-eaten stairway snack.

I guess eating while climbing stairs is just as bad as chewing gum while walking.

I wanna go back ...

... to the island,
where the shrimpboats tie up to the pilin'.
Give me oysters and beer,
for dinner every day of the year,
and I'll be fine.

So, we made it back from Key West Sunday morning, 7 a.m. It's a 22.5 hour drive, half of which is just Florida. Dave said that the drive from the southernmost point of the U.S. to Pensacola, which is the westernmost point of Florida was "surreal." I said it was boring. Honestly, I slept from Shreveport to East Texas.

If you were wondering, yes, there are photos, almost 100 of them. Check them out on Flickr.

Here's a taste:

Our Top-Down Future

No, I'm not talking about convertibles here, but about a method of organization that is entrenched in American culture: top-down management. I can't really think of a branch of government or an economically successful organization that doesn't use a top-down form of organization, where the final word rests in a board of directors and a CEO, with the board being a kind of mirage of stockholder autonomy in a bought-and-sold-by-the-share market. Many people may own a publicly traded company, but in truth only one person really controls it.

Same with our government. In the press you see the president take the heat, World-Bank chief Wolfowitz get an ouster over bad management practices and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi getting sound bites left and right, telling conservatives "Whoa there!" but posing no solutions to our problems. All this makes our government look like a circus ruled by apes -- entertaining, but going nowhere.

So, in this system, where power is veritably concentrated and corrupted, nothing really changes except vacuous, self-serving laws. Most change that happens on a large scale is engineered by demographic shifts and market changes that are almost independent. These changes are large-scale differences in mentality, the mentality of citizen consumers.

So, lately people in my neck of the woods have been all atwitter over immigration problems, a problem so entrenched in society that our government has no real answers to. At least, answers that have any real hope of working. One side says, "Build a fence!" but fences can be climbed over and tunneled under. Another says, "Deport them all!" but splitting families of legal-born citizens from their illegal immigrant parents creates a burden of orphans and wards of the state, and they knew this when they had children here. "Penalize companies that hire them!" cries someone else, but when companies have to increase wages to attract another labor pool, this will cut into profits and thus, prices for goods and services will increase.

So, all of these top-down, federally mandated answers seem a little silly when you think about it. Though, how do we solve the cultural, societal and economic woes that are wrecking American culture without causing more damage than good? I think the answer lies in the proposed solutions. If the strategy leaves much to be desired, then the strategy is lacking. Change strategies.

Something happened last week in North Texas. A small community called Farmers Branch, very close to Dallas, approved an ordinance that would restrict illegal immigrants from renting apartment in the area. All apartment managers would have to verify that the lessors in the complex were legal citizens.

This seems fundamental enough -- community tires of negative impact of illegal immigrants and decides to prohibit them from living in some areas, thus reducing the resident population of illegal immigrants. But this doesn't keep illegals from living in rented houses, or keep them from working in the area, or keep them from having a market impact. It just says that they can't live in apartments in Farmers Branch.

This is an examptle of democracy, or the opposite of top-down managment, or even more liberally, Populism. People that voted wanted a change, they formulated a very calculated rule to have a specific impact on property owned in the area, a protracted attempt at immigration reform. It passed.

Too bad we'll probably never know whether or not it would have worked.

Too bad that today, Federal Judge Sam Lindsay overturned the ordinance, saying that immigration is a federal issue, an issue that should be solved on the Congressional level, which happens to be cluttered with top-down, power hungry sycophants.

Too bad our social experiment of democracy isn't what our democratically elected leaders want.

Blogging on holiday

So, Matt blogged while he was on vacation in the Pitts. I don't know if I'll have access to a computer while I'm away, so I don't know if I'll be on here for a week! I really want to post updates and piccies, but we'll see what happens. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the hurricane season is staved while I am on a rather tiny island.

Otherwise, the weather is here, wish you were beautiful!

XOXOXO

Center of the Universe indeed

We were supposed to crash at a friend's house in San Antonio on Friday, but because plans with them fell through we stayed in Dallas and left for the Texas Hill Country on Saturday after Yoga class. The drive was bumpy; I-35 is the worst interstate highway by far, worse than I-45 only due to it's condition because there's plenty to look at from the road.

When we arrived at our friend's digs, we unloaded and headed out for a beer or two (or three) at a wonderful, mystical joint emblazoned with a bold sign toutint "HILLS & DALE'S -- CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE!"

We walked in from the overcast afternoon to a sparsely lit ice house with a concrete floor. The spartan main room was decorated with plank picnic tables and a billiards area in back. But the main attraction was covering the side of a main wall: AN ENORMOUS BEER REFRIGERATOR!

The wallside cooler was stocked to the gills with any and every kind of imported beer and malt you could crave. They even had St. Peters and our favorite Oatmeal Stout!

I started off with my pint of Guiness and then had a couple of bottles of St. Peters and one of Sam Smith. I was so full of fuzzies that I barely ate dinner! From there we went to Floore's Country Store, Dave's favorite music hall. We listened to Jay Farrar and Son Volt play, had a frozen margarita (or two) and headed back, where I crashed and burned!

The next morning we washed off the previous night, had biscuits and country muffins and washed it down with copious carafes of coffee, black. Well, I washed it down with black coffee, but Dave has to have frou-frou in his cuppa joe, you know what I'm saying, sugar cream and all that! We swapped cds to upload to iPods, gushed about our vacation and then we were a gonner!

Hours later we were back in Dallas again, with laundry to do and loose ends to tie up. I love weekend trips but the reality of the work week is a bummer, especially before an all too short vacation in the American Caribbean!

Making my vote count

Today is the final day for early voting in the May 12 election. Because I'll be on the beach May 12, I need to vote today.

Earlier this workday we were running down predictions on what the Sunday headlines would read the day after. My wager:

Dallas Mayoral runoff between Don Hill and Tom Leppert; Farmers Branch passes immigrant rental ordinance; Prop 1 passes by a mile

Any other Dallasites out there wanna take a shot at 'er?

I could go on, and on, and on...

Food is the one thing that I can easily talk about for hours. I'm in love with the stuff. Really, any kind of cooking method, any kind of recipe, ingredient, flavoring or hardware -- I'll gab to the person closest and most interested. Which is why I was likely stunned this morning when I sat down next to what looked like a punky, disenfranchised gal. I chose her because I had inadvertently left my iPod at home (in my godforsaken gym bag!)and she appeared to be the least likely person to bother me on my downtown-bound train ride. I was wrong.

I quickly fell into the seat next to said punky girl, unzipped my case and unsheathed my dog-eared copy of Family Circle, which I subscribe to mostly for the recipes and home tips. As I was leafing to the back to scope out the recipes, Punky queried, "Do you cook?" Flabberghasted by the sound coming from Punky's direction, I slowly turned my face to hers and said "HUH?"

Yes, I love to cook, Punky. She then asked me a whole bunch of questions like, what do I like to cook most, am I married, does my husband appreciate my cooking (to which I registered a resounding "Of course!") and did I learn to cook from my mom (yes and no; I learned a few key things from mom, like how to follow the directions on the box and that to make fluffy scrambled eggs you add water, not milk, but I did not develop my passion for cooking until much later). It was a very pleasant conversation, and to think I would have completely missed it had I remembered my iPod, which is still lodged in my godforsaken gym bag!

We parted ways and she said that she appreciated the tips on flavoring rice and using a slow cooker, and that she was thinking about moving to Austin, mostly for the nicer political climate and environmentally savvy politics. Yeah, I'd move to Austin, too, Punky, but then I'd miss out on experiences like our little chat.

It's a good thing when it's gone

So, I've lost another pound. I just might look decent in a bikini this vacation after all! The downside? I've become a food Nazi. I've been counting calories like Scrooge McDuck appraises his pool of cash. I've been limiting my intake to 1,200 to 1,500 calories daily, 500 to 800 below what is needed to maintain, and I've started running 2.5 miles daily with a healthy regimen of yoga and weights.

I'd almost given up on my goal, which I made in January. The scale was stuck at 150 lbs. and for three months there was seemingly nothing I could do to get it to budge! I was working with a personal trainer to get my cardio routine together and do exercises to tone the hail damaged areas of my mushy physique. All that was left was diet. I abhor dieting. I just love food, and depriving myself of food that I love seemed awful. I didn't think I was going to be able to do this.

But, I then became addicted to Hungry Girl, which is a great resource for fast, easy and healthy substitutions for the stuff that I love. And I really cannot say enough about how important getting enough fiber is to losing weight. You've gotta eat whole grains, raw veggies and suppliment when necessary with psyllium husk powder.

So, hopefully I'll have some brilliant photos when I come back from vacation! Keep your fingers crossed!

Weekend bliss, Vacation angst

A weekend among family is always welcome. They're so much fun to be around; my dad is a really unique individual. He loves his daughters, and he loves sharing his life with others. He could talk baseball with Dave, show off his new pistol grips, talk about his trips to the deer lease or go on and on about small block Chevys. And he cares about whatever you bring to the table. Morning debates around a high-fiber breakfast, fresh coffee and blue jays are the best.

It seems though, that I can never make enough time to visit. I'm always eager to get back "home" and reluctant to leave. We have dinner and conversation, watch baseball and hang out, and then all of the sudden they're waving good bye in the driveway as Dave almost backs into one of the nefarious trees that come out of nowhere (I've collided with my fair share of them). Before that, Jessica, Brent, Sara and Kara were drawing figures in the dingy accumulation on my car's hood, and Fitzgerald was relegated to the guest room upstairs because he just couldn't get along with a 100-lb. black lab, an overly playful Jack Russell terrier and Ginger (Zoe), the mutt with a heart of gold.

One thing that I noticed about my family is their love of food in large quantities. My mom opened a container of oatmeal raisin cookies on Sunday around lunch time; they were gone shortly thereafter. The cookies were 140 calories each! That's insane! With some of them eating two, I could see how throwing caution into the wind like they do could be consequential to their midsection. Although I didn't partake, I felt strangely guilty that I didn't grab the carton of cookies and slam dunk them into the waste bin! It's for their own good!!!

So, it's become obvious that although I've been working pretty darn hard to lose the weight before we vacation in Key West, I'm still about 8 to 10 lbs. short of my goal. That sucks, because I was looking forward to finally having pictures that I love to plaster all over our home. "This is a shot of me and Dave sunning on a lovely pier on the island. Don't I look fabulous?" Instead, it'll be more like, "Here's Dave and ... What is this? How did a manatee manage to get into ... Oh wait... That's me! This is where I was in my bikini and didn't lose all that fat I said I was going to... yeah, one too many trips to my parents' house!"

And to top it all off, I can't figure out what to do for Dave's birthday. It'll be while were at Key West. I wanted to plan a super-secret special day trip for him, but I can't figure anything out. There's no baseball in the area, he's already been to the island. All I can think of is hitting a nice restaurant for a romantic dinner and giving him a fabulous gift, which also still escapes me! And 35 is kind of a milestone, so I want to do something memorable (although, we will be on Key West, what's not memorable about that!?). Maybe I can have the kitchen at the Bed and Breakfast we're staying at make him a birthday cake that I can surprise him with on the morning of his birthday... And then have something crazy planned, like I dunno, horseback riding or something... GIMME SOME IDEAS, FOLKS!!!

Also, what do you get a guy that has everything baseball, that he'll absolutely flip for, and won't totally kill my budget!!! ARGH!

So it goes...

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

-Kurt Vonnegut

News has just reached my desk that the world's most revered Humanist, Kurt Vonnegut, has died. His fatalistic, morally quixotic and dubiously contrived works, including his most famous novel Slaughterhouse Five, earned him the fame that eluded him early in life.

I remember during our trip to San Francisco, we made a few stops at City Lights Books, a Beat Generation mainstay with poetry and philosophy from every continent a large contingent on its shelves. Vonnegut was the only thing that quenched my literary appetite, and I left City Lights with a new copy of Slaugherhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. If you haven't read these Vonnegut classics, you're missing out.

Vonnegut was a man that wrote in such a way that compelled you to at least try to understand ideas that would normally be repulsive. His style was dictated by his early years as a hard-news journalist, a reporter at a Chicago newspaper's city desk. That style made his novels easy to read, easy to follow and easily consumed by readers that may not be so adept with philosophy. He's told stories of near-death tea parties with modern icons and has attracted a diverse yet critical following with tales of planets far away and people near and dear.

Vonnegut died due to brain injuries from a fall several weeks ago.

Get green, make green

Sheryl Crow and Laurie David (wife of Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm) just rode into the sunset in their biodiesel-powered tour bus to start the "Stop Global Warming College Tour." Kicking the tour off at Southern Methodist University, the soon-to-be-home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and think tank, i.e. they Anti-Kyoto Monument of Environmental Ennui, may have been a less-than-optimal choice for the sassy duo.

As Crow and David made the media rounds yesterday, people in my line of work started debating just what they could accomplish by handing out energy-efficient light bulbs, doing a slide show and singing a couple new-folk songs. The debate then evolved to a global scale: These two harbingers of the global climate change end-times are trying to motivate Americans to do something for our planet at the grassroots. What if America really started, as a means of necessity, to make our country more ecologically friendly? What if we started to take coal-burning power plants offline and constructed new and more environmentally feasible energy sources? What would that kind of large scale investment (investments with dubious or unknown rates of return are calculated as losses) do to our economy? What if China and India don't follow suit, and for every one coal-fired power plant that we take down, they construct two more?

I kind of stopped listening when somebody asked if we would be willing to bomb China to stop them from polluting. That's a new concept to me: hurting the world to save it? That's like a coyote chewing its arm off to escape a trap, right?

But then I began to think, why are such ecological improvements necessarily a loss? Why would new construction and taking down older polluting plants be economically harmful? Why must ecological improvement and economic growth be mutually exclusive? It seems a bit specious to me.

Look at San Francisco, Calif., or Seattle, Wash., or Portland, Ore., or Madison, Wisc., or even Austin! These cities are striving towards sustainability; abating environmental impact to the point which the environmental gains negate human impact. All of these cities are not only environmentally friendly, but are also economic powerhouses. The investment in their infrastructure to make the cities cleaner, safer and more ecologically integrated has made them attractive, boosting land values and making them sought-after locations for creative-types and progressive firms.

Dallas could do this, too. We could be come the next green-living outpost. Too bad we've got business leaders and council members that would cut their noses off to spite their faces. They'd rather have toll roads running through our greenspace and intruding upon what was supposed to be our own verson of Golden Gate Park... It's too bad that we won't have a dense urban core, afforable multi-family highrises or a downtown peppered with well-manicured parks and recreational facilities. It's too bad that companies come to Dallas looking for a steal, and then they really do, they steal from the communities' investment in infrastructure, developing reinvestment zones that take tax revenue from the city for new bells and whistles for their towers of babel.

What will get us there? What will make us as beautiful and preserved as San Francisco? As ecologically sound as Eugene, Ore. or Seattle? Progressive leadership -- a commodity that we sorely lack.

To make Dallas whole

I fell hard into my uncomfortable chair at work, the recoil of the hydraulic lift making my bean soup slosh gently. The warm bowl in my lap and my cool caesar salad on my desk, I thought about how I hadn't blogged in such a long while. I've been thinking about that a lot lately, mostly while baking bread and doing yoga at the gym. I've been wondering if I really had anything to say at all.

Sure I'd read something that would make my blood boil, but how on earth do you really speak out about anything if your job is the proverbial cat with your tongue? So, I've decided that I'll get back to the nitty gritty of Dallas, what's wrong, what's right and what we should do about our myriad problems.

If you're ever in Dallas and want to have a pleasant trip, do not talk about race, ever. That's like pulling a lion's tail, especially if you're white. It would make what Don Imus is coming back from look trivial. So, it's astonishing that in our Legislature, two lawmakers are asking that the state formally apologize for slavery. Note, they're not from Dallas, but Houston also has a history of racial tension.

So, it's really peculiar that so many racially charged issues are on the floor in the Texas House. On March 21, David Swinford effectively killed a bill from Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, that would disallow the removal of any memorial plaques or statues from state property without the approval of the Legislature, including several Confederate memorials at the University of Texas that have recently drawn fire.

Not that I agree with slaveholding, Southern, belly-up aristocracy, but history is history, even the ugly parts. Will an apology do any good at resolving centuries of ingrained racial dischord? Not really, but if it makes Texas and it's pussilanimous Legislature feel better, then sure, go ahead and apologize for slavery.

But instead of just an apology, a third-rate collection of words officially saying "Gee, we're real sorry about the whole indentured servitude thing, forgive?" How about we do something that will really change the tides of race relations and its associated poverty, something that will wash away the geographical dividing lines that still segregate. Why don't we do something meaningful instead of asking a bunch of completely oblivious white dudes to say "I'm sorry" for something their ancestors did?

With the money the Texas House has wasted debating an apology for slavery we could have gotten started with programs keeping black kids in school, providing their parents with opportunities to start over, to break the cycle of poverty, to end their relegation to Dallas' "Southern Sector" and to dissolve fifedoms of racial inequity through combined community investment.

Nah, that'd make way too much sense.

Four cups to shake the cobwebs

For the past few nights I've been so restless, and I haven't been able to sleep. I'd toss and turn and roll over again and again, but nothing could keep me comfortable enough to make me go to sleep and stay that way. Not even my dashing husband and his loyal mutt!

But last night was different. I skipped cardio at the gym and did Marj's Iyengar yoga class only. We did lots of backbends and a few twists, no inversion, but Savasana, some Pranayama and some chanting. I came home though, to only panic about dinner. I couldn't figure out what to make! It was the end of the week, and pickings were slim. There were a few sprigs of cilantro, some silken tofu, whole wheat tortillas... I got the genius idea to make enchiladas! But, wait... I've never made enchiladas before...

So, I created a whole new animal: The Enchilada Lasagna! Layers of whole wheat tortillas separated a spicy mixture of sauteed onions, red peppers and celery in a tomato and green chile base, with a middle layer of chicken and corn, all laden with a thick, creamy cilantro/tomato/tofu sauce! Baked for 30 minutes and served with long grain and wild rice with black beans... Tasty!

Satisfied, I cleaned up after dinner and retired. My creativity was spent, I had no mental energy left. I crawled into bed and minutes later I was in a peaceful, uninterrupted slumber, only to be stopped by the annoying soliliquy of my alarm clock.

Now, Friday morning with so much junk to do at the office because three key staffers are out today, I'm having to down cup after cup of hot fresh java to get the gears turning in my cranium!

Tonight we're going to Benihana for my brother-in-law Marcus' birthday. Tomorrow, we look for houses, and tomorrow night, Kara is coming to town! YAY!!!

Hope I can blog again soon, with pictures!

Stuff I luv!

I know you're all dying to know what I think about the new Trinity River Project plans for a toll road inside the river's corridor, but until I see a few key pieces of evidence, you'll just have to wait. In the mean time, I'm going to share just a few products that I've grown to absolutely adore!

1) Aveda Blue Oil: This pepperminty oil comes in a roll-on vial that easily and weightlessly smooths on skin in areas that you feel tense or need relaxing. It's cooling and warming, with a divine scent and gentle tingle. A little bit on achy muscles before bed is a recipe for relaxation!










2) Aveeno Skin brightening Daily scrub: Gentle little beads in a creamy oatmeal-infused base exfoliate gently to reduce the size of pores. It's easy on dry, irritated skin and won't clog pores. Admission: I have occasional hormonal acne around my mouth and chin, but using this regularly keeps my face clearer without using harsh chemicals.













3) Aveda Hand Relief: This was a real skin saver this dry Dallas winter. Smooth on just a little of this rich, creamy lotion with an awesome scent and it almost instantly heals hardened little mitts!












4) Bath and Body Works Black Rasberry Vanilla: You've just got to smell it. Oh-so-sweet!