Year: 2020

Do you sometimes feel like we have lost touch with part of our humanity? Our modern life is so easy and we take so much for granted. I am not a luddite and I do believe that science and technology can create a better world for everyone but I sometimes wonder how much of our humanity we lose due to the technological world. How many “Bed Bath and Beyond” and “Applebees” do we need? For better or worse, the Covid-19 paradigm shift, hasn’t altered my social life much. We tend to be home bodies or forced family fun day trippers. We don’t dine out much, don’t engage in a lot of social activities but try to get outdoors and play or do yard work as much as possible.

My son is a teenager and with each passing day I am more aware of how short our time is as a family unit. Though we spend nearly all of our time together, I am always questioning if we are teaching him enough. During these last few months at home, I am trying to really get the point through to both of my children that the only constant is change and the ability to adapt to your situation is the most important thing to learn.

So back to the land, literally and figuratively. I am a real-estate junkie and follow all types of home and lands on the various websites, monitoring the sales and price changes. We spend a lot of time in the mountains, here in Virginia they aren’t as busy as in many places and hotels, cabins, campsites etc can be in short supply. I saw a large price drop on a 13 acre parcel of land bordering West Virginia, showed it to my husband. He also thought it sounded like a good deal and called the agent. The agent said they were considering an offer at the moment but were waiting to hear back on a counter-offer. I asked if we could also put in an offer, he said sure could and my crazy husband and son took off on a Sunday afternoon for a 3 hour drive to see the lot.

I think it was a good bonding experience for the two “men” to go and look at the land, it was a rough parcel with no clearing. They had to cut their way through and by standing on a stump, a mountain view could be seen in the distance. Though it wasn’t an area we have done much exploring in, it was within an hour of many hiking/biking/kayaking places we wanted to be near, the price couldn’t be beat and with Corona-Tine still in effect for most summer activities, it would be something to do as a family.

As a kid, I never went camping. The closest I ever came to camping as a child was the time I went to summer camp for a week and slept in a cabin. I didn’t really enjoy the communal living aspect and I became violently ill with food poisoning one night and thew up all over my bunk and the bunk below me. I spent a lot of time in the infirmary. I did not make life-long friends at this camp.

After I married my husband, we went tent camping once in South Dakota. I don’t remember much about this trip except we brought along our little shih-tzu mix and he barked at every noise he heard. It was a busy and noisy campground and we didn’t sleep much.

Now that my kids are older, we have taken them camping a few times. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I tend to be a control freak and I think having to let all of that go is actually quite relaxing for me. I actually prefer the remote campsites, no bathrooms or people right next to you. If you are going to the wilderness having a giant RV next to you running a generator isn’t my idea of fun. So while I actually like camping, I don’t particularly like camgrounds.

I have always wanted to own land. I joke about wanting to be the “landed” gentry.” My mother’s family comes from a long line of farmers and I like to think that I have land lust in my blood. I also have a deep doomsday prepper vein constantly running in the back of my head. The last few months have really brought this to a head and I had to check myself from going Mad Max. But recent events and shortages also showed how by being as prepared (and certainly there were lessons on things to improve upon) I was much less stressed than I might have been otherwise.

I like to consider myuself a minimalist, I like to keep the belongings I have for as long as possible, I try to keep life as simply as possible. I work to live not live to work. Recently, we found some acerage, priced very inexpensively, in the mountains about 3 hours from where we live. We made an offer on sight and closed a few weeks later. The day we signed our documents on-line, we headed to the property with a weed whacker, a chainsaw, tick spray and a dream. We cleared just enough to fit our tent so that the next time we came back, 4 days later over the 4th of July, we had a homebase!

I am going to chronicle our progress here, we have had a blast getting outside and getting very very dirty!

I am racking up the miles, I recently had my Runkeeper odometer pass 999 miles, nothing exciting happened and it did indeed still carry over to 4 digits. No Y2k style meltdown (yes, I am a Gen Xer.) As there is no chance I will be racing against anyone anytime soon, I am focusing on running for distance, not speed.

I have also started listening to audio books while I am running, though I still have my spotify lists and tend to alternate. For some reason my bkue tooth automatically connects in my car to the last thing on my Spotify. I listen to an embarassing list of music, Poison’s, “Talk Dirty to Me” is likely to blare on the speaker, scarring my children for life.

I have also stepped up my Etsy shop during the quarantine, this gives me a lot of anxiety. I still have trouble putting my art out there and I am afraid of negative feedback. I have been called thin skinned, usually by my parents, for my whole life. I like to think I am overly sensitive, I even found a book about it once. It was very relatable to me but hilarious to think about announcing that ” I am a highly sensitive person, please keep the noise down!”

I did sell two painting, I liked them, I hope the buyers did! I just posted these two today:

currently listed on Etsy
my saucony socks! And a painting, also listed on Etsy!

No Pinterest Pics Here!

{Warning} There are no pretty photos on this blog. I can link you to my Etsy shop for that.

I am not afraid to substitute, my family is afraid when I substitute, with good reason. I have had some less than successful baking results, but they were “healthier” so there’s that. Except the time when I added salt instead of sugar, I am pretty sure that was at LD50.

In my defense, my sugar and salt decorative jars are very similar. It was inedible. Spit it out inedible. I blamed the salted butter, which I accidentaly bought during the Corona panic buying. It was not the butter, I added a cup of salt. But they were almond flour, so healthy?

This morning, I needed a pick-me-up, I didn’t sleep well. I am trying to reinvent my life post-COVID19. This is a story for another time. We are not a “paleo” family, no verified allergies, just the vain wheat belly reasons. I randomly subsitute almond flour into traditional recipes, it doesn’t always work out. I also don’t believe in using more than one bowl when baking, sort of a “one pot cooking” but for baking, it also doesn’t always work out. I know there is a science, nay, a chemistry behind the two or sometimes 3 bowls used in baking recipes, liquid/solids, acids/bases, oxidation/reduction, etc. I just don’t think it’s efficient and as I have learned more about myself, my goal is to optimize, sometimes the baking doesn’t look so pretty.

Exhibit A. #blueberry (I don’t know how to use a hashtag either)
Kids, come take a scoop of blueberry mess!

Back to this morning, today was a good day. The recipe, once I scrolled past all of the manicured pictures and found the buried recipe treasure, was pretty simple. I decided on a few substitutions. I didn’t have much coconut oil, I generally use olive oil for everything (I know, most of the best pastries are made with olive oil, ha-ha) I buy it in bulk (optimizing) and it usually works ok in most things. I find that olive oil and almond flour prove to be a little leaden when they combine forces so I use whole plain yougurt. This seems to add the fat but allows for a lighter texture. More edible, less building material.

Not all substitutions are successful, i.e. salt for sugar, vinegar and milk for buttermilk. Pretty sure the indigenous people built dwellings from this maize creation. You could really taste the vinegar, which was not at all tasty.

I beat the eggs, yogurt and honey with a hand mixer. I felt like it needed some vanilla extract so I added a capful or so. I then mixed in my salt, baking soda and almond flour, being oh-so-careful not to overmix. Acid/base blah blah blah.

For the topping I used brown sugar, I don’t know what coconut sugar is, cinammon and all spice. Also, I learned that allspice is not a mixture of all of the common baking spices as I thought for most of my life, according to my Google overlords, it is “Jamaica pepper, myrtle pepper, pimenta, or pimento, is the dried unripe berry of Pimenta dioica.” I think I will say I added Jamaica pepper next time, sounds more beachy. I drizzled a little oilive oil on top. I did not add slivered almonds as I felt the 3.5 cups of ground almonds was probably enough nuts for my GI system to process this morning.

I popped it in the oven and then the questions began. “Another coffee cake, are you putting blueberries in this one too?” “Is that almond flour, why can’t you use regular flour?” “How old is this coffee?” It baked in less than 30 minutes and was quite attractive for one of my baking experiments.

The entire cake was consumed in a few minutes, there were no stray blueberries squished onto the floor. A success! Additionally, I had but one bowl to wash. It was relatively light, delicious and practically a vegetable. I went on a run later and did not feel like I swallowed any lead weights.

No, I am not a professional photographer, but I can see why you might be wondering.

If you asked me a few years ago if I would ever consider the benefits or even attempt something called a “long run,” I would have laughed. It’s been 3 weeks since I had to close my office due to COVID-19 concerns, 3 weeks since my kids abruptly left school. So much has changed. Yet, as someone who once purchased the domain name, hermitwhimsy.com, it’s more like a restrictive summer vacation to us. We generally don’t socialize much and our summers are chock full of togetherness. We hike a lot in the summer and explore places and things, we are trying to stay close to home now.

The long run has become my coping mechanism to deal with uncertainty. I take a wide berth around the people I never saw until a few weeks ago, I run all winter and summer, like the post office, wind, sleet, snow, etc and have never seem most of these people.

I didn’t realize how much my winter psoas injury had effected my running. I read that a posas injury can take months to heal, but I am stubborn and don’t think normal healing times apply to me. I am not running fast, though there isn’t much incentive as all of our local races have been cancelled, but I feel strong and I am pretty much heading out until I feel like turning around. I ran over 7 miles the other day, a personal record. Not a marathon or even a half-marathon for that matter, but I kept a steady pace (around 9:45 min/mi) and managed to run the last mile in under 8:30 min/mi. I listened to music, admired the blooming trees, held my nose past the Bradford Pear trees (smells like vomit!) and focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

I am trying to look at this break in my life and work as a sabbatical, something I always joked that I wanted. Well, I have it and now I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And veer around all of those other people.