Ombailamos

watch ALL the shows!

I realized last night, looking at the long list of shows on our DVR, that Mr. P and I have become serious consumers of filmed media. And we hardly even go to the movies anymore. Between web video and the TeeVee, all I can say is it's a good thing I can read at the same time most shows are on because otherwise I would have to sequester myself in a room without a screen. I shock myself.

Speaking of Mr. P, he recently found this: http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cdf25c08c7/the-rece-pt The Rece!pt is a short film inspired by a German thriller called Run Lola Run (which is excellent by the way). It concerns a young man who has to get across town with a receipt so that his girlfriend can return a very expensive handbag before the store closes, and the obstacles he faces along the way.

If you live in L.A., it's quite funny because our hero is on foot and the locations he crosses range from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood to Long Beach to Beverly Hills. And the obstacles themselves are pretty funny. One of them is a gang of ... ballroom dancers. (Why?!) And Mr. P and I were in the project. If you are on the lookout, you will see us, trying not to laugh (because we are not actors) while the hero dashes through the group.

In other news, we are now keeping up with SIX scripted shows as well as Iron Chef America, DWTS, SYTYCD, etc. Maybe we should send them all a demo reel. Then all this couch-surfing could be justified as "research."

random notes

I am in one of those list-checking-off, tidying-up, housekeeping & organizing phases. Precipitated by a chapter Board meeting and a dinner party. Now if this mood will just persist till the tax prep is done, I'm golden.

Ms. Hummer 2012 has been on her nest for a week now. If all goes well, chicks should be hatching toward the end of this week, beginning of next. I will be spying regularly. ... Either she is getting used to me, or she was just too comfy to leave the nest when I went out this morning to refill the feeders.

Mr. P and I will meet with our coach again this week, and this time with much lower pressure - working on just one dance instead of four, and for a (donated) performance instead of a competition. And we have music to work with, which always helps. I am fairly proud of the edit I did on this one, two splices and a trim from the front to get it down to length and get the boring instrumental bridge out of the way. :-)

A fairly ambitious weekend menu worked out well. I will cover in more detail in the next few days.

And finally, I am on the homestretch of a small addition to my Etsy inventory and hope to get that all posted next weekend. Motivation there: a wildly self-indulgent trip to the Gem Faire in Santa Monica on Saturday. Kahn-Fagan, my nemesis!

the dream house, v2012

I am a house nerd. I am interested in architecture, building design, and building technology. I am interested in simple living, self-sufficiency, and space management. I have done to-scale drawings of house plans for nearly thirty years, ranging from very ornate and/or avant-garde to extremely simple and minimalist. In the past few years, I've been actively educating myself about what kind of house I want to live in, in my later years.

Obviously I am hoping that I won't be living there alone. But one thing ten years of marriage has taught me is that I have a deeper interest in the details of this future home selection than Mr. P does.

It's not that he's not interested in design: he definitely is. He's got spatial-relations skills for days, he's a great lighting designer, and he has strong opinions about what looks good and what works. More, this is a case of me learning about stuff and then talking it through with him. I'm the researcher.

We watch "Holmes Inspection" together and we have mutually decided that one thing we DON'T want is a fully-renovated older house. We just have no faith that the renovation will have been correctly done, or that the original structure will be sound. So the retirement properties we'll be looking at in a few years will ideally be unrenovated. Because we're just going to take all the interior non-load-bearing walls down anyway, and probably the interior sheathing of the exterior walls as well.

We want to retire in a house that is inexpensive to operate, which means it needs to be well-insulated, with low-maintenance exterior surfaces, high-efficiency water use, and minimal HVAC requirements. Obviously, the location we choose will be an essential part of this equation. We're going to be looking on California's central coast, but inland - where temperature ranges are, well, temperate; and "weather" is not really a consideration.

One thing I feel pretty strongly about is not buying too much house. This is about retirement. I want to have time to have a garden, time to work on crafts, time to teach a little if I want or need to. So if it would take more than thirty minutes a day to keep the house tidy and clean, the house is too big. In effect, this means I want no more than 1200 square feet of inside space - and if I can design the layout myself, we could be quite comfortable in quite a bit less.

Far more important to me than the size of the house is the size of the lot, and freedom to make use of it as we please. So we won't even look in any 'association' areas. We'll almost certainly be looking outside city limits.

But at the same time, we need to be close enough to amenities that cabin fever isn't a risk, and close enough to emergency services that a gardening accident doesn't mean dying alone in a ditch. So we're not going to be looking in remote or difficult-to-access areas, like somewhere on a twisty road in the Coast Range. We're going to be in one of the valleys, near a good-sized town.

I want to be able to install photovoltaics, a greywater irrigation system, a composting toilet, and a rain garden. I want to be able to hang a clothesline and put the vegetable garden in the front yard if the site works best that way. There will be no grass lawn, no lawnmower, no leaf blower; there will be fruit trees, and I definitely want some chickens, or ducks, or both. So my yard is going to be messy. I don't want neighbors so close that they are going to bitch about my meadow or my bees.

We are still five or more years off serious house-hunting time. By the time we're ready, we're going to have a very precise set of requirements to set before a local agent. Having never worked with an agent before, I can only guess how they will react to having a set of requirements that treats common considerations as unimportant!

But really: we don't care about the school district. We don't care if the property has the potential to appreciate in value. We're hoping to die there, and our heirs are likely to be the Nature Conservancy and a nephew we barely know. This is about what we want. It's about how we want to live as our lives wind down.

It may be weird to think so closely about all this at midlife. We may not be moving into this dream property for twenty years. But this is a decision that, if made incautiously, could be very difficult to reverse or correct. We want to get it right the first time.

link of the week: slate.com

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/intelligence_squared/2012/02/obesity_is_not_the_government_s_business_how_paul_campos_and_john_stossel_won_the_slate_intelligence_squared_debate_on_feb_7_.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2

Well, I'm of mixed feelings about this. I don't buy the "it's a slippery slope" argument that funding health education leads to banning products and mandating behavior. Libertarians like to use that argument for any proposed government spending - except, of course, the programs that benefit them. But I also don't buy the "government can fix this!" optimist approach.

On the one hand, I do think an education-based approach to healthy lifestyles can work. On the other, I generally think that government funding of medical interventions for unhealthy lifestyles is not the proper use of taxpayer dollars.

What's the distinction? It's that "medical interventions" part. There is a tiny body of research now - which will surely grow, in the future - relating to re-setting body chemistry so that fat people can better metabolize stored fat (by burning it as energy) instead of relying on blood sugar for energy. It's a method of rebooting the insulin metabolism, as I understand it, and has been very successful in rats.

However.

Lab rats only get to eat what you put in front of them, don't they? All the metabolic readjustment in the world wouldn't work on a person who flatly refuses to eat anything but high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt second- and third-order foods. That is to say, edible constructs that are far from what humans evolved to eat.

Taxpayer dollars are, by necessity, limited. What we can use them for is limited. Should we use them to fund research on the Lap-Band, or to underwrite gastric bypass surgeries? I think ... not. Should we use them to promote diets, and dietary products, created by for-profit institutions? Again, I think not.

I don't think we should use taxpayer dollars for A LOT of healthcare-related expenses that they are currently used for. And I definitely think we should not be using taxpayer dollars to fix a problem that is, almost all the time, solvable through behavior modification.

Yes, even the morbidly obese person whose internal chemistry is completely borked can change it, and restore hirself to health, most of the time if the effort is made consistently, consciously, and forever. It's the "forever" part where people tend to stick. Most people apparently can't keep it up for more than a few weeks or months.

But given the evidence that even people who choose bariatric surgery will fail to keep the weight off - because they fail to consciously and permanently modify their behavior - I really don't see the point in putting government money into it.

Some people will overdose on heroin. Some people will drink themselves to death. And some people will eat themselves to death. I don't think tax dollars should be going to try to "cure" these people. They aren't sick, not in the same sense that someone is sick with leukemia that can be cured with a bone-marrow transplant, or with pneumonia that can be cured with penicillin.

Along with the evidence (in rats) that this or that gene or hormone therapy can promote weight loss despite a high-calorie diet, there is even more evidence (in actual humans) that behavior modification - diet and exercise - can both promote weight loss and reverse obesity-related conditions including high blood pressure, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and of course type II diabetes.

We can't make fat people live in a lab. They are out here in the world trying to live and work. The basic "how to" on being healthy hasn't changed since the beginning of time. Some people will make it a priority to get, or stay, healthy. Some people won't. And that's something government can't control ... and shouldn't try to.

All that said: government also, at some point, is going to have to exclude fat people from certain anti-discriminatory classes. A 400 pound inmate should not be able to sue the prison system because there's not a big enough jumpsuit. A 600 pound heart patient (or his family) should not be able to sue the hospital because the EMTs couldn't get him into the ambulance.

If you can't get out your door under your own power, you'd better make sure you're light enough for a couple of normal paramedics to lift you, is all I'm saying.

new event for amateur competition

Those of us who are DanceSport Athlete members of USA Dance have already received notice of a new event for Nationals. Perhaps inspired by Dancing with the Stars, perhaps by the relatively new Show Dance competitions for professionals, Nationals will include a Freestyle-Showdance division for amateur couples.

The first Freestyle-Showdance competition was to be an invitational, meaning couples were invited to submit a video recording of the routine they proposed to perform and a committee would select up to six couples to compete. There were no qualified entrants in this division for 2011, but I hope some couples will put something together this year.

The biggest considerations for amateur dancers interested in preparing a routine are the following rules (more detail on which are in the USA Dance Rulebook, free download at www.usadance.org):

• Competitors from all four disciplines may enter: International Standard, International Latin, American Smooth, or American Rhythm; all will dance against each other in a single event (as on "America's Ballroom Challenge").
• The Freestyle event is considered a championship-level event, open to couples in the Youth division and above (not preteen or junior).
• Submitted routines must be between 3:30 and 4:00 in length, excluding entrance and exit, with a maximum of 30 seconds for entry prior to beginning the dance and a maximum of 30 seconds for exit after concluding the dance, with a brief coda of music permitted to underline the couple's exit.
• Each routine must, to be considered for competition, include sections of choreography representing at least three of the dances included in the couple's discipline. For example, a couple entering an American Rhythm routine must include some combination of Rumba, Cha-Cha, East Coast Swing, Bolero, and/or Mambo. It can't be three minutes of Charleston or West Coast Swing with a few East Coast Swing figures thrown in.
• At least 75% of each routine's choreography must represent the dances selected from the discipline. Thus, for the illustrative four-minute Rhythm routine, at least three minutes must represent the selected dances, while up to a minute may involve elements of other dances and dance forms.
• Props are not permitted - that is, nothing that must be carried on or off the floor and/or is not part of the performers' costume.
• Lifts are permitted - a maximum of three lifts per performance, but only in the transitional elements between dances, and not exceeding two measures of music or 15 seconds in duration each. A lift is defined as any movement in which a dancer has both feet off the floor at the same time with the assistance or support of his/her partner. (Anyone who watches DWTS will recognize Carrie Ann in this. Also, this helps make clear why it is not considered a "lift" if the partner is being assisted or supported, but at least one foot is on the floor. It's a trick, yes - but not a lift.)
• Thus, for the exemplary Rhythm routine, a couple might choreograph a 15-second passage of mambo or tango; transition with a 1st 15-second lift to one minute of cha-cha; then transition with a 2nd 15-second lift to one minute of rumba; then transition with a third and final 15-second lift to one minute of bolero for a total of four minutes.
• One important thing: all dance styles must be at the correct competition tempi. So music will need to be edited. This raises the sophistication level considerably, in terms of the amateur couple and the coach all needing to have some technical ability, or access to it.

It should be noted that many, if not most, of the couples interested in the Freestyle-Showdance event will be couples already well advanced as competitors; the technical work involved will be beyond the scope of most beginning dancers, and the challenge of putting together a long routine that segues between three dance styles is significant. However, anyone who has already prepared and performed any kind of show dance - even if partnered by a professional, as many of our local showcase dancers were - might want to give some thought to this possibility.

Our Los Angeles dancers were sadly under-represented at the USA Dance Nationals which occurred here in 2010. I don't expect many to make it to Baltimore this year - even Mr. P and I don't plan to go. But if this new event is successful, it will be repeated, and Nationals will be back here in 2013. You'd better believe I have my sights set on Freestyle!

the optimist, keeping an eye on the paparazzi

See that pale rim of soft-looking nest around the top?  That's the new stuff.  The darker gray nest cup was all recycled.  I am sure that the entire interior is carefully lined with fresh new spiderwebs and other fluffy goodness for the average pair of teeny tiny eggs.

enforced beadery

So last week, Mr. P and I were supposed to be gearing up for competition. And then we both caught flu. Murphy, meet Law.

As flu goes, this one was trivial: a day of chills and fever, and a couple of days of fatigue and general acheyness. Compared to my last dose of flu, it hardly even qualified. But it did mean a couple of days off work for me and three days off for Mr. P. What do to with all that unscheduled "free" time?

Obviously, in my case, a lot of reading. I polished off a mystery series I was re-reading prior to donating to our library. Caught up on a couple of issues of Fast Company, and a National Geographic. Got some computer chores done.

But over the weekend, Mr. P sort of commandeered the laptop to stream Season 4 of "The Tudors" onto the big screen, and while that was playing out I engaged in some overdue and very entertaining (to me, because I'm a nerd) beadery.

There was a necklace I made a long time ago that needed to be renovated. So I did that. Then there were two other, more recent things that needed to be enhanced. So I did those. And then there were four drawers from the bead pagoda out on the floor and I engaged in a binge of organization.

You would simply not believe how many shades of red there are. Apparently I own some kind of bead representing each of them. The yellows and metallics were a breeze in comparison.

I really love all my beads and the collection itself is a joy to behold, but I hope to seriously draw down the collection this year. I meant to make a lot more last year than I actually did make; and the things I made just didn't use enough product! I need to find me a project I can work on a little bit at a time that will use a whole lot of beads.

At least I can go into it considerably more organized than I was a week ago.

hummingbirds! [facepalm]

She's doing it again.

Last week I was sitting on the couch having my breakfast before work and saw the telltale jiggle of the ficus tree. Sure enough, there is Ms. Hummer stitching away at a nest.

It looked as though she is recycling one of last year's nests, rather than starting from scratch; after a year of exposure, the structure had been pretty well cleaned by rain, wind, etc. so maybe she thought "good, a fixer-upper" and decided to save some time.

Of course, she really ought to have waited. Just because Nest Building Day 1 was sunny and mild, doesn't mean February isn't going to bring its usual 10 to 14 days of cold, wet weather. But nature is optimistic.

on hiatus

Due to overscheduling myself into an abyss of unfinished business, Ombailamos will be dark this week.

Thanks to all who check in. I'll be back to ramble some more in February!!

cauliflower, chorizo & egg = easy dinner!

What to do when you have a head of cauliflower and not much of an idea what to put with it? I had a half-pound package of Spanish chorizo (the hard kind, like pepperoni) and decided to try that.

The playlist:

• 1 head of cauliflower, cleaned and sliced into chunks;
• 1 pkg chorizo, sliced;
• 1/4 c. cream cheese;
• 3 or 4 eggs.

The preparation:

• chorizo was sliced directly into my risotto pan and heated on medium until some oil was released and the sausage started to brown a little.
• Then I added the cauliflower and about 1 cup of water, put on the lid, and set the timer for 10 minutes.
• Checked for doneness, gave it another 10 minutes.
• Stirred everything up, nice tender veg, but needed a little something more as still a bit insubstantial for a full dinner.
• Added cream cheese to mellow out the sausage oil, then thought "I could poach an egg in there."
• Broke three eggs into hollows, replaced the pan lid, and left alone for 5 minutes.
• Served with Shaya old-vine Verdejo.

This entire invention took about thirty minutes and was quite tasty. Another inexpensive, nutritious, starch-free dinner preparation brought to you by the produce box.