Rebuild from Depression Blog

We hit the road last weekend for the central coast of California and spent Sunday morning in one of our favorite coast towns, Pismo. Pismo is home to some of the best clam chowder I've ever tasted, good surfing (so they say), pigeons pooping cryptosporidium, 1950s style beach dwellings, and the Hotlix candy store.

Hotlix was known locally for its original product, a spicy cinnamon sucker but then it got a little crazy and developed a tequila-flavored sucker with a worm inside. I knew they hit the big time when I found their tequila sucker at a truck stop in Kansas in 1992.

At Pismo I made the grand announcement to my son that we must get cinnamon suckers. I don't get out much apparently because somehow I had missed the booming insect business at Hotlix. Their display window looked like they had teamed up with David George Gordon, author of the Eat-A-Bug cookbook. We could buy worms, crickets, and apparently ants, all candied or chocolate coated.

Always looking for a high protein snack to get me through pregnancy and any excuse for chocolate, we quickly forgot the cinnamon suckers.

"Are your crickets roasted?"

"They are baked."

I am pretty open to raw food, but I do draw the line somewhere before crickets.

"How much?"

"Fifty cents for two."

"Wow, Mama, they are only twenty five cents!" Frederick interjected.

"Do you have any idea what kind of mark-up there is Frederick on that tiny chocolate cricket? People who actually eat insects don't buy them here."

I admitted I had consumed battered tarantula legs. The gals then reported that the crickets sell well and that they just taste like chocolate.

I recommended that they bundle those crickets up with Gordon's cookbook and sell them as holiday gift packages. Shockingly, my son who saw the uncoated crickets in the store window, has already eaten two of the four crickets we purchased and reports that they taste like chocolate. I doubt I'll get any myself.

But the big question is: Do they fit the bill for pregnancy snack food? At a quarter a piece, I would recommend salmon roe instead, which has the added benefit of being loaded with depression-fighting nutrients. Very few times will life allow us to justify the expense of wild caught, deep sea roe as a snack food bargain. This may be one of those times.

Technorati Tags: foods that fight depression, pregnancy, Hotlix, puppy, Rebuild from Depression

The summer of 2008 will not be known for its garden. With well over one hundred plants, including upwards of thirty heirloom tomato plants, we eat summer squash only sporadically. We do have an abundance of tomatoes, but we will not end up with quarts of sauce or gallons of jars of dried tomatoes even with thirty plants.

It was a strange, lean summer. Spring lasted longer than expected and our plants sat in the garden, uninspired, through most of June. The plants looked great for the wedding here in August, but guests certainly would have been surprised to hear that our biggest crop was purslane and we didn't even plant it. (We nominate purslane, by the way, as the crop of the future climate Apocalyse.) The nectarines and apples did not disappoint but it sure is hard for fruit to make up for the absence of a fine yellow crook neck squash. For those who just started gardening with Victory Gardens and who had a similar experience: this isn't normal.

As a final "goodbye" to the season's crops, I've invited a new friend over for a feast of bruschetta on fine sourdough bread and red wine. We will sit on the back deck, eat our bruschetta, and watch the sun set. I will lament the summer garden and doubly lament that I should not lament with red wine until this baby arrives.

Technorati Tags: gardening, heirloom tomatoes, Victory Gardens, Rebuild from Depression

Just a quick PSA here to announce that the work I actually get paid for is finished for the season. I have nothing at all whatsoever scheduled for e next seven months except apparently having a baby. Of course, when I say "nothing at all whatsoever" that excludes trade shows for the business, other business marketing, new product development when I get a wild hair, this blog, and whatever pops up that I can't say "no" to. Even so, this is an improvement over my last pregnancy where I continued through the pregnant and postpartum months with a whole lot of commitments.

Having been squeezed through the summer and the past month in particular to tie up some work, I do have plans to post just a bit more on this blog. :) I have some food data I'm sitting on that I know people will find fascinating. Also, in a moment of mania I ordered some products to sell from this site to fund an assistant for it in the hopes that it become manageable. I'll be posting about that soon. They are interesting.

The book is all but ready and waiting for me to pull the trigger. I had a coauthor on a project many years ago who had a book ready for the press. I saw a mutual friend in January and was told he never pulled the trigger. My manuscript was nearly ready at the time and I said, "I've got to pull the trigger." I wonder if it's a sign of mental illness that I've had such a problem with this? Due to shame alone, I really must do it.

On the for-pay work in case anyone is interested, I do custom research projects for social service agencies with a focus on schools. In the past year I have been developing an e-commerce site taking an aspect of the custom work that I do and creating a process that allows me to sell it on the cheap to schools and districts in California. The business centers on graphic display of educational data. A busy administrator faced with a presentation on her student performance on the California High School Exit Exam can come to our website and order a package of graphs based on her school's data. The graphs are publication-quality and cheap enough that administrators should not spend their time making their own. In fact, right now we are giving away two packages to any California administrator who shows up at our website.

We've got a second type of product coming out of development now -- a full report with graphs and descriptions for a couple of different audiences. The most targeted is our QEIA monitoring report which provides the required data for any of the nearly 500 schools in the state receiving QEIA funding for the next five years.

I do all of the graph development for the business. It's about 90% monkey work, but most jobs are. The remaining 10% requires a great deal of focus as well as skill in programming and design that I've developed over the years. It is about as politically-neutral as work can be, a good thing for me. I also find that when my brain is that focused, it can't worry, have anxiety, or get involved in politics. That 10% is good to my brain.

Technorati Tags: QEIA

I just knew there was something about ice cream and perhaps eating it daily in the first trimester of this pregnancy is why I am getting along so swimmingly. In fact, in my last pregnancy I was in the depths of depression by about 28 weeks and headed into a couple of psychotic episodes. Here I am at 30 weeks still out of the pit.

Is it the ice cream?

I turned to Google Trends for the answer and check it out. When people are on the Internet searching for the word "ice cream," they are less likely to be searching for the word "depression." Wow.

In the figure below, the blue trend line is searches for "ice cream" and the red for "depression." Each year the searches for ice cream peak about mid-year and, accordingly, searches for "depression" decline. (Sorry for the "A," "B," "C," "D" in the graph. They will give you Google news stories on "depression" if you were actually in Google Trends.)

Does Google provide us with proof positive that there are foods that fight depression? Is the recent rise in searches for the term "depression" due to ice cream shortages?

The alternative theory is that sunlight in the summer improves our vitamin D status, vitamin D deficiencies aggravate depression, and that summer time is a great time for ice cream. The recent rise in searches may well be due to that other type of depression. But if you need an excuse, by all means, here's some data to justify ice cream. There is no reason to let alternative theories stand in the way of a good story. Consider having some fatty fish high in Omega 3 fatty acids as well.

Technorati Tags: depression, foods that fight depression, ice cream, Rebuild from Depression, sunshine, vitamin D

All's well. I'm just about 33 weeks now and trying desperately to prioritize my life in these final days.

Baby appears healthy. The ultrasound showed no markers of anything bad that I am aware of. I did ask the ultrasound tech not to tell me if she found only one marker of Downs or some other problem. I wouldn't have agreed to an amnio with one marker and I just didn't need the stress. Of course, when she told me of no markers, I wanted to ask if there really were no markers and sucked it up instead. She did not appear to spend extra time on anything, so I told myself there were probably no markers. (And here I am obsessing over markers which is exactly why I asked not to know.)

Baby is active. With Frederick my placenta was anterior and I didn't feel a lot of movement. This baby's placenta is posterior, on the back side of my uterus. I feel like my childhood cat named "Mother Kitty." When she was in late term pregnancy, the kittens appeared to wake up together (likely one woke up the others) and would begin to kick. Poor Mother Kitty would lay on her side tolerating a few dozen kicks around her middle. I've got a bit of a show going on here myself.

Baby is likely vertex and posterior. Frederick was breech and came out the hard way. Whomever out there gets elective c-sections must be a little bit crazy. Weeks of recovering cannot be worth avoiding the hours of labor. I may or may not find out. At the last prenatal appointment, the midwife began some if-then discussion about "if baby is breech, we'll schedule a section around this date, if not we'll schedule around that date." I cut her off and said I would just like to wait and see what we've got in December. Too many "if-thens" are bad for my brain. I'll worry about too many "ifs." My case is complicated by the prior c-section and my lack of any history of vaginal birth. We cannot plan a vaginal birth, but depending on the circumstances of my arrival at the hospital, it could go any way at all. My mom's labors lasted two to three hours and we are 90 minutes from the hospital. Like I said, there are far too many "ifs." We'll just see what happens.

Baby dropped and I'm having "practice contractions." Frederick never dropped and I didn't get very big with him (I still had abdominal muscles). This time around I am learning what it means to have your center of gravity off. I'm not waddling like a duck, but apparently I am walking a bit different. Contractions have started and have gotten my attention. I had some in August and ended up on bedrest. These current contractions send me to bed as well, but I am less concerned that they are some early omen. I expect I am just warming up.

My brain is healthy. I suppose this is the most incredible news. I am already four weeks passed the point of my major melt-down in the last pregnancy and I'm still trucking along. I got a call from a client about five weeks ago with the news that a deadline was three weeks earlier than we thought. We had to mobilize in a big way to meet it and I'm still recovering, but the amazing thing about it is that I didn't go bananas. My mother was impressed and amazed. She said, "This would have caused a major meltdown even when you were not pregnant." Good for me.

My approach has been a whole lot of self-care. I rest when I'm tired. I rarely go anywhere because it does wear me out. I am a bit disappointed in this issue. We took a short trip to the coast a month ago so that I could get in one last bit of travel. It was great but I paid for it. It's probably better to forego the trips, keep everything on track, and go on a trip sooner postpartum. I should add that we live in the middle of nowhere and so "trips" really means "visits to civilization."

Included in the self-care is less contract work and on this issue I should add "the economy really sucks." Sure, I can act like I'm not taking on new work because I'm pregnant, but it begs the question how much work is actually out there. Not a whole lot. It's a great time to have a baby I suppose since I need to reduce my workload anyway.

A big part of the self-care is eating well. I tend to go in cycles of eating exceptionally well and then not-so-well but not-so-bad either. I take supplements and will post about them soon. Eating well for me tends to be a whole lot of protein and little or no wheat. I try to eat a lot of beneficial fats such as those high in Omega 3 fatty acids. Some people have asked me if I am still drinking raw milk. Most people know me to be a raw milk drinker but also know it's on the pregnancy "avoid" list. We've had listeria in our raw milk market and I am a bit listeria-obsessed. I actually heat my lunch meat or leftovers (also on the listeria list). It takes just a few bacteria to cross the placenta to begin a chain of actions that ends in early deliveries or miscarriages. It is hard to imagine what a preemie baby due to raw milk drinking would do to my fragile brain. Baby care and brain care are first. I'll drink the milk later.

In these last seven weeks, I'll pull the trigger on the book lest I have to go back for a total rewrite on the new postpartum experience. That would kill me or I would just give up. While I am done with contracts, we're still working on marketing QEIA reports to about 500 California schools. Because I don't have enough blogs, I started a data blog related to that work. My favorite entry there so far may be about my husband Sander's plan for a trade show raffle. I don't know why *I* have the reputation for being crazy.

As I said, all's well. I hope it is with you too.

Technorati Tags: foods that fight depression, pregnancy, raw milk, Rebuild from Depression

It appears that surfing the Internet can help keep your brain healthy. A study found that folks can keep their brains sharp by surfing. Surfing provided better brain-building than reading. Getting lost on the Internet may be an effective tool for middle-aged and older folks to keep their brains sharp. Of course, I figure that I am close enough to middle age that these findings apply to me as well. Like I need encouragement.

This result is kind of like buying organic ice cream because the cow may have been eating grass and that ice cream may have a higher content of the body-slimming and health-improving fat conjugated linoleic acid. You might even argue that ice cream fights depression. I am all for this sort of rationalization in appropriate doses.

It does appear, however, that there are probably better ways to sharpen our brains. We could sit down with friends and play games like Parcheesi or Mancala, some of this family's favorite games. They work your brain and you get some social interaction at the same time. If no friends are around, you could play Rush Hour, one that is very effective in keeping my brain focused. These activities require more focused gray matter and may well keep your brain even sharper than it would be surfing the Internet. Furthermore, the games fit my whole goal of keeping my brain focused on something other than life's current anxieties (the Internet doesn't likely do as well in this department). I've mentioned a number of times here that I find it effective in troubled times to engage in an activity that requires brain power so that my brain is focused on the activity, not on the troubled times. Rush Hour is a good one for me, so is my site on data for California public schools.

But before working on graphic displays of school data, I just need to check on one small thing online... I'll be back to data after about two hours of brain sharpening. ;)

Technorati Tags: depression, brain exercises

I never thought I would be an opinion leader in the politics of chickens, but a few friends have emailed me asking for advice on Prop 2. Furthermore, I am looking at my absentee ballot today. I decided I should do my due diligence and spend a few minutes looking at it.

This initiative would outlaw use of specific confinement systems for chickens, veal calves, and pregnant sows. It requires that animals be able to stretch their limbs and turn around in a circle. If you have seen battery hen cages, you would note that the egg-laying hens are sitting in a little cage with no room for a good leg stretch. Likewise, veal calves are kept from moving so that they do not develop unwanted muscle. I have never seen the sow arrangement, but they are confined in pregnancy and again postpartum to keep them from squashing their new piglet.

The pig portion of the law is one area of controversy. The law would allow pigs to be confined just before giving birth, in the last week before its due date. After the birth, the sow becomes "non-pregnant" and no longer falls under the confinement law which applies only to pigs in pregnancy. The "No on Prop 2" side is making a big deal that pig confinement is necessary to keep the pig from killing the piglet. What they don't seem to mention is that Prop 2 applies only to pregnant pigs. Unless a miracle occurred somewhere in the process, the presence of the piglet would suggest the pig is no longer pregnant.

Feeling a lot like a pregnant sow lately, I find myself somewhat predisposed to Prop 2. It sure is nice to be able to roll over and stretch my legs as much as my joints might creak to do so. I'm "yes leaning" on the pig portion of the issue.

Chickens are probably the most discussed area of the law, likely because most of us eat quite a bit of eggs. Opponents say that the legislation is poorly worded and might outlaw indoor chicken operations altogether. The text of the law doesn't suggest ambiguity or such an extreme conclusion. If a chicken's indoor yard allowed the chicken to flap its wings and turn around, it would be good-to-go.

An important argument for the opposition is the increase in egg prices likely with this proposed law. The little cages for laying hens are apparently the most cost-effective way to produce an egg. Furthermore, Capital Ag Press reports that 30% of California eggs are brought from out of state. California egg producers would be at a disadvantage competing with eggs from battery operations out of state. It is likely that proponents do not see this as a big deal since I expect they have a list of states to lobby in next for similar legislation. (I won't mention the notion of eggs from China or Mexico.)

Opponents of Prop 2 also argue that the law would be taking a step backwards in food safety. This argument appears to be their very best argument. Those little cages that laying hens get to live in can be kept much cleaner than an open facility. The hens aren't laying on the eggs of other hens. With egg layers myself here, I have some appreciation for the amount of manure that can attach itself to an egg in open laying boxes. That said, the manure potential grows in direct proportion to my laziness in cleaning those boxes. Laying boxes can be managed to reduce poop on eggs but probably not as well as battery cages can be managed.

An interesting angle on this legislation is that if farmers convert their battery operations to non-confinement operations, they are then a stone's throw from entering a higher-end egg market. They can add some flax to the feed and call the eggs "Omega 3 eggs" or they can buy organic feed and go organic. Consumers will have a more difficult time figuring out which hens actually get to forage and which are just hanging out in a big building.

Prices of eggs will go up with this initiative and it just about kills me to vote for higher food prices at the beginning of a who-knows-how-long-and-how-bad economic event. To complicate things for me, the law affects my household very little since we do raise our own eggs. It just doesn't seem right to be voting about other people's food choices, but then I think about that pregnant sow again as I sit here pregnant.

I am "yes-leaning" on Prop 2.

For more information, read both sides:
Yes on Prop 2
No on Prop 2

For sheer entertainment on our purchase of the wrong type of chick, read:
She's at least a triple D

Technorati Tags: Proposition 2, Omega 3

My son Frederick has a line of "Pollan Paintings" at the Ethicurean and a food safety related painting posted here in honor of the Nebraska Beef E. coli scandal. People have requested more and I would love to provide some.

The problem is that Frederick is six and focused. If he's into something, he's really into it. If it's painting, he'll bust out several in a day, some relevant to food, some not. If it's math, the first question out of his mouth in the morning may be "Mama, tell me some plusses." He's been in a math phase for about two months now. It looked like he was headed out of it because he got focused on board games the other day. But then in the middle of a board game, I illustrated some math issue from the game on his white board. As I said to him, "Let me show you how to do the calculation...," he whipped his head around and became obsessed with the calculation.

I am as ready for the newest craft phase as anybody. As his math teacher, I'm actually getting a bit worn out by math obsessions. It's great, but it's been two months. "How did this child become so obsessive?" I ask. Others in this household laugh at the question because apparently he got it honestly enough. I can't imagine what they mean by that.

Technorati Tags: Pollan paintings, Ethicurean