The Record

Sometimes
by David Whyte

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.

Not a Spoiler: John and I went to see Infinity War (Avengers) last night. It hit me very hard. When we got back to the house (I get there after John does), John had looked up spoilers for the next round of movies and that made me feel better.

Sometimes I would like a movie to just be standalone and not the next installment in a series.

That said, I really didn't realize how many Marvel Universe movies there have been. I just went and looked them up. 24 movies, including five as yet unreleased. Add to that 12 different television series, including one as yet unreleased.

Wow. I have a lot to catch up on. I've seen Iron Man 2, Captain America (the first one), Ant-Man (which I thoroughly enjoyed), one of the Avengers movies (either the first or Age of Ultron), and now, Avengers Infinity War. Oh, and I saw both Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which I liked very much. I may have seen Iron Man 3, but not sure. I've watched the first season of Jessica Jones but that's it.

#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

Went to see the Book of Mormon last night. Ended up staying for the whole show, although beforehand I thought I might leave because I was so tired. I'm going in to work for 10am. Glad I made the decision to go in later, because the drive home last night was brutal and there was no way I would have been able to drive to work on four hours of sleep.

The show was really quite something. I had no idea. I have to say - it is very clear that a hell of a lot of work went into that show. I was dubious about show at intermission, although there had been some good songs. But the 2nd half really tied it all together. Really quite something.

There was such hard work and artistry going on last night -- I had no idea that there was going to be such physical comedy going on. So glad I went to see it. I don't have the heart of a cynic, so perhaps I missed things, but in the end what I experienced was that this was a love letter to the Mormon church. However, the message of this love letter was very modern "idea not dogma" (see Chris Rock in the movie Dogma). I also didn't expect that a large part of this story would be about the growth of these kids into men. I really appreciated that the Ugandan villagers were not reduced to stereotypes - this was so amazing to me.

I think any Mormon that has a deep insecurity about their religion will not be able to tolerate this. My therapist - no way. She would not be able to tolerate it at all, not be able to see it for what it was.

I spent about a half hour winding down watching Book of Mormon before I went to bed.

10:15am. I've been up for a few hours. Tried to sleep in but my body wasn't having it. That's fine. I'll be able to crash early, which I need to do.

I'm pretty proud of myself, although it's very hard to try to muster up the "proud of myself" feeling. I've just now made my lunches for this week. Blue Apron taught me some very new recipes and introduced me to some new foods that I loved, one of which was Korean tteok, which is a kind of chewy food made of rice flour. In this recipe, it's used like a pasta. Most importantly, I was able to eat it and digest it.



The recipe itself is located here and looks like this, which is essentially how it came out for me except that I didn't take that kind of care with the scallions:



My version had beef because it was closest and I saw no ground pork anywhere and I wasn't about to go another store. I used Hoisin instead of sweet soy sauce, so the recipe is slightly less sweet. Totally forgot the sour cream, but that's fine. No gochujang paste because it's too hot for me.

I tripled the recipe and it tastes Great. I am looking forward to lunches.

Meatballs, into the oven!



I love cooking for other people.

I am having trouble keeping up mineral levels for things like calcium, iron, etc. Multivitamins aren't cuttting it. So, I've started drinking herbal infusions, where you pour boiling water over an ounce of dried herbs and let that infuse for four or more hours. You then strain out the plant remnants and drink.

The newest plant to work into the rotation is Chickweed. I can report that Infusion of Chickweed is a dark amber-colored tea that has wonderful top notes of fresh lawn clipping, a broad taste trail of decaying autumn leaf, and a savory finish of rain-soaked wooden stick.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-los-angeles-police-immigration-20161114-story.html (via shareaholic)

I tried a gluten-free pizza from a local pizza place last night. They make fabulous pizza, so I thought - okay, they probably wouldn't sell craptastic gluten-free pizza.

It was great. I could eat that and not miss regular pizza.

Notably, I was not in agony last night. My abdomen didn't blow up and my shoulders and knees weren't aching. I was able to sleep last night on my shoulders. I drank plenty of Diet Coke to see if that would create a problem, but it didn't. I really expected to have the same physical reaction to the gluten-free pizza as I do to regular pizza, but I didn't.

It's not the best pizza in the world. But, it's damn good. And a far cry from crappy frozen pizza. It is thin crust, which is not my favorite, but that's fine. I saved one piece to reheat in the microwave - it totally passed the microwave test.

So, basically, I'm thrilled. Pain-free pizza.

I am still not willing to admit that I have a gluten or wheat intolerance. But I am motivated enough at this point to search for pain-free pizza.

The pizza from this particular local place, and there are five close to me, causes me the least amount of pain after I eat it. I did order a second -regularnormal- pizza just in the gluten-free was craptastic. I did not eat any last night. I will eat that today and see what happens physiologically.

Learned something interesting this morning. I have been working hard at converting a published hardcopy book into an acceptable e-format. The author had uploaded a PDF of her book to Amazon and it came out very badly. (The book was only available on Kindle; that's how I saw how bad it was.) I proposed to fix it in exchange for her services. I decided to use Smashwords as a distribution tool for non-Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing for Amazon.

I finally finally finally finished fixing the book yesterday. So, I uploaded it to Smashwords to distribute it out to the world (iBooks, Barnes & Noble, library repositories, etc.)

Smashwords came back late last night and said "nope, your book failed epubcheck, you will never be a published author ever ever ever unless you fix all of these errors and chances are you can't so hire someone already."

Yeah.

So this morning I said "Oh yeah? Show me."

Smashwords said "Go here to the online epubchecker thingy and it will show you."

So I did and yep, there were lots of indecipherable errors. I tried to track them down via Google and what I found gave me significant pause. I had seen that the upload had reduced the quality of the photos, but this was crazy.

But then I thought "I couldn't possibly have effed up the book that badly."

Smashwords made me convert my .docx Word file to a .doc file, which I then uploaded. I thought to myself "Self, I know that Word's conversion abilities are diseased at best." And then Smashwords further converts the document into epub and other formats.

So then I converted my own pure Word document into epub all by my lonesome. I then uploaded that file to the online epubchecker. And voila, 'twas perfect. All of the photos are perfect. The text doesn't flow perfectly in some spots, but I can fix that easily. All of the photo funkification I noticed last night was gone.

I headed back over to Smashwords, overrode their "Word doc only unless you really are an expert and you probably should have hired someone anyway" message and uploaded my clean new perfectly beautiful approved epub file.

And right away the message came back saying that I'd passed their epubcheck.

Because really. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Never assume it's all your fault.