Funny’s 37th Law of Inevitability: The older you get, the faster time passes.
Illustration: Up at 4:30 a.m. Twenty minutes later, it’s 6:30 and I’m late getting out the door.
Idle essays
My Daddy’s Diet
In the past two and a half weeks, I’ve lost an amazing eight pounds.
Did standing up for the daily eight to ten hours of computer work do the trick? I kinda doubt it. No visible change had happened after a week of that stuff.
Did knocking off the sauce (again :roll:) make it happen? Not likely. About once every six months I jump back on the wagon for a few weeks, and it never changes the scale reading. Besides, I don’t think one or two glasses of wine, beer, or bourbon and water really is that far over the top.
The weight loss has occurred, in fact, over just the past week or so, after I decided to experiment with my daddy’s favorite folk diet: cut out all starch.
By “starch,” he meant bread, potatoes, rice, cereals, and pasta.
LOL! In the good old days, they didn’t eat much of what we would call “pasta.” It would never have crossed my parents’ minds to serve a big bowl of spaghetti topped with fresh chopped tomatoes, basil, and shredded Parmesan. Spaghetti, to their generation of Americans, was some kind of ethnic food that entailed a full day of simmering a gloppy red sauce. Macaroni was served with cheddar cheese and white sauce. And noodles were to be smothered in rich beef, pork, or chicken gravy, preferably with cream added.
Yum. If it were just a little cooler (say, about 50 degrees cooler…) I sure could do with some of my mother’s beef strogonoff over noodles.
Well, anyway. As soon as I quit eating “starch,” the weight started to drop.
We could say this is a modified Atkins diet. Actual, real Atkins, it is not. On My Daddy’s Diet, you’re allowed to eat anything you want except “starch” and desserts loaded with refined sugar (pie and cake, for example, would be nixed, but plain strawberries or peaches would be OK). Atkins wants you to stay off sweet, juicy, delicious fruits (at least at the outset) and certain kinds of veggies dubbed too high in carbs.
Sorry, Dr. A, but I wasn’t about to let the candy-sweet watermelon and the Costco flat of astonishing peaches in the fridge go to waste. So I’ve been blithely scarfing down two or three peaches a day, and as much as a quarter of a watermelon.
And I still lost weight!
Atkins also wants you to kick not just your alcohol habit but your caffeine habit: he theorized that caffeine somehow interfered with your metabolism. Right, sure. Life’s miserable enough without a bourbon and water in the afternoon. I’ll be darned if I’m doing without my morning coffee and my all-day iced tea supply. Matter of fact, as we scribble I’m swilling down coffee with élan.
And I still lost weight!
Hot dang.
Daddy’s scheme allows you to eat pretty well, without making you feel unduly deprived. Come to think of it, I don’t feel in any way deprived…now and again I push away from the table feeling I ate altogether too much. It’s just a matter of finding something unstarchy to substitute for your favorite cereal and potato products. For me, it’s been lettuce, lots of lettuce. Cabbage is good, too.
Breakfast looked a little problematic. Though I don’t eat much cereal (hate the processed stuff, and am not crazy about gooey cooked cereal), I’ve long been in the habit of fixing two pieces of bacon, two slices of toast, and about a gallon (so it seemed!) of orange juice frappéed with frozen strawberries.
I substituted a couple of sweet, flavorful tomatoey Campari tomatoes for the toast. With so much fruit in the house, often I’ve scarfed down a large peach or slab of melon in place of the juice, which itself consists of one large glass of OJ blended with about four large berries and a drop of vanilla extract. There’s been plenty of fruit at breakfast: a few days I’ve had a peach and watermelon!
When I took it into my little pea brain to cook up a stir-fry, I was given pause. After all, isn’t the whole point of stir-fry to eat the rice soaked in soy sauce? Well, it was late at night and I sure didn’t feel like making a green salad, which didn’t sound very good with stir-fry, anyway, so I just added lots of veggies and tried it sans rice. It was delicious! It didn’t need rice at all to be highly wonderful. What’s an Asian word for sans?
{chortle!} I figure the initial poundage drop is the loss of bloat from drinking one or two bourbons and water a day. I rarely drink more than two, and they’re pretty watered-down, but still…they are alcohol, which when you come down to it is just another sugar, only even less benign than the white granulated stuff. The pot belly is still there, though the love handles are noticeably reduced.
Exercise? Not hardly! It’s been too hot to poke one’s nose outside the door this past month. By 10:00 p.m., when it’s marginally cool enough to walk around and the pavement won’t burn Cassie’s feet, I’m usually just too pooped to do much other than drag into bed.
This morning when I woke up at 5:00, though, it was an unheard-of seventy-five degrees out there! A brilliant full moon hovered over the western horizon like a hallucinatory alabaster plate floating in the sky.
Grabbed the dog and made a tour of the neighborhood (as far from the German shepherd hosts as possible). After we returned and Cassie was fed, it was still cool enough for me to pump up the bicycle tires and ride all over Richistan, just to the east of us. Then plunged in the pool before breakfast.
So I got a little exercise, certainly nothing very vigorous but better than nothing. And it’s not likely to happen again soon, because the brief cold snap we’re having is supposed to dissipate today.
But it’s only a little after nine, all that activity has been activated, the plants are watered, all the laundry is done, and the sheets are on the line. Dang! Not a bad kick-off for the day.
I’d like to lose another eight or ten pounds. Even though I’m back in the “normal” BMI range, which I’d managed to edge above, I believe about 140 is more like “normal” for a woman my height and age. What I hope to do is get down to 135, so that during the times of day when one weighs out at one’s heaviest, the scale would never read more than about 140. And if that actually comes to pass, which would surprise me, I think the only way to maintain it will be to stay off the sauce permanently and after this to refrain from dumping vast mounds of spaghetti on my plate.
Welp, speaking of mounds, a pile of student papers awaits. And so, to work…
Image: From a photo by Aoife of box of pareve Pillsbury pancake mix marketed in Israel. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
More freakish weather
Incredible dust storm whipped through here last night. If it were sand and not fine, sifting dust, hot and not cool, I’d say it was just like the shamals we used to get in the Saudi Arabian desert. The heat dropped a good 20 degrees as the dust moved through. It’s down to 80 right now.
Turn off your sound before clicking on the video above; the TV station inflicts a particularly annoying, noisy ad on viewers before letting you get at the images. Here’s a more polite video by an amateur photographer, but shorter and without the awesome sky photos.
The storm hit the suburbs to the south of us around 7:00 p.m., while it was still light out. An hour or so later, M’hijito remarked, over the phone, that a gigantic wall of something was bearing down on us; by then it wasn’t obvious by looking at the storm front that it was dust. A few minutes later, though, it sure was! When I peeked out the front door, I literally could not see the houses across the street!
Here it is again moving through one of those ghettos for families with kids in the East Valley:
Ugh. So much for having spent six and a half hours cleaning house the day before yesterday. Everything—every piece of furniture, every square inch of flooring, every windowsill, every baseboard, every piece of decorative trim on the woodwork—is coated with dust. This morning both classes are unloading a ton of work on me, so there’ll be no time to clean house. About the best I’ll be able to manage will be to pull Harvey out of the pool and dump in some extra chlorine. And backwash. Again.
Doesn’t look like much debris fell in the drink, though. It’s just cloudy with dust. At this hour—3:45 in the morning—I can’t see much out there. Will have to wait until 5, I guess, to get to work on that project.
Whee. Why do I live in this place, again?
Ask the Hive Mind: Can standing up to blog help you lose weight?
So the new strategy to stand up while working in front of a computer is now under way. It occurred to me to wonder if standing and thinking might burn more calories than sitting and thinking. Here’s what the Web says:
Sitting around doing tasks like homework will, for a woman my height, age and weight, burn about 45 calories an hour.
Standing while drawing or writing will cause such a person to burn 55 calories an hour.
Hm. Ten huge calories an hour advantage: all of 80 calories a day.
The other plan, also fully engaged (for the nonce), is to knock off my favorite potables. Now that would save some serious calories:
1 bottle of Guinness Extra Stout: 153 calories
1 jigger of bourbon: 69 calories
1 halfway decent glass of red wine: 500 in a bottle; that would be about around 110 to 120 calories per glass
So. Each day one restrains oneself from quaffing one’s favorite brew and stands up in front of the computer for eight hours, one deletes 233 calories from one’s daily pack-it-in activities. Put another way, one beer = 1 hour and 55 minutes of standing on one’s feet.
On the other hand, one bourbon-&-water costs you only 52 minutes of labor in front of the computer.
Interesting. I don’t expect we’re supposed to be looking at it that way, are we?
Image: Guinness Original. Ojw. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Bird Rescue
So, late this afternoon I notice the swimming pool is laboring, choked by all the crud sifting down from the hated palm trees. I’m on the phone leaving word with the accountant’s answering machine about a new little project I’ve cooked up while running across the yard to shut off the pump when I spot yet another bird in the sink of death.
That’s what a pool is, you know: a sink of death. It kills all sorts of small things, from little insects to little children, with birds about a third of the way across the spectrum. In size, I mean.
This one, though, has not yet drowned. It’s managed to climb aboard Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s hose, where it’s perched next to the intake. Because the pump is so thickly clogged, not enough current is sucking to pull the bird off its life raft.
It was a fledgling white-wing, the second to fall into the pool in the past week or ten days. So stunned was the chick that it allowed me to reach in, wrap a paper towel around it, and lift it out of the water.
But…then what?
It couldn’t come in the house: Cassie would make real short work of it. For the same reason, it couldn’t be left on the ground. If Cassie didn’t grab it, the ants would soon eat it alive.
I carried it around to the west side and set it on the shaded concrete bench, figuring it would probably die soon enough on its own.
Half an hour or so later, peered out the Arcadia door to see it was standing on its little feet, still all wadded up and unhappy-looking but distinctly alive. Put some water in a plant dish and set that and a handful of birdseed on the bench. The bird was not interested.
Went out to wrestle with the pool, around phone calls from Gerardo, who claimed to be trying to get a palm tree dude over here this afternoon or Saturday. Took some doing to persuade him that when I said I intend to spend tomorrow in Waddell, I’m not kidding. Pulled Harvey out of the drink; cleaned out his leaf-catcher and the pump pot but decided to let the extremely premature backwash job wait until after the promised palm tree guys have come and gone, since they’ll make an unholy mess of the pool and the pump will have to be backwashed again. Which reminds me: I’ve lost the bonnet to the water-hose-run debris collector.
Damn! Another Home Depot run. Already $126 in the red this month; by the time these guys are done, I’ll be a good $350 in the hole.
But while I’m out there, I realize a couple of adult doves are flying around with uncharacteristic bravado. They must be looking for their pup. So that means the fledgling belongs on the east side of the house, somewhere near its nest. There’s another fledgling hopping around in the tree, which must mean the mating doves haven’t yet lost all their brood to the pool.
After awhile, I spot their nest: about two stories high in a limb of the devil-pod tree. You’d need a cherry-picker to lift this bird back up there. Hm.
Finally, I decide to put the little bird on top of the metal storage shed, which by this time in the afternoon is fully in the shade. But it’s a 110 degrees out there, and the metal is too hot for it to sit on any length of time. A large, flat plant dish, retrieved from the junk pile hidden behind that side of the house, would work to insulate and hold the bird, though. So I haul out a stepladder and set this thing atop the metal roof.
Go and retrieve the bird, which still shows no inclination to try to escape.
However, when I climb up on the ladder and go to set it in the plant dish, it doesn’t like that idea at all. It panics and tries to fly away, skittering across the corrugated metal roof and falling down behind the shed, between its back side and the concrete wall.
Seriously damn! Dead bird, for sure!
Well, no. I peek back in there and see the bird has landed on its feet and looks OK: a great deal better than it looked when plucked from the pool. The old boards I hid back there years ago are level and coated with an inch or so of composting devil pods and leaves, forming a soft substrate…probably not unlike a nest. It’s shaded and cool back there, and there’s no way Cassie can reach the bird. Probably there are precious few ants back there, too—it’ll take them a while to find the little thing, anyway.
As I write this, it’s coming onto the middle of the night. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight out and peeked behind the shed, expecting to find an avian corpse out there.
Gone!
The bird has flown the coop. Couldn’t see it on the ground, either. So presumably it must have eventually dried out enough to take flight and, with any luck at all, made its way back into the tree and maybe even back to the nest.
Let’s just hope after all that it remembers to stay away from the darned pool!
Images:
Two White-winged Doves perching on a cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
A White-winged Dove perching on a Santa Rita Prickly Pear cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
The Empty Garage
{sigh} It’s strangely disorienting to walk into the garage to toss the trash in the recycling bin and find the darned place empty. Vacant. Lonely.
The Dog Chariot is down at Chuck’s Auto Service, there to have its oil leak diagnosed.
Weird, isn’t it, how one develops an affection for inanimate objects? (Or does one? Maybe I’m crazy as a loon!)
My favorite car was the beautiful little Camry I gave to my son at the time I bought the Dog Chariot. I loved that car: gave it a name, “Katydid,” because its license plate (the first I’d ever bought on my own, as an independent person!) started with the letters KTD. But in due course I had to have a vehicle that was large enough that Anna the German Shepherd couldn’t stand on back seat, plant her muzzle next to my ear, and bark (nonstop!) in the decibel range of a nuclear blast.
LOL! Buying a minivan so Anna couldn’t deafen me had a lot to do with the 40 grand I spent on that animal during her lifetime. Hence the sobriquet the thousand-dollar-a-day dog.
At the outset, I wasn’t nuts about the Sienna, an ungainly, lumbering, gas-guzzling bison. Looked like and drove like a suburban mom’s car-pooling bus. Oh well.
But over time, it grew on me. It has a lot of room: room to haul junk around, room to haul not one but two ninety-pound dogs, room to sleep in when you’re car-camping and a scary lightning storm blows up. With its Camry chassis, it’s one helluva lot more comfortable to ride in than a Suburban or a Land Cruiser or a Chevy van (all of which I’ve driven endlessly). And it puts plenty of steel between me and my fellow homicidal drivers.
It is, in short, like a good man: maybe not so rakishly handsome, but kindly, capacious of heart, and reliable.
Last time the cost of gas went through the stratosphere, I took out three of the four back bucket seats, by way of relieving the vehicle of some weight. The effect was to create a cargo bay the size of a limestone cave. Never put them back. It seems to have worked. Despite the car’s decrepitude, this morning I calculated that it made almost 21 mpg over the past two weeks’ worth of exclusively in-town driving. Not bad, for a tank with an EPA rating of 18 mpg.
So, it makes me feel sad not to have the Dog Chariot sitting in its familiar place, right next to the water heater in the garage. (Yeah. I know.) (There’s a fire door between the garage and the house. Yes.) And I guess that’s why I don’t feel in any great hurry to run out and buy a new car, even though it’s past time to get one and even though my financial dude says I can afford it.
Nothing lasts forever, of course. Not even you and me. But I’m going to miss that car when it’s gone.