Tag Style

Shopped Till I Dropped

Michael Leave a comment

I did something different last week. I went shopping. Not the shopping you do at a supermarket regardless of how super your market is. Real shopping that involved considering style and fashion, color and fabric, and trying stuff on. Oh that might not be very different for you but I assure you, it is indeed different, almost exciting, for me. Over the last 3 years I’ve managed to lose 110 pounds. I may have mentioned that about 20 of them were desired and even intentional. The other 90 or so came off as pieces of me came out during and after various hospital stays and recovery periods.

During that time I made due with piecemeal attire supplementation and the occasional reintroduction of an item that was spared a trip to the donation bin during the years when I was busy gaining some 110 pounds. But I finally had to recognize that I could no longer go out in public – even a public as limited as companion patients in doctors’ waiting rooms, dialysis clinic nursing staff, once a week grocery co-shoppers, and fellow churchgoers – with the ragtag rags that my togs were quickly becoming. Thus, a shopping spree.

And let me tell you something that probably every mother of a teenage boy already knows. If you are male and are not an adolescent male whose fashion sense is dictated primarily by the local college or professional football teams’ uniforms (regardless of the chronologic age of said adolescent male), there’s not much one can call smart for men out there. Oh I found plenty of shirts, slacks, and jackets in formal, informal, and in between styles but those styles were quite the same as the styles of those few previously mentioned articles that had stayed with me since the last time I weighed this little. And that was around 30 years ago.

Not to be deterred I soldiered on and did grave damage to my credit limit, restructuring my wardrobe to one that does not elicit questions like “have you been sick?” by any passerby who subscribes to the Hi Guy Principle. To be honest, when I started the day I thought I’d be exhausted and want to quit before it got on to time for a mid-morning snack. And to continue to be honest, I was getting tired. But tired and somewhat exhilarated at the same time. It had been so long since I had been shopping, even though most of what I was buying was basically the same stuff I had bought so long since, that I was actually enjoying myself.

There’s nothing like spending a day, and lots of money, shopping in a store where your selections aren’t plopped into a plastic cart with wheels you push to the check-out line at the front of the building.

I’ll have to try to do it again sometime in the next 30 years.

 

Half-Baked

Michael 2 Comments

I baked cookies yesterday. Hold your applause. They were just oatmeal cookies. Oatmeal cookies are like the Blue Apron of the baking world. No thought required. The most difficult step is finding the measuring cups.

You all already know I enjoy my time in the kitchen but it’s almost always cooking. Baking is a whole different animal. It requires measuring stuff, preheating the oven, using the timer even. As a person who spent his whole career in a regimented, scientific occupation you’d think the most comfortable thing I could do in the kitchen is fall into the baking regimen. Nope, I prefer the loosey-goosey world of cooking.

Maybe that’s because I enjoy the freedom of modifying the dish I’m working on based on what’s fresh, what’s handy, what’s tasting good. Maybe it’s because most of the dishes I started out cooking were family recipes which changed as the family moved from Italy to America and ingredients changed based on what was available. Or maybe it was because some of those recipes were written in a combination of Italian and English and we weren’t always sure what was supposed to go into that pot so we improvised.

Or maybe that’s because it’s just the way I’m wired.

While I was deciding if I wanted to weigh or measure my dry ingredients I did some thinking about just that. Does our personality reflect our cooking style – and shouldn’t it also compare to our chosen lifestyle? Here’s what I came up with.  . . .  Maybe.

Take me for the first example. Even though I decided on keeping the wolves from my door in the highly regulated, policed, and exacting world of health care I tend to keep most of the rest of my life in the “let’s see what’s up” end of the spectrum. Back in the day when I actually made plans my idea of making plans (unless it involved non-refundable air fare), was “hey I heard about blah-blah-blah on the radio this morning, let’s go!” Thus my life in the kitchen is more a matter of “hmm, I wonder what’s in the refrigerator that hasn’t changed color yet, let’s eat!” And 9,999 times out of 10,000 it will be good.

Consider the ex. I’ll not be bad-mouthing anybody here. I’m just using her as an example. Her idea of spontaneous was using only two sources of information for research on a place, restaurant, movie, or wall-covering. But boy could she bake. Pies, cakes, breads, cookies. If it involved a rolling pin (no, I won’t go there), she had it mastered.

Now, let’s look at the daughter. The mix of the aforementioned Thing One and Thing Two. On one hand she’s creative enough to have selected one of the most imaginative fields you can imagine to make a living at and is making a living at it. On the other, she’s making a living at it by working for herself and manages to handle all the requirements of self-employment successfully enough to still make a living at it. Her style in the kitchen? She can bake a mall-worthy cinnamon roll in the morning and finesse her way through a dinner for four with whatever might be in the pantry after not shopping for two weeks in the evening.  Living at both poles and baking and cooking with aplomb.

I guess that’s make her sort of a hybrid.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?