Robin, Author at Bumblebee Blog

Bzzzz October 9th, 2007

This, my friends, is not a home acupuncture experiment. It is my new mushroom patch.

I am growing shiitake mushrooms, ordered from the Gardener’s Supply catalog. In just a few short weeks I will have a bloom of mushrooms that will be made into delicious, savory, enticing meals for my family. All in the dead of winter.

As a bonus, I finally have a use for those knitting needles that have been idle for years. They hold up the humidity tent that surrounds the mushroom patch when I am not spritzing it with water.

You see, I have tried on numerous occasions to learn to knit.

First, there was with Mrs. Bashaar, my fourth grade teacher at Butts Road Elementary School. She started inviting me inside at recess to show me how to cast on and do some basic knitting stitches. I’m not sure exactly what prompted the personalized attention, but it ended abruptly when I surreptitiously circulated a petition among my 10-year-old classmates to end what I considered her cruel and unusual punishment of having the class sit boy-girl-boy-girl at the lunch table for being rowdy in class. Mrs. B., otherwise the soul of kindness, caught me red-handed and marched me down to Mr. Bunch, the principal, for punishment. As I recall, I shakily, but bravely, made the case for why lunchtime was an important social event for young children, was sent back to class and never heard another word about it. (It WAS the seventies, after all. I will say that at least while I was at Butts Road Elementary, the teachers never used the odious boy-girl-boy-girl seating arrangement at lunch again.)

I tried knitting again after Benjamin was born and had taken it upon myself to be a model mom by staying at home knitting and keeping house until he reached kindergarten. When I proved inept at knitting I took up cross-stitching with such a vengeance that it landed me at the orthopedist’s office for cortisone injections in my wrists to kill the pain.

The good, stay-at-home mom part didn’t stick either. It ended the day Ben, not quite six months old, and I were watching Sally Jessy Raphael’s show on sex slaves. She had some scary dominatrix chick in leathers and jerking around a pasty, pathetic, sweating chubby guy on a dog chain. He was wearing a leather hood and spoke only when spoken to or she yelled at him. (I don’t think Sally allowed her to bring the whip. It was, after all, a family show.)

“That’s it!” I told the six-month-old Ben. “If THIS is what I have come to—cradling my cross-stitch ruined wrists and watching this trash—I am going back to work. You’ll be fine.” (He was and is.)

I spent the next few years working at a grueling ad agency job while my husband sailed around the world. Okay, okay. He was in the Navy. He was on an aircraft carrier. He was flying nighttime missions. Oh, and there was a war going on.

Well. I had a soul-sucking ad agency job and an active two-year old to deal with by myself.

Longing for an after-hours activity that would be meditative and slow down my monkey mind, I enlisted the help of two aging Italian ladies at a local yarn shop to teach me to knit. Yes, I PAID FOR PRIVATE KNITTING LESSONS.

They talked to each other in Italian while they shook their heads and looked at my tiny, tight little stitches.

“Relax. Relax. Relax. It is-a too tight,” they told me. “You should-a drink some wine while you knit.”

Best advice yet! Still, I flunked out of private knitting lessons. After a couple of sessions, I slinked away and didn’t return for my lessons-paid refund.

Then I tried again after moving here to Calvert County. Here I am, out in God’s country. The garden is growing. I have little animals running around. I have actually CANNED MY OWN VEGETABLES. Surely, the knitting gene has kicked in my now, right?

Like any good yuppie, I headed to Barnes & Noble to buy all the basic knitting books I could find. I stopped by Michael’s to stock up on all the yarn colors I liked and a selection of knitting needles. I even had a special knitting bag embroidered at the Annapolis Mall with my initials so that it could hold all my cool new knitting projects.

Now we’re talkin’! I am equipped!

I tried something VERY BASIC. DISH CLOTHS. This is not complicated, I told myself. Failure still. I am SO VERY totally pathetic. I am a big looser in the knitting game. People all over the world teach this to themselves without the benefit of this $100 in hardback books.

What the heck is wrong with me? I can play Debussy arabesques and Chopin preludes on the piano. I can type 70 words per minute, thanks to Mrs. Bryant, my 9^th grade typing teacher. But I can’t knit a freakin’ dish cloth!!!?!!!??? Nope.

So, here you have it. I am pleased as punch that these knitting needles, which have been in repose at the bottom of the monogrammed knitting bag in my closet, finally have a purpose.

Aaaahhhh.

The bonus is that I will have some lovely, savory mushrooms that I can point to as the fruits (fungus?) of their labors.

Ciao!

Posted In: Humor

Tags: knitting, mushrooms

2 Comments

Bzzzz October 5th, 2007

Before I fall off the wagon and eat a whole coconut cream pie, I suppose I’ll explain why I am on a detox diet following my trip to Las Vegas.

Newsflash: Las Vegas is an astonishingly unhealthy place. In fact, if you truly hate yourself, just pack up your bags and move there right now, get a job in a casino and live in one of the teeny tiny concrete apartments on the edge of the desert where you can enjoy the sounds of cars whizzing by at all hours.

But I digress…

I truly enjoyed Angela’s company while in Vegas. She is one of those gals with a sunny, bright disposition who peppers her conversations with chuckles and laughs. She seems to find almost everything amusing. She’s also up for trying most anything in the way of fun or adventure. Here’s Angela:

Angela%20in%20Vegas.jpg

The thing about Angela is that she prefers not to spend a lot of time or money in Vegas on silly things like food. She prefers to play poker while in Vegas. So with the exception of a proper sit-down dinner following our outing to Zumanity, my diet consisted mostly of coffee, sandwiches, croissants and, in my misguided bid for at least something approaching a healthy meal, a bizarre kind of boiled fish concoction with overly-steamed vegetables. THAT’S a meal that was donated right to the trash bin.

So, add to this culinary nightmare the bad casino air, light deprivation and noise pollution and you’re starting to get the picture of what I mean by unhealthy.

Sure, we got out and walked one morning. I wanted exercise and Angela, being the adventurer that she is, turned it into a walk with a purpose–hiking on foot from the Venetian to the Sahara where she recalled seeing an attraction where you could drive a Humvee over some obstacle course. Nevertheless, we did walk.

Still, I was feeling very out of sorts. I missed my garden. I missed the quiet. I missed my family and little dogs. I missed the fresh air. And I REALLY missed exercise. To walk in Vegas is to hike along the strip, which is like doing exercise in a gas chamber.

Then, here was the clincher.

I ran into Lady Diana. No, I’m not delusional. I’m talking about her wax image at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. (Thrifty Angela finagled us free tickets.)

Diana%20and%20Robin.jpg

See, although I wasn’t an official royalty watcher, I was always interested what Diana was wearing because we were always the same height and weight.

“Wow, she looks good,” I would tell myself, figuring that if she looked that good, I probably did too. Okay, it was perhaps some faulty logic, but there you have it.

Well, I hate to say it, but when I stood next to Diana, I had the startling realization that I could probably, maybe, perhaps not fit into that size 6 blue sequined gown she was wearing. Crap. When did that happen?

Well, so there you have it. Bad air. Bad food. No exercise. And then to realize I can’t wear the size 6 blue sequined gown. Not that I want to wear blue sequined gowns in the garden anyway, but I might want to dress up when I water the indoor plants or something–you know, just for a change of pace and to brighten my mood.

So, here we are at the Las Vegas Detox Diet. I invented it myself. (Okay, it’s mostly common sense.) It consists of:

– Drink a glass of water every single hour you’re awake, starting when you get up in the morning. Fizzy water doesn’t count because it usually has sodium, which defeats the purpose. I have found also that drinking this glass of water every hour reduces the hunger pangs.

– Eat ONLY fresh vegetables, fruits and small amounts of cheese and nuts. Avoid breads, pastas and other starchy foods.

– Avoid alcohol and large slabs of chocolate.

– Take a mega-vitamin.

– Drink green tea in the afternoon and evening (in addition to the water).

– Avoid snacks between meals.

– In addition, run (or walk if you have to) a full hour each day.

Now, I absolutely LOVE to run and really do try. It’s just that I-can’t-breathe-and-my-heart-is-going-to-pop feeling that I don’t really like. So I alternate running and walking. Walk north up the driveway. Run south down the driveway. Walk north up the driveway. Run south down the driveway. Do that twelve times and an hour is gone. It’s an important part of the Las Vegas Detox Diet, so don’t skip this part.

Don’t worry. This won’t become a blog about my quest to get into that size 6 blue sequined gown. But I might consider a series of gardening exercises–stretch while you weed, flower pot weight lifting, aerobic tilling–that kind of thing.

Ciao!

Posted In: Travel

Tags: Las Vegas

6 Comments

Finally, a Use for Those Knitting Needles

This, my friends, is not a home acupuncture experiment. It is my new mushroom patch.

The Las Vegas Detox Diet