Shared Concerns and Cool Whip in Everyday Ramblings

After heavy overcast and marine air we had some clearing yesterday afternoon and it was a mild almost clear fall day out today. Kes and I took a trail in their park by the river we had never been on before. It was short and ended in an elevated blind for shooting of various kinds. Personally I am more interested in the photographic kind than the firearm kind. But you knew that.

I do buy what we call Duck Stamps (the official name is Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps) here in the U.S., which is a program started by hunters that allows one to give a little extra support to our National Wildlife Refuges and in particular our wetlands. Something we birders have in common with the hunters is a desire to preserve habitat. (You also get to park at them for free if you have a Duck Stamp.) They have a contest for the artwork. This year it is of a beautiful Canvasback Duck pair.

It was such a wonderful relaxing weekend. Kes and I have given up soda again. ( I managed a whole month without any earlier in the year) but If she sees me drinking it, she wants it, so I pledged to go off it with her. We’ve made it two weeks so far. We share the temptations of this habit and addiction throughout the day. It is so easy, particularly when I am tired, to go into a kind of trance and go to the convenience store and buy one, without being fully aware I am doing it.

This time I am also doing something I have not attempted ever before. I am trying to stay away from chocolate. My new rule is that I can eat it in a dessert, if I am with other people, but no solitary chocolate consumption.

It is my kryptonite.

And when I am not drinking diet soda I crave chocolate even more. When we were snowed in last winter I ran out of chocolate and thought I was going to lose my mind. I don’t think it should have quite that kind of hold on me.

We are trying to not buy alternative soda. Yes of course it is better to have real sweetener (even high fructose corn syrup) rather than some sort of chemical concoction such as aspartame but only occasionally. So it is water and more water and sparkling water or mineral water or tea sweetened with honey.

One of the things they are talking about in Weight Watchers lately is changing one’s relationship with food. I am taking a good long hard look at that relationship right now. I love to eat good food and last night we had the most filling acorn squash with our meatloaf and then these adorable lemon tartlets that are like lemon curd made from real lemons. That one was a Weight Watchers recipe.

They had Cool Whip in them and as Kes and I both have absolutely no experience with Cool Whip (as it is not real food) we didn’t realize we needed to thaw it out before mixing it with the sauce we made from the lemons. It was pretty funny.

We were watching on Acorn Television the CBC adaptation of Louise Penny’s Still Life. We are both not sold on Nathaniel Parker as Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. He doesn’t have the heft, the authority or the baked in kindness that the character has in the books. But we agreed that Anthony Lemke is perfectly cast as Jean-Guy Beauvoir. And the actress who plays Ruth Zardo looks perfect but is too twinkly in the eye. In the books she is truly a dark and troubled individual.

What was pretty amazing is how the beginning of the first book ties in so beautifully with the detail in the 7th. And I was thrilled that the script takes the dialogue from the books verbatim. Those books are so well crafted…

Now I need to fold laundry and drink a cup of green tea and get myself to bed.

Last updated September 29, 2014