daily prompt – will garden for cake

Welcome to 2017, now get on the bandwagon and change it up. My thoughts on that, not very original; I need to change my diet and make some progress removing the weight that menopause thought it would be fun to gain. Actually, for several years now, I have had a doctor tell me that I need to get my cholesterol levels down below 200 and keep them there. Not an easy task if your job is to bake and develop recipes. Constant tasting + constant temptation = consistent failure to some extent. The process of moving did nothing to help this quest at first, but a month after moving into the new place, I may have a new strategy.

When we began the process of moving, we packed everything we wanted, unloaded what we didn’t and after the sale of the house, our belongings went into storage. With no real kitchen to cook in, we ate out a lot and it quickly caught up with us. Then when we moved into the new house, it was holiday baking season and it just slid down hill from there; cookies, cake, wine, candy… In the past, I would walk nearly every day and it was easy to go 4 or 5 miles on the trails near our home in Williamsburg. In a pinch, I could walk laps in our neighborhood because even though there were no sidewalks, we lived in a development made of two dead end streets and I never had to worry about the traffic. Walking the streets is not an option here at our Nashville home because not only is there a complete lack of sidewalks, meaning I must walk on the narrow shoulder, the traffic whizzes by at 30-40 miles per hour and if I need to jump out of the way, chances are I will be laying at the bottom of a drainage ditch. Even so, I am hoping to find a route nearby on some of the less traveled streets until I can find a trail system close to the house.

As to that new strategy, if I do not buy it, I cannot eat it. We purged so heavily for the move that I am having to restock completely. As I shop, I think twice about the things I buy and now that the holidays have come to a close, there is no need for some of the ingredients I have always kept on hand in the past. Simply put; out of sight, out of mind. If I keep the temptations off the shopping list, I think I can do this. Now if I could just get winter to go away…

Tempted

via Daily Prompt: Vigor

If you have been reading my latest posts, you know we are knee deep in relocating from Williamsburg, VA back to Nashville, TN. While this excites me on so many levels, it also has the ability to suck the joy out of things. Honestly, I have had a hard time getting excited about the move, about all the things that come with a move and not just the packing and unpacking. The “not knowing” when and where we will be calling this home-our home. A lack of residency status, in a way; not really a resident of Tennessee, not really a resident of Virginia.

Right now, all I want to do is get on with it, get it over with; unpack and move on to the business of settling in. My mind is racing with lists of things I want to do, things I need to do. Visions of garden beds are floating before me and I am bursting at the seams to get my hands back into the dirt. Our chickens made the trip and are living temporarily in a friends backyard and we look forward to bringing them home too.

The holidays are upon us and I want to bury myself in flour and roll out sheets of cookie dough. My cutters are accessible and will be one of the first things I unpack! It just isn’t Christmas without sugar cookies and gingerbread, cut into festive shapes and covered with icing and sprinkles.

So why call this post vigor? As much as I am in a somewhat happy place-yes I am happy, despite what this post might suggest, I am still anxious for the unknown, for the fact that we are technically homeless and living in a motel room until the purchase of our new home goes through. My creative part has given way to a writers block and I had to resort to using a random prompt; the word “vigor” from my reader on wordpress.com and as far as the daily prompts go, I am not alone, follow the link and read posts by other bloggers using the word vigor

Beans, bounce, brio, dash, drive, dynamism, energy, espirit, gas, get-up-and-go, ginger, go, gusto, hardiwood, juice, life, moxie, oomph, pep, punch, sap, snap, starch, verve, vim, vinegar, vitality, zing and zip. According to Merriam-Webster, these are all synonyms of vigor. They are also a list of the feelings I have, the things that are pushing me along as I wait-the hurry up is done for now.