However,  I want to put my foot down about something. Ready?

Turkey bacon.

It’s not a thing, people. There is no part of a turkey that is “bacon.” The thing about true bacon, from a pig, is that it’s an actual strata of fat and meat. And good heavens, it’s delicious. I bought some nitrate free organic stuff this weekend for Easter breakfast, and in no way did that make bacon healthy, but hey, I felt a little more virtuous. So if you wake up in the morning and you think to yourself, “SELF, I need bacon today!” Then go forth! Eat awesome bacon! And be content in the knowledge that you’ve labeled your food correctly.

However unless you wake up in the morning thinking “Self, I cannot make it through the day without pieced together turkey meat jumbled up and seasoned and then sliced to mock the purity that is actual bacon” (and unless your religion bans you from eating pork), there is no good reason to eat turkey bacon while still calling it bacon.

Now, do not get me wrong – I’m the last person on earth to give dietary advice, so by all means, eat the turkey stuff. I know people who even enjoy it more than bacon. My only beef (do you see what I did there with a meat pun?) with the whole thing is the name. Truth in labelling! Is that too much to ask?

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So I’m reading this book called the China Study – and it’s basically about how eating too much animal protein causes people to DIE, but that a plant based diet with a modest and sparing amount of protein is a recipe for long life, etc. And it’s been such a remarkable book that I’m actually cutting back a lot on flesh (olde vegetarian lingo!). I have to be careful to still get good sources of plant protein (of which there are plenty) and keep my blood sugar balanced. (I have PCOS, in case anyone is interested, and must keep my insulin levels from peaking or dipping). I still use a small amount of animal protein – particularly for something like a holiday, and even occasionally throughout the week as a supplement to plant proteins. It’s funny then, that I would be posting about bacon so shortly after the vow to cut back. Anyway, this is all to say that if we’ve had a conversation about the China Study, and I mentioned that I was cutting back on meat and sugar, I still mean it, and I’m still doing so.

2011 was a lackluster year for me – it’s the first time I’ve ever felt like I made no progress in my life. I merely aged. As everyone else I knew acquired new jobs, spouses or babies, I didn’t. I took a parallel step in my career, launched of a series of siblings onto their adventures, lived alone for a while, made no new friends and didn’t document a thing because it all seemed without much color.

Black and white photography has always seemed like an excuse for not being able to take a good color picture.

It was just a year that was. I left my camera uncharged for four whole months straight. I made no playlists to listen to. My journal was full of unmarred pages. My blog a veritable wasteland. I had no dinner parties. Not once did I try to impress anyone.

And now – I don’t know if it’s the season, or if I just got enough sleep this week or what – but I feel like three months into 2012, I’m might be shaking off the spectre of 2011. I charged up my camera battery again. I’ve got 143 new photos waiting to be edited, and that’s just from the last two weeks, so perhaps. Perhaps.

It would be a real revival.

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It is incredibly rude of me to say that about black and white photography, and it isn’t true. But my dad said it once – most likely in a larger context, and it stuck. In my own photography, I prefer color – right now anyway. Maybe it’s just an excuse for not being able to take a great black and white photograph.

I never win ANYTHING. Except one time I won the “who knows her best” game at a bridal shower. I’d never met the bride before, and I can’t remember why I was there. But I won, and it was awkward for her you know, actual friends and family.

Anyway, I won something! Over at Livi’s blog, the Bright Bit, she had a giveaway from Melt’m Design Studios, and I won a pair of adorable heart shaped rose gold earrings. I got a notice from my mailman that there was a package waiting for me from Istanbul, and I was totally puzzled until I finally toddled over to pick up my package, and there it was! My PRIZE.

My PRIZE. Bwahahahahhaaaaaa.

I’m totally digging rose gold AND hearts right now, so I can’t wait to wear these.

Coping with this occasionally involves forgoing sleep, or a much wanted weekend, but more often than not – it just means pushing harder, and/or rearranging a paradigm. Sometimes I’m incredibly excited by the challenge, and other times it can be wildly frustrating and exhausting. Eventually though, what seems *impossible is melted down and forged into triumphantly possible. It becomes the new normal.

And then a week or two later, it happens all over again. And I kind of love it.

Perhaps I have a hopelessly Pollyanna attitude (it would be a first), but I feel like there is an intense bright side to being thrown into that state of panic – it’s galvanizing. It makes me rethink what can be done – what can be asked for from life.

In looking for what I want in a home – I’ve been thinking about the impossible. I want a brilliant house.

‘Brilliant’ will mean different things to different people – square footage, I don’t care about; nor do I care about school districts or prestige of neighborhood. I’m not looking at houses in Park City, Sundance or the Avenues in SLC, for pity’s sake. But I have things I want –  I seek good bones in a structure, enough land to give me space and the small orchard I’ve always wanted. I want a home that is me. 

I have my eye on a property, and it looks nothing like the houses below, but it’s on a sunny hill with an orchard, and the house has the same warmth of feeling that these do. It feels creative to me, it has the kind of magic I’m looking for. I really, really want it to be mine.

And for a few reasons, mostly money, but also some tricky zoning issues, it might be impossible. But maybe, if I’m willing to trade some now for some later, some life for some extra freelance work, I just might eke out possible. It all starts with that request, this time coming from me – having the guts to just ask for something to happen.

Because sometimes I can stretch the impossible so far it will flip. 

Furniture and room by Morelato.

House by Dean/Wolf Architects, photography by Paul Warchol.

A beautiful house in Washington by NB Design Group.

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*How impossible can these requests be, you ask, if they become possible? I started to write a whole thing about it, how design is INVENTION and CREATION, and how it’s like airplanes and how one century they were the dreams of fools and then the next people are flying around like it ain’t no thang – but clearly it got overwrought, and that’s embarassing. Besides, I work at a craft company. So shhh, don’t ask questions. Just let me have my moment.

I’m sure anyone reading this is going to know this already: I’m not advocating buying beyond one’s financial means. I’m advocating stretching your vision of what life can hold, and being willing to push harder for it. I’m not married and I don’t have kids – house buying is where my priorities are at – appropriately, I think  - right now.

I digress. This time, I actually bought something.

I hate egg cartons. They make my fridge look shabby. My parents always bought free form eggs (by which I mean sans carton) from an egg shaped woman at the outdoor market across the big street from our apartment complex. She sold all kinds of eggs, too – not just chicken eggs. She had white ones, brown ones, big duck eggs, tiny quail eggs, and since it was China, petrol-colored, many ringed thousand year-old preserved eggs.

Ick. Although, if I’m being fair, sliced thin, with a little soy and a thin sliver of ginger, they’re not bad. I just get SUPER heebie jeebied out by the idea. Eggs should not be old. Or green. (Insert Dr. Seuss nod.)

Anyway.

Now I can recycle my egg cartons and use this ceramic egg thing – I can wash it, it looks gorgeous, and I’ve wanted it for ages. I am happy.