Recipes as suggestions
Ingredients variable
One big rambling part.
I am writing this from my condo rental in Kihei, Maui. I’m looking out the sliding door past the balcony to the ocean. It’s humid. Big ol’ clouds are here today. It may rain.
I have a full kitchen in the condo. I like to bake. I got some flour and yeast and made bread 2 nights ago. It was pretty good. KS and I were talking the other day and I mentioned I hadn’t made bagels in a while so last night I made a small batch. No recipe. Just memory and miscellaneous items in the cupboard. I made four bagels and they are now gone. There is an odd satisfaction with the brief boiling of bagels before popping them in the oven.
On top of the last bagel I put some babaganoush. Who has babaganoush you ask? Well, in the store the other day I thought an eggplant looked good so I grabbed it thinking vaguely that it would be roasted. The next day one of KS’s daughters said she loves babaganoush. I look up recipes and the basic cooking method is easy but they all call for things that would require a trip to the store and maybe the purchase of a food processor. I’m not going to the store. So…. I roasted the eggplant whole while baking the bagels, let it sit overnight, peeled it, squashed it up with random seasoning from the cupboard and ate the whole friggin’ thing on a bagel and it was good. and it is not reproducible. No recipe, just suggestions. And far simpler than any recipe I found.
My adventure buddy, KS, is a bottle of fun, in my opinion. Maybe mostly because when we were attempting to run up an impossibly steep slope yesterday she started giggling…. and did the same as we struggled to find footing on a steep muddy slippery slope downward. Somehow, neither of us bit it. Laughing and giggling at discomfort is a cool thing. She said something like ‘complaining about it only makes it worse”. Me, I’ll giggle too at discomfort. But I may be more up front in my masochism… I just like some kinds of self imposed discomfort.
Speaking of discomfort. I am sick and tired of my skin rash... presumably from poison oak exposure. This is not a discomfort I would choose and it’s getting really difficult to have a sense of humor about. Sometimes it is difficult to think clearly. Who the heck knows when or where it was from. My calf area seems to have been poked by an oak oil loaded stick. It started there and spread to a rash that covered my entire calf. I went to the doctor 2 weeks ago because it was so nasty and was starting to show up on my torso. They gave me a steroid shot and pills. The torso spots went away right away. Now my leg is almost better but yesterday I started getting rash spots on my forearms that are itchy as all get out. The same area on each arm by the way, just below the elbow. At least I’m symmetrical. And the rash still seems to be slowly spreading up the back of my leg. What in the heck!!! I thought the steroids were a recipe for relief? Apparently not entirely. They did at least provide me some relief for a week. Online it says “most systemic PO rashes will resolve within 3 weeks”. I’m at 3 weeks! but then it says, “but some can last for over a month.” What in the heck!! I’m done with this. Can I just detach the nerves for a while, please? On a side note… I think I had two trail runs on consecutive weekends where I may have encountered poison oak. If my major rash was from the first one… I’ve potentially got an additional week of fun coming. oooo.
Yes, if you read the last bit carefully you’ll note that I have basically done this to myself. Sympathy? No thank you. I’m just venting. Funny thing is… if you look at the back of my leg right now it looks kinda bad… but feels fine. My arms look fine and are itchy as hell. (addendum! 12/20. I am not usually a swimmer, but I did venture out into the ocean and submerge myself a few days ago. It felt good. It was warm. It soothed my poison oak. My suspicion now is that while soothing my skin I actually managed to get swimmer’s itch. Geez. So… two different rashes. They do feel different. I could be in a clinical study. Poison oak? It’s more like a wasp sting. This one? It’s more like stinging nettle.)
I once had a boss, LL, whose business philosophy was summed up in one little speech he gave. “Ready, Fire, Aim”. At the time I thought it was silly, but now I think it’s a pretty good way to go. Ready. Set yourself up for success and realize you have a general idea of what you want to do. At that point, don’t wait. Don’t wait for a concrete vision of where you are going. Don’t wait for specific solid plans… If you do, it may never happen. Have faith, trust and GO. Fire! Then. Once you’ve begun, adjust your aim. Take advantage of the things that happen along the way and follow the new path that has appeared before you. Most likely, the options you find will be things you never imagined when you were getting ready.
KS is also just open to what comes along. This works well for me. In my life many of my best experiences have come along, unplanned. You do have to set yourself up for adventure. You can’t just sit at home and hope adventure will find you. But once you have placed yourself in the adventure position you can just keep your eyes open and ride the wave. Here in Hawaii the closest trail run to the condos was up a ridge to a bunch of wind turbines. Probably not on anyone’s top list of hikes. But it was dang fun. To stand under a bunch of turbines and here the wind rush through their blades and their gears grind is a sensory experience that is hard to define and feels quite surreal.
When Katie and I went to New Zealand we had plane tickets, train tickets, ferry tickets and car rental arrangements… Basically we had a short list of places we had to be on certain dates. Other than that we just went for it. 5 weeks. Still the best vacation ever.
Recipes, or plans, to me are just things that have worked for other people in the past. They may like the results they got but I do not necessarily want to repeat what they did. I want my own experience. If this means running to a major viewpoint on a cloudy, rainy day and not getting a view, but instead getting a sensory experience on my skin. Getting to see the lusher green of wet leaves. Getting to hear the song birds that love warm soporofic rains. That’s fine by me. That’s my experience and I might tell you about it to inspire you to your own adventure.
