I wake up at 5 in the morning, and the first thing I do is check my phone. It says that I have fifteen more minutes before I need to get up, so I read the phone for a while. The news announces that the President has just signed new climate accords mandating an increase in clean fuels over the next 15 years. Those in the fading coal and oil industries will be retrained in solar and wind.
I get dressed and go downstairs to my car. My car is electric, as most of the cars are. The cost has gone down enough that people can afford them. Clean tech is subsidized through tax incentives.
There hasn’t been an air quality alert in three years. Cities are cleaner and asthmatics can breathe better. The world is healing itself, given a chance.
In my office, the hypoallergenic therapy cat saunters by asking to be petted. I pet her and she jumps in my lap. I guess I needed a hug. My cats at home get jealous sometimes.
My coworkers are friendly, relieved of the stress of the environment.the world is a bit kinder of a place.
When your last name is Leach, “Leachie” is a natural nickname.
I think it started in Kindergarten, which is a natural time for kids to figure out that “Leach” > “Leachie”. It continued through school, and I think people even called me that in high school. Not a terribly complicated story.
However, my favorite user name is “Lleachie”. If someone on the web has the nickname “Lleachie”, it’s a good chance it’s me. It’s pronounced like “llama”, with one L. Except for one person from Poland who pronounced it “ill-e-ATCH-ie”, which I’ll forgive him for.
My Scrivener files are a mess. Something happened with syncing that they are no longer opening on my iPad, and I’m afraid that if I open them up on my computer, the same thing will happen and all the versions will be corrupted (through a sync).
So I’m going to have to make and move copies before I open Scrivener and see if I can transfer the moved files back in. Otherwise I’m not sure what I can do to de-corrupt too many files.
The first thing I did when I found my error was count my lucky stars that it hadn’t been published. Now what I have to do is some research and rethinking to make the plot more plausible.
My error had to do with technology — in particular, the technology concerning encryption and the fact that my example was not secure enough. As my writing is fantasy rather than science fiction, I don’t have to get into the details of the tech. I do have to be somewhat realistic (given my style of writing, which is closer to magical realism) and plausible.
So this morning is going to be research and rewriting some sections of the book. Not my favorite thing to do, but I want my books to be good.
I have another Big Audacious Goal I hadn’t counted on, and that is to lose some weight. I am way too plump for my doctor’s liking, and now I have to do something about it. My weight is starting to affect my health.
This is going to be a neverending goal, and that is a bit daunting for me. I have a sugar addiction (and I mean this in the most literal way possible). I have always had disordered eating in the form of sweet foods. My doctor said, “I mean you can have those things occasionally,” but given our game plan, I don’t know how.
The goal is to eat around 120 grams of carbs a day. That is not a SMART goal, so I need to work on it. I will set a goal of 127 grams of carbs, 48 grams of fat, and at least 60 grams of protein a day (give or take a few). This is based on a 1500 calorie a day intake. I will choose complex carbs like fruits and vegetables and whole grains. I will track my food intake daily to see if I meet those goals. I will weigh myself once a week. I will wean myself onto Ozempic according to my doctor’s instructions.
Notice I focused on my actions instead of the results. If I had said “I will lose 2 pounds a week”, I might have run into problems, as this doesn’t take into account my 62-year-old metabolism. Focusing on my actions makes more sense, because that’s what I can do something about. I made my goals realistic (I can do this!) and specific and measurable. The only thing is it isn’t time bound because it’s open-ended. I should be eating this way for the rest of my life, I suspect.
There are things this BAG needs. Like “how often can one diverge from this meal plan to have occasional ‘bad things’?” (I don’t care what dieticians say, there are ‘bad foods’ when an ice cream concrete leads to a sugar binge). A goal of how much weight to lose (at the moment, that’s 50 pounds. I have more than 50 pounds to lose, to be honest, but we’re being realistic).
So far, after two weeks of following this protocol, so good. I haven’t had a bad eating day and I have lost 3 pounds. Knowing my past attempts at losing weight, this stage is not the problem. The problem is keeping it off, especially when faced with desserts. Wish me luck.
This is a hard question to answer, because the one thing I “can’t live without” is my iPhone, and I don’t know whether that is a luxury or necessity these days. I use it for work, I use it for entertainment, I use it to record my carbs every day. I read and compose email, I keep up with people I know — it’s a tool that’s no longer a luxury to me.
At the same time, it’s a luxury. I pay a decent amount of money for my iPhone, although I only replace it after several years. I have lived without a smartphone, but I used to have a Palm Pilot back in the days before the iPhone. (I remember the Palm Pilot for its tendency to regurgitate all its data and become useless until synched on the computer.)
I suppose I could live without my iPhone, but it would have to be a different world, one in which I didn’t get daily emails from my students or have to fill out paperwork for them. One where I don’t need a handy reference for counting carbs. One where my life was a lot slower than it is now.
I do not have some of the typical fears — flying, public speaking, spiders. I have a fear of heights, but I consider that perfectly reasonable, like fearing something that’s about to tear your head off. The big fear that I harbored for many years was a fear of driving a car.
Cars are big and you can kill people with them. That was what was on my mind when I was sixteen and in driver’s ed. When I had to get behind the wheel of the car, I was a disaster. I could barely accelerate, oversteered the car, and hit the brakes too hard. Worse, I couldn’t figure out in what order I was supposed to do things, so I failed driver’s ed by stopping the car in the middle of the railroad tracks to check for trains. So I didn’t only fear being behind the wheel, I had a reason to. After a second time going through driver’s ed, I took my driver’s license test and barely passed. And then I never drove.
When I was 29, I got hit by a car, which didn’t help the fear any. All it did was break my leg, but it pretty much pulverized an inch of bone near the ankle. I now have a metal bar in that leg from knee to ankle.
A few years later, I lived in an area with a vibrant arts scene, except that the scene was spread over several towns. So one had to be able to drive to Franklin and West Kortright and maybe even Albany. I had just broken up with my husband, and the social engagement sounded nice to me. So I decided I needed to learn how to drive.
I took driver’s ed again, this time with a driver’s ed teacher who figured out the problem and helped me get over it. He made me check with him out loud anything I was about to do while driving. I talked myself through it. Then when I didn’t need to say it aloud anymore, I took my driver’s test and passed.
I got myself a car, and I was not a good driver at first. I got into a couple fender-benders, one with a rental car I had gotten while my car was in the shop. Some of the fender-benders weren’t my fault. I was suspended for 60 days for one of the accidents that wasn’t my fault. But I kept on driving.
I am still scared of driving sometimes. I am scared of driving in cities, especially with complicated splits in them. I am scared on crowded interstates. I keep seeing accidents in my head and they keep me from driving solo a lot of times. I don’t like it, but at least I can drive locally without fear.
Today is supposed to be a stormy day, the kind of storm that comes with a side of three-inch hail and possibility of tornados. The worst of it is going to be north of us, I understand, but we are in an “enhanced” zone.
I hope the storm waits until we’re all home. This afternoon, I am at work for meetings, and I don’t want to deal with sitting in Colden Hall’s basement waiting for the all-clear. I’m CERT-trained, which means I can act in mass disasters to stabilize injuries and reduce the chaos. I hope to never use my training.
If I’m at home for the bad weather, my husband and I will go to the basement and wait for it to pass. The city has sirens, but we also have weather apps on our phones to alert us. The cats will follow us down. The basement is unfinished and cluttered, but there are chairs downstairs for us.
I hate tornado weather. I can handle severe thunderstorms, even though one took out our peach tree and a length of fence recently. I don’t like the destructive level of tornado weather. Towns get taken out by tornados, and I don’t want to be in the middle of one of them.
In my undergraduate years, my major was Foods in Business, a major designed to position people into the food industry. This was not what I ultimately did with my life, having discovered Family and Consumption Economics, and my life’s work, my junior year. But as an undergraduate, I wanted to work in a consumer affairs position, or even better, in a test kitchen.
I took a class my senior year called Food Science, where we spent the first half of the semester learning the chemical and physical properties of food, and the second half of the semester testing hypotheses about food. Mine was testing for substitutes for butter in baking poundcakes — margarine, butter flavored shortening, and regular shortening with butter buds flavoring. (Note: people preferred shortening over everything, including butter.) I fell in love with test kitchen work and, if it weren’t for the fact that I loved the thought of graduate school more, I might have gone into test kitchen work.
So, if I had a choice of any job to step into for a day, I would walk into a test kitchen. I think I remember the basics 40 years later — standardized recipes where one weighs all the ingredients on a scale (including a very sensitive one for small amounts like baking soda and seasoning), tasting rooms with good ventilation, white walls, and neutral lighting, testing of texture, crumb, and viscosity using simple and complicated testing. I think I can do it for a day with very little coaching.
I write a newsletter once a month for my (potential) readers. My reader list came from posting free copies of my book on BookFunnel, where people would read it in exchange for being put on my newsletter list. If you’re wondering what it’s all about, it’s a lot like this blog — a reflection that relates to the books, followed by book news and a freebie link to BookFunnel.
I have 2808 readers, most of whom (I suspect) do not read the newsletter. But that’s okay, some people are reading it. I don’t think any of them have bought a book. But that’s okay, someday they may. That 2800 people subscribe to my newsletter amazes me.
If you want to subscribe, drop me a line and I will put you on the subscriber list.
Words Like Me 