Soy Milk Sounds Cute

Balls! Blogger just ate my post! It was funny, too!

So instead, here's a photo recap of my day:

A picture! Of my (half-eaten) breakfast! That's a pretty Pink Lady apple, peanut butter, and the healthy version of Crispix with soy milk. Yup, that's non-organic vanilla soy milk, not unsweetened, organic soy milk. When I say the healthy version of Crispix, I'm assuming that you too used to eat "healthy" cereals as a kid, though now you recognize that even mainstream "healthy" cereals are in fact sugar-delivery devices. I've become quite the cereal aficionado, actually, and most recently I'm liking the Nature's Path version of Crispix. With my sugary soy milk:-) (Nobody ever said that disordered eating habits were rational.)

On the way to the grocery store:



An escaped dog, wandering around Sunshine Canyon and barking its face off at anyone who came near it. After slowing traffic down for awhile--you know, so the K9 didn't get his shit wrecked by the grill(e?) of a Subara Outback, it's owner came along and explained why his dog was loose. Another onlooker says, "How did she get out?" and this mister says, "Well, she gets out." Alrighty.

And finally, here's a picture of the beautiful scenery we're soaking up from our mountain house with the amazing view:

Yah. It's not summer anymore. It's winter again. Only its May, not December, and instead of Santa the only thing I have to look forward to is eating too much cereal, followed by self loathing and regret:-) I wonder if Rachael Ray would give that a YUM-O!

*What about you--are you emotionally affected by the weather when it's cloudy or cold? What kinds of cereal (if any) are you eating these days?

ED Reflections, no. 2

Holy pot pie this little pseudo-blogger is tired! I'm trying very hard to post once per day but moving, bizness at the new house, and a lack of home internet are making it somewhat challenging. But, I persist. I will not let my reader(s) down! Surely your time is better spent reading my diary than picking your cuticles. (Is it just me that does that while waiting for web pages to load?)

So, the "soup" of the day today is the first part of my post on my eating disorder history. BAM!

Rather than writing a v.v. long post about my past with disordered eating and exercise, I decided that it might be easier (and less of a huge boo-hoo downer) if I broke it up into parts with lots of sarcastic jokes (let's call these "little fatty tidbits"). I’ll start with the “beginning” for clarity’s sake, though when I think about my eating and exercise, I always remember disparate snippets that feel very dreamlike, including little fragments in which I alternately remember being a little girl who hated herself and her body or a twenty-something anorexic who needed exercise to soothe my anxious thoughts.

When I left off, I had just asked you to imagine a chubby adolescent eating candy and simultaneously wondering why she was overweight. That’s me. My parents fed me many, many more things than just candy and Blackjack Pizza, and there were always carrots, celery, and grapes around for us to snack on. But I’m a sensitive freakin’ girl, and being freckly, fairly awkward, and highly insecure made me use food to feel better about things that had nothing to do with food. While I had been a skinny child, puberty hit me hard and left me slightly overweight and very uncomfortable in my skin. It also left me feeling uncomfortable in my ears, which have always been rather “perky”:

1. I do not wax and shine these babies.
2. This picture only makes it look like I'm a werewolf.
3.  If you saw me in person you'd be able to tell that my ear perks out like the handle on a coffee mug. 

But that’s for a different post on a more self-indulgent, narcissistic day. Today's post is about real challenges, not first-world ego problems.

So, the result of all of this is that I began dieting young. At eleven, to be precise. And I can still remember how it made me feel. More importantly, I can remember how it made the people around me feel about me. Friends at school, most of whom I suspected of not really liking me, suddenly seemed to actually like me. A friend’s mom even told me how wonderful I looked and asked me how I had lost weight (F-you Mrs. S!) I know it probably didn’t happen this way, but I truly remember a group of my friends crowding around me on the first day of school when I returned from summer break in my new thinner body. I don’t recall how I arrived at that body, whether it was through extreme dieting or being more active, but I do remember feeling like something important had happened. Like a fundamental part of who I am or would be was in the works with this simple little act of burning off a few of the cinnamon bears I liked to eat.

Stay tuned for more. I tend to be more funny when I talk or write about my intimate feelings and neuroses:-) (Still can't figure out these f-ing emoticons...)

The Roof is Really On Fire. No, really.

Another post that I've been envisioning is one in which I explain my moving/living situation. After a week in Southern Colorado at the bf's parents' cabin, we have returned to Boulder to our "new" house. I say "new" because it's so freakin' new that it's not finished yet. It's like camping indoors but in the mountains--no Internet and no cell service (yet!), random creatures (carpenters and such) wandering around your tent site, and best of all, great hikes straight from your front door!

The back story behind this house and its location is that the bf's original house, located west of Boulder in the foothills, burned down 1.5 years ago in the Four Mile Fire. After a dollop of consideration, the bf decided to rebuild in the same location, since, after all, real estate in the rest of Boulder is pretty much scandalous. After living in a rental house for the last year and a half (during which time he was uber-ly blessed to have me move in with him), the house is finally (nearly) ready. Yesterday, we decided to celebrate our first few nights in the new house with a run/hike.

While some of the burned area still looks pretty charred:

We saw bundles of wildflowers growing everywhere!

I swear I never posed like this. . .the camera made me look like a snotty diva. The real me was prolly two seconds away from tripping over some wildflowers and wrecking my face on that rock you see in the foreground.

I'll show more pics of the house itself in a few weeks when it's finished. For now, I'm blogging from Whole Foods and dreaming about having Internet at home again. At least WF has better snacks than we do at home:

That's a cumin kale salad with tofu, tomatoes, and some (likely) non-organic blackberries. I also had a yummy date nut muffin, but I can't find it now to photograph:-)

*What would you grab from your house if you knew it was going to burn down? I'd take my computer and at least a few of my own books...let the library books burn!! Muwahahahahaha!

ED Reflections

One of the major posts that I've been envisioning is about my history with eating disorders. This is not that post, per se. But as I sat down to write a post I realized that I hadn't posted pictures of my eats for the last few days. This prompted me to think again about what kind of blog I want this to be--i.e. do I really want to catalogue everything I eat and/or generally make this a blog about a person recovering from disordered eating? Yes, but no. That is, when I decided to start a blog, I felt like part of what I could offer is my experiences working through recovery. And I mean _working_, because changing old, destructive habits and continuing to choose recovery even after zazzilians of setbacks is HARD.

On the other hand, I do not want my relationship with food and exercise to act as the foundation of my life or this blog. I am also very mindful of the fact that posting pictures of what I eat or how far I ride my bike may not be healthy for me or for readers who might be struggling with the same issues.

The only conclusion that I've come to about this issue is that--just like everything else I've learned in recovery--it's never as simple as yes/no, black/white, or disordered/healthy. Things are much more murky and just as it wouldn't make sense for me to totally ignore the issue of food and exercise, it is also not productive for me to focus on them to excess. I can't say what "excess" is right now, except that I'm hoping it's like pornography and I'll know it when I see (write) it. For now, while I'm still getting the hang of blogging, I'm going to continue to show pics of my eats and my activities intermittently. What that really means is that when I do a badass ride/run or eat something worth showing (PEANUT BUTTERRRRRRR!), I'll let you know. I'll also finish writing and post about my past with eating disorders. For now, just imagine a freckly adolescent eating too much candy while simultaneously wondering why she was kinda chubby. (Even at that age my reasoning skillz were pretty fantastic.)

*In the meantime, how do you feel about bloggers who share all their eats and exercise? Does it draw you to a blog or turn you off? Do you think it is healthy or unhealthy?

Pictured: Veggie quesadilla and pesto pizza salad that the bf and I ate on our way up Cucharas Pass. All I'm going to say about these items is that later, when my belly hurt from eating them, I felt rather perturbed with David, who had forgotten our peanut butter sandwiches at home and thus compelled us to eat at a restaurant where canola oil is an appropriate salad dressing. 

Blogging Ain't For Chumps

When you start a blog, you have to write stuff or your blog becomes a lot like that old bottle of hairspray that you haven't used much because it made your hair feel dry that one time and now it has a thick layer of gooey stickiness in the spray nozzle and lots of crunchy stuff around it. In other words, you might look at it again, consider using it, but then decide that it's just easier to throw it away than to clean it properly.

If you're male, it's like old porn magazines--you can't throw them away, but you'll never "use" them again. So sad.

Given my stellar (and subtle) use of simile, now seems like a good time to discuss what I do when I'm not reading blogs or remembering what I used to watch on the Food Network when I had a TV. I'm a Ph.D. student in English Literature, writing my dissertation on nineteenth-century British literature. (Yes, I know Dickens got paid by the word for some of his novels. . .please don't tell me this in order to justify your illiteracy.) More specifically, I'm writing on the ideas of sympathy and knowledge, especially as they are represented in Victorian literature and GYNECOLOGY! Yah! (My dad is so proud!!) (Really, though, he is.) In addition to reading about Victorian gynecologists, I'm also an editor for the academic journal English Language Notes. I notice when commas are missing--it's my jam! Feel free to ask me about my career prospects it the comments:-)

In other news, the reason I was absent for two days is that we've made our way back to Boulder to our "new" home and things have been exceedingly busy. In addition, because I failed to call about internet until yesterday, we will not have internet at our house until next Friday. This is a good thing for the dissertation that I mentioned above, but not so good for Nikki Cooks Kale. Right now the bf and I are completing e-tasks at Whole Foods before going home for the night. This is our view:

Gah Boulder is beautiful!!! I have several posts in the works, and will be seeking out free Wi-Fi everyday this week so that I can share them--stay tuned!

For kicks, here is someone that we met while still in So. Colorado:

She is staring at my food bar. Sorry, little pony.

Nikki Eats Dirt (and some roots)

So we're two days into our small-town living / internet free lifestyle, and it's going. . .great!! Waking up to this:

isn't too shabby:-) (P.S. How do I get real emoticons??!! Mine are like ghetto-icons compared to the ones the other blog girls have. . .whine)

Perhaps the biggest highlight thus far has been Olivia, the 145 lb. potbelly pig that we came across at the local library yesterday. Olivia likes plant roots--so much so that she's willing to eat mostly dirt to get a few root nuggets.

Olivia is not unlike me quickly eating the best parts of an entree when the bf and I are eating out and sharing.

Highlight no. 2 is the bike ride that we took this afternoon. La Veta, CO to Cuchara, CO and up to the top of Cuchara Pass. I'll check Mapmyride.com later to see how much of a badass I am.

I do not drink 7UP. Maybe if I did I wouldn't look this surly.

If you've ever been to Colorado, then you prolly know that the small mountain towns are absolutely *the best* place to be--yes, in the winter, but I think even more so in the summer! Touring around on a road bike makes for so much fun--both while on the bike, and later, while consuming extra calories, or as I like to call them, "I'm like two weeks away from going pro, so I'd better eat this banana bread" calories.

*How _do_ you get those emoticons? Where else in the US has small mountain towns that rival those in Colorado?

When You Get Old, Your Skin Looks Like Shit

That's right, friends, it starts to look like the tread on your car tires, especially if you've spent the day scrubbing foot prints off of white walls, utterly incinerated pepitas(!) out of your oven, and strange sticky stuff out of your refrigerator.

Yup, we moved. By we, I mean my fiancé David and myself. But I'm not going to call him fiancé anymore, because that's too fancy for us. I'll just call him my bf (boyfriend) for now, and once we're married (in August), I stick with fuckface. I'll show you a picture of him soon, once I've gained your trust.

For now, however, we are staying at his parents' cabin in Southern Colorado, until the construction peeps finish our house in Boulder. Lest you think I'm a spoiled, selfish brat (whaaaat?!!), I should first tell you that we're building a house in Boulder because David's house burned down in the Four Mile fire 1.5 years ago. (Fire victim ≠ brat). I should also tell you that on the morning of the fire I peed on the trail right above the canyon where the fire started. I was trail running and at that time I was still pretty impressed that I was willing and knowledgable enough to pee in the wilderness without a toilet or tp. Not the only time knowledge has saved me from peeing all over myself.

I'll let you guess why I'm showing you this picture in the comments.

So. We should should be moving into our new house at the end of this week, though there will still be a lot of work going on even then. Until then, David and I are desperately soaking up the internet at the local Inn since the cabin is internet-free.

The second half of my breakfast:

Eggs and toast. That little bowl just passed my dry and cracked hand was the first half, and used to be full of fruit that had soft notes of bleach.

A shot of downtown with the Spanish Peaks in the background:

***Plea for comments (aka question section):

How long could you go without internet?