Comestible

Sometimes I eat food that I don't make. One example is South River's "Dandelion Leek Miso" made of deep well water, organic soybeans, organic brown rice, sun-dried sea salt, dandelion greens, wild leeks, nettle greens, organic sea vegetables, and koji culture.
   Another example is an artisanal chocolate made of [all organic] stone ground cacao, cacao butter, honey, hemp, and maitake mushroom.

But I'd say 90% of what I eat is food that does not have a label. Maybe I should track that to be sure. Who wants to know what I eat every day? Do I?

Salad

I made up a salad yesterday that I love.
   I used 2 pomegranates, 2 avocados, a bunch of cilantro, and 5 green onions. I dressed it with the juice of 1 lime, olive oil (probably halfish a cup), and Himalayan salt.

Bidness Woes

For my business, I independently contract with a company I'll call LatKes. LatKes recently rolled out a new website. On this new site, more of my stats are available to me.
   Earlier this year I noted a significant and repeating discrepancy between ostensible income (calculated simply by multiplying [number of students] by [number of scheduled lessons] by [price per lesson]) and my real income. I make a lot less than it looks like I will. It didn't take long to figure out why: cancellations.
   I've been, therefore, aware that cancellations are eating up potential earnings (I even took it up directly with one cancel-happy student), but I didn't track them precisely.
   Enter the new LatKes site with the new stats.
   A whopping third of my scheduled lessons for this year were cancelled. That includes any students who stopped taking lessons and cancelled anything remaining, and the lessons I cancelled when my computer died in September. So it reflects more than just current students and includes my own cancellations. Even discounting those things, easily one fifth of my planned lessons fell through!

I want next year to be different. My problem is that 85% of my clients are through LatKes and I can't change my cancellation policy for them. They have the option to cancel up to 24 hours in advance.
   What's an independent contractor to do?!

Things and Stuff

I can have a hard time letting go of tangibles.
   Once upon a time, what I would do with an item that I struggled with discarding was (1) take a picture of it and (2) tell Roscivs a story about it (3) discard it straightway.

The picture was his idea.
   When it came time to process the data card (once it was full) I would keep the picture if I still wanted a picture. This may have happened once or twice, but I can't specifically remember it. Usually by that time I had already let go, realized I was happy without it, and chose to delete the picture.

Now I skip the picture step.

Some things I have held onto until now:
   • 20+ lb. of Japanese language learning papers (many of which don't even have R's handwriting on them ... all of which are materials I can't read)
   • a sea shell that my childhood penpal Ricki painted and sent to me
   • scrapbook papers — e.g., a spate of trite poems that I wrote (by assignment, in response to trite prompts) in 5th grade

What do those things mean to me? I choose to use this blog post, rather than those papers, to commemorate
   • how Roscivs was so unusually devoted to and delighted by learning;
   • how thoughtful a penpal Ricki was (that shell was her postcard to me from a vacation in Mexico);
   • how in 5th grade I was oversaturated with vacuous assignments

I feel better now.