Every Saturday morning I read aloud from a semi-random collection of spiritual, inspirational, and philosophical books to Stacey and anyone else who wants to listen. Here are some highlights from today’s readings.
In principle, of course, every day should be your day, and every hour your hour. But the fact is that very few of us have reached that point. We have the impressions that our family, place of work, and society rob us of all our time. So I urge that everyone set aside one day each week.
“Choose life!” — the byword of the Torah. Death is not denied, and death is not embraced It is present, unavoidable, but not the only option so long as one is yet alive.
From generation to generation we kick the stuffing out of our children to teach them to “know their place” and to behave, think, and feel with proper modesty as befits one little ego among many.
You do not have to know “everything.” In fact, whenever a child asks a question that goes beyond you ability to answer, you have an opportunity to teach one of Judaism’s great lessons: learning is for everyone.
…in our anti-nature, control-oriented culture, parents are expected (if not required by law) to oppose or control children’s natural developmental impulses toward personal empowerment
Just sampled some of the cold brew coffee I started last night. Nice! But… Having grown up in Tampa, FL, I tend to like my coffee “Cuban style” which is half very very strong coffee (think “espresso”) topped off with warmed or steamed half & half. I tried this method with my cold brew - 2 ounces cold brew (it’s a concentrate) and up to half the mug with hot water, topped off as mentioned above. Over all, a weak cup o’ joe. The cold brew has a nice texture and flavor, don’t get me wrong. And I think I’ll be tweaking this method as time goes by because I don’t want to just give up after the first try. Note that though this isn’t necessarily a “cheap” method of making coffee, I was able to do it with what I have at home without buying one of those fancy-schmancy cold brew mechanisms now on the market.
So, how I did it was as follows: I measured about 1/2 pound of beans (thinking I had enough room in the French Press for that much ground), and upon seeing how much I had in ground beans used half. Filled the press to full with filtered water and left to sit overnight. In the morning just press the coffee down and there you have it. Cold coffee concentrate. You could, of course, just use a pitcher and a thermos-top filter instead of the French press if you don’t have one of those. I’m a novice to this method, so don’t quote me as an authority when you try it yourself. Although, do try it yourself and let me know what you come up with!
Next in my pretty little head is Raw Vegan Food. But first! Some backstory. To understand this little bit I will go on to you need to know, maybe, that 1) I’ve been working hard on losing weight - see I’ve always been a skinny girl until about 8-ish years ago when the pounds/fat started packing on due to a rocky marriage and a mental illness requiring a large assortment of various psychotropic meds. In less than 8 years I went from 160 pounds and a size 10/12, to 210 pounds, size 18. Even though I’m 6′ tall and I “carry it well,” that was very scary for me and after having a baby recently I decided I really need to shed the excess weight before Avdi and I have more babies. So, dieting and weight lifting is my MO nowadays. Dieting not being, however, the fad diets that go around, but rather sensible (”Primal“) eating. And know that 2) I am a “foodie.” Now, on we go to the Raw Vegan Food thing.
As I look around for interesting recipes to try out, and ways to prepare old favorite dishes I often come across eating in the raw. There are a lot of benefits to eating living and raw foods, and raw vegans swear by their diet. Good health, longevity, a clear brain and better eyesight are all touted as benefits of a raw diet. I have been doing a juice cleanse periodically (yes, I know, not recommended for lactating mommies - gimme a break, I have thoughts on that too, but I digress) and the day or so following I’ve decided to eat raw in effort to ramp back up to the Primal diet I am becoming accustomed to.
One site I’ve come across belongs to one Russell James of the UK. See pics of his delectable creations here (they’re all raw!!). The food looks so tasty that I’m thinking I should plan a trip to England just to take one of his weekend classes to learn to make this stuff. I wonder if it tastes as good as it looks? Well, after having a day of raw yesterday I think I can safely guess that it probably does.
Yesterday’s menu was tasty, although hear me out. The breakfast I had, though delicious, was texture-wise a disappointment. It was a shake comprised of fresh orange juice, a banana and ice cubes. The problem here is that our blender seems to melt the ice rather than crush it, so what I ended up with instead of a creamy banana-orange slushy, was a very watery banana flavored orange juice. Tasty, but lacking. Not the fault of the recipe, though. And it was filling. I seem to not be needing as much food as I used to. Or maybe I’m training my body to eat less and rather focus on activity whether mental or physical.
Lunch was also a disappointment. (I know, you’re thinking, “But you said the menu for the day was tasty!”) So, the menu included a garden salad. One-fourth head of red leaf lettuce, 1/4 head romaine, I used 1/2 sliced avocado, 1 wedged plum tomato, a carrot thinly sliced, and 1/4 thinly sliced cucumber, topped with lemon juice and cold-pressed evoo. Strangely, I was excited about the salad, until I sat down and realized I’m eating a salad. A plain old, ordinary salad. I like salad, but I was hoping for a raw creation that was tease my taste-buds. Alas, it did not.
So now, dinner. Here’s where it got really, over-the-top good, and also the reason why I consider my raw day yesterday a wild success. Well, for me anyway. Dinner was a Creamed Zucchini soup followed by Cherry Sorbet for dessert. The soup contained all blended in a blender, zucchini, avocado, celery, garlic, dill weed, salt (I used “Real Salt“), lemon juice, evoo, and I garnished it with a dash of cayenne for heat. The kids had theirs warmed because they weren’t thrilling over the idea of a cold soup as I was. Avdi liked it, said it was quite tasty, but after the heaping bowl of luscious decadence he was still hungry. I was not, however, even if I felt like I could eat what was leftover of both kids’ soups - which was substantial. (My kids are so picky!) The following dessert was simply organic frozen cherries mixed in a food processor with a bit of raw local honey (recipe called for Agave Nectar, but mine hadn’t arrived yet - it’s on order in bulk from Amazon). Run it in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions, and voilà! cherry sorbet. Freeze it first, of course. The recipe made 4 generous servings.
I might add that though raw vegan food is of interest to me, I will probably not become a raw vegan. I do enjoy my raw, local milk and raw local honey. And to my recent discovery jerky is also, technically, raw, though marinated and dried. I could do raw if I included those things, however my family would not approve. One recommendation by Rose Lee Calabro suggests including 50% raw foods in one’s daily diet. That sounds reasonable for me and my family. Maybe I can go a step further by including raw in my personal diet (breakfast and lunch) a little more than that. Will blog about it as time goes by.
(N.B. - With regard to weight loss, just wanted to add that my total weight loss since the beginning of this year when I started, in earnest, to try the Primal diet/way of eating, and weight lifting, has been 15 pounds, and 4″ off the waist.)
One thing that putting up an iterationfrolic board has really brought home is just how much we expect of ourselves in a given three-week period. We can’t even fit it all on the board! It’s a real eye-opener, having this kind of visual representation of our project load.
I mentioned in the first Agile Living post that we weren’t happy with the term “iteration” for our three-week planning periods. It’s fine for software development but it’s too stuffy for family life.
One alternate term used in the software industry is “sprint”. But even this sounded much too intense and energetic for The Lazy Faire. So after much consideration, we’ve settled on an acceptable substitute term: a frolic.
In a couple of our Agile Living posts I’ve made reference to “point values” for projects. This is another practice inspired by Agile software development. Before adding a project to the current or upcoming iteration, we assign a point value to it. This is a value between 1 and 3, where 1 is the easiest, and 3 is the hardest.
These numbers have only relative significance. They are not connected to any real-world metric such as “days required to complete”. They are interpreted relative to each other - a 1-point task is easier to a 2-point project, which is easier than a 3-point project. The only relation to a concrete measurement is that they must all be accomplishable within a single three-week iteration.
If it’s not a concrete number measure, how do we judge task difficulty? It’s a gut-feeling call - is this project one of the easier ones we’ve considered, moderate, or one of the hardest we might attempt to accomplish in three weeks? We also explicitly include emotional difficulty in our estimates. One project might require only a single phone call to accomplish, but that phone call might be one that causes us significant anxiety, causing the project to receive a “3″ rating. The goal is to come up with an overall rating of effort, whether from physical effort, financial outlay, length of time required, or emotional resistance.
Planning poker
The actual project estimation is conducted almost like a game - agile software refers to this step as “planning poker”. One of us counts to three, and on three we both hold up a number of fingers equal to our estimate. The point of estimating simultaneously is so that neither of us influences the other beforehand. Remember, this is all about gut feeling. Once we’ve both shown our “hand”, if both estimates are equal, we write the number on the card, circle it, and move on to the next card. If not, we discuss.
Note that we do not try to “split the difference” between the differing estimates. Usually a difference in estimate indicates that we understand the project differently, or that one of us has thought of a complication the other is unaware of. So a difference in estimation is an opportunity to come to a better understanding of the project being estimated. We don’t put a final estimate on the card until we’ve reached a consensus.
Rationale
The primary goal of estimation is achieving predictability. At the end of each iteration, during the retrospective, we record how many points’ worth of effort we scheduled, versus how many we actually accomplished. As we become more adept at estimation, and as we collect more statistics, we will come to a better and better understanding of how much work we can reasonably expect ourselves to accomplish in a given iteration. This, in turn, will help us move forward with our various plans at a steady, sustainable pace - having confidence that we can accomplish what we’ve set out to do.
A core practice of many Agile software teams is the retrospective. This is a meeting held at the end of the iteration to look back over the iteration and discuss what went well and what could have gone better. It’s not a witch hunt or a blame-fest. The iteration is performed with the assumption that everything that was done (or not done) was done to the best of the participants’ ability at the time. The idea is to use the insight gained from the retrospective to improve the next iteration.
We’ve incorporated retrospectives into our “agile living” practice at home. We schedule one at the end of each three-week iteration. When it’s time for the iteration, we pack up our 3×5 cards and sticky notes and head to a restaurant or cafe. This part is important: we want the retrospective to be a treat, not a chore. And we want to be on neutral ground, without the usual distractions of home.
Once there, with drinks in hand, we begin the retrospective. We start with statistics. Referring to the planning cards form the iteration that is ending, we list:
How many points’ worth of effort we planned
How many points’ worth of effort we accomplished
How many points’ worth of effort we failed to accomplish
We don’t dwell on the ratio of accomplished to not-accomplished. The numbers are just a way, over time, to get a feel for how much effort we are capable of accomplishing in a three-week period.
Then we discuss three things:
What went well
What didn’t go so well
Ideas
For each category I put a sticky note down on the table. We move through these three categories roughly in order, but it doesn’t have to be a strict progression. As we think of things that went well, things that didn’t go so well, and ideas for the future, we scribble them down on a 3×5 card and lay the card down under the appropriate sticky.
What went well
E.g. “spent a lot of quality time with the kids” or “felt really energetic”. These are the things we felt good about over the course of the iteration. They could be things we accomplished, good things that happened in our lives, or just positive feelings.
What didn’t go so well
E.g. “didn’t get enough sleep” or “the basement flooded”.
Ideas
This category is for ideas for future iterations. It’s pretty wide-open: it could be specific projects or tasks, or daily practices to try out, or new strategies for tackling tasks that we didn’t do so well at in the preceding iteration.
Conclusion
Eventually we stop thinking of new items to add to the three stacks, at which point we wrap up the iteration. I collect the three card stacks and transcribe them online as soon as practical.
Rationale
The goal of the retrospective is reflection. It’s a way of being mindful as a family, and hopefully of bringing our unconscious joys, concerns, impediments, and ideas to conscious attention. This gives us a chance to re-create circumstances that worked well, minimize conditions which caused us pain, and to think as a family about how we approach our daily challenges.
We’re still working the kinks out of our “agile living” system here at The Lazy Faire. One of the things that quickly became clear during the last iteration was that having our goals posted online simply didn’t give them enough visibility. It was too much of an effort to get online and review the plan. To remedy this, I installed a 3′x2′ corkboard in our bedroom hallway, where we’d walk past it every day. I divided it into three sections: one for finished projects, one for the current iteration, and one for the upcoming iteration. I also bought a stack of small sticky notes. These we use to tag each active project with a “next action”. When we finish a project’s next action, we can quickly slap a new next action onto the card, and so on until the project is finished.
This gives us the ability to see at a glance where we stand with regard to our goals for the current three-week period. It also gives us an easy way to start incrementally planning the next iteration. So far it has been working well.
Welcome to The Lazy Faire, a family blog about the practice of abundance in every aspect of life. Your hosts are Stacey and Avdi. Together with our children we are building our dreams and writing about the journey.
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