Queenkv’s Brainpickings

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As always, it’s been a crazy month or two or three at work. It felt good to stand next to the sunflowers. Something about the bright colors and the warm sunshine made me feel better after another long shift in the newsroom.

Our political coverage’s kicking into high gear with the Democratic Convention and then next week’s Republican Convention. We just wrapped up our live coverage from the Summer Olympic Games. I was tickled with our live reports from our morning anchor in Beijing.

I suppose food and sleep are the big challenges of my overnight shift. Sometimes I forget to eat and sometimes I can’t sleep. People tell me I’m young and that I can handle the hours. They’re probably right but I don’t know how I’d pull-off a 1 AM to 10 AM shift and raise kids.

CA State Fair at Night from Kris Vera-Phillips on Vimeo.
In the meantime, I take advantage of my weekends with the hubby. We had a blast at the State Fair last week. Good times.

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My station has been rockin’ the Beijing Games with international and local live news coverage.

OK, Michael Phelps has set a new gold standard for the Olympics. The American swimmer has won the most gold medals, ever. And he still has a few more events to go. It also looks like the Redeem Team is on its way to living up to its namesake on the hardwood. However, I am most impressed with swimmer Dara Torres. She’s 41-years-old, she had a baby and she’s still in top Olympic form. After last weekend’s relay race, she has another Olympic medal under her belt. Rock on Torres!

I’m also looking forward to all the Taekwondo action next week. My Judo instructor, Dr. Min, helped introduce that martial art as an Olympic sport for the 1998 Summer Games in Seoul.

When I used to do Hankido with UCMAP, Dr. Link’s wife taught some of the upper belt classes. She’s shorter than me and weighs around 100 pounds. I think that’s all muscle. We used to do mat work together. When she got me in a hold, it was like being surrounded by steel. She’s one of the nicest, perkiest black belts in the club and she can knock down guys twice her height. She’s in her 40’s and she has 2 kids. Club members say she was still flipping over people for martial arts demos when she was in her third trimester.

She works full-time at another job and she still works out like she’s a teenager. It was thrilling to follow in her footsteps for our kicks, punches, dives and combinations across the mat.

She’s one of my heroes. I want to be like her when I turn 40.

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Making Friends, originally uploaded by queenkv.

Daisy’s slowly making friends. She still doesn’t like other doggies to sniff her butt, but then again, it’s quite a pushy thing to do. Especially on first sniffs. She started growling at this hefty boxer when he tried to cuddle closer to her. Crazy dog.

Daisy has been a blessing for my graveyard shifts. On my weekend, she’s my sounding board, my jogging partner and my TV watching buddy. The puppy was happy to see Jennifer kicked off Project Runway. Heck, the dog can’t help being bored by the matronly dresses from the Syracuse designer.

This week, we ran about 1.5 miles on the bike trail near Alamo Creek. Daisy’s learning to pace herself at the beginning, unless there’s a squirrel running up a tree. She has this blissful look on her face as she’s trotting by my side.

For me, I let go of all the negative vibes from work when I’m running on the trail. As always, work is hard. It’s exciting work, but it’s also stressful and demanding. I’m doing my best to avoid any screw-ups.

So on my weekends, I run. With my heart pounding and my brow dripping with sweat, I feel like I can take on the world again.

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Like the evolution of Sin City, I’m also learning about what I can and can’t do with my body at age 30.

Despite my crazy work hours, I’m still finding time to stay active and balanced. I try to fit in sun salutations and breathing exercises before work. On my weekends, I go running on the bike trail behind our house. Sometimes, I manage to sync up my weekends with the freestyle schedule at Vacaville Ice Sports.

I noticed it’s also taking me longer to recover from physical activity. There are days when my leg muscles remind me I’m no longer a teenager. In high school, I used to be able eat a meal before hoping on the ice. Now, I need at least 2 hours between eating and exercise. Or else, I feel bloated and nauseous. Plus, it kinda hurts to fall. At least, it hurts a little more than what I remember from my time on the ice….more than a decade ago.

I’m also feeling some of the physical strain from work. I spend hours at my workstation: typing up stories, mouse-clicking on video and letting my back stiffen under the pressure to break news and beat the competition. Sometimes it feels like a Goofy-sized stopwatch is sitting on my shoulders as I race to finish my teases and headlines before showtime. And those crazy work hours? I’m lucky when I can fall asleep in the daytime and catch 6 hours of sleep. Still, I’m still happy to be doing my dream job in my home state. I think exercising outside of the newsroom helps me stay sane and works out any aggression I have left over from whatever.

Oh yeah.
I also did something pretty stupid with my yoga practice back in Kansas. This time last year, I was in a plank position and I felt a tweak in my left shoulder blade. Then I kept going with the asana. I spent the last 12 months with a sore shoulder blade and back. It felt like I had a hot dog-shape lump wedged between my shoulder blade and spine. I thought I could tough it out, like how I treated twisted ankles and bruises during my skating days. I figured more yoga, stretching and loving massages from the hubby would straighten everything out.

It’s been a year and I think Mark’s hands are sore. He recommended I check out a chiropractor. I found a chiro practice that also used massage therapy. The doctor took some X-rays and found evidence of my Pathfinder-flipping days. Apparently, my neck curves in a different direction from a normal one. He said that’s consistent with a bad car accident injury. He also showed me signs of my skating days. I have a hip bone that’s turned inward severely. He said it’s probably from all the thousands of times I fell on the ice. My coaches once said I’d learn something from all those falls and I guess my body took away a souvenir from the experience.

So, after the last few weeks of back cracking and adjustments, my hot dog-shaped lump has shrunk and I’m not feeling a tweak in my shoulder blade when I do my yoga practice.

I think I can still play as hard, but I have to take care of my body.

Now, who wants to race me on the ice?

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offal: 1: the waste or by-product of a process: as a: trimmings of a hide b: the by-products of milling used especially for stock feeds c: the viscera and trimmings of a butchered animal removed in dressing (from Merriam-Webster)

Anthony Bourdain often said cooks learned how to make the nasty bits taste good out of necessity. Eventually, those tasty dishes get elevated to gourmet dining because it demonstrates the cook’s skill in working with all the edible scraps, trims, bones, guts and more.

For chefs like Cosentino, cooking with offal has been transformed into an art form. It’s a nod to the tradition of past chefs who made do with little and a look forward to healthy, sustainable eating.

Almost 7 years ago, I would have never thought I’d be part of the offal dining movement. In our early dating years, Mark and I did Valentine’s Dinner at Incanto. It was an intimate, romantic dining scene. This was before Chef Cosentino exploded on the TV food scene with Iron Chef America. Back then, the food tasted delicious, refined, hearty and I wanted seconds. In 2008, I can’t wait for our next dinner at Incanto.

St. Paul’s on Easter Sunday, originally uploaded by queenkv.

After the shortest Easter Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s (45 minutes), we also celebrated with an Easter Supper Dinner at Incanto.

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