a peek inside the fishbowl

Some of you may know me well enough that I have been known to embark on small projects purely for my own personal amusement. The Hourly Photo projects started that way, as did our now-annual Family Advent Calendar. And come to think of it, so did the Moments of Bliss, the Sugar Fast, Couch-to-5K, the Trust Experiment, and even the cookies we baked in the car a couple of weeks ago. I don’t do it for the clicks, I do it for the kicks. And I guess I like to keep busy.

My latest little whim has been concerning my lunches. Some of you may have already seen a photo or two flit by already.

Allow me to indulge in a bit of backstory for a moment.

I find it a wee bit annoying when people who don’t know very much about Twitter insist that tweets are only about the mundane events of people’s personal lives. Admittedly, to some extent this is true. Many of us let tedious tweets escape into the larger world. And I don’t entirely disagree. For example, I see WAY too many tweets about the contents of diaper blowouts – and I would prefer not to see those – but this does not summarize everything that Twitter is about. Twitter is more. It’s news, politics, gossip, information, relationships, community, charity, therapy, and then some. If you are a current-events junkie, and if you like to be the first to know what’s going on internationally or even right down the street from you, Twitter might be your tool of choice. You just have to know who to follow.

The anti-Twitter argument is often prefaced with statements such as: “I don’t care about what people have for lunch!” And then the person will denounce Twitter as an utter waste of time.

But you know what, I want to know what you had for lunch, especially if it’s a great recipe, a good food find, or a good restaurant that I may visit some day. Besides, knowing what someone had for lunch is personal and revealing. This is something I’ve wondered about: what does a person’s lunch say about them? For example, what would you think about someone who voluntarily ate these meals almost every day:

• beans in a can, eaten out of the can
• an organic portebello mushroom burger on a homemade multigrain bun with baby greens they’ve grown themselves
• a bag of chips and a pop
• homemade soups and stews, made ahead of time and frozen in individual serving sizes
• take out from a fast-food place, eaten cold, in the car (Double Downs, Chick-fil-A, Quadruple Bypass Burgers etc.)
• Bento Box lunches made to look like Japanese cartoon characters

I think we can all agree that there is such a thing as a healthy lunch. And that healthy lunches contain items from the different food groups with emphasis on whole foods (especially produce) that are processed as little as possible. So what do sub-par lunches say about the people eating them? That they don’t care about themselves? Can’t afford to eat well? Don’t know how to cook? Don’t make the time to shop and prepare something good to eat? Care more about comfort and convenience than health? Maybe there are people out there who grew up eating beans and/or beefaroni out of cans, and that makes them feel happy, so they continue to do so into adulthood. Anyway, the reason why is neither here nor there, I just think it’s interesting.

Personally, when I’m eating a bag of chips for lunch (and it has happened) I see it as a personal failure: to myself, my health, my body, and even to my family … because my kids are going to be the ones taking care of me when I’m an old lady.

I know it’s only lunch, but STILL. You get my point right?

I find it inspiring to look at other people’s great lunches and it encourages me to do better with mine. There have been many many days these past two months that I have been very tempted to slather a layer of peanut butter on big fat bagel and hoover it up while standing over the sink, but I don’t, because I know I will be tweeting it and thus someone is watching. I can see how many people are clicking on each photo, and this is just enough motivation to help me eat a little bit better. (I urge you to try it out and see for yourself. Do YOU want the world to know you scarfed down a bag of chips for lunch? I think not.)

I started on a whim and at first my goal was to document entirely breadless lunches: soups, salads, anything as long as it didn’t contain bread. And then we went camping and I decided it would be too hard to make do without bread – so I blew it for awhile. Oh well. I am now back on the bandwagon!

The set of photos I’ve posted so far are pretty revealing. You can see what days I have my act together, the days I slip, the days I probably have a fridge full of food and the others when I’m just scraping by (cucumbers and blue cheese? Yuck). But as I look back on the 50 lunches I’ve eaten I realize I do ok for the most part.

Anyway, yes. There is it. My lunch tweets may be a little self-indulgent, but you know what, I don’t care. :)

So for the next while I’m going to continue snapping and posting them to the Flickr page (but not here on the blog). I will tweet them as I eat them, one a day, and as soon as I figure out how I will tag each them #dailylunches in case anyone out there wants to join me for lunch. :)

It was a cloudy morning fourteen years ago today. I was disappointed. Everyone wants sun on their wedding day and there would almost certainly be rain. This meant that the ceremony would have to be relocated from the pretty garden to the back veranda of our venue. I needn’t have worried so much.

Later I realized that it was silly of me to have spent so much time dwelling on the weather. It did rain, and the ceremony was moved, but it did not put a damper on our day. August 7, 1998 would be one of the happiest days of my life in spite of the overcast skies that appeared that morning. Nine months later there would be another happy day in our lives, but 14 years ago today, this brand new family consisted of just two people:

Thank you Mark, for 14 years of fun and sunshine. I love you so very much.

p.s. would you like a peek at our wedding day? It’s right here.

It’s Thursday, which means that I’m officially en route to BlogHer 2012, one of the biggest blogging conferences in North America. It’s in New York City, and I’m bringing more than just a suitcase full of clothes and shoes. I’m bringing the family too! I’m happy they’re coming but also sad that I won’t be able to take in many of the sights of NYC. I’ll be sharing more about our adventures next week but I will say this: we are DRIVING. Eep!

I won’t be posting very much while I’m away so I wanted to leave this little blurb for BlogHer-related visitors who might find their way here during the conference and are wondering what the hell it is that they are looking at.

The Fishbowl is about a lot of things: family travel, eco-friendly gear, food, great design, and healthy living. I write quite a lot about about Ottawa too.

I work primarily as a freelance writer and web content manager and I have had a lot of interesting writing gigs. For example:

• I regularly write feature profiles for local home/design/reno magazines.
• I scripted a series of e-learning videos for DND (including one that took place at a shooting range)
• I wrote a script for a promotional video about an explosives-testing facility (ask me what kind of shoes I wore when I went on a tour of the place)
• I’ve written about poison-dart frogs and other critters for a local museum
• I wrote a script for a promotional video about a summer camp for kids (some fun research required there)
• … and a script for an educational high-school video about the Canadian Parliamentary system.
• I have also written about toilets. And dog-sledding. And cupcakes. And spelunking.

And that is just skimming the surface.

Right now I am cooking and eating and writing and snapping food photos for Recipes.ca. I blog for CanadianFamily.ca and UsedEverywhere as well but most of my blogging time is spent right here.

Some of my favourite posts are about:

• Food (I have devoted a whole category to eating and recipes)
• Our giant reno (I often ask readers for advice. Let’s just call it crowdsourcing!)
• The business of blogging (e.g. monetization, rate sheets, and other topics in professional development)
• My experience baking cookies in the car.
• Chipmunks. (Cute video alert!)

You can read more about me here if you are so inclined. You can follow me on Twitter or follow the Fishbowl on Facebook for additional content.  You can also receive my blog posts by email.

Thanks for following!