Dan & JillTaking it one day at a time…

So we are on our 3rd Bountiful Baskets order.  I’m loving it!  So far each week we have gotten something new to try.  The first week was a coconut, not new of course, but not something that we get too often!  The second week we got bok choy cabbage which we used in our own homemade chow mein which was mighty delicious.  And this week we got plantains (Well we got them last week, too and Dan found out the hard way that they weren’t bananas when he put one in his protein shake.  Oops!) and made a delicious Caribbean meal of sautéed pork chops and fried plantains!  They were so delicious, like a cross between fried zucchini and french fries.  Just got done eating them:

Summer Gardening!

Step 1: Clearing the giant weed tree that somehow blew into my parents’ yard some years ago!  Boy was this hard work even with a chain saw!

Step 2: Leveling the ground and the garden bed

Umm… Step 3 & 4: Build planters and plant plants!  Woops… missed a few steps in my slideshow.  Must’ve been carried away with all the work!

Step 5: Clean up; many bags of the horribly annoying bermuda grass

Herbs: Basil, Cilantro, Oregano, & Catnip!  and summer squash.

Tomatoes, Bell Peppers, and Nasty Crawling Critters we found in the dirt

And the finished product:

Some found treasures:

Army men, slammers, and old trampoline springs were dug up in the process!  Fun!

That’s what I am embarking on!  I am determined to get healthy and do it the right way.  I am restarting P90X tonight.  I woke up this morning and had a delicious blueberry/strawberry/banana protein shake, took all my meds, and then Dan and I headed off to Costco and Sprouts to get all the food we will need for the week on our P90X diet.  I also tried out a simply yet yummy recipe for lunch today and got to use one of our veggies from the co-op!  Yay!  I made a chilled cucumber salad, minus the onions and I think I liked it better than with onions.  I also used dill instead of celery seed.  Overall it was light, refreshing, and delicious!

Dan and I were recently turned on to this food co-op called Bountiful Baskets through a blog that I follow regularly.   We’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while just never really knew what was out there.  We are really trying to lesson our carbon footprint.  So, we decided to partake in this food co-op where a bunch of people pool their money together to get bulk discounts on food and then share the food evenly with everybody.  I saw how much food the person from the blog that I follow had gotten and immediately knew that it would  be too much food for just Dan and I and we would need somebody else to go in halfsies with us on it.  So we were able to talk our good friends, Jason & Julie into doing it.  Then after sharing the idea with both of our parents they decided they wanted in on it, too!  So, we’re going to order a couple baskets starting next weekend and split them up between the 4 of us.  I ordered my first basket this past week just to test it out and see how much food it really comes with.  Then as I said, starting next week it will be the real deal with all 4 of us!

I got up early this morning and drove over to the golf course in Dan’s grandma’s neighborhood to pick up my very first basket.  It was such a neat experience.  The people were so nice and since this was my first basket I had a person walk me through all of the steps.  Basically they have all these baskets lined up in a parking lot with numbers on them.  You sign in with the person that has the clipboard, he gives you a number and then you find your numbered baskets and transfer the food into your own container, box, bag, etc.  There was also a lady there giving out bay leaves from her tree to everybody, which was cool!

Anyways, it was a lot of food.  Too much food for just Dan and I to eat in a week before it starts to go bad.  Going to give my parents half of this basket.  This is what we got:

11 Gala Apples
7 peaches
6 bananas (1 bunch)
1 container of strawberries
1 container of blackberries
1 coconut
4 avocados
7 roma tomatoes
3 yellow squash
2 HUGE cucumbers
1 bag of baby carrots
1 bundle of green lettuce
1 head of green cabbage

I’m very excited to start our own “co-op” with our 4 families!

On another note, we are going to plant a garden with my parents in their backyard.  I thought this would be the BEST way to try to lessen our carbon imprint and an awesome way to try to sustain 3 different families with 1 garden!  I want to get my parents’ old garden area all cleaned up and ready for planting in the next few weeks and make it a family activity that we can all do together.  Need to research what can be planted right now.  I know things can grow year round, it’s just a matter of what!  Food probably wouldn’t be ready until a couple of months away so we will still do this Bountiful Baskets thing for quite a while.

We are very excited about this new endeavor!  More to come!

For my birthday I decided that I really wanted a little vacation somewhere and so we decided on San Diego with our good friends, Jason & Julie.  We had such a great, relaxing time!  We went to dinner the night of my birthday with Dan and I’s other good friends, Dean & Alissa and got to meet their new little baby.  We went to 2 beaches, drove to Mt. Soledad, toured the USS Midway, ate at several great and one not so great restaurants, and my favorite part of the trip was the short amount of time we spent at Balboa Park.  I can’t wait to go back to San Diego to see and take pictures (more to come) of the park in the day!  Here’s a few highlights from our trip:

I’ve had asthma since I was 9 years old and never has it given me such a fuss as it has this year.  I remember as a kid having to go to the nurse’s office before P.E. and to blow in the “peak flow meter”.  My doctors always said I would grow out of my asthma once I enter adulthood and that it was only “exercise-induced”.  Boy were they wrong— it’s gotten worse in my adulthood!

When we moved out of our apartment back in February there was so much dust kicked up during all of the packing, cleaning, and moving and that’s when I first started noticing my troubles.  I also suspect there was mold in our bathroom, but I am not sure.  Ever since then, I have been suffering silently from my asthma.  That added to all the stress that we went through from February-March really exacerbated my condition.  It’s gotten so bad that my asthma attacks will last days and then take days for me to recover from them.  I heard that this was the worst allergy season in 100 years.  I believe it, with all the rain that we had this year!  Anyways, so I’ve been seeing my doctor regularly (practically weekly) and have even had to make a couple visits to the emergency room.  Not fun.  My doctors recently told me I had the lungs of a 63 year old and that I am at risk for COPD.  Not cool.

My goal right now is just to take care of myself.  Asthma is a very serious condition and I haven’t taken it serious enough for far too long.  I am following my doctors’ strict orders of taking my close to 10 medications daily and taking my breathing machine to work in case I need it there!  I’ve missed far too much work over the past 2 months than I care to admit and I am ready for some relief.  Ready for this allergy season to end and for things to go back to normal.  It’s so hard to explain what it feels like to struggle for air day in and day out.  It’s extremely tiring and requires a lot of time to recover from an asthma attack.  Once I get the relief that I need from a breathing treatment, the next 12-24 hours consist of me lying in bed or on the couch just to feel normal again.  Every part of my body screams for that oxygen!

I am so lucky that I have the support that I do.  My husband has been incredibly caring and understanding throughout all this and is always having to tell me to “sit down”, “lay down”, “go in the house”, and all that good stuff.  I like to be a part of life and do what I normally do but my husband knows the risks and he makes sure that I take it easy.  He is so awesome.  My mom and dad bought me an air purifier over the weekend to help get rid of as much indoor pollutents as I can (i.e. animal hair, dander, pollen, dust, etc.) and I think it’s really made a difference.  I have so many people around me who care about me and are very worried about me.  So, I’m doing my best to take care of myself and in turn take care of them!

I stayed home from work today again as I woke up feeling like I was being strangled.  I’ve tried to take it easy today and have been doing my breathing treatments all day.  Hoping tonight goes better.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

I live in a police state.  This is a dark, dark time in Arizona’s history.