Swimming (Part 4)

(Part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here)

It has been a year now since Christian and I have taken up the habit of going to the pool Friday night. We once had to miss a week and when I returned to the pool I noticed myself almost embracing the familiarity of the water. That feeling in itself was a reassuring sign of improvement. Although I can’t yet swim and have not graduated to the deep end, there have been milestones worth recording in this self-experiment.

As with the beginning of most projects, I had a lot of enthusiasm. This waned when I felt like my progress plateaued but gradually, the accumulation of practice and exposure lead to increasing comfort in the water.

I fill an hour in the pool with drills… kicking in streamline position, pulling using a pull buoy, sideways kicking with fins - all while wearing a swimmer’s snorkel; and backstroke and floating and rhythmic breathing in between.

A significant snag in my progression was the fear of being unable to breathe. Fear of water is very common in adults and tackling breathing has been akin to undoing a knot. I started watching videos by Caribe Swim (here). I’ve noticed that when I’ve hit a wall in my progress, I need to find techniques that break things down into even smaller increments. Here’s a recent example. Step 4 of “The Shallow Water Mastery Course” (here) teaches a forward glide, with a head lift to catch a breath. I tried this repeatedly, over weeks. I’d pause to practice breathing exercises and relaxation techniques (here) and still, I could not lift my head to breathe. I realized that lifting my head and breathing was in fact two things. The pressure of having to catch my breath in this movement was preventing me from being able to execute the head lift. Decoupling breath from the movement made it possible, just last Friday - marking the 50th hour in the pool - to glide, holding my breath, then glide and raise my head out of the water, then glide and stop with my feet on the ground to catch my breath. The point was to prove to myself that I could lift my head without having to touch the bottom of the pool. And this felt like the happiest success, because by continuing to practice the movement, I am confident I’ll get to a point where catching a breath will come naturally.

These small wins, and the growing ease of movement I feel in the water are encouraging signs that this experiment is working, even if very slowly.

Telephone table / night stand

I found this telephone table on Facebook marketplace and instantly liked the design. I’ve given it a dual purpose in our bedroom as nightstand and as menu planning station… the filing cabinet fits neatly underneath and houses recipe printouts categorized mainly by ingredient. Nearby I have a shelf of cookbooks. Making a “station” for this weekly exercise, complete with its own chair, fills me with content!

Collage

In the spirit of experimentation and making art, this is another batch of little collages… They are for individuals, but also, they are fun, and I lose the sense of time cutting, arranging, and glueing things into place.

In the spirit of this exercise, Brendan Leonard has a video about making art here. What is unique about collage is that I don’t feel pressure to improve. With drawing, I do. With collage, it’s just experimentation. It’s a true hobby!

Cooking and Baking

I made these fruit and nut-filled “crowns” on Thanksgiving as a change from regular bread. They are of the “looks impressive” category of bread.

Christian brought home such a large butternut squash that not only did I use it for Melissa Clark’s Butternut Squash Pizza, from her cookbook Dinner; I cut up the rest for soup (recipe here) and served a butternut-squash-themed meal.

Another vegetarian meal we tried this week was Anna Jones’ “Proper Chilli”. I can’t remember how I had access to the recipe from her Substack (here) but The Guardian offers the recipe here. This recipe, like Bolognese, is markedly better on the second day. On the first day, the spices all clamour for attention, and the raucous competition made me second-guess their quantities. On the second day everything calms down a bit. You can enjoy a bowl as if you were a passenger on a train, cupping a bowl in your hands while taking in the scenery outside.

Finally, I really liked Maggie Hoffman’s podcast episode with Mark Bittman (here). Towards the end, Maggie asks for cookbook recommendations, and Bittman offers a list and concludes “the important thing is that people cook. It’s not really how they cook or what they cook or how they learn how to cook. It’s that they cook.” Maggie asks why and Bittman answers:

Cooking is just better. I mean, cooking for yourself, cooking for your loved ones, it’s just, it’s better than not. […] Not everybody can cook at home and not everybody has the time or the ingredients. Not everybody even has a kitchen. But for those of us who do and can, I think it’s sort of the first step toward good head and a good life is teaching yourself and your loved ones how to cook and cooking for your loved ones. If you can’t make the time for cooking, first you have to ask if that’s legitimate, I think, if you really don’t have the time for cooking. And if you really don’t have the time for cooking, that is a societal problem that we need to help you figure out how to address.

At a different spot in the podcast, Bittman says “So much of what there is to cooking is experience.”

To end this… my kids… cleaning up after having made and portioned out a batch of soba noodles with sauce for school lunches…

Enjoying

Out for lunch with a friend, we discovered one of the best wonton soup spots… it’s Aroma Bistro at 741 St. Mary’s Road, and this picture makes me want to go back for another bowl!