A. and I had a lazy day on Saturday, and it was nice. That statement might not sound like it means much, but normally I am not very good at lazy days. I crave them when I am busy. I idolize the type of day where I don’t get out of my pajamas. But when it comes down to it and I finally have one, I tend to get antsy partway through it and want nothing more than to get out of the apartment and DO SOMETHING. Unfortunately, that something often turns out to be utterly unnecessary shopping. It’s hard to go out and do something without spending money!

Since we moved a few months ago and I haven’t been working, I’ve had a lot more opportunity for those lazy days. The first month or so I nearly went out of my mind with it. Then, I sort of found my rhythm and started enjoying it. But then, I got some volunteer gigs and all of a sudden felt busy again (even though I wasn’t nearly as busy as I had been when I had a full-time job and a social life)! So Saturday was a welcome break.

I’ve noticed that when you have “nothing” to do, it’s hard to make yourself do the things you “should” do (because in reality, there’s always something to do). When I’m sitting around the apartment all day, it takes a lot of willpower to make myself clean the bathroom or do the laundry, for example, things that, when I’m busy, I always wish I had time to do. I guess it’s inertia-a body engaging in laziness will continue in laziness until acted upon by some outside force. I used to hate that my mom’s response to the inevitable childish “I’m boooored” was to offer me lists of possible things to do. It took some force to break that bored-ness and get me doing!

I’ve also found, though, that when I’m engrossed in a good book, everything about life just seems much better. A good book can keep me on the couch all day with nary a whine. And if I have a short amount of downtime while I’m in the midst of a good book, I get a thrill of excitement that I have a few minutes to go read. When I’m reading a book I’m not enjoying as much, though, in that downtime I’ll avoid picking it up like the plague. I’ll piddle around on my phone. I’ll get on the internet instead. I’ll watch a mindless episode of Army Wives. And none of these satisfies as much as reading my book.

On Saturday, I slept in a bit and read all my Google Reader items. A and I watched FOUR episodes of Friday Night Lights. I watched the last session of the National Swimming Championships that I recorded about a week ago. I finished reading Wicked City (which, by the way, I wasn’t crazy about, but which I also didn’t hate enough to quit reading). And when the antsiness started to hit at around 2:00, I pulled out my sewing machine and did a project I’d had flagged in my bookmarks for awhile! (You’ll get to see it on Nearly Wordless Wednesday.) It was a good way to break the monotony. And I didn’t do anything radical like take a shower or put on anything other than a t-shirt and comfy shorts. All in all, it was a nice day of rest and togetherness.

Are you good at taking a “sabbath?” What are some of your go-to boredom busters?

Yesterday was A’s birthday. I got home from volunteering at the thrift store at about 4:30 and immediately set about assembling a meatloaf and getting it in the oven, since it needed to cook for >1 hour. A. went for a run at about 6:15, with plans for me to meet him at the nearby market to buy beer for a get-together. At about 6:20…the power inexplicably went out. THANKFULLY, the meatloaf was done! So my rushing around earlier paid off. Unfortunately, though, that meant that A’s birthday dinner consisted of meatloaf and potato chips, since I wasn’t able to cook the rest of the stuff. Oh well.

Tonight is the real celebration. We’re having some friends over, and I’ve been planning/working on the menu for awhile, with a lot of help and inspiration from Pinterest. We’re having:

• Spinach and strawberry salad with walnuts and goat cheese
• Vegetable pizza with pesto
• Black bean southwest pizza
• Fruit kabobs (While assembling these, I learned that I haven't the foggiest idea how to cut a mango.)
• Oreo cheesecake cupcakes

Our friends are bringing appetizers. One recently got a mozzarella making kit and is bringing homemade mozzarella cheese! I’m looking forward to that. I often refuse when people ask if they can bring anything to an event I’m hosting, because I’ve usually put a lot of thought into what I’m making and have chosen things that “go” together. My worry is that someone will bring something that just doesn’t fit with the rest of the meal! But cheese goes with everything (and I’m also trying to relax a little bit about having people over), so I acquiesced.

My tip for entertaining is to start planning early. Now, there is definitely something to be said for spur-of-the-moment hospitality, and I hope to get to do that sometimes, too. I have a lot of respect for people who don’t feel the need for their home to be perfect in order to invite guests in, but I still have the urge to clean and de-clutter well in advance. But it’s a lot less stressful for a planned party if you do things ahead of time. I made the menu last week and picked up most of the ingredients I would need while doing my regular weekly grocery shopping on Sunday. I cleaned the bathroom and dusted yesterday morning, and picked up the fruits and veggies yesterday afternoon. As I mentioned, A. and I bought the beer last night. Then, this morning, I baked the cupcakes, assembled the fruit kabobs, and made pesto for the veggie pizza. So this afternoon all I have left to do is assemble the pizzas and the salad (including making dressing) and piddle around the apartment obsessively straightening things up! (The piddling is an essential part of the LL Entertaining Checklist.)

The crazy thing is…we’re only having 4 people over! I am in awe of people who can throw large dinner parties seemingly at the drop of a hat. But I figure if I practice with small groups, I’ll get my routine down and be able to expand in time. And I think the more I do it, the less I will obsess over having everything perfect.

But for tonight, at least, I think we’ll have ourselves a little slice of perfection. :-)

Yesterday, per my Birthday Resolution to get enough calcium, I kept track of what I ate and checked nutrition facts to find out how much calcium everything contained. For the items that didn’t have nutrition facts, I used Wolfram Alpha, which amazes me.

According to this article, I should be getting 1,000 mg of calcium per day. Apparently, “surveys have shown that average women in the United States are consuming less than 500 milligrams of calcium per day.” I don’t drink milk, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if my number was very low as well. However, by keeping track of things yesterday, I found calcium in surprising places! Small amounts, yes, but every little bit adds up.

Here’s my list:

Breakfast

• 2 tbsp 2% milk (in my tea) - ~41 mg
• 1 cup Oikos Organic Greek Yogurt - 150 mg
• 1 slice havarti cheese (on 2 small multigrain rolls, which had no measurable calcium) - 100 mg
• 1 peach - 9 mg (I was surprised by this!)
• Women's One-a-Day Multi-Vitamin - 450 mg

Snacks

• 1 package peanut butter crackers - 20 mg
• ~8 baby carrots - 91 mg (also surprising!)
• (Sadly, my chocolate covered pretzels do not imbue me with any calcium.)

Lunch

• 2 slices wheat bread - 80 mg
• 1 slice cheese - 100 mg
• (Turkey apparently provides no calcium.)
• Apple - 10 mg
• Almond Nut-Thins crackers (16, a serving) - 20 mg

Dinner

• Flat Iron Steak - 10 mg
• Baked Potato - 68 mg
• Sour cream and cheese on said baked potato - 10 mg, 81 mg
• Sauteed mushrooms - 3 mg!
• Slice of cheesecake - 64 mg
• Berries on cheesecake (straw- and blue-) - 20 mg, 8.9 mg (although I probably ate less than the serving size indicated by those numbers)

According to this record, I consumed 1,335.9 mg of calcium yesterday (although if you subtract my mutli-vitamin it was only 885.9). I don’t feel like I ate differently than I normally would have, so I think this is a pretty fair reflection, even if some of the amounts are a bit inflated.

Some things I learned:

• It's a good thing I eat yogurt, because it has a lot of calcium.
• A lot of fruits and veggies have calcium in them; taking that into account along with all their other nutrients,it's  no wonder they're so good for you!
• Cheesecake has a lot of calcium, but I probably shouldn't rely on eating it every day.
• I need my multi-vitamin, because I would be lacking, at least in the calcium department, if I didn't take it.

Today and from now on it’ll be back to my regularly scheduled programming of not keeping track of my calcium intake. But I feel like this was a really interesting exercise, and I have some good thoughts on how to mentally make sure I’m getting enough, without keeping an exhaustive list. Strong bones and teeth for the win!

I managed to grow up in Mississippi WITHOUT listening to country music. That’s not to say I didn’t go through some embarrassing musical phases. The first CD I ever got was the Spice Girls’ debut album, and after coming home from BeBop Record Shop with it, I holed up in my dad’s study (the only room that had a CD player at the time) and listened to it all day until I knew just about every lyric. It’s quite possible I also made up dances, but we’ll just pretend that never happened. As I delved even deeper into 1990s pop music, I think my hippie rock loving parents wondered what on earth they were going to do with me.

In high school I decided that I was more of a punk-rock kind of girl. I briefly wore baggy cargo pants and black t-shirts, painted my nails black, and wore black and hot pink jelly bracelets. I shudder to remember it. And I listened to such hardcore bands as Brand New and The Used. (I also included Yellowcard and Good Charlotte, so I’m not sure how authentic I was!)

During that time, I simultaneously developed a love for contemporary Christian music, which has an undeniably cheesy reputation. I don’t know how those two genres fit together, but somehow they did for me.

Somewhere in there my dad bought me a Nickel Creek CD (which, albeit, is bluegrass, not country) for Christmas, and I went away to boarding school. And somehow, little by little, country music began squeezing its way into my repertoire. As I went on road trips through the boonies of the South, not only were country stations often the only ones in range, but they also just seemed to fit the scene.

And so it is that today, of the presets on my radio, one is a weird alternative station that I added because I thought it seemed cool but that I hardly ever actually click to listen to, one is a pop station that plays 90s songs every weekend, two are country, one is classic rock (mostly for A.), and one is “safe for the whole family” Christian. What can I say; I am an eclectic gal.

I’m working on not being embarrassed about my love for country music, despite a lifetime of reviling it. I sing along loud to songs about being from the boondocks and being a redneck, as if they were written precisely about me. I roll in my new Honda Civic and blast mud-ridin’ pickup truck songs. I guess I’ve embraced it.

That said, though, I still heartily enjoy making fun of country lyrics. They are so predictable and sometimes hilarious. Here is one that is particularly funny to me of late, from Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem.”

We like cornbread and biscuits / And if it’s broke ‘round here we fix it 

It’s my country lyric o’ the week. More to come.

What’s your musical guilty pleasure? What music phases have you gone through? Do you like country music?

I just finished Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and I have to admit: I kind of hated it.

I expected to be fascinated. I expected to fly through the pages and come away with all kinds of scintillating knowledge about why the world works the way it does. Malcolm Gladwell is quoted on the front saying, “Prepare to be dazzled,” and I was. I was prepared.

But then, I started reading, and I was anything but blown away.

My first objection stems from my rigorous training as an English major wherein we were taught, especially by one particular professor of mine, the importance of thesis statements, and the necessity that every subsequent sentence be somehow related back to that topic. Each “happy, healthy thesis sentence,” as he called them, required 3 elements: a transition word or statement, a grappling hook back to the original thesis, and a topic for that paragraph. I took his writing class freshman year, but those rules have stuck with me, and I’ve used them to analyze everything I write. (Granted, I sometimes choose to ignore them, but it’s a conscious choice.) So, I struggle with the concept of writing a book about “the hidden side of everything.” To me, trying to write about everything means you will probably end up writing successfully about nothing. I felt like the transitions in the book were lacking, and the grappling hooks were shaky at best and an irreconcilable stretch at worst. I know the authors’ point was to address ridiculous questions and point out how they are, at root, related, but I felt like they failed, because they lost me in the transition.

Secondly, throughout the entire book, I felt like I was being scammed. Since their whole point was to argue against conventional wisdom, I expected a lot of backing behind each of their outrageous claims. Now, granted, had there truly been enough backing to satisfy my need to know, the book would have been horrible dry and statistical, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed it then, either. But I felt like I was being forced to buy the authors’ arguments and points of view hook, line, and sinker, with no explanation. I don’t think this is any better than buying into conventional wisdom. (And in fact, I feel like a few times they actually bought into conventional wisdom themselves, like when they bluntly claim “[…conventionally speaking, spanking is considered an unenlightened practice. We might therefore assume that parents who spank are unenlightened in other ways.” Excuse me? Not that I’m all for spanking, but I’m not quite sure how it’s okay for them to just throw that highly opinionated, charged statement in the middle of a chapter dealing with highly rational statistical regression analysis of data. Okay, </soapbox>.)

A review I read on Goodreads said, “Sure, this book was a compelling read that offered us all some great amo for cocktail party conversation. But ultimately I think most of what Leavitt claims is crap. He dodges accountability with the disclaimer about his book NOT being a scholarly work, but then goes on to drop statistics, theories and expert opinions. These assertions laid, he doesn’t provide readers with enough information to critically examine his perspectives. Ultimately I have a problem with the unquestioned, unaccoutable role of the public intellectual. Levitt dances around with his PhD on his sleeve, but is never subject to peer review or any sort of academic criticism. I think it’s irresponsible.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I initially intended to post only an excerpt of that review, but I found I couldn’t decide where to cut it off, so I ended up posting the whole thing.

I normally am wary of taking a hard and fast stand on anything. I think that’s part of the reason I was never wholly successful at Youth Legislature. But for some reason this book got me whipped into enough of a frenzy to write a blog post about and to go on an impassioned rampage to A. the other morning. And it doesn’t hurt when I find other reviewers who take a similar slant.

All this got me thinking about bestsellers. I wonder if a lot of people raved about this book just because it was a hit and they were “supposed to,” or if they legitimately thought it was a well-written and worthwhile piece of literature. I read as much fluffy fiction as the next person, if not more, but I have to admit, I actually have some respect for authors who can churn out formulaic pageturners. It’s a different sort of “good” writing that takes an understanding of plot, character, and the mind of the average reader that not every literary genius had. To me, Freakonomics hits none of those high points. A reviewer from the Wall Street Journal claims, “I tried hard to find something in this book that I could complain about. But I give up. Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae.”

Well, I guess I’m criticizing a hot fudge sundae, because I found plenty to complain about in Freakonomics.

Do you have any spare change to add to this discussion? Have you ever read a book that plenty of people loved, only to think it fell flat?