Close as we are, I can’t even claim Reverend King’s impact to the same degree as my sister.

I’m just a liberal white boy, full of liberal white-boy guilt, who tries real hard to do the right thing and tries too hard to say the right thing (and who ends saying too much of the right thing, and trying too hard, and just… embarrassing himself). I’m the one who thinks, deep down, no matter what I do, I’m somehow part of the problem.

But if nothing else, I can see the dinosaurs of our past dying out, year by year; replaced by children who are better than the generations past. Better than me. It is a glacially slow change, but likewise inexorable, and it gives me hope.

And when I read too much of today’s news, and hear too many quotes from too many stupid, scared, old white men, and my faith in the glacier starts to fade, I look at pictures like this…

'I have a dream that one day that little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.'

… and I think that maybe I can see the change happening. Maybe I even do a (very) small amount to help.

And I am very, very lucky that this is so.

“I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

So last night, I spoke to Twitter and said:

I love my new bowling ball. My new bowling ball hates me and is filing for a restraining order. I think I’ll name her ‘Carla’.

Yeah. I’m going to talk about bowling again.

As I’ve mentioned previously, my bowling game has improved quite a bit in the year since I got started in a league with some other gamer nerds in the area. Good times and steady improvement led to a pretty surprising second-place finish for the fall season. Our team was edged out of 1st place in a nail-biter of a final game, our salty tears diluted somewhat by the fact that Kate and I were first in the Most Improved categories for our respective genders and we both got second place in our “High Handicap Series” categories.

Oh, and the prize money. That helped too.

I decided to farm the filthy lucre back into the habit that spawned it and get myself a new bowling ball.

See, for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been using a ball generously given to me by Chris (the guy who got us into the league in the first place). It’s an old ball of his, drilled for both his hand measurements and for a ‘beginner’s’ grip. It’s a little beat up, and I have to kind of crook my thumb a bit to wedge it into its hole well enough, but… well, it works. It doesn’t do anything too fancy, but clearly I can make it hit the pins.

So why get a new ball? Well, I can turn in a very nice score with the Old Ball, but it doesn’t really let me do those fancy curving shots that you see the pro guys put out, and those fancy curving shots actually help the ball hit the pins in a way that makes it more likely they’ll fall down and go cracka-boom.

So I dug around a bit, and took some suggestions from Chris, and ordered up a nice new ball. It’s pretty. It does lovely curvy things. I named it Carla. You know, just in my head. As a joke. Totally a joke.

Say hello, Carla.

Before the new season started last night, I went in and got the ball drilled. Oh, shush: quit snickering.

Okay, fine: “I got new finger grips added to the ball.” Happy now?

The guy at the shop told me that he would allow no stinking beginner’s grip on a ball like that, so I drilled me up a ‘fingertip’ grip.

Which is fine; that’s kind of what I was expecting. When he was done, the ball was finally ‘finished’. Ready.

And damn she was pretty.

But there’s a saying in bowling: “Pretty balls don’t throw strikes.”

The ball curves, yeah. WAY more than I’m used to, but that hardly matters, cuz I can’t get the damn thing to come off my hand; that fancy fingertip grip basically means that everything I’ve trained myself to do with Old Ball is wrong wrong wrong. So wrong that I damn near hurt myself last night. I’m going to have to completely relearn how to play, pretty much from the ground up.

So after an abysmal first game (95 pins! Woo!) during which I threw more gutter balls than I think I ever have in a game, and air-balled a fifteen-pound hunk of stone more than I’d like to admit (encouraging many nearby bowlers to look around for the moron noob who didn’t know how to play), I put Carla back in my bag, mumbling something like “It puts the lotion on its skin…” and pulled out Old Ball. My security blanket. Security ball. Whatever. Shut up.

Old Ball didn’t fail me. The approach I used was simpler. Crude. Basic.

But the pins fell down and went cracka-boom.

Frustrating, to have the New Pretty Thing and to have to actually WORK before it produces… well, forget about ‘something better than the old ball’; I’ll be happy with ‘something comparable to the old ball’.

Is this about writing? It might be. I’m a pretty basic guy when it comes to putting words down. As Papa said “I know the 10 dollar words, but there are older words; better, simpler, and those are the ones I use.” Could be that the thing I’m working on right now also includes some fancy-schmancy tricks that I’ve seen used by writers I admire, and I thought “I can do that. How hard can it be? It’s just writing.”

Yeah. Gutterball.

So what happens to Carla now? Do I stick with Old Ball and my respectable-but-maybe-not-as-good-as-it-could-be game?

No. This weekend, I go to the lanes and I practice. A lot. First I figure out how to simply deliver the damn thing, then I’ll figure out how much that changes the roll, until finally, maybe, I’ll get the results I want. Practice practice practice. Lots of people throw tricky balls like mine; they do just fine, and dammit, they aren’t any better than me.

But last night I bought a bowling bag that holds two balls. Old Ball will never be very far away.

Sometimes you need old and simple and crude and ugly. I see no reason to give up the simple things that work, just because I’m working on a fancy new thing.

None at all.

It’s fun. Shut up.

In a way, it’s a weird return to my childhood. While bowling continues to grow in popularity in the U.S., bowling league participation dwindles, but such was not the case when I was a little kid. Both my parents bowl (and bowled), and I can remember many Saturday nights when my folks couldn’t get a sitter and my sister and I spent the evening running around the alley, screwing up someone’s game of pool, or mastering a sliding tile game that I only got to mess with during league play.

So about a year ago, one of our gamer friends asked if we’d be interested, and my wife thought it’d be a good way to meet people in her new home town, and I thought “sure, I’m a pretty decent bowler, why not?” (Funny thing: being around bowling doesn’t actually make you a good bowler. Who knew?)

This is what I remember about the bowling alley when I was a kid.

So we dove in. We got shoes. (Those of you who know my wife know she needs very little provocation or encouragement to buy shoes.) I bought her a bowling ball for Christmas. We didn’t do that great that season, but we had a pretty good time.

The next season started up, and we decided to keep playing.

And the next…

And the next…

And now it’s eighteen months later. Tonight is the last week of play for the fall league. The team that Kate and I are on (Crazy Bowling Monkeys) is in first place. Kate’s the #1 Most Improved women’s bowler. I’m #1 Most Improved men’s. Between us and the other gamer-geek team (White and Nerdy, with Ninja Pin Action), there is not a “leader” category we don’t pretty much dominate. It’s kind of awesome.

Obviously, with the big showdown tonight, it’s on my mind, so I thought I’d write down some stuff I’ve learned about Bowling in the last year and a half.

1. You gotta show up.

It’s a hassle. Sometimes you have to bring your kids along and keep them distracted (and in turn be distracted by them). But the only way to enjoy the game is to play the game, and (if you’re me) try to get better.

2. Getting better takes time. And lots of repetition.

I was never a horrible bowler. Sure, I’ve had horrible games, but I don’t know that I was ever really super-bad (and the nice thing about bowling is that you can still help your team out even if you kinda suck).

But I’ve always wanted to do well. I may not have learned a ton about the technical bits of bowling as a kid, but I did learn what good bowling looked like. I saw a lot of it. Hell, I heard a lot of it. I wanted my ball to do this, and the pins to do that, and the noise they all make to go cracka-boom.

So I keep working at it, and what used to be a 120 average is now a 160 average, and for all that that’s pretty respectable, not a game goes by that I can’t name a dozen things I did wrong, even on the strikes.

3. Don’t aim at the pins.

It seems counter-intuitive, but aiming at the pins you want to knock down is a pretty good way to ensure you’ll hit fuck-all when you throw the ball. There are these great little arrows on the lane that are about a third to half-way down, and you aim at those. They’re close enough to hit with some accuracy, for one thing, so you use them as your front-sight (shooting reference). Basically, it’s not the end result you think about, it’s the beginning and the middle that you work to get right, and the cracka-boom will follow.

4. Be consistent.

Generally speaking, if you start from the same spot every time, and you hit the right arrow, the end result is assured considerably more likely. That’s why you do the repetition — you figure out what works and what doesn’t, then you do the ‘what works’ thing over and over again until it’s hard not to.

5. Don’t be consistent when it’s not working…

Lanes dry out and suddenly the ball hooks too much. Or the lane-monkeys greased the damn thing up and nothing hooks at all. Or your pants are too tight. Or you shouldn’t have had a beer. Or you should have had a beer. Or you’re distracted from work, or family, or your kid with the tile-sliding game. Whatever the reason, The Thing You Do to Make the Pins Go Boom ain’t working: not by a little, but by a lot.

See when that’s happening, and try something else. If that doesn’t work either, sometimes you just have to laugh a little at the whole stupid game and have a good time while you rack up a terrible, terrible score.

6. … but don’t freak out when it’s almost working.

The hardest thing to deal with in bowling is a split — when you leave a couple pins behind, and they’re physically separated from one another by a great and terrible distance. And here’s a hard fact: the difference between a strike and a split is fractions of an inch. Or the exact same throw, but at a different speed. A spare is usually a strike that just didn’t quite strike.

So what do you do if you’re throwing a bunch of splits?

Nothing. The errors are small. Sometimes they aren’t even visible, and you’re left looking at the lane saying “are you kidding me?” In those situations, you just suck it up, go get your ball, and try to clean the mess up as best as you can with the second roll. You’re not doing anything wrong, it’s just not quite working, so keep throwing the ball the same way you have been, and eventually – probably – the kinks will work out.

7. Have fun. Don’t look at the scoreboard.

Is it a sport or is it a game? Could you go pro if you get good enough? Are we going to place this season?

These are all silly questions.

It’s something you enjoy, so do it. If you get really really good at it, maybe you’ll get back a little prize money when the season’s over. Maybe you’ll get a patch for your shirt, or a fridge magnet.

But seriously, who cares? If you can’t remember that it’s supposed to be something you like doing — maybe even love doing — why waste the time?

Yeah, you gotta show up, and you have to play a lot (a LOT) to get better (and take some other player’s advice, and maybe a few lessons, and, again, lots of practice). All good play is also good work, I think, and vice-versa.

But the fact is this: You will never be good if you forget how to enjoy it. Never ever.

There. I’m all done talking about bowling now. Too bad none of this applies to any other activity. Ahh well.

Maybe tomorrow.

... totally buying this if we win tonight.

This thing, while good on its own, gets better with the addition of a stick of butter and a bunch of vanilla and brown sugar. WHO KNEW?

So there’s this thing Floy-Jean makes around the holidays. It’s generally called “Grandma’s Special Squash”, because

1. No one really makes it quite as good as she does.
2. It’s special. (And be ‘special’ I mean ‘actually a dessert, masquerading as a hot dish’.)

Here’s how it goes.

1. Start with 3 lbs butternut squash, peeled, seeded. and cubed. (Not everyone skins them. Grandma does. Grandma’s version is better. Draw your own conclusions.)

2. Cook the squash in water until the cubes are tender enough to mash.

3. Drain the squash pieces, drop em in mixing bowl, and beat em until they’re smooth. Smooooth. No. Smoother.

4. Add milk, butter, eggs, and vanilla; mix well.

• 3/4 c milk
• 6 T butter, melted (yeah, that’s most of a stick of butter. deal.)
• 3 eggs, already beaten
• 1/2 t vanilla

5. Combine these dry ingredients, add them to squash, and mix well.

• 1/8 t nutmeg
• 3/4 c sugar
• 3 T flour
• 1/2 t cinnamon
• 1/8 t cloves

6. Transfer everything in the mixing bowl to a (greased) 2-qt baking dish. Cover it and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

7. While the squash-ness is baking, make the Topping. THE TOPPING IS NOT OPTIONAL.

In a small bowl, combine these topping ingredients until crumbly.

• 1/2 c vanilla wafer crumbs (about 15 wafers)
• 1/4 c packed brown sugar
• 2 T butter, melted (yeah, that’s the rest of that stick of butter you started in on before)

8. When the squash is done baking, pull it out, and sprinkle the Topping over it.

9. Stick the whole thing back in the oven again, uncovered, for about 12 to 15 minutes.

10. Mouthgasm.

(To which she was like: “Here’s the recipe, you didn’t have to beg. Food isn’t a secret.” Which is one reason she’s awesome.)

I had trouble finding the recipe last year. When I did find it, I posted it on my blog to make it more readily accessible to me.

Anyway, it’s getting cold out again, and when it gets cold my thoughts turn to this yummy chili. I dug the posted recipe up and, in reading it, realized that I actually don’t make the recipe as written by Floy-Jean anymore.

So here’s my version.

2. You will need, in this order:

• 1 lb. boneless skinless chicken breast, cut into 1/2 in. cubes
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1.5 teasp. garlic powder 1 garlic clove, chopped
• 1 tbs. veg. oil

• 2 cans (15.5 oz) great northern beans, rinsed and drained
• 1 can (14.5 oz) chicken broth
• 8 oz chopped green chilis 8+ oz chopped jalapenos. You can get cans of these, pre-chopped, but I now just buy them whole and chop em myself.
• 1 t. salt
• 1 t. ground cumin 2 t. ground cumin, maybe a little more
• 1 t. dried oregano
• 1/2 t. pepper
• 1/4 t. cayenne pepper 1 t. cayenne pepper

• 1 cup sour cream (I don’t like sour cream that much, so I don’t always use it. You like it? Use it at the same time as the whipping cream.)
• 1/2 cup whipping cream

(Note on the seasonings. I’m not sure exactly HOW much I put in. I know it’s more than the original recipe, and sometimes a lot more. Season til it smells good; I trust you.)

3. First cooking bit
In a large saucepan, cook the chicken chunks, chopped onion and garlic in the oil, until the chicken’s not pink. (Sometimes I throw a few of the chopped chilis in at this point, but not all. Some.)

4a. If you Did Not Double the Recipe (or if you did double it and your saucepan is muy macho):
Add the beans, broth, chopped chilis & seasonings to the pan. Bring the whole thing to a boil. Reduce your heat & simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Doubling the recipe is one of the few situations in which I’ll get out our deep-dish electric skillet.

4b. If you Doubled the Recipe and your Saucepan is not Huge, or you have loads of time and want your house to smell like Awesome:
Dump the cooked chicken stuff and everything but the whipping cream into a crock pot and run it for a couple hours on high, or all day on low.

5. Finally:
Remove from the heat, add the whipping & sour cream, and serve immediately. (With some shredded cheese and crackers and such: you know, chili stuff.  Basic recipe feeds about six or seven people.

This unfamiliar comfort comes to me as the primary benefit of burning some of my precious vacation time to extend the Thanksgiving holiday a little bit. Tomorrow, Kate and I will be spending ten hours of quality time together – with our dogs – driving to (and through) the barren wastelands that birthed me, but I took the extra day to both prep for the trip and write.

That’s right: a whole glorious day of writing – an actual day away from work, and not some crappy Saturday or Sunday, where your writing time is polluted by pointless interruptions like “family activities” and “feeding children” and “things I absolutely promised I’d do, even though it’s NaNoWriMo”. There are no family activities or children to do them with — the kids are at school, and my wife is working. Likewise, I have no weekend home improvement/maintenance obligations, because it is not the weekend.

Do you see the loophole I have discovered? Can you conceive the power that rests within my hands?

Who wants to touch me?

I said WHO WANTS TO TOUCH ME?

I’m sure you’re asking yourself how I’ll be spending the day — with Thanksgiving coming, there’s even a small chance you’ll be able to enjoy a luxury similar (albeit inferior) to mine, so let me lay out the means with which I maximize my writing productivity on a day like today.

[But first, a brief pause in the writing while kick my daughter out of the house drive my darling child off to participate in the physical and mental enrichment so necessary to ensuring that she can take care of me financially in my old age. ]

*Returns, windblown, toting a mocha with double espresso shot.*

Ahh, evil corporate caffeine goodness. *sips* Ahh.

Okay, now then, where was I. Oh yes.

The Day.

Now is the time that we make the boogie.

A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window. – Burton Rascoe

6 am: Get up.

I know this isn’t how most people roll. Hell, it’s not how I’d choose to, if I didn’t have a day job and (more significantly) a four year old to get ready before I can go to said day job. However, I do have those things, so 6 am is what happens, even when I could theoretically sleep in — my brain wakes me up at 5:45 and I start thinking about stuff, at which point I might as well get up.

Breakfast.
I eat immediately upon rising, because otherwise I forget, and if you get up and stay active for about an hour or so in the morning without feeding yourself, your body starts worrying it’s not going to GET any food, and goes into fat-storage mode, which means that when you DO eat, it’ll all get stored as… well. Yeah. So I eat right away, check email, catch up on my must-reads out on the internets, et cetera.

Blog Post.
I start putting together the daily blog post.

Daughter.
She slept in a bit, which is fine since we’re in no rush today. She piles into the office and sits with me for a bit, then demands breakfast, which I provide. After, she is given instructions to get dressed for school (and oh how I love that she’s able to do that semi-autonomously these days), and I poke at the blog post a bit more.

Wife arises.
There may be some kissing here. I ain’t sayin’.

Kate also, at Kaylee’s request, is in charge of Doing Hair. Apparently, I suck at it.

School Delivery.
Goodbyes take awhile, since I won’t see Kaylee until Friday and I need to store up as many hugs and kisses as I can.

Drop-off is followed by Ambulatory Caffeine Tropism (run to Starbucks).

More Blog Post.
That would be me, writing this.

Start Next Blog Posts.
I’m going to be on the road all day, so I’m writing a pre-scheduled post for tomorrow (probably built around a comment Nathan Fillion made about the cancellation of Dollhouse) and for Thanksgiving (on the secret practices of Ninja Story Writing). The Thanksgiving one will be scheduled to drop EARLY, peeps, so you can implement the secrets within THAT VERY DAY.

Exercise.
Kate is off to Nia, where she is working on getting her White Belt (first tier of Instructor, I gather). In the meantime, I go downstairs and do about five miles on the elliptical (30 minutes). Say what you will about gym-vs-outside-vs-whatever, this is the deal: with a kid around, it is emm-effing hard to get to the gym regularly (unless the kid’s scheduled to be in a class there themselves), and frankly it’s a pain in the ass to take an hour to get ready, go, and come back from a 30 minute workout. It is not a pain in the ass to walk downstairs and hop on the elliptical – therefore, I actually do it, which is really that part that makes exercise… you know… effective.

Why does exercise make it into the Day of Writing schedule? Because mind and body are all one thing, peeps. They call it muscle memory for a reason; I’m not just a squishy harddrive being carrying around by the meat-zombie – the whole body is the harddrive, and it needs refreshment and exercise as much as your brain to work well. Also, the workout gets some blood going to the brain, which ain’t bad.

(Not to mention Thanksgiving’s coming, and I just had a Venti Mocha — the fact is, I just need to work out.)

The elliptical faces a blank wall, which encourages my mind to wander to things I need to write today. This is on purpose.

Maybe you don’t have a home gym, or a gym-gym? Then go for a walk or something. I highly recommend it.

Shower.
Another great idea machine. My best ideas come in the shower. I wish I could find a waterproof whiteboard to mount on the wall in there.

Finish Blog Posts.
Hopefully by about 11am, but given that I’m already behind a bit on my schedule AS I WRITE THIS, more like noon.

Lunch! (And Stare out the Window)
Ham and cheese on toast. Coke Zero. Some almonds. I want to keep it light so I don’t get sleepy in the afternoon.

Also, probably dump some of the leftovers that are going to go bad while we’re gone.

Also also, get caught back up on email and Twitter and suchlike.

Write Story.
One keypress disables the wifi in my netbook (I had no idea how often I’d use that feature); another disables the touchpad. Off we go.

I’m shooting for a big chunk of words today: four or five scenes, hopefully.

Scene One done.
Go get another soda. Let the dogs outside. Rotate the laundry, if Kate hasn’t already.

Scene Two done.
Stare out the window for awhile. Think about building an addition onto the house. Finally remember to check to see if the hotel for this weekend has wifi.

Get another Soda.

Err. Wait. Is that an actually bold-faced thing? Probably.

Scene Three, done.
Walk the dogs around the block, pick up the mail. Get outside, let your brain chew on local flora and fauna. Let your dogs sniff local flora and fauna.

Dump all the mail into the recycling bin when you get home. Saves the trouble of sorting it.

Poke around the Internet. Stare out the Window.
Twitter. My own blog if there’s comments. Play the new Adrift podcast back while I’m browsing. Twitter again. Newsreader, and probably Burning Wheel’s forums, just cuz.

Also, log into Lord of the Rings Online on the Main Machine, so that it can download updates, cuz December 1 is coming soon, and there’s a new expansion dropping that day. It’s like they KNOW about NaNoWriMo.

Scene Four… kinda halfway.
I started it too late, and it’s time for…

Supper.
Which is going to be Chuck’s Stuffed Squash Thing tonight. It SHOULD be a leftovers night, but dammit I want to try the recipe.

Also, we’ll probably watch some TV. Castle and Fringe are on the DVR, so figure we blow at least 85 minutes on both of those, not counting cooking time, so figure it’s dark by the time we’re all done.

Also also, we’ll fold and put away laundry while we watch TV. Hell, I might even pack my part of the suitcase. Watching TV is one of those (very rare) things where I don’t mind multi-tasking.

… Finish Scene Four
This will take awhile. I will get up and get another soda at least once in here.

Browse More Internets.
Kiss at least 30 minutes goodbye here.

Start Scene Five
There is going to be a LOT of window-gazing in this one, because it’s been quite a day. My goal is to get about halfway in, then leave it so I can jump into that on the long-ass drive tomorrow. (Bless the 7 to 9 hour battery life on my netbook. Bless it, I say.)

And that’s the Day.
What to take away from all of this? It ain’t all writing. Breaks are necessary. (Honestly, I’m sure I severely downplayed the number of times I’ll check the internet today.) Refresh your brain often, and spend time with the people in your life because while writing is awesome, having someone to share it with when you’re done is so much better.

That’s it.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

¹ – I could actually talk at some length about why I write in the chair/lapdesk on my netbook and not at the nice big desk all of four feet away — the one with the lovely ergnomic keyboard hooked up to the Big Fancy PC and Big Fancy Monitor — but that’s probably a post for another day. Specifically, for a day closer to the start of the month, not the end. Opportunity missed, I’ll come back to it another time.

Reading:
It’s been a very good month for me as far as new reading experiences go; first there was Terry Pratchett’s Nation, then Neil Gaiman’s wonderful Graveyard Book, and I had the pleasure of catching up with all the cool kids and read The Lies of Locke Lamora on the Philly trip. Great book. Just enough ‘new’ in the fantasy world, with great characterization and plotting. Capers are capered, swashes are buckled, and a great many skulls are duggeried. I came fairly close to sleeping on the couch a couple times, thanks to interrupting Kate’s own reading with chortling, out-of-context excerpts. Recommended (as are the others I mentioned – highly).

Writing:
The “Adrift” story continues, in which Finnras seems to be engaging in some kind of Cunning Plan. We’ll see if he’s as good at such things as Locke Lamora. Odds are not good.

Habit the First – Tracking what I Eat
This went very well in the first week – I even dropped a few pounds. (Actually, according to the website on which I track such things, I dropped too much in one week, and now they want to me to eat more this week — as in… a lot more… “I can’t afford a whole cow!” more — it’s confusing.

I have regained control of my eating patterns by keeping meticulous records.

Habit the Second — Getting up an Hour Earlier

This one isn’t going as well. Yes, I’m getting up earlier, but I never have to use an alarm clock normally, and I for damn sure have to right now. Also, I’m dragging through large portions of the day, short on energy and long on nap-tropism.

I think part of the problem is that I haven’t set up any kind of reward for when I succeed at this each day (the other part of the problem is that I have no personal desire or investment in this – it’s wholly external) — so I need some help with that: what kind of reward should I be giving myself for getting up at the crack of dawn every day?

Suggestions need to be something concrete: that early in the morning I don’t think highly enough of my fellow humans for “a sense of moral superiority” to mean anything. Gimme some ideas in the comments.

For instance, a number of my classes have to do with modifying your own behavior (time management, giving feedback, verbal communication, how to not be a pain in the ass for everyone who reads your email, et cetera), so when I talk about what needs to change, I also talk about how to change that habit or, more to the point, how to make the change stick.

Failure to form this habit will result in the tape-and-body-hair punishment.

Changing a habit is always the hard part, after all, and it’s why people fail at things like ‘keeping the house clean’ or ‘saving money’ or my personal weak spot, ‘maintaining a healthy weight.’

Usually, this failure stems from one simple thing: none of those goals involve changing just one habit; they require changing a lot of habits and frankly people aren’t very good at changing a lot of habits at the same time. In order to make progress, you need to pick one habit out of the whole mess, and focus on that.

There are, in fact, steps.

1. Commitment. Commit yourself to a habit change, big time. Make your commitment as public as possible.
2. Practice. Changing your habits is a skill, and like any skill it takes practice. Commit yourself to a 30-day Challenge and try to do your new habit every single day for 30 days.
3. Tracking. It’s best if you log your progress every day. This will make your habit change much more likely to be successful.
4. Rewards. Reward yourself. Do so often, early on — every day for a week or so, then every three days, then the end of every week, and then at the end.
5. Focus. It’s hard to do more than one or two habits at a time — you can’t maintain focus.

This is basically what I tell people. I even coach them through it.

Sometimes, I make use of this for myself.
– I wanted to find the time to do at least a little creative writing every single day. This led me to the Adrift story, via twitter, which I’ve now written an entry on every day for the last three months. This simple fact makes me goofy-grin happy.
– I went a long while without blogging very regularly, and I wanted to change that, so I told myself I’d try to write a blog entry every single day in April. With the exception of this last Saturday, I succeeded, and I believe I can continue that habit. (I didn’t write every single blog entry for this blog, but I did always write one.)

Sometimes, I don’t do this for myself, when I should.

As I’ve already mentioned, one of my personal goblins is weight gain. I don’t gain weight fast by any means (I kind of wish it did, as the problem tends to creep up on me, unnoticed), but over the course of the last two years I’ve managed to put on roughly 1 pound a month. I’m nowhere NEAR as bad as I have ever been – my Medium shirts and some slacks have just gotten snug, but that’s it – but about two months ago I decided enough was enough.

So… it’s been two months. And I’ve put on two pounds.

*shakes head*

I’m failing at this because I’m trying to re-institute all the habits I had two years ago – tracking my intake and daily exercise and all that – all at once. It goes for a couple days, and then it falls off my radar for a week. Not for lack of trying, but just because there’s too much “Habit” there to handle all at once.

So, here and now, I am getting a Habit going: During the month of May, I’m going to get back to tracking my food intake. As I have said before, paying attention to what you’re putting in your mouth is far and away the most important thing you can do for yourself, so I’m starting there.

1. Commitment. Well, this is about as Public as I can make this commitment. You can also expect me to add little addenda to my regular posts, mentioning my point totals for the day. (Or possibly tweets.) I use Weight Watchers (the online service – which I’ve been paying for and not really using for over a year). *shakes head*
2. Practice. As I said, every day in May. For June, I think I’ll … well… let’s keep that for June.
3. Tracking. This shouldn’t be a problem as “tracking myself” is actually the point of the whole project.
4. Rewards. I’m a little hazy on what I’m going to do for this, but I *think* what I am going to say is “no computer or TV after work until you log your points.”
5. Focus. I will worry about getting back to a regular exercise schedule until June, though I have some small hope that the points tracking will also remind me when I need to do a little something extra.

And that’s it. Is this an interesting post for you? I can’t say – in this case, it’s really all about me; taking that first step of commitment and aiming the giant whupping stick of PUBLIC FAILURE at my ass.

If nothing else, watching me slog through this process should carry a faint whiff of schadenfreude. Enjoy!

Then I got one – I think as part of our wedding registry, which it was on because of all that stuff I’d read – and… it sat in a cupboard, because it had a whole series of instructions on how to ‘season the pan’ and how you couldn’t actually wash the thing with soap, and you had to RE-season it after every use and…

Well, it just sounded hard.

Yes, I’m THAT lazy. Turns out that seasoning a cast-iron skillet consists of wiping it down with some vegetable oil and putting it away. Big deal.

Anyway, I decided to cowboy up this weekend and get that skillet going. Here’s what I did.

Preheat the oven to 425.

Get some thick, boneless meat. I used whole chicken breasts, but pork chops or steak is cool. Dry them off with paper towels. Season them heavily on both sides. Salt and pepper is fine, but I look for ANY EXCUSE AT ALL to put our Golden Toad to use, so that’s what I did. (I used the steak rub. There’s a ton of options, and you can buy em all at Whole Paycheck.)

Heat up the skillet on the stove top until water drops sizzle and disappear in just a second or two. You want it f’in hot, is what I’m saying. Takes about five minutes with the burner on halfway – maybe less.

Turn the fan in your hood on. Maybe open a window.

Put the meat in, dry. It’ll stick. By “stick” I mean it will spot-weld to the skillet. If you’re doing several chunks of meat, plan out your arrangement first, because you won’t be able to move the meat once it’s down. (I ended up cutting the fourth breast in half to fit it in the available remaining spaces.)

Let the meat sit for five minutes. Don’t mess with the heat; don’t mess with the meat. Don’t do anything with it at all. If you’re me, the only way to manage this is to physically leave the room.

Come back five whole minutes later and turn the meat over. It’ll turn easily, and the side you just flipped up will be gorgeous. Walk away again. Update twitter. Pour some wine. Make out. Whatever.

After another five minutes, flip the meat. Damn it’s pretty.

Pick up the whole skillet (USE AN OVEN MITT — cast iron skillets are all metal and don’t give a damn about your hand) and put it as is into the preheated oven. (This part is why you don’t want to use more ‘modern’ skillets with insulated handles.)

Leave it in the oven for four or five minutes for steak, seven or eight minutes for chicken or pork.

USE OVEN MITTS to take the skillet out of the oven. The skillet, which was hot before, is now HOT. Transfer the meat to your serving plate and just let it sit while you do this last bit.

USE OVEN MITTS. Put the skillet back on the stovetop on pretty much the same heat as it was on before. Pour some wine into the skillet until the bottom’s covered pretty well. It’s going to boil and bubble and get all uppity. Get a metal spatula and scrape up everything on the bottom of the skillet, so that it all mixes in with the wine (this step is why you DO NOT WANT to use a modern ‘no stick’ pan – you’ll ruin the pan and probably poison yourself). Pour in a little water (eh) or apple cider (mmm) or appropriate broth (safe bet) with the wine. Not much – half of what you put in for the wine. Toss in a pinch of flour to thicken it up a bit. You won’t need much, cuz things are popping and boiling and getting thick and yummy on their own. When it’s somewhere between ‘water’ and ‘syrup’, pick the whole pan up and pour the sauce over the meat.

Takes… twenty? Maybe twenty-five minutes. Just about the best damn chicken I’ve ever had. Ohmigodsogood.

So… now I want to cook everything in the cast iron skillet. Everything. Anyone have good food ideas for this wondrous device? Spill.

Brain: You know what’s going to suck a lot more than that?

Me: … not really.

Brain: That frozen waterfall on the side of your house.

Me: Wha…

Brain: Or rather, replacing the blown-out brass sprinkler valve that the frozen waterfall originates from.

Me: No, what sucks is you. You suck.

Brain: Me?

Me: Why didn’t you tell me to shut that valve off until almost midnight last night?

Brain: Why didn’t you listen to me two weeks ago, when I told you not to turn it on in the first place, because there’s always a blizzard near the end of March?

Me: … Touche.

Brain: It’s Touché.

Me: Whatever. Why the HELL do they put a valve like that on the outside of the house, anyway? That’s the second time it’s frozen and burst in seven years.

Brain: Because if they put it on the inside, it would flood the house when something like this happened.

Me: But something like this wouldn’t HAPPEN if they put it on the inside of the –

Brain: Shh. Don’t speak. You know what happens when you speak.

Me: But –

Brain: Shh. Look, someone updated on Twitter.

Me: Oooh…