Green Smoothy mullings, not yet taking the plunge

I'm bogging on this Green Smoothy plan. Seems to be hard to get started. I think it's just a temporary slump and I'm sure I'll recover, but at the moment it's just hard to get up and go do it. I have all the ingredients ready to go except for my mood.

Except for cleaning the vegetables it's really not a hard thing to do. Maybe I'm afraid that it isn't going to have the effect I'm hoping for. Sigh. Well, again, I'm sure I'll finally get around to doing it and then I'll find out.

I'm very taken with what I've read, not the whole context of alternative-foods thinking as some of it gets way out in La-La Land it seems to me -- AND more expensive than I can handle too -- but I love the simple idea of Green Smoothies themselves: natural foods we generally don't eat enough of, in a form that concentrates their nutritional impact, pleasant to drink too, and with hardly any calories.

What I'm hoping is that a Green Smoothy a day, or two when I'm up for it, will supply enough of a nutrient gain to lessen food cravings, thus naturally cutting down on overall calorie consumption, plus improving health in measurable ways. The theory is that overeating CAN be the result of nutrient deprivation so that you pack in the calories in an effort to increase the deficient nutrients, and it doesn't work so all you get is the calorie increase and a negative impact on health.

At the moment I have no expectation of doing more than adding in a green smoothy or two, maybe upping my salad intake as well, though I already love vegie salads and do them frequently anyway, but otherwise not trying to change anything else in any conscious way. I do have in mind that the addition of such a nutrient boost COULD alter my experience of food for the better in many other ways, and I'm rather hoping it will, but as for making any other conscious changes, no, not at this point.

I do want to get going on this and other food-related thoughts, but sometimes I just have to sit on the sidelines of my own ambitions waiting for inspiration to strike.

...and Bananas and Pears and Spinach and Chard and Kale: GREEN SMOOTHIES: a Health diet that might really work.

So. I may actually be starting a new "healthy" diet. I've started many in the past and never stuck one out, had pretty much given up on trying again. I might stick this one.

Friend S wrote me a few days ago:

Do you have any interest in healing diet material? I did a lot of research and am now thrilled with a raw food diet. Green smoothies blending fruit and lots of green leafy vegetables. I didn't know leafy greens have so much protein. Even one green smoothy for breakfast each day starts the healing process and you have so much energy! If you're interested let me know.

Well, it sounded good. My only concern was that all the "healthy" diets out there usually involve supplements I can't afford. There was a period a decade or so ago when it seemed that every church had a few members who were selling some particular health item, usually some natural food in various forms -- bluegreen algae comes to mind -- wanting to recruit you as a buyer or as a seller as well. It was always a line of products and the seller was personally using them and very sincerely recommended them. I had no doubt they were good for you, though I did often doubt they were good ENOUGH to spend the money on them. Much of it I really couldn't afford at all, and, I have to admit, I never liked the money-making emphasis in those systems. Nothing wrong with making money of course, and if the product's good what's my beef anyway? Probably have to analyze myself about that. Maybe it's as simple as not liking the idea that some natural food is singled out as the center of a business. The emphasis always seems to end up on the business, not on the food.

Or maybe I just don't know why it bothers me.

So when S reassured me that green smoothies don't involve that sort of thing but are natural foods I could learn about myself, I said I was interested and she sent me some links. I spent most of the next few days reading up on it myself and deciding that I definitely wanted to try this, if only at the most minimal level.

Green Smoothies are one part of the Raw Food diet and some people do the whole thing. Some start with the smoothies and work up to the whole diet or some level of the diet, some plunge right in to the whole system at the beginning, some just add a Green Smoothy into their usual routine. The whole diet does get into some health food lore that can make your head spin if you aren't naturally geared to the alternative medicine scene, as I am not, but I was very intrigued with the basic Green Smoothy idea itself.

So simple. We never get enough green leafies in our diet. I know I don't. But greens are just chock full of important nutrients, so we're missing out on a lot. "Green leafies" means spinach, chard, collards, kale, beet tops, the green lettuces and the like. You may eat them once in a while, but not really very often, and for some of us they are hard to really like, one of those things you eat because your mother told you to, and sometimes that becomes a reason NOT to eat them after you've grown up and left the family home.

They can be bitter for one thing. But put them in a smoothy, even enough greens to make half a dozen normal-sized salads or side vegies, mix them with fresh fruit to take away the bitterness, which adds another spectrum of nutrients, blend it all until it becomes a pint or a quart of something pleasant to drink, and it begins to suggest something both enjoyable and power-packed. Then read the lore about how a good blender has the effect of releasing the nutrients in the leaf to an extent impossible with mere chewing, further multiplying the effect of the already-multiplied amount of nutrients, and I'm convinced: this is something that's really possible, really available, that could truly contribute to better health. I hardly EVER feel that way about a health-improvement program. Well, never, to be precise.

And then there are the testimonials. Every health system has its testimonials of course, but these seem especially consistent and believable. "More energy" is the number one report. S was very convincing about how much more energy three weeks of two quart-sized green smoothies a day had given her. It had cured her of insomnia and the need to take naps during the day among other things. I could certainly use that myself as my sleep pattern has been a mess for a few years now -- in fact I don't have a sleep "pattern" any more, that's the problem. I suddenly get sleepy and have to sleep -- at different hours around the clock. It sometimes becomes urgent -- I simply can't stay awake another minute at times. But I rarely stay asleep more than three or four hours at a time. Yes, a mess. Can green smoothies straighten that out? Well, if I can get this thing rolling we'll find out.

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Sunday December 12. Tried my first Green Smoothy this morning. A bunch of spinach leaves plus a banana. I got the idea from some website or other, somebody's blog I think, which was about a lot more than smoothies but I liked the simplicity of this one for a starter, especially since I had the ingredients on hand.

It was just a tad bitter -- two bananas or a second different fruit would probably have taken that away but I went on a banana binge yesterday and only had one left, and I'd forgotten to get apples. It was just a tiny bit bitter I want to emphasize, the faintest tinge. The dominant flavor was banana although it was intensely green. I enjoyed it.

I only got about a pint out of what I had, but I want to work up to a quart. I wasn't sure my old Osterizer would do the job, but I put about a cup of water in to start and then the greens and it worked just fine (the usual advice is to put the fruit in first but at least one expert does it greens first and I wanted to give my not-so-powerful machine a head start on the hard part of the task, which is the greens, and it worked for me). It probably wasn't as smooth as the very powerful machines can make it but it was just fine nevertheless.

From what I've been reading about the best blenders I thought I might have to rename my concoctions Green Lumpies but the spinach and banana were smooth enough. The lore of green smoothies says you get the most nutrition out of the plant when it's thoroughly pulverized and all the cells in the leaves have burst. I suppose a $400-to-$600 2-or-3-horsepower machine could be expected to accomplish that better than an old $40 Osterizer, but I'm saying So far so good anyway. Maybe fewer burst cells than optimum, but hey. Barring a miracle I'll never be able to have one of the powerful machines but with prayer the Osterizer should be able to turn out decent smoothies for some time to come.

Royal Wedding, stuff of daydreams -- and dreary duties apparently

I enjoy watching royalty sometimes, the way so many do. Well, why not? I don't spend a lot of time at it but when a royal wedding is coming up I have to admit I'm interested.

I guess we could analyze this interest but I doubt there's much more to it than a little indulgence in daydreams about wealth and perfection and beauty and a life denied most of us. It's also why I enjoy movies about royalty. And I do think that's what we want from the real life stories of royalty, at least it's what I want. A little taste of heaven perhaps.

I DON'T want to see them fail, I DON'T want to see them turn out to be just ordinary people -- of course I know they are but I want them to consistently rise above it and behave like royals. I DON'T want to see them have a lavish wedding and then end up getting divorced. I want the wedding to be perfect and their lives to be perfect and their happiness to be forever. I want them to have many perfect children, and I want them to always look perfect, always be dressed beautifully, always say the right thing and so on.

Will William and Kate make it? So far so good I think. Better than Charles and Diana. Diana was way too young, too pretty, too innocent for Charles. Then she ruined even her own pretty image in my opinion by rebelling against royal protocols, permitting herself to look contemptuous and unhappy in public, basically a spoiled brat. Of course Charles was cheating on her and made no effort as far as anyone could see to be what Diana needed, but he will be judged for that, and still, royals have to be royals and Diana didn't play the role beyond the bare minimum. Given a lemon, make lemonade. Although the public mostly seem to have applauded her for her rebelliousness and just about deified her on her death, I couldn't. I stopped liking her with her first public sneer.

So William and Kate are the same age, they're good looking, they look good together, they say little but it has the right tone. Kate seems to have more appreciation of the role required of her than Diana ever did and no objection to any of it. I suspect she'll play it well and not alienate any of William's family in the process. Me, I could do without the pictures of them in swimsuits and I wish long hanging hair weren't the fashion, it just doesn't have dignity. Where did that start anyway? I would guess it might have started back with Joan Baez, when she first walked out on stage barefoot with her long straight black hair, and it's been a fashion ever since. I wish it would go out of fashion. At the very least it's not royal. Of course I've often also wished the Queen didn't look so dowdy when she's not in her royal regalia. But anyway.

I enjoy watching movies about royalty. I recently saw Young Victoria, and The Duchess. Beautiful costumes, public dignity even if privately things are falling apart, all that. So this upcoming wedding, the plans for it and the marriage after, will be like a period piece movie to watch.

I wish them the best.

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But of course the daydream is the public's, while their reality may perhaps be more drudgery and duty -- so many obligations and appointments, something every day. And of course exactly what I want them to convey, that public dignity as I describe it above, could be oppressive. So they say anyway. Perhaps I picture more complete privacy, and freedom in that privacy, than will actually be the case. Maybe. A few hours a day of obligations and then lots of privacy? Something like going to a job, then home for a comfortable long evening? Oh well, what do I know about the life of royalty anyway?

The Hilarious Explosive Sun Chips Bag

My daughter who was visiting recently introduced me to Sun Chips while she was here. By waking me up in the middle of the night with the most amazing noise that sounded like the crash of all my grandson's toys falling on the kitchen floor at once. I really thought he was up with her but since if he had been he'd have been chattering away as the three-year-old he is, or screaming from sleepiness, and he wasn't, I was forced to rethink the source of the noise. But being too sleepy to get up myself to check it out I had to wait until the next day to solve the mystery.

The mostly-vegetable-matter compostable Sun Chips bag is unbelievably LOUD. You can't quietly take out a chip, you have to wake up the neighborhood doing it. Google "sun chips bag loud" and see for yourself. And here's a discussion of it

A few nights later we were all around the kitchen table munching Sun Chips and reading the blurb about the bag's compostability. Unfortunately I don't have a bag handy at the moment for reference, but as I recall this is what it says:

The bag is guaranteed to break down over a few weeks

in a hot active home
or commercial composting operation.

It's possible to read "home" as the end of a thought rather than as related to "composting operation" and that got me laughing so hard I almost couldn't breathe for shrieking. If a full bag got stashed in a cabinet and forgotten in this hot (it's August) active (the three-year-old is beyond active) home, would we discover only a pile of chips there after a few weeks?

Sorry if it doesn't come across here as funny as it did to us. But we had a good laugh anyway.

What exactly is sportsmanship? It isn't what the Colts star player showed after the Super Bowl.

I don't watch football as a rule, but it's hard to avoid the news about a big Super Bowl win by an underdog team, which happened this last weekend. There is something exciting about that kind of win, with its own heroes and all.

But I just saw this story about how the star of the other team wouldn't shake hands with the winners, and this blogger is actually defending him. Something has radically drastically changed in our culture for anyone to make such a case. I must protest.

The story is titled Peyton Manning storms off Super Bowl field. Is he a poor sport?

You betcha he's a poor sport, by all our time-honored standards. I hope this story isn't a sign of the times, because if so we are living in a grungy new world these days in which nobody knows what being a good sport means any more.

Here is the story:

Peyton Manning didn't shake hands with New Orleans Saints players after his Indianapolis Colts lost 31-17 in Super Bowl XLIV. Apparently some think this is a sign of poor sportsmanship from the NFL's greatest player. It's not.

Walking off the field without congratulating Drew Brees(notes) may go against our misguided notion of what sportsmanship should be, but it wasn't at all disrespectful or bitter. It shows how much Peyton Manning wanted to win the game. And who can argue about that?

I can!!! The whole POINT of sportsmanship is to rise above your passion to win the game. To congratulate your opponent, who wanted to win as badly as you did and was the winner this time as you've been at other times, is to show you are a civilized human being who can control his emotions and defer to another's happy moment, not rain on his parade just because of your disappointment. It's the grown-up thing to do.

What is this, Postmodernism meets Permissive Parenting's Sulky Adolescent or what?

LeBron James was caught up in a similar controversy during the NBA playoffs last year and the same thing that was true then is true now: A perfunctory handshake doesn't make someone a good sport. It either makes them indifferent to the game's result or a good actor. What would people have preferred Peyton and LeBron do, laugh off the loss with apathy and treat the victors to dinner after? This isn't Little League.

Oh brother, do you have things backward. In Little League we make some allowances for unbridled emotion. They're kids after all. We take the kid by the hand and lead him to the winner and coach him to shake hands without sulking, and then when he's grown up he should be able to rise above his lack of self control on his own. That's what good sportsmanship means.

Of course the loser isn't indifferent. It's not about what emotions we HAVE, it's about rising ABOVE the emotions we have. Self-restraint isn't acting. You don't pretend you're happy about your loss, you simply show decency to the other guy. It's about not imposing your state of mind on others. It's fundamental manners. We don't seem to have much of those any more.

No, this isn't about pretense, this is about a civilized gesture. It's about self control. It's about dignity. You make the civilized gesture, controlling your feelings, and THEN you leave the field. You don't "storm off" the field like a spoiled brat, you leave it quietly and with dignity. And leave the other team to celebrate. Go cry about your loss in private.

Again I hope this writer (and the ball players too for that matter) is just having an off day, not representative of a younger uncivilized generation.

The Art Instruction Blues

From time to time I check around the internet to see if there's an art course I might want to take, oil painting usually. I've made these forays into the world of art and art instruction off and on all my life. Sometimes I do start a course or at least buy an art instruction book. Then I give up. There may be nobody else on earth with as much apparent interest in art and desire to learn to produce art who yet can never learn it. I do draw fairly well, but making actual pictures just doesn't happen, and if I have to do it in color, forget it. I see in my mind ideas of what I'd like to be able to do, but for some reason I can never do it.

But over the years if nothing else I've developed a very definite idea of what is good art and not good art. And in fact I do have to say that most of what is actually taught as art does not appeal to me. There's a whole series of art instruction books called North Light, or there used to be, and I have to say I just about always dislike everything offered as examples in those books. The same applies for the most part to art instruction I've found online. I don't like the stuff. There are exceptions, I've found some art I do like, but it's usually by people who aren't teaching it.

(If I maintain some interest in writing about this topic beyond this one post I may link to some of these sites to illustrate my opinions. I may even try to understand my own opinions better than I do.)

Recently I found another instruction site and at first encounter I liked the program. As usual I didn't much like the art but I thought I could get something out of the program anyway, and perhaps I could. It's expensive, though, for me anyway, and I'd have to save up even to take the bite-size modular version of it. So I'd have to be very sure I want this course and could benefit from it. I like that he provides all the materials, even the camera to take the pictures to submit for evaluation, relieving the student of a lot of responsibility. Quality control there, and predictability. And it cuts way down on the decision-dithering I'm prone to. I need that. Also, having to submit work does prod one to actually do the assignment and actually try to learn something. I need that as well.

But as I got to mulling it I got more and more doubtful about it based mainly on my reaction to the teacher's artistic judgments. I tried to tell myself I could still learn basics, techniques etc., but eventually I was back to my usual doubting mania and I guess I won't be taking the course.

But one part of his site stuck in my mind and I think I'd like to talk about it. This is where he gives a sample critique of a student's work and I liked the student's work so much better than his "correction" of it I thought it might be worthwhile to try to analyze and explain my reaction.

Here's the student submission:



Here's the page where the instructor discusses it.

Here's his "corrected" version of it:



First I want to say that what I like about the student's work is primarily the color and the tone and the atmosphere. I love the softness of the colors. I think they all work together beautifully. They don't fight with one another, they enhance one another, they form an overall unity that makes the work art. I think this student has the very talent I wish I had. I'm more likely to produce something that grossly imitates nature and loses the beauty. This student captures the beauty in the color. I love the way he's painted the water, I love how it works with the tone of the sky. I love the muted red of the building and the sensitive shadings in the red. I love the way the gray tone of the roofs is shaded from dark to light. I love the way the white of the seagull is echoed in the white of the buildings at either side of the picture and in the clouds. The pilings even manage to echo the red of the building somewhat. The colors and tones in this picture are really admirable it seems to me.

Clearly there's a problem anyone can see right away with how the buildings are on a tilt or a slant. The student doesn't have a good grasp of perspective. It's enough of a problem in the painting that it would have to be corrected somehow, but I'd want to go very carefully in a critique about this because there's so much good in the picture otherwise -- good that the instructor seems to ignore completely. I think this is merely a problem with perspective, but the instructor instead finds problems with composition. I don't see it.

I don't really see a visual problem with the seagull's tail leading the eye off the picture, which the instructor noted, although maybe the bird should be moved a bit more into the picture, but I'm loath to correct too much in this charming painting. Actually, I just LIKE this seagull. I like his fat white body. I think he can stay where he is without a big problem really. The tail is darkened so it doesn't really make a sharp line pointing off the canvas. Still, sure, ideally it should probably be moved in a bit.

The instructor makes much of lines of sight leading out of the picture and wants to encourage creating lines of sight that lead into it. I've encountered this kind of critique many times before in art instruction discussions. Sometimes I see the point, sometimes I don't. In this case I don't. At least if it results in the sort of painting the instructor produced there's nothing I can find to praise in it. The quiet water in the student's painting is part of the overall design. It's a quiet design. If there is a problem with lines leading outside there must be a far more subtle solution than the garish busyness the instructor produces. He's created a busy sky instead of the student's tranquil sky, and very busy water, and lost the beauty of color and tone and atmosphere. I even have the feeling he's created more of the kind of problem with sight lines that he wanted to correct, with the strong lines of the water pointing down to the lower right. The red of the building is garish and harsh and fights with all the other colors in the picture. He's lost the softness in the gray of the roofs. He's lost the lovely relationship between the whites and substituted a harsh dark silhouette in the bird, and made hard dark shadows elsewhere. It's UGLY. Whatever the faults of the student's painting, it has a beauty in it, a sensitivity, a real artistic feeling the instructor seems to overlook completely. After analyzing all this I'm now convinced it would be useless to take classes from someone whose aesthetic judgment seems to me to be so wrong.

Without mentioning it the instructor includes a corrected perspective in his painting and it's true that the student's perspective needs some correction, to bring it more down to the horizon and correct the upward tilt to the left. But I'd rather leave it as is than force the artificial hard-lined perspective of the instructor's version. I also like the student's rendering of the upright posts around the stone wall. The instructor's are too extreme and formulaic, the student's are nicely positioned in the total scheme.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that the instructor's analysis of the directional lines in the painting is just wrong. Perhaps I'm insensitive on this point but I just don't see it. Here's his sketch of the problem:

I just don't see that the tilt of the central group of buildings has that supposedly strong effect of driving the sight off the picture frame. I agree there's something wrong with the tilt itself, but as far as directional lines of sight goes there are many other elements in the picture that stop the movement. In studying it again I see a strong balancing element to that movement in the line of the bird's back -- even the whole body of the bird -- which points right to the red building in the center of the picture. In fact that is the movement I tend to see first, and not this supposed movement out of the frame. The line of the peaked roof on the right also points to the red building. I also see the offending directional line coming to a halt at the vertical where the stone wall has turned away toward the right distance. I don't see it moving beyond that point but stopping there. Also, the many vertical lines in the painting, the pilings, the uprights around the stone wall, the edges of the buildings themselves, stabilize it and prevent any wild movement off the edge. The horizontal lines in the water and the sky add to the overall impression of stability. So I just don't see this supposed sight-direction problem. There is still the perspective problem, but if that were corrected to bring the tilted lines on the left into the vertical/horizontal overall movement of the painting, the directionality the instructor is objecting to would be completely eliminated.

Here's how I see the directional lines in the existing painting:



That is, I see more lines focusing inward than outward, and many lines balancing or outright stopping movement out of the frame.

A FEW DAYS LATER:
So I got to fooling around in Paint again, and came up with a way the perspective problem could be corrected by skewing the middle part of the picture:


You can see by the color wedges I inserted how much I skewed it to get it to the horizontal. Skewing it unfortunately puts a new tilt into it, to the tall red building, and removes some of the bird's plumpness, but I think the alteration at least makes the point that the problem is with perspective and not with composition or directional lines.

Snow in the West

Outside my door yesterday morning after it snowed all day Monday. A foot and a half on the cars.