Health Wads

Last Sunday I went on a massive shopping expedition to Rainbow. I had gotten a few ideas from my cranial-sacral guy, which meant stocking up on some new things. While I was there, it started to seem I might not be able to get it all home on my bike, so I put back laundry soap and dish soap, which turned out to be a good thing.

I have two panniers which can each hold a standard paper grocery bag pretty much full to the brim, plus my backpack for overflow, plus, if necessary, I can hang grocery bags from the left and right ends of my handlebars, but only fairly light items can go in the latter. It’s not the ideal solution, safety-wise, but does in a pinch.

At the checkout counter, another shopper observed my vast haul and asked, “Did you ride your bike here? Good luck!” Sure enough, if I hadn’t put those two items back, I would have had to wheel my bike all the way home with them balanced on my rear rack.

At home, I rinsed fruit and chopped veggies and washed spinach for salad and mixed steel-cut oats with water and a bit of vinegar to soak overnight. I made enough pasta sauce for 10 servings and froze the individual servings. I made potato-kale soup and dal. It took into the wee hours (i.e., past 8:30 p.m.), but it’s worth it. I love looking around my counters and in the fridge and seeing all that beautiful, healthy, cooked-with-care food.

I was going to make Health Wads, too, but ran out of time—tasty cookies made with whole-wheat flour, egg replacer, and walnut oil, a recipe of my own devising. I’m trying to think of a better name. Tom suggested “Eco Chunks.”

The next morning I cooked the oats with a big pile of strawberries and some cinnamon and sweetener. It was great, especially with sliced banana on top. My cranial-sacral guy says soaking grains makes them easier to digest, but the very best thing he said was about avocados.

I was telling him about the nausea I’ve had lately, and he speculated that maybe it’s caused by supplements, and suggested eating something beforehand to coat my stomach, such as avocado. I said I love avocados, but I only buy one at a time, because if you buy six, they will invariably all ripen on the same day.

Jack said that avocados can be “stop-actioned” in the refrigerator: If you put a ripe avocado in the fridge, it will stay as it is and not go bad; if you put an unripe avocado in the fridge, it will stop ripening until you take it out again. So he says, and I hope he’s right, or Tom is going to have to eat a whole lot of guacamole, because I bought seven avocados.

Just between you and me, I skipped showering Saturday night, not too unusual, but also Sunday night, what with all the avocado rinsing and so forth. Two days in a row is kind of pushing it, but I basically work alone, as I remarked to myself while putting on my most disreputable and most pajama-like pants Monday morning.

Once I got to work, I constructed yet another version of an AM I DREAMING? necklace, so I had two objects dangling around my neck, the other being my work badge, but it was fine: who was going to see me? For good measure, I wrote “AM I DREAMING?” in ink on the back of my left hand.

I had been invited to a pizza lunch at work that day, and one of the two admins our our floor had, not long before, inquired if I was planning to attend, and I said I was, so I guiltily put it back on my calendar, but hoped she wouldn’t remember when the day actually rolled around.

But sure enough, as I was sitting in my cube eating delicious homemade dal with chopped tomatoes and dinosaur kale, I heard her yelling, “Linda! Are you coming?”

“Yes!” I said, through a mouthful of dal, and after I’d shoveled in the remainder and snuck to the kitchen on the far side of the floor to wash the bowl, I went into one of the big conference rooms, there to see 20 or so people I’ve seen on my floor for years but have never spoken with because we’re in different groups and do different things.

I took one of the empty seats at the far end of the room and saw we were going around the table introducing ourselves. Right across from me was a guy I wasn’t sure I’d seen before, and next to him a woman I definitely had never seen before—the new boss in town to meet her troops. Doh!

The occasion for this lunch I had not at all grasped, and if I had, I would probably have skipped the dream necklace and writing on my hand, and I would have taken a shower AND not worn my worst pants. Oh, well, next time.

So I got to chat with this boss for 45 minutes. She’s not my own new boss, but evidently this latest round of changes has put me under the same umbrella as, of all things, all these people on my own floor! (Like, in family tree parlance, their grandfather is my great-grandfather or something; we’re seventh cousins four times removed.) That really is rather novel. It’s been years since I was in the same group as people I actually see.

Right after lunch—oh, and no, I didn’t eat a second full meal at the pizza party; I just had a smidgen of undressed salad, the ultimate power lunch—I got a call from that same admin saying that they’re all going to a baseball game in a couple of weeks, and since we’re one big happy family now, do I want to go with them?

Wait, let me think: Do I want to sit around for several hours smack in the middle of a workday, eating free food and watching the game instead of working?

Do I ever. Score!!

I actually am not a baseball fan (to my knowledge), but my bike ride home takes me right behind the ball park nearly every day—they have valet bike parking on game days—and it had occurred to me that maybe I should go to a game just to see what it’s like.

This was formerly shaping up to be one of my least-favorite reorgs, partly because it has drifted along for the better part of a year without my finding out who my immediate supervisor will be, who I’ll be working with, and what I’ll be doing, questions that remain unanswered, but now it’s way my favorite, for the perks.