This is a portfolio of my work in many forms. It should give you some insight as to the products I might help you to create.
So, today, I was in the mood for breakfast, and had some extra time to make it. I just picked up some eggs last night at the grocery, had some generously donated tomatoes from a good friend’s garden, some nice simple sesame seed rolls in the freezer, and a lot of coffee. Finally, I gave in to my addiction for KIND bars, this one was a cashew flaxseed omega 3 extravaganza. I seasoned the egg with garam masala, salt and pepper. Together, it came to this.
A very dear friend just asked me a very interesting question, which I’ll paraphrase to “Is there a conflict for you between your love of technology and your love of a simple life?”
In no way whatsoever is there a conflict for me. Let me explain.
I do not love all technology for technology’s sake, and I do not love all simplicity for simplicity’s sake.
For example, one might consider the new Google Nexus 7, an Android based tablet, a technology. Books are technology too, by the way, but I assume that she referred to my love of new technologies. I love it because it is open. I love it because it is useful. I love it because I am a fan of Google as an organization. I think they make good choices. I love it because it is innovative. I love it because it is portable, functional, and benefits me in my lifestyle. I love it because it is extensible, flexible, and meaningful beyond the technology in and of itself.
It provides me with a certain simplicity in many ways in my life. For example, I use it to log my calories while I am out, as I eat during the day, using the MyFitnessPal app, which allows me to track my caloric goals, get support from the community, look up calorie values for just about any food I eat, and store all of my eating activity. I could do this with a simpler solution, such as a notebook, pencil and calorie counts book, but it is simpler, in my opinion, to carry just one object, in which I can do those tasks with less effort.
Another example is my beloved Fitbit, an amazing device that acts as pedometer and altimeter, tracking steps taken very accurately, stair flights taken, sleep, and calories burned. I have used a few pedometers in the past, and I got incredibly frustrated with their limited function and inaccuracies. The Fitbit allows me to know when I have done enough movement for the day, when I’ve not, how I’m sleeping, how many calories I’m burning, how fast I’m going, and more. Guesswork is gone. Using other methods to do this might be without technology, but they would not be simpler in the least. When I walk in my home, the Fitbit wirelessly syncs with my account on the web, updating my charts and reflecting my effort. All I have to do it remember to throw the Fitbit on my hip, and the rest is simply movement. This is simplicity defined, given my goals.
In my opinion, technology provides increased simplicity, or it has less value for me. Technology and simplicity are not only compatible for me, they are deeply connected.
Part of my success with fitness and nutritional awareness has been the openness with which I have shared what I know and have learned, the openness of studies and findings on nutritional topics, and free-flowing information. Knowing other things in life can be easy too.
Today, I had my 2 boys with me. I see them for a few days a week now, about 15-20 hours a week all told, and it’s a joy in life that no other joy can begin to compete with, in a life of a thousand joys. In a recent post, I’ve talked about my retreat from practicing alcoholism and my losses as a result of that struggle, and one of my most relieved fears is that I will not have to lose time with my boys. My absolute joy.
How did we spend our time today? It was a question, a question we ask each time we meet, discussing how best to spend our time together. Usually, there are three to four components, and those are: food, exercise, exploration, and play. Today we did all of those.
I recently had an automotive run-in with a guard rail, which is another story. It’s a short one about a wet road and a quick curve, but for our purposes here, my car being in the shop means that travel is… difficult. It means no stop to Princeton for dinner, no travel to Ewing and the Farmer’s Market, no visit to Trenton for a walk downtown or gallery visits. It means, in short, forced locality. There are buses, and other means of travel, but that takes time away from a precious limited set of minutes. This difficulty of travel is not a bad thing, but a thing that affected our day together, wonderfully, as it turns out.
So, what to do? We needed to eat some food, and that could have meant a cooking lesson, or a call to a local pizza joint for delivery. [aside: I don’t know if you know this, but Central New Jersey undeniably has the best pizza in the world.] Ha! I’m just kidding, everyone knows this.
So anyway, we also wanted to get some exercise, which, for me, means 10,000 steps a day. My boys, 7 and 4, do a great job of keeping up, but asking for 10,000 steps from a 4-year-old is a very special request. We typically walk to the nature preserve, walk around a park, and go back home, with far less than 10,000 steps.
So to combine these tasks, I asked them if they were willing to talk a longer walk than usual, from where I live in Plainsboro, NJ, near Dey and Scotts Corner roads, to a shopping center about 2 miles away, where they have pizza, Chinese food, cafes, Indian food, fast food, and a grocery store.
They loved the idea! They are amazing. So, off we went on an adventure to walk to brunch. They say that the journey is the important thing, but this walk proved it. They exceeded my expectations and then some. As you can see from the image above, we did 13,000 steps today, among my highest on record.
While on the walk, in both directions, we meditated a bit, and I shared how I do it as I have on this blog, and they shared how they did it. Their methods are a bit less about focus and more about personal discovery, perhaps, but their meditation is natural, and wholly legitimate. We talked about nature, and play, and walking. We discussed how we were able to see so many things that the people zooming in cars were missing. We saw mushrooms and discussed their fragility and defenselessness. We stopped and visited with a rich, old tree along the path. We talked about building robots and developing new methods for slingshots. We saw two deer, diving into the brush. We counted scores of insects, butterflies, moths, and grasshoppers. We looked at houses and wondered who lived in them. We saw birds and tried to name them. We saw excrement from the various animals who lived in the ecosystem, and discussed the ways in which humans differ from animals. We saw the landscape change several times. We heard sirens and cars, and silence, and crickets, and cicadas, and wondered what they were singing about. In the last stretch of the walk home, there is a field of dirt and scattered vegetation, littered with large stones, riverbed stones about 6-8 inches in diameter. We picked one out, as though at a pet store, and brought it home with us, as a keepsake.
When we got to the shopping center, we decided that the grocery store gave us the most options, and we were right. We purchased fresh peaches, a banana, an apple, some pre-cooked chicken shumai, some Kind Fruit and Nut bars (an addiction for me now), a small bottled mango juice, a fresh flaky croissant, a crusty Portuguese roll, and a two liter bottle of seltzer water. It was a veritable feast, and we finished about half of it, and had all we could eat.
Perhaps the best moments today was this:
On our walk, we came across a bee. I asked my 7-year-old if he liked bees, and he said he did. I smiled, told him I liked bees, and asked him why he did. He told me that they were very important, that they spread pollen, which helps plants grow, which gives us oxygen, which helps us to grow, which gives plants carbon dioxide, and that bees were important in all that going on. I stopped walking, mouth agape, surprised that our conversations on this had sunk in and spread for him so deeply, that he was able to articulate it so simply. I grabbed and hugged him, and told him how proud I was of who he was and what he knew, and it was just gratitude and joy and humanness for us. I am crying now, thinking of the moment.
If you can, walk with your loved ones in nature, and talk about what you find there. Regardless of the physical exercise, which I credit for my tone and fitness, the intimate connections that are possible in the mental exercise, in my opinion, are harder to set up in other activities.
So, I recently fell in love. There’s a little shop in Princeton called D’Angelo Italian Market, on the corner of Spring Street and South Tulane, and something there caught my eye. They have a great little Italian market, as the name implies, with fresh food everyday, but the real gem is in the trattoria. There you’ll find Grandma style (rustic) pizza, soups, the most amazing hot pressed panini, and really delicious fresh bread, if a bit oily to the touch. It is not low calorie food, but it is real food, and to me that is the important part. I’ll count the calories for delicious food every time, and enjoy it.
I fell in love most recently there with a certain spinach mozzarella roll: spinach, mozzarella, and ricotta cheeses wrapped in pizza dough and served with a quarter cup of house made sauce. It’s about 2 inches high, 8 inches long, and 3 inches wide. It is a portable, delicious, nutritious meal, but it’s a problematic relationship.
Problem 1: Small food businesses need not publish calories.
There’s the issue. D’Angelo, being a small, non-chain business, is not held to the same rules as Subway or Panera in the new national healthcare laws regarding calorie display on menus. I adore these rules — they help me to make decisions in just about every chain restaurant I go into now. But in this case, because the calorie display is not required, and likely no research has been done to even determine the calories in D’Angelo food, I’d have to guess at the calories in a slice of pizza, or breadstick, or anything, because it is not standardized in size, ingredients, or weight like packaged foods are, or even like most fast foods are. It’s real food, but I didn’t cook it, or make any decisions about what went into it, and so counting it is difficult.
Solution 1: Find out the calories of something similar
But you can guess fairly accurately with common foods like pizza, because others who make pizza of similar shape, style, and size make their calories known according to the law. For example, if I have a large plain slice from a local pizza joint, it’s often the same size, weight and style as a Papa John’s slice of Large (14 inch) original crust cheese pizza (300 calories) according to http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-papa-johns-original-crust-pizza-i54242 and so, I can safely count it as that and be within 100 calories, more or less, disregarding extra oil, cheese, dough, or sauce.
Problem 2: D’Angelo Mozzarella Spinach Rolls are not a common chain brand item.
It gets more problematic when you have a local joint specialty like a spinach mozzarella roll. It’s like a long hot pocket, but far more delicious. There are not a lot of calorie publishing places that make these, and not in the same style or size. For instance, Sbarro’s publishes their calories, and I often go to them as an example of more decadent Italian dishes. The calories are always surprisingly high, because their food is always suprisingly large, delicious (due to extra oil and cheese and dough, usually) and rich.
Solution 2: Find something like a spinach roll somewhere, and use those calories.
Like I suggested above, I was able to find something like D’Angelo Spinach rolls at Sbarro: they have a veggie stromboli, and it’s 714 calories per 10.5 ounce calzone. You can see this at this site: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-sbarro-spinach-tomato-broccoli-stromboli-i55074 This particular site allows you to get adjusted calories according to the weight of the item, which by default is 10 ounces.
Problem 3: I have no idea what the roll I ate weighed.
Because I do not know if the spinach roll I had at D’Angelo was 10 ounces, 6 ounces, or 14 ounces, simply using Sbarro’s calories for reference is not necessarily the best idea. Just because Sbarro uses the amount of cheese, dough, and veggies that they do does not mean that D’Angelo’s will. With Pizza, it’s a bit easier, because 14 inch thin crust pizzas are kind of the norm, a standard, if you will, but in something like this, all bets are off.
Solution 3: Know everything you can about what you are eating.
I had a spinach and mozzarella roll at D’Angelo today, and as I ordered it, I noticed that there was a scale there because they sell meats and other goods by volume. I quickly asked if he could weigh it for me, and while I got kind of an puzzled, if nice, look, I really don’t care. I care much more about my nutrition and fitness than what the guy behind the counter thinks, and so should you, though he was interested when I explained. It was 10.5 ounces, and so I feel quite safe using Sbarro’s calories as a guideline for my counting.
D’Angelo Italian Market http://goo.gl/maps/TtQkI
So, there’s a saying in project management: You can have something “Fast, Good or Cheap — Choose Two” – (The Fast, Good and Cheap Pricing Method | FreelanceFolder at But in this case, I’m going to show you how this does not have to apply to making coffee.
So I love my press pot. But I don’t like how long it takes. I do not always have 6 minutes to boil water, then an extra steeping time of 4-10 minutes. I want it fast.
I love expensive coffee, like from Starbucks, but I do not like the price per pound. Cheap coffee in a cheap process though tastes cheap. I want it cheap, but not cheap tasting.
I like good coffee. But I was under the impression that the coffee itself made all the difference. The fact is, for me, you can extract all the rich oils and pseudo crema that you expect from expensive coffee from cheaper coffee if you do it this way.
I could solve all of these by spending more money for better coffee, extending the time of the process by grinding my own beans, and getting a great cuppa. But I’d rather do this:
Fill your press pot to the fill line, and dump the water in a pan. Measure out your coffee and add it to the pan. Turn the heat on high and cover. My pot takes exactly 6 minutes to boil. Stir the coffee gently 2 or 3 times as it boils.
When it starts to bubble, immediately add it to the press pot, and press immediately. Enjoy.
It’s fast: Old process: 10-14 minutes. This method: 6 minutes.
It’s cheap: I use off the shelf store brand coffee from the big can, and I don’t miss Starbucks until the brew gets cold, and then it is sort of obvious I’m using cheap coffee. life is too short for cold coffee, though.
It’s good: I think it’s a delicious cuppa. Try it, fellow coffee snobs, and let me know where I messed up your brew!