Day 17

lj-tags: in today's news, iron nani

I'm on day 17 of my embargo on High Fructose Corn Syrup. Its been easier
than I thought - no rampant cravings, no mysterious headaches, just me being
inexplicably hungry a lot. Of course, this makes sense - when your body gets
used to getting those extra 600-ish calories a day, it'll complain until it
gets used to operating without. I will confess that I have found myself
looking longingly at dew when I see it left out, or when Freak offers me one
out of his stash - but I have been good, I don't drink any & go get some
juice or water or tea to drink instead.

I suppose I should be pleased that I'm very good at ignoring hunger when I
can't be bothered with eating.

The thing I've been noticing lately - on the subject of paying attention to
my own personal cause/effect - is that when I cook dinner for myself, out of
actual ingredients, I don't get hungry in the middle of the night. If I
yield to temptation and hit Jack in the Box (or go out & eat @ Shari's)
it'll fill me up... but about 4 hours later I'm waking up hungry. And yet I
<u>know</u> that a jumbo jack & 2 deep-fried tacos are not what you'd call
"low calorie". And I'm not eating any more food than what will fit into one
of my purple rice bowls - maybe about 2 cups by volume. If that.

The real bummer of all this is that now that I'm not going to the Farmer's
Market every weekend, I don't have this supply of inspirational veggies
showing up in my kitchen. Which really helps with the whole "what the hell
am I making for dinner" question every night. As well as the financial side
of things - at the farmer's market I'd spend (maybe) $15-20 on a whole bunch
of local/organic produce, and make dinner AND the next day's lunch off the
haul all that week. As compared to fast food - I spend $15 & we're fed for
that night. I'm going to have to find a different source for inspirational
veggies - Safeway perhaps? They're open 'till 1 am, and QFC is open all
night, although Safeway really doesn't carry much of the weird stuff that I
find fun.

Well, there's always Top Foods. I adore their produce dept.

Gravy Debate

lj-tags: iron nani

Which is another question.

The turkey, when I cooked it, left me with more than a pitcher full of
drippings. Of which the top 3" is turkey fat. Which, seeing as I stuck it at
the back of the fridge it all solidified into one fatty, easily removed
brick.

The question: should I save the greasy brick & use it to make some kick-ass
roux? Or should I assume that all the horrid fat-soluable toxins are in that
fat, & just toss it out, using butter to make the roux to make some gravy?

Think think think. Well, its a moot point until I get home anyway...

want

I want m&m's.

Like, really badly.

Not sure why.

more miscellania

There's a hint of blindness when posting from work via email. You can't see
your lj, you can't finish posting & click over to your friendslist to see
what everyone's up to, you can't look & see if anyone's commented on your
posts lately. I've speculated that livejournal is much like putting a
candle in the window for others on their own journey, but posting this way
is almost like writing a prayer on a piece of paper then burning it in the
incense bowl. Just a little strange.

Getting ready for work today - well, in the final 5 minutes or so anyway -
my ankle suddenly started hurting. Which my thought was, I haven't done
anything to re-injure myself... well, crap, incoming weather system. Let
the Freak know then finished packing up then headed out. Which, roughly 5
minutes after THAT, its HAILING on my CAR!!!! Not rain, not snow, but
actualy honest to god frozen teeny ice cubes dropping from the sky. I was
shocked, dismayed, and inexplicably wanted to turn right around & go back to
bed. Like, more than usual. Silly me.

Last night I discovered that Freak never enjoyed the pleasure of singing
"Brother John" in either english OR french. Which makes me wonder - did my
polyglot upbringing result in me picking up words & phrases like a sponge?
Am I destined to create a pidgin everywhere I go? Not that I mind.

Also, last night I discovered that while my mouse touchpad cannot be used as
a very small wacom tablet, my old standby of a light under a sheet of glass
makes a good makeshift light table. And when added to my scanner plus
photoshop installed on my laptop? Evil. Pure & complete Evil. I started
sketching at my kitchen table last night and FUCK it was easier than I
thought once I started drawing. Hell, after a 15-year hiatus I may even be
better than I used to be simply because i'm more coordinated than I was when
I was a teenager. Of course now I have to re-clean off my kitchen table &
perhaps spend the weekend with my watercolors & inks. Maybe turn one of the
sketches last night into an actual christmas card for once. Addicting.
Horribly so. You're all in trouble now...

Either a dumb, or brilliant, thought

Lj-tags: tekromancy

Is is possible to use one's laptop's touchmouse as a teeeeeeny wacom tablet?
With a stylus of some kind?

Worth messing with when I go home.

darkness calls

Just finished doing my insurance elections for this coming year.

Had to choose a dentist to be my primary dental provider, which was somewhat
dumb since I got 2 options for Snohomish County... admittedly I could have
gone with the more expensive option, and had more choice, but i've never
really had issues with dentists and one of the options was pretty close to
where I live, which is generally more important to me anyway.

The other election that was the one I wanted to make sure to change though
was my Vision provider. I've always liked the Transitions lenses - they get
dark when it gets bright out, which is almost required here in the Puget
Sound Area. However the old option - which was the ONLY option we had -
didn't cover transitions lenses. They'd negotiated prices with providers on
their network that were probably cheaper than paying cash, but still. $65?
That's a bit more than I can throw around normally, especially since I have
a hard time finding frames that look good on me in the bargain bin. But this
new provider, VSP, they cover photochromic lenses in full, and up to $130
towards your frames. So i'm happy.

The only thing I have to decide now is, do I get an eye exam and "free"
glasses on my old insurance, then get the photochromic ones in January when
it switches over? It would be a good idea, really, since having a spare set
of glasses is a <u>good</u> thing, as I learned when my last pair snapped in
half. Of course this would require me to actually find someone who takes
the old insurance, get my eye exam & prescription, then choose & order new
glasses...procrastination being my favorite sport & all.

Gotta Get Fruity

Lj-tags: in today's news, iron nani, green

One bummer about cutting out the HFCS is that it also means that I can't
fall back on canned peaches anymore. Yes, they do have canned peaches that
are canned in fruit juice... but the problem with those is that the sugar
content in the liquid is not enough to act as a preservative over the 2 or 3
days the uneaten peaches sit in tupperware in my fridge. Which is also sad,
because i'm not willing to eat them fast enough to keep them from spoiling,
and i'm not willing to search out the overly-sugared kind just for
preservation needs.

So this means I need to go to QFC after work tonight.

Yes, the peach season is over & done with. However, QFC carries (or at least
used to carry) frozen fruit from a local grower. I'm not sure if its
organic, but it is local, and with it being frozen to where I can reach in &
grab out however many I need, I can have my little
yogurt/honey/fruit/granola breakfasts with impunity. And without looking
mournfully at the green hand of bananas on the counter, wondering if any of
them have ripened sufficiently to eat. That and they'd probably have frozen
blueberries. And if there is any fruit that I don't mind having on hand
frozen, its blueberries...

Fall of Western Civilization, Part 2

Lj-tags: in today's news

I'm sitting here drinking my last can of non-vending machine dew.

Admittedly I'd stopped hitting the vending machine for my dew fix months ago
because I was really annoyed by their inability to 1) stock dew in cans and
2) clean out the money when they restocked the machine so you could
<u>buy</u> the dew they'd (maybe) put in there. It hasn't been a true
boycott - I did break down & feed my money to the machine a couple of times
when my cache was empty, but i've been mostly good throughout.

But after my shopping trip this weekend, and seeing the ingredients lists of
those jars of spagetti sauce...(Citric Acid? HFCS? Why not leave them BOTH
out?) I'm struck with a renewed interest in turning a declaration of Not My
Friend into a full-blown embargo. Where there will be no HFCS containing
items consumed by me if I can possibly avoid it. No dew, no "juice", no
fake maple syrup... Which, really, i've already been doing these last few
months but with the exception of the dew.

So here's some numbers, for my thermodynamically-oriented friends, as well
as myself:

<u>Mountain Dew</u>
Calories: 170
Sodium: 65mg
Total Carb. 46g; Sugars 46g
Caffeine: 54mg

So the thing that's really been holding me back from going all out on the
HFCS-Embargo thing has been the lack of caffiene. Which, I do have options
available - there's the excedrin clone painkillers in the first aid kit at
work, there's the eternal collegiate standby of No-Doz. And, of course, tea
& coffee. (anything with aspartame or other synthetic sweeteners give me
raging headaches, so that's not an option either.) What i'd like to do, of
course, is figure a way to add caffeine to drinks I mix up - adding fruit
juice to tea, for example, or whatever goofy/fun things I come up with that
day.

So i'm thinking I should hit walmart tonight after work. Check their prices
on medium grain rice by the 25 lb bag, since i'm out, but also to look at
their mini-section of No-Doz type items & see what dosages & ingredients
they include. The only thing I was wanting was to get to give up HFCS for
something - like Lent, but longer, except not for New Years since that's a
little abused. So, here we go...wish me luck.

An Idea

Lj-tags: manga, blithering

Which occurred to me. Manga, when you buy it, is around $10-$15 per volume.
However, after you read it, unless its a truly earth-shattering manga, most
of it just takes up space until months later when you might want to read it
again. Which makes the library a truly nice thing when it comes to manga -
you can read it for free, which if it does turn out to be something
earth-shattering you can then go out & buy your own copy of it.

Sure, you could buy stuff & sell off the volumes you don't want to keep. But
what if you could get it on the computer? Takes up no space, just hard drive
space, and you could burn it off to CD if you wanted to make backups.
Problem with this is that scanning most manga is difficult, just because of
the binding method they use - you either crack the glue so badly that it
disintigrates, or you get scans that look really odd because you
<u>didn't</u> smush the book down to the glass to get a clean scan.

Idea? If you got enough otaku together, had them pitch in like $10/month,
you could buy the manga, razor the pages off the binding then scan them,
convert to pdf, & distribute them to your "manga club" members. And
possibly more, if you haunted half-price books or the library book sale
table or yard sales or suchlike. Hell, I have several volumes of random
manga i've aquired that way that I have no compunction against sacrificing
like that. Of course the hard part would be finding people who wanted to
participate in something along those lines, that had the money to spend &
didn't mind dismembering manga that way...

Might just do that anyway with the volumes I have. Just to save the space.

jeez i'm lagging

I've noticed a couple of things about succumbing to the temptation to get
fast food for dinner.

One is that when I go to Jack for dinner, yes, its quick, yes, its cheap;
but while it does adequately feed the both of us dinner it does not leave
any leftovers for the next day. Which is more nessecary than i'd originally
thought - I tend to take leftovers with me for lunch at work, and Freak will
nuke & eat them when he gets up during the day.

The other thing that I realized is that if I were to take the money I spend
on Jack - as little as it is, really - and spent it on buying a rebuild kit
for the grill on my back patio? Well, i'd have money left over for
replacement grills, and a full tank of propane, and a bunch of ground
beef... Perhaps when I get my sick time cashout from the last year i'll get
over myself & just order it all - that way I can do the burger thing, and
the grilled chicken thing, and the grilled veggie thing... Good times.

spring forward, fall back

Lj-tags: in today's news

It sounds like it should be a Tai-Chi move or something.

Freak spent the weekend, as he has for the last week or so, working on the
heap of clutter in his room in anticpation of inspectors & window installers
needing to be able to walk through the room. Which he's pretty much gotten
things cleared out - mostly - and I would intermittently wander up to ask
him questions & get enlisted in "helping" - one visit he asked me to look
around & pick computer screws out of the carpet. Thankfully it occured to me
after the 3rd screw that they were made out of metal & made him give me a
magnet out of his speaker magnet collection. But several large boxes of
stuff got donated, as well as a good sized box of paper & plastic bottles
got recycled, and a couple of little bags of garbage thrown out. He got
various caches of random tools sorted into his big toolbox, and parts sorted
into his random computer parts cabinet, cables into the random cable
storage... you get the idea.

I mean, his room is still a disaster area, but at least its not as bad as it
has been.

Otherwise... Alex came over to visit his cat, & ended up hanging out with me
in the kitchen for a bit. I'd installed trillian the other day, & got to
chat with a few people in IM - my sister in taiwan & gogo both said hi, and
I burned through a bunch of text messages with <lj user="misterflames"> at
one point. He needs an Amnityville Toaster. If anyone has one they want to
get rid of. I watched some of my stuff off the DVR, freeing up some hard
drive space; and watched the Yuyu Hakusho movie i'd gotten from the library.
Set up my VCR special for it. And it was odd - it was post-rescuing Yukina,
but Pre-Dark Tournament, and they didn't use the same voice actors as the tv
series, and they kept saying Kuwabara's name wrong. Admittedly it could be
they were saying it RIGHT in the movie by pronouncing it Kuwahara, but i'm
really not sure. It really was throwing me off.

Finished reading <u>Blame!</u>, which I was really liking despite it being
post-apocalyptic sci-fi, sadly the library only had through vol. 7 in its
collection. Its quite possible there ISN'T any more than that. I'd have to
look at the publisher's site to be sure.

It really feels like I didn't get anything accomplished this weekend. Sadly,
it also doesn't feel like I got a break out of my 2 days off... like I need
a day off to recover from my days off. Odd. Of course that could simply be
because I didn't really COOK this weekend, just sort of scavenged. That
could be it.