Sunday, August 24, 2008
Calories, Mature Taste, Optional
I go through phases where I feel I should stop drinking soda, and occasionally I do, for a few weeks. It never lasts though, since eventually I have a night where I really need the caffeine to stay up to work on some urgent project, or I just really want that cola taste to pair with fried food or pizza or nachos, and I gots to have a Pepsi, or sometimes a Dr. Pepper. (By the way, I'm typing this at 8am, 3 hours past when I wanted to be asleep, after working 8 straight hours. I'm starving since the peaches I meant to snack on at midnight are still sitting, unsliced, on the kitchen counter, and I'm now gobbling corn chips and washing them down with about a 1 to 3 mixture of mango juice and Tanqueray, which is hitting my empty stomach like a cannonball from the 10m platform. So um... beware typos. And brain-os. And pretty soon drunk-os.)
I'm not a big soda drinker; a day with 2 of them is very rare, but I just figure the empty 150 calories a can is pointless, when I work out so hard to keep a flat stomach. More or less successfully. But I'd like to be a not-soda drinker, so my idea lately is to try and switch to diet soda, as preparation to not drinking the stuff anymore. At least not at home. I can splurge once in a while in a restaurant, I suppose. Unfortunately, I've always hated diet soda. Fortunately, that's part of my plan. I'll drink it for a while and pretty soon I won't want soda anymore at all, since diet soda sucks.
My grandparents used to just Hoover (shop wet-vac?) up the stuff when I was a kid. I'd drink a Pepsi or three every day while visiting them in the summer, and they'd each go through 4-6 cans of Diet Coke. Mostly caffeine free Diet Coke. I was, of course, having the straight Pepsi, and they used to wonder why I was always so hyper. I'd try a sip of one of their Diet Cokes once in a while though, and it would almost make me puke. Literally; I don't mean I didn't like it, I mean that the stuff actually nauseated me. I read Stephen King's
Tommyknockers when it was released in 1990 or so, and when the main character has to force himself to vomit after taking a bunch of sleeping pills, he pours a bunch of salt into a glass of water and drinks that. I used to wonder why he didn't just have a Diet Coke.
Anyway, impendingly-drunken digression aside, since I've sort of resolved to switch to diet soda, I figured I should compare and contrast. I know I like Pepsi more than Coke since I have Coke on airplanes and in restaurants from time to time, and it's just not as good. It's got a kind of malted, gooey flatness to it, while Pepsi is much crisper and fresher on the tongue. I may lapse into wine-inspired terms here in a minute. Be warned.
After checking the selection at CostCo this week, (Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke, but no Coke Zero) I stopped at a Mini Mart on the way home from the gym Thursday night, and picked these two up. Taste test!
I've heard word of mouth extolling the quaffability of Coke Zero, and their commercials are relentless in driving home the "tastes just like Coke" meme. (Actually, most of the Coke Zero commercials are those idiotic "
we're suing ourselves for copyright/taste infringement" ones that I think are easily the dumbest beverage commercials since Budweiser had those non-threatening black guys bellowing "Wazzzzup". After a full football season of those ads, I swore never to drink Budweiser again, a vow not particularly hard to keep, giving the utter mediocrity of their brew. I'd probably have sworn off Coke Zero by now too, based on those stupid lawsuit, faux-reality commercials, if I'd watched TV anywhere other than on the overhead sets at the gym in the last year.)
So, supposedly Coke Zero tastes like Coke (although the fact that their commercials state it is pretty strong evidence that it does not). Ironically, I don't particularly like Coke, but I figured I might like it more than Diet Pepsi, so I had to compare. Hence the (plastic) bottles of Diet Pepsi and Coke Zero. I thought there was a Pepsi One product, at some point, though I don't know what the difference between that and Diet Pepsi might be. (I do know the difference between a big shot of 100 proof gin, or not, in my morning/late night mango juice is, though. Cause I am flying!) They didn't have it at the gas station, faux-7/11 I got my samples at, though, and they didn't have it at CostCo either, so let us never speak of it again. CostCo didn't have Coke Zero either, but that was almost to be expected, since their selection has rocketed downhill over the past year or two. At least 5 or 6 things I used to get there every time are no longer carried, and I do almost as much bulk shopping at Smart & Final as CostCo now. Not that Smart & Final is any good, and it's not as cheap, but since CostCo no longer sells chicken chili, vegetarian refried beans, jalapenos, red pepper flakes, battered chicken strips, canned peas, tater tots, poppers, onion rings, any frozen pizza that's not pepperoni or supreme, sliced black olives, Dr. Pepper, Shi'itake burgers, portobello mushrooms, or any fresh produce that's not 1) rotten in 2 days, or 2) totally green and never to become edibly-ripe, those of us who shop in bulk and live nowhere near a Wal-Mart (and wouldn't shop there if we did) have somewhat limited options.
So, the soda. Or something.
I had the Diet Pepsi Thursday night, pairing it with a variety of fried food appetisers (most of the Smart & Final options listed above) and a garden burger (which CostCo usually has, though brand keeps changing the the price keeps going up). It wasn't bad. Tasted like weak, slightly flat Pepsi, but it was drinkable and didn't have that horrifying chemical additive taste that diet soda usually has. I can't imagine drinking one by itself, just for the taste of it, but it didn't make me want to Tommyknockers all over the floor, and when I had a few inches left in the bottle after my food was done, I sipped it happily enough.
I had the Coke Zero the next day, with a similar menu (for the sake of comparison). It's much different. Tastes absolutely nothing like Coke, which didn't surprise me, after all the effort those commercials spend swearing that it was interchangeable with the American classic. I don't think it's on
my old commercials logic page, but it's pretty much common sense; anything an ad spends that much time telling you is true, is sure to be false.
What does it taste like? I can't really describe it, despite my recent years of wine adjective training. It's shockingly artificial. Like something that fell from space, or was engineered to never spoil and to keep astronauts healthy on long voyages. It's not really food-like, and it doesn't taste organic. It's got a weird, slippery mouth feel too, kind of like mouthwash, as it slips down your throat without leaving any impression on your tongue. It's like some kind of high tech, biologically engineered hydralic solution, like something Data would drink to keep his interior joints squeak-free.
I don't mean this as an insult or a criticism, either. It's nothing like Coke, or any soda with actual sugar in it, but it's distinctive and unique, and it tastes like it's designed to taste like it does -- whereas most diet sodas just taste like lame, melted-ice versions of their full sugar selves. They didn't try to make Coke Zero just another cola-esque liquid; they made it something all its own. I didn't particularly like it, but I can imagine a person deciding they liked it, or growing/choosing to like it, with an intensity that most diet sodas will never know. It's potent and pungent and memorable, and 2 days and I can still remember exactly what it felt like in my mouth, and I'm sure I could pick it out of a blind taste test. Whereas I already have no idea what the Diet Pepsi tasted like, other than being a vaguely cola-ish stuff with a hint of that aspartame-tang sugar free products (and gum) all have these days. (Coke Zero is pure artificial sweetener taste. It leaves your mouth feeling like you just crammed a whole box of Orbitz.)
That said, I doubt I'll ever drink it again. It's just too chemically. I poured out the last 1/3 of it when my food was done, since drinking it was making me kind of uneasy. It didn't taste that bad, but it felt like it was going to give me cancer of the brain, or nasal passages, or something in that area.
So while I can't really recommend the Diet Pepsi, and I'm not sure if I'll buy some of it, or try to just survive on water alone, and the occasional beer (wine too, but not with greasy fried foods), I will not do Coke Zero. Don't trust it. Too weird.
Labels: commercials, food
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Kitchen Surprise
There are few small bonuses in life more pleasurable than peering dubiously into the fridge, your belly rumbling, and finding two last pieces of leftover pizza you'd forgotten you had. Lunch mission = accomplished!
Labels: food
Friday, April 11, 2008
Summertime?
Suddenly,
it's hot. And I'm reminded of why I so prefer the winter, spring, and fall. Well, winter and spring, anyway. It's been unseasonably mild here in the North Bay and the whole Bay Area for months; I recall it raining steadily all through Feb/March/April/May and into June last year, my first (and I thought then, my last) in San Rafael. This year I've hardly seen a cloud since Valentine's Day (literally, not figuratively), but it's been quite temperate. I don't mind the sun when it's 62, but over 70 I start getting unhappy, and above 80 my mood deteriorates appreciably.
Predictably, I've felt peevish and antisocial yesterday and today, although the heat did at least motivate one benefit. It drove me to get my first
Jamba Juice of the year. Peach Pleasure, sub rasp for banana, w/ energy boost, kplzthx. I'm also experiencing another one of my "hot weather only" desires. Tuna salad. I haven't had a Jamba since last fall, but I think about them from time to time, since I love fruit smoothies. I haven't had tuna salad since last fall, but the thought of making/eating some hasn't entered my mind even once. Until just now, as I looked in the fridge and tried to think of something I might be able to stand eating when it's still hot/bright outside, and unbidden, the idea of tuna salad on Ritz crackers leaped into my thoughts.
I'm now trying to think what else I like to eat only when it's hot out, and wishing I could somehow sleep (in a cold room) until Monday, since the forecast says hot all weekend, before a return to the 60s that we average this time of year. The countdown to November and cold weather begins... now.
Labels: food, weather
Friday, March 28, 2008
Cat, food, bones, and humor
All-inclusive post title there, eh?
The headline first, since it's timely (I guess) and amusing. Here's what it said in the navigation space on ESPN.com this afternoon. I glanced at it, blinked, and looked again, wondering how I'd wound up on ESPN Europe, or Desportes, or something. My best guess was that this headline was about a UK football transaction, but I couldn't imagine why that would be news on ESPN.com, when adult Americans care nothing for US soccer, much less European soccer.
I clicked the link out of curiosity, and laughed when it was some NASCAR news. I don't "get" NASCAR in any way. It's guys driving modified sedans in a circle for 4 hours. It seems impossible to me that this could be a major sport in entertainment attention span deficit America, but somehow it is. ESPN pays a lot of money to show the races, so of course they're going to headline news developments in it, but the races actually do attract 100,000+ spectators every weekend, and it's not just in the south anymore; real states like California and New York now host these events.
I had a long blog post half-written about NASCAR many months ago, with a bunch of links to a photo gallery of NASCAR fans I'd seen on SportsIllustrated.com. In that post I was going to try to derive some logic to the popularity of the sport, since it baffles me, and was going to point to racism as a contributing factor. Of the crowd shots on SI.com, 85% were fat men,
99% were white people, many had
Confederate flags on their vehicles or flying over the grandstands, etc. Plus the drivers and crews and owners and sponsors of NASCAR are almost entirely whitewashed. It's not that NASCAR fans are necessarily bigots or racists, but it's certainly a sport that racist whites can follow without ever being perturbed by the site of any frighteningly dark skin. Plus, getting involved in NASCAR requires one to have a family background in racing, and the fact that there's no athletic ability required of the competitors means that the "sport" is not, and never will be, dominated by non-whites.
I never published that post since blogger crashed and ate it before I was done, and I was losing interest in the subject even as I typed about it. Much as is happening right now. So, to wrap things up, I don't get NASCAR, and I don't understand why anyone finds it interesting, it annoys me that it's clogging up space on sports TV and websites, but I don't care enough to hate it, or make some big effort to sociological indict it as a racist entertainment. Especially now that, like Wal-Mart, it's spread across the country and has gained some black, latino, and asian fans.
In fact, this puzzling headline is proof of NASCAR's growing diversity. Ten years ago that headline would have read, "Bubba Joe receives beer from Budweiser Racing" and I'd have known at once it was about NASCAR, wouldn't have clicked to see the details (lite or draft?), and wouldn't have had material for a blog post.
In other photo news, I had this for lunch a few weeks ago. It was a semi-date afternoon with the IG, and we did a
chocolate factory tour, and then drove over to Berkeley for a crepe. I'd only previously had crepes from dessert bars in buffet restaurants, and had never enjoyed them. Tasty exterior, like a very thin pancake, but the stuffing was essentially foamy cake icing, and unpalatable.
The IG wanted to get a savory crepe though, which just means non-dessert. I was game, so we went to one of the many crepes places within a few blocks of UC Berkeley, and split a spinach, mushroom, and cheese crepe. Very tasty. It's basically a glorified pastry-style quesadilla, served rolled up into a funnel, so you can hold it at the point and devour it like a giant waffle ice cream cone. We ate ours on a plate with forks, since we were splitting it and we aren't savages.
I don't know if I'd make them a regular part of my diet, even if there were a good crepes place conveniently near my home and price were no object, but it was nice for a change. Plus it was fun to see the cooking process on the special crepe oven, as pictured above. Nice image quality for a cell phone cam, eh? Remember that, because...
This is a photo I took of Jinx in the tub, also on the cell phone camera. It's not that my camera died, it's that the only illumination in the bathroom at the time was an overhead heat lamp, which accounts for the red/orange light you see suffusing things in this shot.
Jinx sleeps in the bedroom with me at night, and I close the door since it's like, bright in the plant-infested living room. She's a quiet kitty though, and usually sleeps soundly for the whole night. Or at least doesn't become unsoundly enough to wake me up, so same thing. She's always thirsty in the
morning when I get up though, since while she's got a bowl of water, she only drinks out of it in desperate need. She gets most of her water from a little waterfall relaxation sculpture thing in the living room, where she can drink it as it flows down over the rocks. She's also fond of drinking out of the drain dishes below houseplants, though she likes rainwater best. She was chugging the overflow from various mosquito-enabling dishes and trays on the back patio, during the rainy season (which usually extends until about June here, but apparently ended in mid-February this very sunny winter).
I don't leave the water fountain on overnight though, and since it's always blindingly bright in my living room, I usually just crack the door to let her out of the bedroom when I wake up. She heads out into the living room, but usually returns to me in the bathroom where I'm shaving or using the toilet or showering, since there's nothing to drink in the living room, since the fountain hasn't been turned on yet. And she's thirsty, as I might have previously mentioned.
Lately, she's grown impatient and has taken to finding her own sources of flowing water. She drank out of the sink constantly when she (and I) lived in Malaya's condo, but lost that habit in this apt. She still hasn't reacquired it, but she has lately started hopping into the tub and licking up any drops of water she can find, if some linger from last night's shower. Better yet, sometimes she can guilt Daddy into turning on the tub, just a trickle, which she then uses primarily to get her face wet while occasionally managing to lap a few drops out of the air.
Just to end with a better quality image, here's one from her work on the back patio a few weeks ago. I put her box out there to air out a bit with a bunch of new litter in it, and as always seems to be the case with housecats, she found the prospect of free range pooping to be quite intoxicating. She kicks about twice per box visit, when the box is inside, with the usual lid on it. When she catches it outside though, and uncovered? She
digs like Faildog.
Finally, here's a long overdue photo of last year's birthday present from Malaya. We continued our annual tradition of visiting
The Bone Room on or around my birthday, and since I already had a nice sheep's skull w/ horns, and tree branch with some bat skeletons on it, I diversified to this articulated snake skeleton. Rather a nice before and after sort of image, eh? Click to see it much larger.
Labels: food, jinx, photos, snakers
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Frankenmilk?
Amusing
news from the world of genetically-modified foodstuffs, where Ben & Jerry's ice cream is fighting a court battle to preserve their right to advertise their product as they wish. Big business interests are fighting to keep them from doing so. Why?
...a newly formed farmers' group, backed by Monsanto, is pushing for labeling changes, saying the hormone-free labels imply that the milk is safer than other milk, when they say it's not.
"There's no question that rBST is safe. ... That's what's so frustrating to us, that there are organizations out there that would indicate that it's something other than safe." said Carrol Campbell, a Kansas dairy farmer who co-chairs American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology, the new group.
He says they aren't out to take choices away from consumers. They just want them to know that whatever choice they make, it's the same, nutritious, wholesome product, he said. Monsanto, a corporate sponsor of the group, says it's a question of accuracy in labeling. "Monsanto is really an advocate in support of accurate labeling of dairy products in the dairy case," said Monsanto spokeswoman Lori Hoag.
You've got to love that line. They just want to defend the accurate labeling of products in the dairy case. Who could argue with that?
Now obviously, the Monsanto front group is more concerned with keeping the consumer from knowing about the presence of frankenmilk in their dairy case. They surely pressured Ben & Jerry's and other dairy-consuming companies to use the secretions from their frankencattle, and when they failed to achieve 100% compliance they launched this clever end around; trying to ensure the smooth adoption of their product by banning companies from gaining a competitive advantage by not using it.
It's obvious why Monsanto is doing this, but I can't believe they'll prevail in this court case. They would against a smaller company that lacked the deep pockets to fight them, but Ben & Jerry's isn't some mom and pop organization to be nuisance sued into compliance. Resistance is probably futile in the long run; Monsanto will just bribe, I mean make campaign contributions to, enough congressmen to get a law passed superseding the authority of any local courts. What's right or fair won't matter then, but for now it should hold the day, since Monsanto's is a patently-ridiculous claim; pun intended.
Under FDA guidelines, companies are allowed to claim that their milk comes from cows that were not treated with rBGH, as long as the labels do not "mislead consumers" to believe the milk is safer or better.
Ben & Jerry's packaging says "the FDA has said no significant difference has been shown and no test can now distinguish between milk from rBGH treated and untreated cows."
With that wording, there's just no argument that Ben & Jerry is not within the law, absurd though that law is. It's as if some chemical company (say... Monsanto) sued to ban the sale of "organic" food since that implied that the pesticide residues that persist in most produce are unhealthy. Or if the clover-growers sued to ban honey from being advertised with the
type of flowers it was made from, since saying wildflower, or buckwheat, or sunflower honey implied that clover honey wasn't safe. If Ben & Jerry's wants to say their cows are fed only hay, or alfalfa, or are free range, or are all white with seven black spots, it's their privilege. Whether it's worth the expense or will interest consumers is their problem.
This sort of anti-public health legislation for the benefit of industry isn't exactly unusual in the US; I posted endlessly about
the Mad Cow disease issue a few years ago, and nothing has changed since then. The FDA is still making no serious effort to prevent or uncover CJD in the US beef supply, and they're still legally preventing individual US beef producers from conducting 100% safety testing on their own cows, as they need to do in order to compete in foreign markets. The logic there is the same as with this Monsanto anti-frankenmilk issue; if anyone is allowed to say conclusively that their product is safe, that will imply that other companies' products are not safe. So it's in the best interests of everyone (except the consumer) that no such safety testing is allowed at all.
The key difficulty for Monsanto and other biotech companies is that we've all seen this sort of thing in film, and in 100% of the instances, the mad scientists playing God are, at best,
consumed by their own creations, or, at worst, bring about
the end of life on earth. It's nifty when they figure out a way to splice in jelly fish genes to make rabbits glow in the dark, but that gets scarier when it's something in the food supply, with the potential to mutate in unforseen ways as it moves up the food chain. The issue of frankenfood is huge in Europe and Japan, where they've been fighting to prevent imports of US, genetically enhanced (GE) produce and seeds for years. Maybe the hybrid rice and corn and other products will be wonderful, or maybe they'll look wonderful for a few decades before evolving into something lethal, but there's really no way to absolutely predict the outcome in advance.
I think it's inevitable that this scifi food will become universal, but it's worrisome if you have less than absolute faith that our early fumblings into genetic engineering won't come to some unexpected results. The ones that worry me are those single use seeds. Plants that are engineered to only grow from seed, and not naturally reproduce, so farmers can't buy the seeds once and then grow more each year from the seeds the plants naturally produce. The yield is so good that it's economically worth it to buy the seeds every year, but the disaster movie based on that concept pretty much writes itself. Bees and other insects spread the pollen, there are mutations in the gene, and in fifty years the earth is a desert covered in no forms of plant-life more advanced than moss, except for a few fields of corn that only grow one season and must be replaced by ever-more-expensive genetically-modified seeds. Bon appetite!
Labels: business, food
Friday, May 04, 2007
Sometimes it's better not to know.
So I had a tub of sour cream in the fridge last night, and I was considering cooking something that sour cream could be usefully applied to. Before things escalated to that extent though, I began to wonder just how old that sour cream was. The creamy white goop is rather known for its perishibility, after all. So I started debating it, and trying to remember when I bought it, and the more I thought, the more suspicious I became. Pretty soon I'd not only talked myself out of making taquitos supreme, but had decided to throw away the sour cream as well. But before I did, I had to check to see how rotten it was.
Why? Good question. I was already committed to not eating it and throwing it out, so why bother looking inside the container? Did I crave the sight of green/brown/yellow mold creeping across the surface of the pristine whiteness? Perhaps, but I didn't get that joy, for there was no sign of mold within. It didn't even smell janky.
Paradoxically, that just made me more suspicious. I had decided it was old and rotten, therefore it was supposed to be old and rotten, and the fact that it was old and maybe not rotten merely deepened my suspicions. I dumped it out and washed out the container for future emergency storage needs, and as I did I tried to construct a metaphor that would analogize this situation. Why do people (obviously including myself) have to check to see if something is gross or dirty or rotten when we're throwing it out anyway? You know you look at a bandaid when you change it, or peer closely at the mold on the surface of bread you never got around to eating, etc. I think it's just curiosity, and it's not just potentially cat-killing, but psyche-scarring.
So here's my advice. If you're in a bar and some hot (by bar lighting, at least) girl all but picks you up, and you two end up making out in your car and suddenly she's got her head in your lap and you're thinking it's the best night ever... when she's leaving, don't check. Do you really want to know if "she" has a vagina or not? Think of it as the
Eddie Murphy correlation. Except, of course, Eddie wanted a transsexual prostitute.
Labels: food
Monday, April 16, 2007
Situation Hunger
Just a pointless and short observation, but what's with being hungry when you're awake, but not when you're sleeping? I was up very late and had to get up early for a thing, and despite being fed when I went to sleep, when I woke up 4 hours later I was hungry, and having now returned home from the thing, I'm starving. Yet it's still less than 7 hours since I went to bed. In a perfect world I'd still be sleeping, and when I woke I wouldn't likely be very hungry. But because I've been awake for 3 hours I'd prefer to have spent in bed, I need more food? It's not as if I've been carrying heavy things.
Labels: food, sleep
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Number of Morbidly Obese, Hostess Stock, Soar
Depressing
news item from Yahoo today.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The number of morbidly obese Americans, those who weigh 100 pounds (45 kilograms) over normal weight, is rising much faster than the rest of the obese population, said a study released Tuesday.
The number of severely obese people rose 50 percent from 2000 to 2005, reaching three percent of the US population, or 6.8 million adults, according to a study by the Rand Corporation.
That rise was twice as fast as the gains registered in the moderate obesity, it said.
In order to be considered morbidly obese, a five-foot-ten-inch (1.77 meter) man would have to weigh 300 pounds (136 kilograms) or more, and a five-foot-four-inch (1.64 meter) woman would weigh 250 pounds (113 kilograms) or more.
You have to tip 40 BMI to qualify, while 30 is just "overweight."
Calculate yours here if you wanna, but, as they always say, include logic with your check. If you're one of the miniscule fraction of humans with significant added body musculature you'll obviously weight more than average for your height, and will creep up the BMI scale, but you're obviously not overweight or obese in the way this sort of simple calculator means. (I'm right at the upper edge of "normal weight," but I wear the same size pants I did in high school, when I weighed about 140 and couldn't put on a pound to save my life, and a look in the mirrror is enough to tell me most of the 25-30 I've put on since then is due to lifting heavy things.)
It can be kind of petty/gloating to poke news items about people who are just overweight or obese (the majority of Americans at this point) but this morbidly obese setting is both tragic and dangerous. This article doesn't go into it, but I think I've read that this level of porkitude is more dangerous than being a smoker, in terms of added health risks. (Though plenty of people manage both.) High blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, circulatory problems, etc. And jokes about Hostess aside, you need to eat a lot more than dessert snacks to double your ideal weight, and no one's doing that with salads and vegetables and fresh fruit. Fried chicken, steak, biscuits, gravy, french fries... damn, now I'm hungry.
Anyway, this kind of disregard for your body's health takes a decade or more off of your life, causes constant illnesses and depression, and it's expensive! I blogged about it a couple of years, back when this blog was worth reading, ago after a Vegas vacation (
scroll down to the 3rd Dec 29th update), where we were around a woman who was borderline morbidly obese at the time, and in a week we never left a store without her buying a snack; M&Ms, soda, muffin, giant 800 calorie Starbucks coffee, etc. I figured she was spending $10 a day on that garbage, this was on vacation, when she didn't have her own pantry or a car to indulge in independent midnight snack runs. I hate myself when I give into late night urges for corn chips, or peanut butter pretzel bites, or an extra Dr. Pepper, when I could/should have just had an apple. Imagine how unhappy people are when they do that every day, several times a day, and see the results steadily mounting on their waistline?
Labels: fat, food
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Because it's the weekend...
... and I had a hard week, and have a lot of work to do this weekend. That's the answer.
The question? Why do I feel justified in eating a plate of dates and cashews for a breakfast snack. Following that (some hours later) with bread soaked in olive oil and covered with monterey jack and mozerella cheese, then toasted, and washed down with the last half cup of a peppery zinfindel. Then making a late lunch of a bowl of stick pretzels, salted/roasted peanuts, and Hawaiian BBQ potato chips, washed down with Pepsi.
Hey, I currently weigh less than I have in 5 years, and if I were eating this in a bar while watching college football, instead of working on a website for a largely-imaginary video game, no one would bat an eye. I'll have some real food for dinner, I promise. Probably salad, as my
box 'o weeds is rapidly composting itself, as it always does on the third day.
Labels: food, misc
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Weather based dietary choices.
After bitching about the weather so much, I feel compelled to mention that it's been lovely the past two days. We haven't needed to run the A/C at all, today's high was about 78, and while it's still slightly warmer than average, and a lot more humid than usual, it's not bad at all. We've slept in the bedroom the past two nights, and didn't even bother with the usual "box fan blowing out the kitchen window to suck cool air into the bedroom" trick last night.
They're even forecasting more of the same for the next few days, which means one thing... we've got too much fruit lying around the house.
When it's hot, as it was for the past three weeks, I tend not to eat very much during the day, and to want cool, juicy things when I do eat. Fruit (and vegetables, to a less succulent extent) fit that bill nicely, and during the few hellish days that ultimately drove us to spend the best $349 ever, I ate something like 10 apples, 8 oranges, 3 pears, 2 pineapples, 1 cantaloupe, a small village of grapes, some plums, and more. Basically all the fruit we had handy, and lots more bought out of need, mid-heat wave.
Now that it's cooled down, I struggled to finish off the overripe pineapple and 5 pounds of grapes we had from last weekend, but the oranges, apples, nectarines, apricots and the rest of their brethren are lying around the kitchen and staring at me like the last puppy in a pet store window. I should eat them; they're good for me and they're not going to last forever and I like fruit... I just feel a bit lemur'ed out, at times, and want to move my dinner up the evolutionary ladder a bit.
As for Malaya, she kind of reminds me of my mother (kiss of death?) in this (and only this) case. They don't have much in common, but they're both very ambivalent towards fruit. Sometimes Malaya will tear into a bowl of strawberries or grapes, or she'll eat an orange every day, but other times it's all I can do to get her to take a bite of my platter of sliced apples, pears, and bananas. Her fruit desires are governed by some unpredictable internal mechanism, one that's synched to something, but nothing as simple as my own "hot = eat cold fruit" process.
The other problem when it's hot is that I get really lazy about food prep. No one wants to stand in the kitchen, sweating over a hot stove, as they say. I'll happily spend an hour cutting ingredients, stir frying, steaming, baking, etc for a single meal, when it's cool. When it's hot? Fuck that, let's just hit up Jack's for a spicy chicken sandwich combo, or throw in a pizza and go sit in front of the fan while it bakes. Fortunately, the excessive fruit consumption probably balances out the quick-and-easy junk food, nutrition-wise. That's what I tell myself, at least.
Labels: food, weather
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Photos Galore
It's been months since I posted any photos and years since I updated any of the photo pages, and since I had some free time over the long holiday weekend, I decided to do something about that. Every page in the Photos > Pets section has been updated, though a few only got a new link in the nav bar, thanks to the new
Photos > Pets > Darwin page. Yes Darwin, Malaya's mom's scrappy little beagle mix has his own page with a dozen pictures. Some even include me, and one includes Malaya's mom, not that you'll get any more idea what she looks like than you have about Malaya.
Besides Darwin's new page, I added a bunch of recent (most of which have not been posted in blog updates) photos to the
Jinx,
Dusty, and
Jinx vs Dusty pages, and a few shots of my stepsister's cats to
Misc Pets, as well as a new shot of one of my
mom's cats. Speaking of animals, I even added a dozen or so shots to the
Flux Photos page, though simply looking at my own graven image for as long as it took to do so disturbed me deeply. (Pretending the grossly-misnomered Sexy Flux page simply doesn't exist is about all that gets me through most days. And no, the lack of a link in the previous sentence is not an oversight.)
On top of those, I've got a bunch of miscellaneous photos that don't fit on any of the photos pages, and you're about to see those right here; along with a few of the best shots from the aforementioned page updates.
Dusty looking particularly hapless as he struggles weakly to escape Darwin's jacket. The dog wears it much better, and doesn't flop over the minute you put it on him. Jinx had a quite different reaction, which you can read about in this shot's caption on the
Dusty page.
Yes, I'm cupping water in my hand for the dog to drink. Yes, Malaya thought it was the sweetest thing ever.
More Darwin here.
A very recent photo of me out on a trail with Malaya, shepherding her while she took a bunch of photos with her new camera. Her next project is to work on portraits, and I've been volunteered for that, tragically enough. In other words, you might be seeing more of me, like it or not.
A shot of part of the grove of elephant ear tropical plants in my dad's backyard in San Diego. I will waste no time planting a patch of these when we get our own home, though I doubt they'll grow as verdantly in the colder, cloudier NorCal weather.
Back in March, we had some interesting weather, including the fiercest burst of hail I've ever seen. (Though that's not saying much, with my last 25 years spent in moderate portions of California.) It never snows here, but it does get down into the high 20s at times in the winter. This hail came with spring well underway though, as the daffodils here demonstrate.
It's hard to judge the scale from this angle, but trust me, these were three frighteningly-large onion rings. Three was the whole order, for one thing, and each one was easily larger than a hockey puck or a McDonald's burger, though just about as greasy. When next you're dining at Claim Jumper and the waiter asks if you want the giant onion rings, kick your curiosity in the balls and just take the regular size.
I've blogged in the past about my basic disagreement with Japanese food, and this pretty well shows it off. I like most of the stuff in Japanese food, I just don't like it in the giant sizes they serve. And that includes shrimp, especially when 1) I'm not entirely sure it's dead, and 2) it's staring at me.
And finally, this is a shot of an object that's been perplexing Malaya, me, and all of our friends and relatives for as long as I can remember. We see these blue things beside a house almost every day, but have never been able to hazard a guess as to what they might be. They look like something you'd store a Rubik's Cube in, but you can see how large they are with the fence and garbage can beside them. They're easily chest-height, they've been sitting out in that driveway for at least 2 years, and while we've never gone up to lean the front one over and see if the second one has an identical square depression in the center, it seems like a safe bet.
What on earth could they be for? They couldn't be shipping containers, could they? They're blue, plastic, and way too large, and anyway, they're not well-padded to the top and bottom, only to the sides. Even if they were, what would you put in such a large, cube-shaped hole? The material makes them look like some sort of swimming pool cover, but you couldn't even cover a jacuzzi with something this size, and the thickness and the hole makes that a ridiculous idea.
If anyone has any idea what they are, or even an educated guess, do let us know. We've never been motivated to park, knock on the front door, and ask, but if the mystery goes on for too much longer we might just risk it.
Labels: darwin, dusty, food, photos
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Overeaten and eatin' over.
Days since an update again, and I can but apologize. True, it's not like any of you are paying to read this (well, the one faithful monthly site hosting expense donor is, but the rest of you; not so much), but I would like to update at least daily, to make it worth your bookmark check. Still, I've been very busy, and though I don't run this site in anything approaching a professional manner, I'd rather not post at all than just throw up some pointless bit about a wacky news item (eg:
yet another incident in which Bush lied or distorted intelligence to boost the fever for his preordained Iraq Attack... what a surprise!)
So I've been working on another website, 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day, to be honest, and while there's nothing yet online I can link to, I assure you that it's coming and that it should be worth the wait/lack of updates here. Well, if you're a computer game fan, anyway. (Probably a pretty safe bet, with this crowd.)
In other news, on Wednesday I finally got to meet Malaya's new dog, Darwin. He currently lives with her mom, over by the Bay, but will theoretically come to live with us once we're in a house with a yard and enough space for a dog to be happy. Well, happier. Our downstairs neighbor has one of those miniature collies here, and it seems to be happy, or at least surviving. Well, we think so, though we've not seen it or its owner for a few days, and there's been a godawful mystery stink in the vicinity of our kitchen/dining room lately, a stench we can find no source of and that may well be wafting up through the floorboards.
As for Darwin, he's a beagle mix and is one of those "always seems happy" type of dogs. And as far as I can tell from one day, he always is happy. He's about twenty pounds (9kg) and is just perpetual motion. Tail-wagging, head turning, nose sniffing, feet scampering, and so eager to play or go for a walk or hop in the car. He got to do all of those things on Wednesday, and even had a spirited game of "run furiously between Flux and Malaya while they throw his favorite chew toy back and forth and forever keep it just out of his reach." Darwin's no Jinxie, when it comes to leaping and intercepting aerial targets, but once he started to get tired (after maybe 50 throws back and forth) he started to anticipate our throws and leap up to bite the toy out of the air. And while he never quite managed that, he did successfully body block it a few times, like an enthusiastic but not very skilled goalie. Or a really inept bodyguard.
He is extremely skilled as snatching a moving/bouncing chew toy off the floor though, since the same vestigal forelimbs that keep him from getting much height or pawing at anything while in midair serve him very well in his role as high speed dustpan. As far as we could tell, Darwin would have run back and forth between us forever, and he hardly slowed down even after at least 150 throws, despite the fact that he was panting, his tongue was dangling, and he was almost walking normally, rather than scampering and skidding around as he usually (always) does.
I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of dogs, and having one Darwin in the house would be the noise and rambunctiousness equivalent of about a dozen more
Dusters and
Jinxies, but he wasn't a bad companion, for the day. Plus he settles down at night and doesn't climb on the desks and doesn't vomit up hairballs (very often) and won't find a mousie and walk around the house with it, howling to wake the severely-injured, at 5am, the way Dusty does. I'm not sure if that makes two or three walks a day, walks with the requisite baggage (a plastic bag or two with which to pick up his steaming turds) a fair trade off, but it's a start.
To belatedly address the title of this post though, (forgotten it by now, haven't you?) in addition to the Darwin walking and playing, I drove Malaya and her mom (and Darwin) a couple of hundred miles, for which I was recompensed with a painful excess of nourishment. We had to take a trip up north to get Malaya measured for her cap and gown (she's graduating grad school and receiving her doctorate in a couple of months), but first we inhaled five turkey tacos each, fresh from her mom's kitchen. Ground turkey, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and real sour cream. Five each.
After the long trip we returned to do some local shopping, picking up a huge sack of dog chow and numerous miscellaneous grocery-type items, mostly for Malaya's mom. Our adventures ended at a Round Table Pizzeria, where mom ordered up an extra large chicken supreme, a recipe for disaster which Malaya inexplicably seasoned with a bonus order of spicy buffalo wings. We ate them anyway, washed our meal down with an excess of carbonated, caramel-colored sugar water, (I had Dr. Pepper, Root Beer, and Pepsi. Not all at once, though.) and waddled back to mom's house, where the only one capable of movement was the quadruped.
So while Malaya and I played with Darwin, her mom got busy packing up food to go, and we left there with the rest of the pizza, the rest of the turkey taco meat, lots of taco ingredients, tortillas, a six pack of Pepsi and Coke, about 60 frozen lumpia rolls (turkey and shrimp), a pound of green grapes, frozen fish, a loaf of bread, miniature Snickers bars, a bag of honey-roasted almonds, a big chocolate rabbit, and more stuff I can't even remember. And yes, that's pretty much how it always goes when we visit Malaya's mom; it's like reverse Little Red Riding Hood, with the new addition of Darwin perfectly-completing the analogy.
On the whole, while we only had two meals on the day, (not counting the 2 slices of pizza and additional Pepsi I had around midnight, to get some energy to stay up long enough to write this) I'd say we took in at least 4000 calories total, and with that motivation, 9pm or not, there was no way we could stay away from the gym when we got back here; once we let the cats inhale all of the Darwin aroma off of our clothing, of course. I burned 530 calories in 35 minutes on the elliptical, did a session of free weights, and then stretched and practiced handstands for a bit in the back aerobics room, which means I might only have gained two pounds on the day, intead of half a dozen.
It was fun though, and it made Malaya's mom happy, and since she's going to be my mom, one day, it's all good.
Labels: darwin, food
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