A post on healthy eating...though it may not sound like it at first.

Whoa! It's been a week since my last post. Good thing I'm not doing this for a living. It's been another fairly uninteresting week. For someone who's blissfully unemployed with supposedly a lot of time on my hands I don't seem to be getting much done yet never seem to have enough time. It's another side effect of my post-post-holiday depression. At this point I'm pretty clear it's just plain ol' depression which sometimes pulls me down like a heavy anchor. So rather than swim alone I'm going to see a therapist to try help me make sense of it all.

So what does this have to do with healthy eating? Therapists make you bring up all that unresolved childhood muck that's supposed to be still causing all the trouble in our lives. While I was putting the finishing touches on dinner I recalled a traumatic issue that I vowed never to pass on to my child thus ending a cycle of horror no-one should have to endure: drinking Cod Liver Oil and Castor Oil. During some of my earliest years in Barbados while my parents were getting their business off the ground I was raised by aunts, great-aunts, grandmothers...took the whole village apparently [what kind of child must I have been?!]. And they each believed in power of indgesting slimy hurl-inducing oils; a tablespoon of cod-liver oil everyday, and castor oil once a week for good measure [torture]. I didn't have a say in the matter and was evidently scarred for life.

Thanks to modern ingenuity Omega-3 fatty acids [the reason I suffered as a child] are now found in many other yummy sources, like the blueberry salad dressing I drizzled lovingly over my romaine lettuce earlier tonight. They can also be found in eggs, and I make killer omeletes. I don't know how something that's found naturally in fish gets into eggs, and I probably don't want to know. What's important is that I, nor my child, no longer need suffer slimy sludge to keep our hearts healthy.

I think this post sets the record for connecting unrelated topics...it's a gift.

It's not how big you are...

I'm here in Raleigh, NC now, reunited with my wife and daughter, and all the joys and drama family brings...wouldn't have it any other way. On the drive from Kansas City I promised myself I wouldn't make any unwarranted detours because I was in a time crunch. I was only slightly amused when I saw the sign METROPOLIS 20 MILES. How cute... only in the good old USA would the name of a fictional city be lifted from the pages of a comic book and plastered onto a real town [or is it the other way around? will hit up wikipedia after this]. But when I saw the GIANT SUPERMAN STATUE NEXT EXIT sign about 15 miles later... no detours be damned-I'm going to Metropolis. And sure enough, in front of the court house in a town more resembling Smallville....



And with a Santa hat to boot! I was suddenly eleven years old again thinking this was freakin' awesome! The Official Superman Museum on the opposite corner was cool too. Any and every Superman relic had a home there. There were at least eight of us awed and befuddled tourists snapping pics and no doubt revisiting our childhood. But this little town apparently had a thing for big men and on my way out I found the true hero to errand-running housewives in this southern tip of Illinois...



It was BIG JACK the giant grocery-toting mascot. I'm not often at a loss for words [not a good place to be for a blogger] but I was fairly silenced by Big Jack. Seriously... what can you say when you see this?

I'm thinking this town holds the record for giant statues per square mile. A worthy detour indeed.

Play it again Sam

We decided to give our piano to family friends who've always wanted one. They've got a six-year-old who is the 2nd [duh!] most amazingly adorable little girl I've ever met and they have visions of piano lessons and Christmas sing-alongs. I didn't have the heart to tell them that it's a pipe dream...it's good to have something to grasp onto no matter how fleeting.

My friend showed up with movers and the piano is gone...and I'm sad.

We made some good memories with that cheap never-stayed-in-tune studio upright. I wrote some great music on that thing. We did have our share of sing-alongs with family and friends. It's gotten me laid quite a lot 'cause the wife loves it when I play & sing to her, especially original stuff. I've used it for venting, processing, sorting out my thoughts, catharting, meditating. There'd be times when I was in some kind of mental or emotional vortex and couldn't see a way out. I'd sit, play the first chords that came to me, next thing I know an hour's disappeared and all's right with the world again.

So why are we, two music-therapists-turned-ministers and still occasional song-writers getting rid of it? Simple. We're tired of hauling that thing around the country. Pianos are friggin' heavy! Ten years, four houses, two states, and one child later, we're just tired of hauling it around. It was gifted to us by our former [and pretty much still present] minister who hauled it to Virginia from the mid-west. We hauled it back here to Missouri and figured it didn't need an east coast sequel.

Yes, I used the word 'haul' in some form repeatedly because it is a haul; there ain't nothing easy about moving a piano. Unles you're professional movers who strap it on a dolly which they strap to themselves and lift it down icy steps in under 5 minutes. I don't feel they suffered enough to have hauled off a bunch of my favorite memories.

I guess I still got the memories.

I just don't have a piano.