Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

Life has been busy since I started my private practice. I’m not brimming with clients just yet, but in the past month, I’ve furnished my office (with lots of help from friends Nancy and Libby – and others here and there, too – Robert, Jason, Christopher, Brian, Shannon, Everette, etc.). Because of the busy-ness coupled with the extreme backlog of pictures to edit from the past several months (gigs, NYC trip, etc), I’ve been leaving my camera at home much more than usual. Still, when I walk around in the world, I’m still a photographer, and I really can’t help myself. Luckily, there IS a camera with me at all times: my iPhone camera. Nope, I didn’t get one of the new ones – I’ve played with Oliver’s and MAN, it’s cool – not really in my budget. But I have my 3G iPhone, and with the additional apps Camerabag and Autostitch, I’ve been able to grab some pretty fun images from the world. My “Mobe Photes” set is growing every day, and I’m really loving it. Something about limitations in photography fascinates me – always has. I realize this is probably a side-effect of not exactly swimming in the money. It’s OK. I don’t mind, because when I’m limited by my equipment – because of money, space, and/or time – I have to get creative. And getting creative is NEVER a bad thing. Enjoy my iPhone pix, and watch the set grow! Yes, the iPhone has a camera, and it counts!

I got a MacBook Pro 13″. It’s cool, and yes, it’s one of the new ones announced last week. I’m really loving it so far. It’s the first Mac I’ve ever owned (unless you count the iPhone, and I don’t). My ex-husband always had Macs, so there are very few things that I don’t know how to do right off the bat. The gestures on the trackpad are new, so I’m learning those slowly – as needed.

I have but one small complaint, and it relates to the design of the body itself. There is an extremely sharp 90-degree angle where my wrists rest, so that there’s always a little digging in my skin on the underside of my wrists/lower forearms. I thought Mac was all about design? Maybe they are going more for visual than functional with this choice? I really am perplexed. Since it’s a Mac, I keep thinking I must be “doing it wrong!”

Thoughts? Comments? General harangues?

I did something really strange on Friday. A nut company hired a firm in Chapel-Hill to do some research on nuts, and I ended up participating in their Nut Focus Group at Southern Season. I arrived in time for a delicious lunch, during which we discussed how we liked to cook with nuts, what we think will encourage people to buy more nuts, and our favorite flavor combinations using nuts. After a lengthy discussion, the 12 of us participating were broken into 3 groups of 4 and asked to come up with several recipes using nuts. Then, the REALLY fun part. We were released out into Southern Season (a massive, super-stocked gourmet grocery, if you’ve never been) to gather everything we needed to create our dishes. We brought everything back to the test kitchen and were let loose. In other words, we were IRON CHEFS! It was so fun. My group made:

• Spring Tart with Cucumber, Caramelized Onions, Mascarpone, Dill, and Pine Nuts – I made a lot of this one, but the flavor combo was a collaborative effort.
• Breakfast Bar made with Dried Orange, Crystallized Ginger, Oats, Raisins, Almonds, and Ground Cardamon – But this didn’t hold together as well as we’d hoped, so we ended up putting it on Vanilla Ice Cream, and calling it “Better Than Breakfast Ice Cream”
• Mango Chili Chocolate Bark with Macadamia Nuts (That’s the one I was most responsible for, and it was AWESOME!)
• Orange Dream Brownies made with Ginger, Dried Orange, and Almonds (I actually had zero to do with this one – Brownies are yucky!)

The Delightful JNFR

So two particularly fun aspects of this adventure. First, the delightful JNFR was there. She is a special needs teacher, and was VERY good at herding us and keeping everything on track. She was definitely the Alpha that kept us focused so the creativity of our group could flow. Second, WE GOT PAID! Yes, they actually paid me $150 to give opinions about food and play Iron Chef. I can’t believe my luck!

The Day in Pictures:

In 1975, a woman named Gloria participated in therapy with three giants in the field of Psychology: Carl Rogers (Person-centered psychotherapy), Albert Ellis (Rational emotive therapy), and my absolute favorite, Frederick Perls (Gestalt therapy). Here are the three videos Glroria made with Perls. Everyone who’s trained as a psychologist had to watch these in grad school. I was just thinking about them yesterday. It’s really fascinating stuff. Perls is the kind of guy who could drive anyone nuts, but in the end, you love him because you realize that his bizarro approach really helps.

I always thought the reason I hated the Neti Pot so much related to a simple fact: I am a total wuss. I always say that it feels like waterboarding.

Watching this video, I think it’s more complicated. I have a deviated septum. I noticed that my nostrils were very different in size during college, but I never thought much of it. I think it was when Jennifer Aniston got surgery for a deviated septum a few years ago that I wondered if I should care. The rumor was that she’d had a “nosejob,” but her nose didn’t look any different afterwards. She’d cited a deviated septum as the reason for the surgery. Anyway, about a year ago, I tried the Neti Pot, since everyone seemed to think it was the best thing ever. When I’ve tried it, it’s been torture because I’ll pour all the saline water into one nostril, but it doesn’t come out the other side. I am standing there leaning over the sink, my eyes are turning redder and redder, my sinuses are burning, and all this liquid is trapped in my head. I stand there as long as I can stand it. I might get a drip or two out the other nostril, but no lovely stream of saline like in the video. I’m thinking maybe I should look into this deviated septum situation. I was just reading the Wikipedia article about it, and it says that it’s often a result of birth trauma – of which I had a TONS. I have a foot lodge into my face when I was born. I think this explains a lot. Only took 39 years to work it all out.

I think I’m out on the Neti Pot until I talk to a real doctor about my deviated septum and about my allergies, which seem to get worse every year.