It happens as it usually does: a period of time where Mr. Tucker and I find ourselves drinking a lot of alcohol but enjoying it less and less. Our solution to that is usually a month of sobering up followed by some grandiose “falling off the wagon” as a holiday hits, friends come over, or it’s Friday. Rinse, repeat.
The pandemic has brought with it exploding alcohol sales. In the spring drinking just brought me anxiety but once the summer hit I was kicking back poolside, drink in hand. The seasons turned once again and by the fall I couldn’t get any sleep unless I had a drink or two. It wasn’t until October that Mr. Tucker and I realized that we were just drinking because it was habit and that neither of us was enjoying it all that much. So one day I turned to him and said, “Do you think we could quit drinking for an entire year?”
So on November 1st we completely stopped drinking alcohol for one entire year.
As creatures of habit I knew what our patterns were and I wanted to break them. I chose a year because it is probably the longest either of us has gone without a drink since we met (even pregnancy is only 9 months!). We also aren’t used to denying ourselves. Mr. Tucker and I are so incredibly compatible but that’s a bad thing if you are heading in the wrong direction. Also, Mr. Tucker is the worst at being the bad guy. Having a supportive partner is amazing but it also means that he sometimes enables my bad behaviour. For example, we will set a goal and say, try to not spend money because we are saving for something. Mr. Tucker will be great at not spending but as soon as I want to spend he takes it as his cue to go all-in and suddenly we are both spending and no closer to our shared goal.
With alcohol though, we have particular triggers. It’s as if you took the game of LIFE and made it into a drinking game. Rough day at work? DRINK! First day of spring? DRINK! Zoom call with friends? DRINK! But when you don’t have a plan aside from the very vague, “we’re not drinking right now,” cracking open a bottle of wine doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. So we crack open a bottle of wine and then a couple of days later we’re drinking two bottles…We’re stuck inside our old pattern again. So making a concrete goal and determining that we want to make it to a year made sense. It’s not open-ended so it’s harder to give in.
I will admit that quitting alcohol was not the only goal. Alcohol is also ridiculously expensive. In our youth we could drink whatever $5 special landed into our little hands but as you get older your tastes generally swing to more expensive brands. Our go-to wine was a regional wine that was on the low-end at $17 and even drinking one of these a night is a $119 a week. Where we live in Canada, there is no decent-tasting “two buck chuck” so you are looking at $400 a month. $400 that could be better spent somewhere else.
The other thing that really convinced me to give a long period of temperance a go is my health. I have often given up alcohol, done a lot of stretching, exercise & meditation, and made sure I my diet was well constructed. But I’ve never done all three at the same time. So I wanted to see if it would improve my mobility if I combined all of the healthy habits. As much as I never wanted to admit it: alcohol increases my spasticity & makes my balance worse. Not just in the “ha ha I am tipsy and can’t walk a straight line” way but in a way that lasts for days even after I’ve not had a drink for awhile. So that was my primary motivator.
Finally, I just didn’t want the kids seeing us drink everyday. Mr.Tucker and I have a saying and it’s, “we’re not moderation kind of people.” I can’t tell you how many times I have turned down “just one drink” at parties because I am driving. I know myself and I can’t just have one drink. It’s much easier for me to stay sober. So while I don’t want to make it sound like we were hammered every night (we weren’t) we did drink most nights of the week. Now that the kids are entering their tween years it seems even more pressing to model spending our evenings doing other things besides drinking (and spending time online but that’s another post).
So how has it gone? Pretty well, actually. We are two months in and neither of us think about it too much. Christmas was a bit difficult because of old habits but it helped that we weren’t hosting a large dinner this year. Being in a pandemic year helped a bit in that respect. For me the difficulty will lie in when the first really warm day of spring happens and when we open the pool this summer. I also feel like it will be easier by that time as well with 6 months behind us.
It helps that we are doing this for myriad reasons: health, money, parenting and life goals. When you look at the choice objectively it makes a lot of sense for our life to make this one change. I will say though, both Mr. Tucker and I – while constant drinkers – aren’t alcoholics. Obviously I don’t want to suggest that quitting alcohol is in any way easy if you have an addiction. If you do, please seek out professional help instead of trying to quit on your own. I know one person who passed away from complications due to alcohol addiction and it is a real, dangerous way to quit. Call your doctor or check out aa.org for more info.
It’s been a helluva week. Like most people I’ve spent a lot of time glued to the news and to my social media timelines wondering what the hell is going to happen. But the days of eyestrain, neck pain, and headaches finally came to a head today and I decided to step back from the rage machine and tackle my Goodreads goal (150 books!) instead. I’ve read 4 books so far.
Today I finished On Writing by Stephen King, which is why you see these words today. Mr. Tucker is also reading it and so our conversations naturally gravitate to interesting parts of the book, or information we find relevant to our own lives. Last night I turned to him and lamented that I used to write every day back when livejournal was huge and since I joined facebook in 2007 I don’t write with any length anymore.
To be fair, I gave birth to the Bean in early 2008 and writing was not as a high priority. Facebook had also started to take off and it had a more open and succinct style of communication that fit into my knew lifestyle as a stay-at-home-mom of a newborn. Of course, the snappy style of facebook led to its widespread adoption pretty quickly. I also became so adept at it that I made a career out of it – a successful one, in fact. So while it’s easy to blame social media for my lack of writing the reality is that it is a culmination of factors: mom of two kids, working (in communications a lot of the time. Nothing kills your own writing like writing all day on someone else’s agenda), and the ease in which social made keeping in touch with multiple people much easier.
I’ve also always kept a journal. For the majority of my job contracts through 2012-2015 I woke up early to be at work early so I could be home to take the kids to the park by 4pm. So 6am saw me belting out a couple of pages of notes on my life. I didn’t journal from 2016-2018 during my series of operations and the tests that led to my final diagnosis but at the time I was barely living at all. My diagnosis forced me to pick up the pen again to try and make sense of everything that had happened.
I did manage to keep a blog for awhile that I had started when I had gone back to work after being home with the kids for four years. I wrote during my lunch hours and on the weekends, mostly. At that point my goal was debt repayment and early retirement. So I wrote about the things that I found interesting from that perspective. The universe is a cosmic joker though, and when I found myself in January 2018 with a PLS diagnosis & my neurologist recommending I go off work, I found it deeply ironic. All those years spent worrying about early retirement goals only to get streamrolled by forced retirement. Like a petulant child I screamed in my head, “WHAT? BUT MAYBE I DON’T WANT TO BE RETIRED?!” I had been given what I had wanted but not in the way that I wanted it.
So I started this blog…and did nothing with it. I think I have been reluctant to write here because it feels like I should have a theme and stick to it. Put this blog into a little box labeled DISABILITY BLOG and only discuss topics relating to my disability. But when it comes down to it I just want to write about my life and how I am living it. Yes, Post Morbus means after diagnosis and this is my life after diagnosis but my diagnosis isn’t my life. Sure, it has an effect of every facet of my life but it’s larger than that.
So instead of getting caught up in the minutiae where I feel like I need to write some well-researched, perfectly written tome of helpful information I am just going to write. I am going to write something every day (or almost, everyone has bad days) and get back into the habit. Maybe it will just be a recipe. Maybe it will be about some silly thing I saw online. I can’t say. But the goal is to write something every day & to just get back into the habit of writing.
So here goes it: January 10, 2021 is day 1. Let’s see if I can do a year?
Well, it’s been 6 full months since we rang in the New Year so I thought it was a good time to review my resolutions for 2020 given that so much has happened in 2020 already! So what were my resolutions for this year?
– Review/cancel subscriptions we don’t use
– Work towards a zero waste lifestyle as much as possible
– Spend more time together as a family
– Don’t eat out at all unless traveling & generally eat well
– Less time on social media
– Design an at-home exercise program
I also had some loose goals that I wanted to achieve:
– Get out & enjoy nature more, preferably by walking with Mr. Tucker daily
– Create a quiet space in our lives for more creative pursuits: music, writing, drawing, learning how to knit socks
– Hosting monthly dinner parties with friends
– Save money to pay off our mortgage
Stretch goals:
– Gardening
– Traveling to see friends in other cities/countries
Boy howdy is this simultaneously hilarious & definitely not “funny ha-ha!” Of course, we traveled in February only to come home to a full on pandemic with lockdown happening on March 15th. So in some ways, the pandemic has helped us achieve some goals and has completely shut down some others!
Reviewing finances:
– I managed to quit my physiotherapy, my gym membership, and stop dyeing my hair or getting pedicures in the first week of March. I made the decision to just work on a program at home for exercise and Mr. Tucker and I started to walk outside daily right before everything locked down. My decision to be a swampbeast and to get my hair dyed to my natural colour & to do my own pedicures worked out well since we couldn’t do those things come March anyway. I am so glad I don’t have 6-inch brown roots with blonde ends!
– We have not eaten any meals out since our drive home from the airport from our trip in February. Since it was such an abysmal meal we had already resigned ourselves to double-down on our resolution to not eat out. So we ordered a bunch of local meat and to this day we cook every single meal at home. We did buy a lot more junk food in March-June though & drank way too much alcohol.
– I ended up quitting our Sunday New York Times subscription. While I absolutely love it, I ended up getting behind in my reading and it just gave me anxiety. While I may get it again, for now I am good with the website. Still, I did renew our subscription to The Walrus in June for another two years. While I let them pile up for 6 months, unlike a newspaper it was a comfort to spend a couple of days just reading through my accumulated issues. I haven’t renewed the kid’s subscriptions for their magazines but as it looks like we may be homeschooling this fall, I think I may end up doing just that.
– We have managed to save the 15% needed to prepay our mortgage & are working on saving another 15% to put down on our mortgage after we renew this year.
Health:
– Mr. Tucker and I did walk daily for a few weeks until the pandemic sent the kids home and I found myself supervising online learning. Still, we did open the pool in May and both Mr. Tucker and I have been swimming, stretching, and doing water weights daily since June.
– Mr. Tucker and I are cooking from home daily and since we bulked up on snack foods early on in the pandemic due to stress, we are now in a period where we are really eating much better. I feel like the summer has really contributed to this and so has our garden (more on that later).
Environmental:
– We have certainly reduced our in-home waste but the pandemic did cause our plastic use to go up and not by our own choice. Fear of transmission of Covid-19 caused many stores to ban reusable bags and containers. I hope by the end of this year we will be allowed to buy in bulk again using our own stuff.
– Not a resolution but it should be mentioned that we have used hardly any gas for the car and we’ve not needed to buy any new things since none of us are going anywhere.
– We built raised beds and started a garden & home compost! The garden is a cornucopia of greens and other plants are humming along nicely. It was a stretch goal but we are really happy to have our garden & compost for the garden doing well. We were a little worried starting out but every day I eat something from the garden and it is lovely!
Family & friends:
– We had one dinner party for friends in January and it was absolutely lovely. I was really looking forward to hosting more summer drop-in BBQs but again, pandemic. Still, we have had some socially distanced hangouts with friends but it has been difficult on all of us, especially the kids.
– Travel is out for the foreseeable future but I do get to play Trivial Pursuit online with the friends I would have traveled to visit, so that is a partial win.
– In June social media got so overwhelming that I just quit it and I have no regrets. Even though I periodically go back to facebook and as soon as I post something I am reminded of why I left. Everytime that happens I think of Winston in John Wick “Have you thought this through? I mean, chewed down to the bone? You got out once. You dip so much as a pinky back into this pond… you may well find something reaches out… and drags you back into its depths.” Yeah, pretty much.
– Spending time as a family became overwhelming as soon as the kids were home and learning online. Now that summer is here we are playing more games and having family swims in the pool where we just mess around and laugh.
Creative:
– Well, I mean, I am writing here, aren’t I?
– In April I found a cheap second-hand recliner online and had Mr. Tucker pick it up for me. He had his office, the kids had their rooms, and I had no quite space that was my own so I carved out a place in our bedroom so I could just read & chill. Friends donated a lamp and every afternoon after the kid’s schoolwork was done I just curled up there and read. I needed that time after helping the kids all morning.
– To be honest, I am spending the next half of the year on more creative pursuits. We had rented a cottage with two other families that we will bubble with and there won’t be any internet. The goal is to hunker down with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and teach myself the basics of drawing. I also want to write here twice a week, start spending ½ hour on the fiddle daily & learn how to knit socks come this fall. I still have six months, after all.
So I am calling it a partial win. A lot of things have been taken out of our hands due to Covid-19 but we are lucky that it happened as we were headed into the summer months. We have a lovely outdoor space to enjoy for now & soon the kids will be able to play with the kids in their bubble. Who knows what the next 6 months hold but I am happy to say that most things are going well despite the challenges.
“Ugh,” I said to Mr. Tucker. “I can’t believe it’s June and already we have a swarm of mosquitos to contend with inside the house!” Mr. Tucker and I had just sat down to tackle some binge-watching of a new series when I looked over and saw a wall of bugs just over our living room window. With a sigh, Mr. Tucker looked to where I was pointing and headed off to grab a can of Raid.
It was only when he stood on the couch and looked at the bugs that he realized that they weren’t mosquitoes at all. “Huh. That’s weird,” he noted. “What kind of bugs are these?”
All of a sudden I slapped my forehead and screamed, “OH NO! THEY ARE F*CKING PRAYING MANTISES!! SH*T! SH*T!”
But let’s back this story train up a bit.
In the spring when we were all planning pandemic gardens my friend K mentioned in a group chat that we could buy a box of Praying Mantises as pest control for the garden. Knowing nothing about gardens or pest control I figured heck, for the low-low price of $19.99 for “40 to 200 eggs” (“That’s quite the range of potential bugs,” a friend pointed out later), why not give it a whirl? I bought the egg sac, it arrived a few days later, I stuck the box under the seedling table in the living room and then promptly forgot about it.
As you’ve probably guessed, instead of actually reading the instructions in the box, I ignored it but the Mantises did what nature always does: it goes on with its life cycle. So all-of-a-sudden that’s how we found ourselves spending an uevening coaxing baby insects into a jar to move them to a more suitable home in the garden. We don’t know how many of the 40-200 insects there actually were but the next morning we were still rounding them up in jars & relocating them outside. This went on for a few days as we coaxed them out of nooks and crannies & inspected every chair before we sat down.
In the end, I think we did manage to save quite a few but next year – if we try this again – I will be sure to RTFM!
By now we are four months into the lockdown that started in March & it looks like life as we knew it has changed forever. Of course, after September 11 life changed monumentally as well but because we have 19 years distance between that event and life today, most of the changes seem normal now. Life does change, sometimes slowly and sometimes drastically but not all of those changes are for the worse. While we are still managing the fallout from recent events, some people are saying that they appreciate things like being able to work from home, not rushing from activity-to-activity all the time, and spending more time together as a family (although, some people feel the opposite is true).
One of my favourite pandemic activities has been getting together once-a-week with friends to play Trivial Pursuit. Now, I am a HUGE trivia buff but I have terrible recall. My friends on the other hand are trivia masters & one of them has even been on Jeopardy. So while my chances of winning are low, that’s not the point. The point is that I get to virtually see my friends – in three different time zones & two different countries – and we get to laugh & joke and play games. For a very small window of time I get to connect with my friends & it feels almost normal.
We all know that online meetings lack the intimacy of in-person connection but it’s better than no connection at all. I’ve gone from seeing all of them in the past year to probably not seeing them at all for at least a year. That is the problem when some of your closest friends live far away. But we are no strangers to distance: our connection was brought together because of the internet and so we are used to most of our communication being digital. So our weekly TP game is just in addition to our interaction both online and via group chats.
Honestly though, our weekly game is one of my favourite nights of the week. It can be chaotic with dogs, kids, and people eating dinner (that pesky time zone issue) but for me, it’s become one of the best things to have come out of this pandemic. I really hope that when things get normalized and when we can do other things with our evenings that we really make the effort to continue our game night on some scale. It’s really nice to connect with your friends even if it is only virtually.
I’m sick and tired of our generation being called the TV generation. What do you expect? We watched Lee Harvey Oswald get his brains blown out all over. How could we change the channel after that? – Dennis Leary
When Andrew Scheer criticized the government’s handling of the pandemic it was, of course, easy for him. He had the luxury of waiting for the fallout of the programs the Liberals were forced to roll out quickly and he could wait until he could his two cents. Once the smoke cleared and the gaping holes in the programs designed to support Canadians appeared, it was easy to point them out. To be honest, that’s also his role as Leader of the Opposition: to play the flipside of the coin, critique decisions made, and to suggest other things to help the country to get back on its feet.
This is not to blame any party: had the Conservatives been in power, the opposite would also be true. We often forget that the Opposition’s job is to basically OPPOSE the government’s decisions. In fact, everyone was doing their jobs in the roles they had been given.
By the beginning of June with the lockdown in full swing, the hybrid schooling my kids were doing was draining me of all the energy I had. Of course, the older laptop they shared died a spectacular death in April, which meant both of the personal laptops the adults owned were recommissioned to tackle the insufferable, non-intuitive Google Classroom GUI and multiple meetings the teachers had set up. On top of that was a plethora of Zoom meetings for their extracurricular activities & friend hangouts. Sprout – the youngest – needed particular attention to keep her focused, often up to 6 hours a day. I basically just gave up on interacting online with my friends via Social Media and instead turned to binge watching pablum tv when I wasn’t helping the kids. I kissed my online relationships goodbye temporarily (I don’t keep facebook on my phone) and moved most of my interpersonal connections to text or Signal group chats.
Of course, I realized the less I engaged the more desperate the algorithm became as it tried to keep me on the platform. I usually went on facebook once or twice a day just to check my community groups (one because I admin it, one because it’s the neighbourhood group). The odd time I would scroll through my friendslist but it only took a few posts before a post I had already seen previously would come up – a trick I use to signal myself to close the browser. In the past it would take me multiple posts to get to that point but now when the algorithm didn’t know how to parse the minimal information I gave it, it just threw everything it had at me trying to keep me engaged. The more it tried the more I realized how little it had to offer me so as long as I didn’t post and/or comment, the less reason I had to go back to the platform more than once a day.
The second thing I noticed was more of a revelation than anything else (which I discussed in my previous post): so many things are going on in the world that Social amplifies it all, all the time. There is no shortage of horrors occurring daily and we can read all about it. In the past, the news cycle curated what we would see and the weight would be put on local, regional, and national stories: only the biggest of the international stories would be fed to us through the funnel of news curation. Of course, we can also argue that this slanted our view of the world depending on the news outlet and that the internet leveled the playing field where we can now read about ANYTHING, ANYWHERE. But conversely, the algorithms on Social Media (and also to some extent on news websites) continue this funneling of information based upon what kind of content either they want us to see, or what content we’ve indicated we engage with the most. In essence, the problem isn’t solved, it has just become bigger. Gone is the large-to-small focus on local->regional->national-international news and in comes bad news from all over the world. Enragement is engagement and we are more likely to share the most enraging things we come across perpetuating the cycle.
A good example of this is something horrific like a child abduction. We know that child abductions by strangers are really rare and locally they happen quite infrequently. But with Social we now hear more about these incidents a lot more often and from all over the world. The reason for this is because people are more likely to be horrified by – and therefore share posts of – harm coming to children. So if an abduction happens half way around the world it realistically does not indicate that these crimes are going up but by just reading about it our feeling of safety and security goes down. Realistically nothing has changed at all but we feel like it has.
I realized that this effect was also driving helplessness in people and that sharing posts on Social made them feel that they had some power and control when in fact they do not – all they are doing is continuing the cycle of hopelessness. This came to the forefront recently when a friend asked on Facebook that people in the US take him off their political posts. As he – rightly – pointed out: he has no control as to what happens in the US. He doesn’t live there, pay taxes there, or vote there. The multitude of horrors being fed to him daily wasn’t doing anything but make him anxious over something he had zero control over. This struck me because it was so obvious that aside from the larger issues plaguing the world, more current event knowledge IS NOT power: it’s a reduction in power, and an increase in helplessness. That helplessness spills over into every aspect of our lives, too. The fact that the horrors are never-ending given a wide enough world, we stay on Social Media because some new fresh horror will be along to replace the last one at any minute.
This is, naturally, not an argument for ignorance nor is it a call for us to ostrich ourselves in a blanket of ignorance. It’s a recognition that staying informed about issues should follow that large-to-small sphere of influence: keep informed about local issues primarily, and international issues lastly. I do need to know what is happening in the world, I just don’t need to know every horrible minute detail about it.
Thirdly, what I have found from going back to Social only periodically is that everyone thinks they are the Leader of the Opposition when it comes to important issues: you can position yourself to look good just by pointing out the obvious holes. This all comes down to the nature of Social being performative (to be fair, all of social interaction is somewhat performative). @awardsforgoodboys on Instagram has a great write up about this (although it works for people no matter their politics) that covers how I feel about most posts when I scroll through them today: the poignant & funny meme, the hot take on the poignant and funny meme, the rebuttal to the hot take on the poignant and funny meme ad infinitum. It all feels like it’s a part of a great opinion hamster wheel where people are jockeying for position with every post about who is the most enlightened on the issue du jour.
My question has recently become, “so what is the desired outcome here?” I think a lot about this in the context of awareness campaigns and their place in the Social Media landscape. If you’ve been on Social for any length of time you have encountered these “awareness” posts either by DM or by cut-and-paste post requests: post the colour of your bra! A cancer patient’s only wish..! But realistically we all know that cancer is bad and what does this sort of campaign do except for shaming people (“I bet that most of you don’t care enough to repost this!”)? These posts make us feel warm and fuzzy when we share them because it feels like we’ve done something but in reality, we haven’t. In the end, it doesn’t translate into more donations or research, it’s a feel-good action that goes nowhere. Many Social Media posts have become like this: how does sharing this make me look to other people?
So I’ve started to ask myself that question to the larger issue of Social posting: what is the desired outcome here? Does posting this change the world in any way? Is arguing the finer points of issues actually educating and changing things, or is it performative? Am I looking to educate or am I looking be MORE right on the issue by shaming people who haven’t reached “my” degree of enlightenment? Does all this virtue-signaling/shaming/arguing actually change anything? Am I just looking for back pats? Could my time and energy be better spent volunteering, learning, donating money and supporting people who are on the ground instead of fighting with someone’s racist Uncle Bob? Maybe that energy could be better spent in my own community?
That’s what makes the job of the LotO in a majority government so appealing: you can be right just by the very nature of pointing out the flaws in the other person or plan & the people who agree with you, you already know will agree with you. You have the luxury of performance, the luxury of not having to make the hard decisions on the fly, the luxury of not being held responsible if things go wrong. But what you don’t actually get to do is really change anything. It’s a performative role, one that makes you look good but one where there is little-to-no risk. Posting on Social media without action is very much like that: you can scream into your megaphone to your chosen audience and you can all sit around and pat each other’s backs all day long about how right you are when it comes to certain issues. Critiquing is easy, action is hard. But at the end of the day: it’s all shit for flowers without actually DOING something outside of screaming into the algorithm. The question we need to ask ourselves is: if I really care about change/this issue what can I do right now to support it in real terms with real outcomes? I guarantee you that one more Social Media share isn’t the answer.
I have been getting up & heading outside with magazines, books & my journal and then staying there all day. I help the kids with their school until sometimes 2pm but then I swim, I read, I relax.
I’ve not been on Facebook at all. I went on and tried to get through some of it but then I saw the comment about triple funding the police so I peaced out. I wanted to jump in so badly to respond to that idiocy but honestly, why? I scrolled down and saw other conversations I wanted to contribute to and then I realized that this is the exact pattern I want to break: getting chained down to Facebook all day waiting for my turn in the back-and-forth of the argument. For what? I don’t GAF about these people, I won’t remember this convo in a year, rarely are minds changed, and in the end I’ll keep losing hours of my life to bullshit people (many of whom I don’t even know?).
I do enjoy in-person discussions. But what I think we’ve collectively failed to realize is that Facebook isn’t the same at all. It’s not similar to hanging out and have a few beers with friends & engaging in a lively discussion. You have nuance in-person, you have empathy, you have an ability to explain quickly and it all happens in real time. You don’t have convos that stretch out for days because someone disappears to go work, or what have you. Random people don’t barge into your circle and start screaming at everyone. You can say, “well, great talk but I’m calling it a night,” and everyone just leaves. No one continues screaming into the ether.
Will this sojourn last? Maybe, I don’t know. But right now it’s been great for my soul. I feel calmer and more productive than I’ve ever felt. Since retiring I’ve tried to look at ways to stave off technology’s grasp on my life and basically it comes down to, “don’t post, don’t comment.” It’s interesting to watch the algorithm struggle to try and keep me on the platform by just upping the notifications from communities and from where friends have commented on the posts of our mutual friends. But that doesn’t have the pull of a comment on a post or a reply to one of your comments.
I think in the end the balance just tipped for me and SM has become less enjoyable. Too much horrible news from the US (I can’t do anything about), too much news from random places that really don’t concern me but that heighten my anxiety, and too much performative nastiness that serves to shame, not educate.
I have four good hours of energy my brain allows me a day. I can spend it arguing with someone’s racist uncle Bob or I can read, draw, swim with my family and enjoy group chats with friends on Signal. The choice is obvious.
This is an email I started sending around to friends when I gave them some of my sourdough starter. I’ve had my starter for over two years now and we’ve been enjoying baking it regularly. I am thrilled to see people get more into old-timey crafts these days and I am always happy to share starter or answer questions
Welcome to sourdough baking! It seems like a lengthy email but I have put in a bit of troubleshooting and tips I’ve learned along the way in the email. Sourdough is often seen as super complicated but honestly, it doesn’t have to be! If you feed the beast once a week and keep it in the fridge it’s a super simple way to bake. Honestly, the best way to actually learn sourdough is to just do it. I know it seems daunting but at the very core, it’s just flour/water/salt once you get into the habit of knowing your starter (which is just something you pick up over time) it will take you 5 minutes a week to keep the beast alive.
Keeping the beast alive – tips and tricks:
Now that you have the starter, keep it in a glass or plastic container and keep it in the fridge. I use a 1L mason jar and put a plastic bag over it because I don’t want to explode a container with the gasses. By keeping your starter in the fridge you only have to feed it once a week & even then you can stretch that out. To feed it, eyeball the amount in your jar and add 1/2 water and 1/2 flour to the starter. So, for example, if you feel that it looks like there is 1 cup of starter in your jar, to feed it you just add 1/2 c flour and 1/2 c water (filtered or distilled is best. You can make distilled water by just leaving a bowl of water out overnight so the chlorine evaporates). Mix it up, stick it back in the fridge and let it sit for another week.
During the sitting period your starter will get a watery, greyish top on it. It should smell a bit boozy and a bit vinegary. That is the hooch and it doesn’t mean your starter is bad. Just mix the hooch back in before feeding your starter. If it smells mouldy, then it’s bad. If you aren’t sure, just feed it and let it sit on the counter for awhile. If it makes sweet smelling bubbles, your starter is fine.
If you haven’t baked in awhile but you’ve been feeding your starter, you may see your container getting too full. To manage this, you will want to mix in the hooch and then ditch a bunch of it before feeding it. That way you won’t overflow your jar and your starter will stay healthy. I usually will pour half into the compost bin. I keep my starter pretty full because we often will bake up to four loaves at a time, you obviously may want to make less.
If you are like me and have forgotten to feed your starter, oh, say, for almost two weeks by accident you will need to feed it a couple of days in a row before using it. I usually mix in the hooch, feed it, and then stick it in the fridge overnight & then repeat the next day (ditching half of the starter if your container is too full). By the third morning I feed it again, let it sit for 4 hours & then make my bread. You can sometimes get away with only two days of feeding but expect your loaves to be a little flatter (but still delish!). I can actually spread this out over a week as well if I realize I haven’t fed it in awhile. If I want to bake Saturday but realize on Monday I haven’t fed it in awhile, I will feed it, say, Monday/Wednesday/Saturday morning.
Often you will see recipes that say that on the day you want to bake that you should feed your starter and let it sit for four hours before starting your recipe. Since I am lazy AF, I usually feed the starter the night before I want to bake, stick it in the fridge & then the next morning take it out and let it warm up to room temperature (app 1 hour) before starting my recipe. I hate waiting so it’s nice to wake up, pour a coffee, take the starter out of the fridge and by the time I have finished two coffees, I am ready to start my bread before the day gets crazy.
White Sourdough
(I also do an 100% whole wheat using this same recipe)
I have always had success with this recipe from Patrick Ryan. I’ve added baking instructions below but if you need to create starter, click through and this link has all the info you need from start to finish.
I have made the approximate measures in cups/tsps but obviously it’s not as good as baking with a scale. Sourdough can be a bit more finicky based on the starter but I find the weights a bit more forgiving so it should work.
(Makes 2 loaves. Halve the amounts for a single loaf)
• 800g strong white flour (6 3/8 cups app)
• 10g salt (2 tsp)
• 460ml water
• 320g sourdough starter (1 1/4 cups)
• Add the flour to a clean mixing bowl. Mix the salt through the flour. Add the water and sourdough starter to the flour. Combine all the ingredients together to form a rough dough.
• Turn the dough out on to a clean surface and knead for approximately 10 minutes or until the windowpane effect has been achieved. The dough should be smooth, soft and elastic.
• When kneading, do not worry if the dough is slightly wet or sticky. Resist the temptation to add any extra flour. (important!)
• Return the dough to the mixing bowl, cover with a towel and allow the dough to prove for 4 hours at room temperature.
• After 4 hours turn the dough onto a clean work surface and knock the dough back. Knocking back the dough simple involves knocking the air from the dough which helps to equalise the temperature within the dough.
• Form the dough into a tight round ball.
To prove & bake using a proving basket (aka banneton):
• Prepare a proving basket by lightly dusting with flour. Place the dough, seamed side facing up, into the proving basket. Loosely cover the proving basket with a clean tea towel and leave to prove for another 3 – 3½ hours.
• Alternatively, to prove overnight for baking first thing in the morning, place into a fridge and leave overnight.
• Using a fridge reduces the temperature of the dough allowing it to prove slower and longer which allows for a greater development of flavour within the dough but also increasing its digestibility. As dough ferments or proves the gluten within the dough breaks down. The longer a dough is allowed to prove the more flavour it will contain and the easier it is for your body to digest. (this is my favourite way to prove the dough. I sometimes won’t start my loaves until late in the day, which allows me to finish my dough right before bed. I just stick them in the fridge overnight and let them warm up to room temperature – app 1 hour – before baking. If you need to quicken the pace, you can stick your loaves in the oven with a bowl of boiling water for 20 mins/1/2 hour and then taking them out before preheating your oven).
• To bake, preheat your oven to 230°C / 210°C fan assisted (445°F / Gas 8). Place a shallow baking tray into the bottom of the oven to preheat with the oven.
• Carefully turn your dough out from the proving basket onto a baking tray dusted with flour (the domed side with the indentations from the proving basket should now be facing up and the seamed side on the baking tray).
• Using a sharp knife cut the surface of the dough, this is what is known as the baker’s signature (I use sharp scissors, it’s not perfect but it works). The dough can be cut up to ½ cm deep. (This isn’t just for aesthetics, scoring the bread also helps control where and how it rises while baking). if your dough seems particularly flat/not as spongy, don’t cut it. That will give it a bigger rise.
• Boil a kettle of water then pour the boiled water into the dish that was preheated in the bottom of the oven, this will create steam in the oven while baking.
• Place the baking tray with the sourdough into the oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a good crust has formed and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base.
Alternatively, if you do not have a proving basket, you can use a large glass casserole dish to prove and bake your sourdough. I also will often cover my boules with metal bowls and bake them for 25-30 mins and then take off the bowls and bake until the crust browns (10 mins). This traps the steam in and encourages the boules to rise a lot higher than they would otherwise.
To prove & bake using a Pyrex dish (this also works spectacularly with enamel cast iron):
• Line a 2.5l round Pyrex dish with a clean tea towel and dust with flour. Place the formed ball of dough into the Pyrex dish lined with the floured tea towel then place the lid (the inside of the lid lightly greased and floured) on the Pyrex dish. Leave to prove for another 3 – 3½ hours.
• Alternatively, to prove overnight for baking first thing in the morning, place into a fridge and leave overnight.
• The reason for using a Pyrex dish is that it acts like a proving basket. The dish acts as a support to your dough. It encourages the dough the take on the shape of the dish and to prove up and not just to spread out flat. The dough will also be baked in the Pyrex dish.
• Using a fridge reduces the temperature of the dough allowing it to prove slower and longer which allows for a greater development of flavour within the dough but also increasing its digestibility. As dough ferments or proves the gluten within the dough breaks down. The longer a dough is allowed to prove the more flavour it will contain and the easier it is for your body to digest.
• To bake, preheat your oven to 230°C / 210°C fan assisted (445°F / Gas 8).
• Flip the Pyrex dish over so the bowl of the Pyrex dish now becomes the lid. Carefully remove the tea towel.
• Using a sharp knife cut the surface of the dough, this is what is known as the baker’s signature. The dough can be cut up to ½ cm deep. (This isn’t just for aesthetics, scoring the bread also helps control where and how it rises while baking)
• Cover the dough with the bowl of the Pyrex dish and place the Pyrex dish into the preheated oven.
• By baking the dough in the Pyrex dish there is no need to steam the oven. Baking with a lid on the Pyrex dish creates its own steam which will allow the dough to rise and open up while baking. The Pyrex is very similar to the old style of Dutch oven baking.
• Bake for 25 minutes then remove the lid from the Pyrex dish and continue to bake, uncovered, for a further 25 minutes until a good crust has formed and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the base.
• Once baked remove the bread from the Pyrex dish and allow to cool.
Notes: if you have a breadmaker I find using the dough-only setting makes it easy for the actual mixing/first proving . If you have a stand mixer, that works too for the mixing part.
In the end, just play around with it! Some loaves will be fantastic, some will flop. Add olive oil! Herbs! Cheese! Play around with making cinnamon buns and waffles. The options are really endless and once you’ve got the basics down you won’t lose the skill.
Last year I made the decision to take the kids to Universal for spring break. The Sprout is a huge Harry Potter fan and as they age out of theme parks (and as we hunker down for more savings), I thought it was best to plan a last hurrah of a vacation as a Christmas surprise. Of course, booking during Spring Break was way too expensive and we found we could tack on a weeklong cruise in February for almost the same price as Universal during Spring Break. So of course, we ended up booking in February.
We all know how this story ends. By the time Spring Break came around, the government was telling Canadians to come home as soon as they could and things started to slowly shut down. I had friends who got stuck in foreign countries scrambling to get home and then we all ended up in lockdown.
And here we are now.
Truth be told, nothing really changed for Mr. Tucker and I in terms of our day-to-day life. With winter raging outside I generally am housebound during the winter months. The only thing that changed was that the kids were home. Since the order that schools were closing happened on the eve of March break, all seemed normal to them as we allowed unfettered access to devices as well as played games, read books, and watched Netflix – like much of the world was doing. Come the end of March Break I stuck up a schedule (hope springs eternal), signed them up for Khan Academy and we went forward into quarantine.
Of course, it’s now almost 8 weeks since we’ve been home and so much has changed. We now have masks we ordered from http://Starkers.com. Almost all of our purchases are delivery or curbside pickup, aside from Mr. Tucker’s monthly Costco run for medication and supplies. We go for walks but mostly stay inside, and our social lives (like all of our social lives) have moved to online meetings. Still – and probably hilariously – one of our New Year’s Resolutions was to not eat out at all in 2020 and since Covid-19, that hasn’t even been an option for us.
The thing is, when you have a pre-existing condition or disability your life changes dramatically. When the pandemic started the first thing I knew right from the beginning was: there is no way I will ever be prioritized for a ventilator. Even though disability rights advocates were starting petitions at the callousness of denying disabled people the same rights as able-bodied people, I knew that it didn’t matter. Even if the rules changed, the decisions wouldn’t come from a bureaucrat. Fates would be decided by overworked doctors and nurses facing down the difficult decision of who gets to live and who gets to die. We had already seen this play out in Italy and I knew that it was a real possibility that if things got bad enough here it would happen in much the same way.
So we hunkered down, found all our travel size bottles of sanitizer. Mr. Tucker wiped down every surface after he shopped, and we had a stringent protocol when he came home. Life just changed. Life changed for all of us.
I am grateful that we’re both not working full time right now. Mr. Tucker works for a company that hosts online meeting software and so you can imagine his workload right now. But the kids are home and need some guidance to complete the online work that’s assigned to them. Still, we’ve chilled out a lot more since the beginning. While we still limit access to devices to the weekends, they do their homework, classroom meetings, and Khan Academy online & we don’t restrict access to those things. There are books, art supplies, puzzles, and games for anyone to access at anytime so we’re trying to keep things as calm and laid back as possible.
We’re all exhausted and burnt out about being on top of each other all the time. While Mr. Tucker has his basement office & the girls had their rooms, I felt constantly like I had no where to go. So I found a recliner on a second-hand website which Mr. Tucker picked up for me for a song (whilst respecting social distancing rules), a friend gave me a reading light, and I carved out a corner of our bedroom where I could go and relax when the kids were in the common areas & I needed some peace. So things are working out.
As for us, we are happy spring is here and that this didn’t all begin in the fall, when the dark winter starts to close in. We’ve made sourdough for a couple of years now so I’ve happily become the purveyor of starter & I’ve have sent a long many an email of tips and tricks. We made the decision last year to buy as much of our food as locally as possible, so we’ve been lucky to weather all the hoarding (aside from toilet paper & sanitizer). We have freezers full of local meat, buckets full of flour and oatmeal, we get our eggs from the farmer up the street, and we have a weekly vegetable delivery. We had always talked about doing raised bed gardening so we’ve built beds and are looking forward to gardening with the kids all summer. As well, our pool will be open over the next couple of weeks so we won’t feel as confined to the house. So there are some things to look forward to over the next little while.
Of course, there are a million and one places you can go to hear the worst of the worst news and I am no stranger to the anxiety that comes from deep-diving into that quagmire. But now, I’ve resigned myself to just reading the headlines of major newspapers – informed but not too informed – and keeping busy at home. But I am not going to go into that here, preferring to focus on the positive. I love that so many people are taking up old-timey crafts now that they have the time, space, and boredom to tackle new projects such as baking, knitting, and gardening. I love that neighbours are helping each other with groceries, sourdough starter, and seed sharing. People are starting to see the value in supporting local farms and buying from local businesses that it looks like independent book stores are poised to take over market share from amazon. Even in the worst of times, the best of humanity shines through, and if the research is to believed, this is typical of humans when chaos hits. It may be a little while until things relax again but I’d like to think we’ll keep some of the good bits that came out of all this. One can hope.
This is a list of books I have felt have helped me in different areas of my life – and at different times, so they made be dated. I’ve organized them by theme even though some may fit more than one category. I do have books that I’ve forgotten or not read yet and so this is a work in progress. Have a book, documentary or website recommendation? I’d love to check it out. Leave it in the comments.
