do you like these eggs I doodled?

Day 29 of the Whole 30 challenge! In some ways I'm surprised I actually went through with it, and in other ways I always knew I could and would. I know I haven't been the absolute best at writing about it as I went along, but I feel there are so many other bloggers who were more on top of this thing than I was. Not every meal was brilliant. I know I drank non-compliant almond milk and fries which weren't in the spirit of the Whole30 challenge (and later found out were "salted" with a mix of sugar and salt. That was my biggest cheat). But I did it! Besides - can anyone ACTUALLY do a perfect Whole 30? I bet someone can, but she isn't me. All nit-picking aside, I did the thing, guys! And it really does feel good. There is nothing better than knowing that you've been taking good care of your bodies, right? In the past I've definitely underrated this, but I'm growing to love it.

When humans encounter color, an interesting thing happens. We not only see the color, we feel it. It seems that people attach a significant amount of emotion and feeling to color, which is evident in marketing schemes, power outfits, and even the crayons you most used as a child. There's a reason Captain Hook baked Peter Pan a poison cake and turned it green. Because cake is supposed to be many things, but sickly green? It's not one of them. I feel the same cringing that overtook Tinkerbelle when anyone posts a photo of matcha waffles, grassy smelling and almost comically green. It does not look like something I remotely want to eat and I sometimes wonder...what has happened to the colors in our food palette?

I chose a seat near a window today. Great drifts of snow - sullen and sulky because the air is fifty degrees now and they're gradually down-sizing - are heaped upon the sidewalk. I almost didn't make it to the coffee shop down these back-streets it wasn't in the budget to plow.

Although there are definitely some things on which we blatantly disagree, I sat in my car watching Oprah Winfrey win the Cecil B. DeMille award and listened to her speech and thought, thank you. For her coherency, her heart, and her compassion. For her ability (in this case) to put into words things that needed saying. Sometimes when I write about cooking or entertaining, I wonder if anyone cares. Not you, my readers, but anyone in the wider sense of the world. Does it matter if a person does or does not throw a dinner party? Does it matter if a woman knows how to set a pretty table for her girl gang when in other places in the world, girls are being gang-raped?

Whole 30 comfort food. It's a category, you know. Although a very small, narrow, diminutive category. The world, in South-eastern Virginia, is quiet. "Bomb cyclone," "snowpocalypse," "blizzard." All of them terms for the reason the world hushed when the snow began to fall. Of course it didn't stay quiet - everyone crammed the roads and descended en masse on the grocery store - but once we were all settled in, silence reigned and has held sway ever since. My dad is still out plowing snow, 40-some hours later. The rest of us are solidly stuck where we are. We went out for a walk yesterday and again this morning, trying to read a story in the snow-tracks and succeeded in getting happily chilled. By now the snow on the road has oozed and packed into a solid ice-cake, rendering us pretty much immobile, though we might hazard it in pursuit of coffee later on.

I'm a foodie, right? I'm fully committed to edible things tasting good, looking good, and actually being good. Like, I'm that person who would rather skip out on her morning coffee than drink Folgers. So the idea of restricting my choices of food seems like an infringement on basic first-world millennial rights