After my abology (ablogology? Abloglogy?) and lack of writing for a week, I realized my need to give myself a break. I freakin’ love blogging and reading other people’s blogs and being a part of the community, but right now, studying for a master’s degree in a subject that is so challenging for me is taking up the vast majority of my time.  For those of you who are curious, I thought I might share a day in my life. This was yesterday.

5:30am – wake up, meditate (in bed) for 10 minutes, hop up, throw on yoga clothes, and drive to my nearby studio, Viryoga.

6:00am – take a very beginner’s yoga class (I realized I’d rather take a beginner’s class than no class at all, and this is currently one of the few that fit into my schedule.

7:15am – home, take the pooch for a quick walk, make breakfast.

Breakfast these days on the ACD is usually one egg and one white with a load of mixed vegetables.  So delicious, healthy and satisfying. A teaspoon or two of almond butter often finds it’s way in there too!

8:00-11:00 – study, study, study.  Usually SQL, which looks like this:

or C# Programming, which looks like this.

Both are interesting, although programming is often so hard that it causes me to have emotional sobbing fits where I call Anthony from the bathroom with eyeliner streaming down my face; a pleasing combination of high school meets Girl, Interrupted meets Office Space.  However, when I do understand it, I find it genuinely fun and interesting.  I have a lot of dreams how to combine the arts and software, but first I have to learn software as well as I know theatre, which is very hard.

12:00 – I head in to class on the train. 

It takes me about an hour to get there all told, but I use the train to study more, type up notes, etc.  Or, apparently, to blog when I can’t look at another bloody SQL query.  I usually have lunch, which involves usually left over dinner from the night before, or tuna-fish. Very exciting 2.0.

From 1:00 – 3:00, I have Databases.  In databases, for the past six weeks, we’ve discussed SQL fairly exclusively, which is the language in which most databases are constructed and accessed. We’ve been using the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Swimming results, competitors, countries and events to practice our SQL, which is fun and interesting. I find SQL to be very comforting, as it’s English like and 75% intuitive (unlike C#, which is as I’d imagine Martians to to communicate. If they were extremely lazy and difficult. No offence, C# – love you!)

3:00 – 5:00 is Interaction Design, my favorite class – it’s all about learning how people interact with what’s around them; everything from computers to GPS’s to trains.  It’s a very theoretical, rather than technical class, and really enjoyable.

5:00-5:45 – I hop on one of the City Bikes and pedal to Fusion Hot Yoga, where I teach three days a week.

5:45 – 7:15 – I teach my incredible students a class. They make my week!!

7:15 – 8:30 – commute home, to my beautiful man, dog, and house.  Anthony usually makes dinner, which is some variation on a theme of protein and veggies.

9:15pm – “Study’”. Aka, sound asleep on the couch until Anthony comes and gets me. Then, I wake up and start it all again!

QOTD: What’s an average day like for you?

Hi friends,

It drives me batty when people apologize for not blogging. For one, I usually haven’t noticed. I follow a hundred some-odd blogs, some who post thrice-daily, some who post monthly. While I can easily list the few who post many times a day, between those who post weekly and those who post quarterly, there is little difference – I enjoy when they do, but don’t miss when they don’t. I consistently posted daily (and sometimes many times per day) for a while, while I was a full-time personal trainer and yoga instructor. Full time in those careers is a combined 20 hours per week, which left a generous 20+ hours for blogging. It felt perfect.

Then, as it does, life got distracting. First, we traveled for six months non-stop, and while I tried to blog daily, my camera died and internet was often sparse. Then, we moved here, and adjusting to a new country was no picnic. Then, I started university, studying a brand new subject which was impossibly challenging. It feels like every waking moment is spent studying. And of course, there’s the puppy.

For the past week, my family has been here, and we’ve had a blast. And, truth be told, I’ve missed blogging. Checking back through my blog is such a fun way to re-experience adventures, be reinspired for recipes, and see my progress emotionally, physically and spiritually. I’d love to be able to have a record of the trip, and be able to look back and see the ridiculous fun we’ve had.

Plus, reading the blogs from the states makes me feel a little bit less disconnected, and it’s such a wonderful way to “get to know” people, and connect to them. I imagine people are a bit curious about what it’s like to live in Australia (It’s true, we do ride kangaroos to work.)

To make a long story short, I’m not going to apologize to you for not blogging, because I imagine you have better things to do. However, I do want to say that I feel a renewed commitment to my blog, and I am just happy to be here and get to share what I can.

Have a great day, everyone! Back to studying!

After my promise of pizza recipes “tomorrow” after my last post, well, a week isn’t so much different then a day, right?  This masters program is truly taking up every moment, including all those moments I had been using on my blog. I really thank you for your patience as I navigate these waters.

Anyway, pizza.

Pizza so good that we’ve had it three times in 8 days.   Is it overkill? Absolutely.  Is it candida friendly? 100% (provided you are ok with nightshades, which many are not. I am.) Is it totally, and completely, and utterly delicious? You betcha!

The first time I attempted paleo/candida friendly pizza, I used pure almond flour with some egg and baking soda.  While it was completely divine – indulgent, buttery, and crispy – after two small slices, I felt so over stuffed that I didn’t want to eat for a week. It felt like a very special treat, but I wanted to find a way to pizza it up more than once in a while. Before the ACD, we had gluten-free pizza around once a fortnight, and it was our common indulgence. I really wanted to find a way not to give up that delight, but also make it both candida friendly and not so high calorie that I felt stuffed from a tiny bit.

So, I did a little research, and rediscovered my favorite primal blog (save for the INCREDIBLE Mark’s Daily Apple.)  Primal Palate is a sophisticated blog with fantastic recipes, including the one for this crust.  The only way I edited it was by using 1/4 cup LSA instead of flax meal, so for the full recipe, check them out here.

Here’s what the crust looked like after I made it on the second attempt (Anthony did his perfectly the first night, but was on a conference call while I made the second batch.)  Not the prettiest, but it sure tasted divine.

The important thing to know about this pizza is that it takes a LONG TIME to cook, in comparison to other crusts.  It takes around 50 minutes to cook the crust, before adding toppings. However, it’s totally worth it. Trust me on this one.

For our first pizza, since I’ve been trying to rotate my nightshades and not have more than 1-2 per meal, I decided to top it with a spicy pesto sauce and not a tomato. Excellent choice. I know vegan paleo is a contradiction in terms, but it does fall under both categories!

Vegan Paleo Rocket Pesto

Grain-free, dairy-free, nut-free option, sugar-free, paleo, candida friendly

Prep-time: 5 minutes

Cook-time: 0 minutes

Total time: 5 minutes

Recipe by: Kat Reiner

Ingredients:

• 2-3 cups rocket (or basil, or parsley, or a combination. Even mint would be yummy.)
• 1/4 cup-ish olive oil
• 1/2 lemon’s juice
• 1/4 cup-ish walnuts (or freshly toasted sunflower seeds for nut free)
• 1/4 cup water (for making a pizza, or smoother sauce)

Instructions:

Put all ingredients in a food processor except for the water and oil. Blend until a thick paste.  Add combination of olive-oil, water, in your preferred proportions, until the pesto tastes how you’d like it to.  Enjoy on crackers, pizza, veggies – you name it!

Candida Pizza Topping ideas;

• Goat Cheese (if tolerating daily)
• pesto
• grilled vegetables
• roasted zucchini
• beef or chicken mince
• grilled chicken

Hope you enjoy!

Hello friends,

Today’s post is a bit off our normal topic of grain-free delights and yoga sequences, though I promise to post the recipes for the grain-free, veggie-based pizzas tomorrow!

For those who don’t know (read: those outside my immediate family and the club itself) I am vice president and co-founder of Women in Technology at QUT.  I got started with the club via a mutual friend before I even started at QUT, and it seemed like a great way to get my foot in the door socially, help a fledgling organization grow, and meet industry professionals.  Particularly considering the fact that I was new to IT myself, being part of the club seemed like a great way to start.

Thank Goodness Women in IT have come so far. Or have they?

When people hear about WiT, they usually come up with one of two responses; either “I am so happy that WiT exists!  There’s nothing like it here, and boy, do we need it.” The other response is, “Why on Earth, in this day and age, does Women in Technology exist? Why do we need to be separated by gender? Isn’t that anti-feministic? Misogynistic? Just plain unnecessary? ‘”

This post is written in response to the latter.

As a woman coming from a performing arts background, where women outnumber men, I can’t quite say I understand the “in this day and age” line, particularly when I read statistics such as these.

According to a recent New York Times article, the participation of Women in IT is in dire straits. As recently as 1985, 37 percept of graduates in computer science were women. In 2010, the percentage sank to 18.2 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Nicholas Pippenger, a mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd university in California, assesses that “It must be the unique area of science and technology where women have made negative progress.”

It’s hard to believe statistics like these, in this “day and age”, but all I have to do is look around the lecture halls of  My Programming and Database design classes for anecdotal evidence. In both of these lectures with 300 or more students, I can count the number of women on my fingers and toes. For whatever reason, only a very small number of women receive degrees in IT, and for those of us that do, looking around a room and seeing but one other female face is a rather sobering experience.

Considering that IT is not, in fact, the ‘next’ frontier but is indeed the frontier, and that nearly every field in the world has a strong IT component, the fact that women will make up less than 20% of the educated workforce in this field is horrifying. I am not blaming men for this any more than I am blaming women.  There are plenty of research studies that discuss this disparity, but the two reasons that come up the most are that

1. Women are convinced that IT is too hard.
2. Women are afraid of the cultural stereotype of Computer Scientist as the ultimate loner geek.

The club Women in IT aims to do its part to rectify a these misconceptions and encourage women to take part in what is undoubtedly the fastest growing and most dynamic field in the world.  By offering a mentorship program with women who are already in the field, a student-supported-study and tutoring program, WiT also, ideally, takes out the pressure to be “one of the guys” if you don’t want to be one.  WiT gives women a place to be supported, meet successful men and women in the industry, and see a group of wildly diverse, intelligent, and hard-working women in action.  Men and alumni are also welcome members of the club, and have been some of our strongest supporters and contributors to date.

To come to a larger point, however, I don’t quite understand how giving women a particular opportunity to be with other women is anti-feministic. Indeed, as a staunch feminist who has volunteered and worked with organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Women for Women, I can’t wrap my head around the argument that not ignoring the giant elephant in the room that there simply aren’t enough women in IT somehow makes me less of an equal player in the IT field. In fact, I think it’s perhaps exemplary of the most hard-won aspects of the Feminist Revolution – the ability for women to make a choice. In today’s ‘day and age’ if you don’t want to be in a Women-focused group, guess what?  You don’t have to. Join ITSA, or QUT IT or Engineers without Boarders, all of whom will welcome you with open arms.

So, if you believe, as I do, that women deserve truly equal treatment, attention and advancement in the field of IT, or if you are one of the far too few women who are breaking into one of the most gender imbalanced industries out there, and would like some extra support, educational, career and social opportunities, we would love to meet you.  If you’d prefer not to, celebrate that, and the extraordinary work and effort of the women who came before you to give you that opportunity – to make a choice, follow your dreams, and join any club your heart desires.