I’m sitting on the couch beside my sick, sleeping daughter while my son plays his new Batman 3 Lego video game. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, a lazy Saturday with a blue sky outside that belies the frigid Toronto temperatures. My partner is out for a run, a habit he’s returned to since taking a break after completing not one, but two triathlons last summer. When he comes home he’ll take the dog out for a walk. As for me, I don’t have much energy to do anything. ‘Maybe tomorrow’ has been my New Years mantra.
I usually buy into the New Years resolution thing and feel motivated to change my bad habits and adopt some new ones but so far no luck. It’s not for Santa’s lack of trying. On my right wrist is a Fitbit bracelet, an innocuous gadget easily forgotten about until it buzzes me or flashes its little lights at me. Not sure what they’re for. Every few days I go on the website to track my progress and see that I moved around a lot in the morning when I got up and went to work, and that I moved around a lot at the end of the work day when I came home. Nothing surprising there. What it doesn’t show is me moving much any other times of the day, which is because I’m not. The website is a baffling head scratcher, making far too many assumptions about my diet and fitness goals to be believable. I’ll take www.myfitnesspal.com over this any day. I still have to do all the work (which would ideally include biking and running), and the logging in of meals, but at least it doesn’t claim to be anything other than a tracker. While I might be failing at this, the food eaten in 2015 has been very good.
During the last year we’ve heard the deep whirring of our neighbour’s Vita mix every morning. We’ve wanted a high-speed blender for years but have been loath to spend the $700. It turns out that the good folks at Blendtec will sell you a re-built model for considerably less, with a warrantee and a new BPA-free jug. Since Christmas it’s been used two or three times a day. This beast can handle anything that we add – organic soy milk with carrots, apples, oranges, frozen cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, avocado, dandelion and beet greens, kale, spinach, banana, almonds, walnuts, sesame and pumpkin seeds. Best yet, my son loves them, and he doesn’t mind knowing he’s drinking swiss chard. Thankfully he’s also colourblind, which means the putrid-green colour of some of these concoctions looks a more palatable orange instead.
The other gadget that found its way under our tree this Christmas is a canner/pressure cooker. We’ve canned our own tomatoes for a few years but have been inspired to can other things like beans and other low-acid foods. We are avid soupsters so it would be nice to be able to save some of our marvellous creations for posterity, or at the very least for convenience. The beans are soaking as we speak, and tomorrow the canner will make its maiden voyage. As our jars of tomatoes are used up from last summer’s tomato-fest, the empty shelves will be filled with jars of soups, beans ‘n’ tomato sauce, chick peas, kidney beans, chillies, salsas and sauces. A way to avoid buying stuff in BPA-lined cans, it’s also fresher and cheaper.
By the time of my next missive I hope to be able to tell you that I’ve at least gone for a walk-run-walk-walk-walk-run-walk. My next goal will be to replace the walks with the runs. Then over time I’ll get rid of the walks altogether and only run. I’ll run everywhere. To the bathroom. To Starbucks. To the grocery store. Watch for me on Facebook. I’ll be the holier-than-thou uber-athlete, healthy and fit, not motivating others but pissing them off with details of my daily hours-long workouts. Don’t worry folks, no sanctimony here.
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