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The brain boggles.

About five pounds overweight, I try to diet. Doesn’t seem to help much. Yesterday, nothing will do but what I must go onto a modified vegetarian (NOT vegan) diet. This usually jump-starts the metabolism and moves the scale off the dime.

Breakfast: xergis
Lunch: spectacular home-made wonderful amazing tomato-vegetable soup (more about which, below)
Dinner: none (see below)

Yes. By dinnertime I’m busy and so I lose track of time until I realize it’s 20 minutes to choir call. Lock up the dogs and fly out the door, figuring I can stand the pain entailed in waiting to eat until 9:00 p.m.

What I don’t figure on: it’s Birthday Night, an occasion that calls for the ritual Singing of the Happy Birthday Song to every member on the choir whose birthday falls in this month, and for a cake.

By break time, 8:00 p.m., i yam soo hungry i could CRY. And there under my dainty little nose is a cake. Not just any cake, but a GERMAN CHOCOLATE cake, which happens to be my hands-down favorite variety of cake.

A self-justifying calculation concludes that no great harm could possibly come from noshing one (1) piece of this delectable. The worst that can happen, surely, is that I just won’t lose any weight that day.

Well.

No.

I have ONE (1) small piece of German chocolate cake: maybe five ounces at the most. And 1/3 cup of scorched electric drip coffeemaker coffee.

After another hour of rehearsal, I stumble home and fall into bed. I do not eat anything more.

Somewhat before the crack of dawn (5:30, to be specific), the alarm goes off, I arise, and as usual I weigh myself and enter the figure in the daily diet tracker:

17 December: 135.2
18 December: 136.4

HOLY SHIT!

How could I possibly  have put on over a pound after starving myself for 5/6 of the previous day and then eating 1-count-it 1 TINY  PIECE OF CAKE?????

On December 16, I had an apple with nuts for breakfast; a piece of cheese with two crackers for lunch (with wine); and xergis, dates, and nuts for dinner. And walked one mile. This resulted in a weight gain of .1 pound.

And yes, I do understand that one’s weight fluctuates throughout the day. That would be why I always weigh myself at the same time every day, before breakfast.

On the way to the weekly bidness group meeting, I complain about this to my carpool-mate. She, a gluten-free  aficionado, points out that the cake not only contained sugar, a verboten product, it also contained flour.

A lot of flour.

She suggested that gluten could cause one’s body to retain water. Water retention would be the likeliest explanation for this little spike, since three to five ounces of sugar-laced flour could not otherwise cause one to put on 1.2 pounds.

Well, of course the gluten craze is the latest fad, so one has to take all this with a grain of salt (heh…one probably should refrain, though…). It must be said, in the water-retention department, that neither the xergis nor the veggie-tomato soup was made with salted products.

If you buy into in the gluten craze, it appears possible (if you believe the faddists) that wheat products could have that effect. And it certainly is true that every time I have a bowl of beloved pasta, every time I gobble a piece of pizza, every time I eat a piece of bread I do put on weight.

Honestly, I don’t know what else would explain it. I haven’t consumed anything over the past several days that should cause the bod’ to put on weight.

Oh well. Here’s a recipe for an exceptionally delicious, exceptionally dietetic edible:

Tomato-Veggie Soup

One large or a couple small containers canned tomatoes***
A small yellow onion, finely chopped
A stalk of celery, finely chopped
One or two cloves of garlic, minced
Parsley, if you have it
Some raw carrots, finely chopped
Frozen or fresh vegetables to fit your taste (such as corn, peas, spinach, chard, etc.
Cheap white or red wine, or water
Small amount of olive oil
Herbs to your liking

***Canned tomatoes are full of salt! Avoid. However, you can get salt-free tomatoes in a few brands. I used Pomí, available on Amazon and sometimes at Sprouts or Whole Foods. If you can’t find packaged/canned tomatoes that are free of added salt, use a pound or two of fresh tomatoes.

Put a small amount of olive oil in the bottom of a stock pot; turn the heat to medium-high and add the onions, celery, and carrots. Stir around. When they start cooking, turn the heat to medium or medium-low. Allow to cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are starting to brown. Add the garlic and parsley. Stir around and allow to cook for a few more minutes. Add the herbs — I used fines herbes because I couldn’t find the thyme, but thyme plus tarragon plus whatEVER would be good. Add the tomatoes. Thin with wine or water, as desired. If you’re using a root vegetable, such as potatoes, add a few cut-up potatoes now. Otherwise, ignore.

Simmer until flavors are mixed. Now add whatever quick-cooking veggies you have around: any frozen vegetable; any leaf vegetable such as spinach, kale, or chard. Cook until everything is done.

Consume. Garnish with a spoonful of yogurt or a sprinkling of Parmesan or feta cheese, if desired.

This makes a very tasty soup. Leftovers stored in the fridge only improve with time.

Okay, I’m done.

Last night, reflecting on the MRI maneuver, I realized this ultra-sensitive search mechanism is just bound to find more threatening (at least in the minds of doctors) stuff in my boobs. And when that crops up, as it surely will, I can say good-bye to the scheme to bring the ongoing horror show to an end by having them lob off the damn boobs.

I can feel it coming: Sometime next week someone is going to call from the Mayo with another “good news/bad news” call, and the bad news, as usual, is going to be some scary-looking thing that they want to carve out, carve up, analyze, diagnose, and use as the basis for more slicing and dicing.

A-n-n-n-d…that is not going to happen anymore. If they won’t just do the job without any more jacking around, I quit. I do not care if I die. I’m going to die anyway. We’re all going to die anyway. I’m not afraid of dying.

But I sure as hell am afraid of any more of this business as usual.

If they call me up and tell me they want to torment me in some new or extended way — more biopsy, more testing, more surgery, more treatments whose long-term effect will be to destroy my health, all in the name of “it’s not really cancer” — I’m going to tell them “fine, thank you very much, good-bye” and hang up the phone. That is IT. I’m not doing any more.

If they’re willing to take off my boobs without any more screwing around, then fine, they can do it. But I’m not going to be subjected to anything more than that. If they have some other scheme, I and they are done. If I die, I die. Then we can say it was time.

Enough. Is. Enough.

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Been enjoying the dispatches from GoogleNews, the NY Times, BBC, NPR, and waypoints? Amazing stuff, isn’t it?

Lately, since I’ve been flat on my back in the sack most of the time, I’ve been spending altogether too much time reading news reports. Whaddaya think of some of this stuff?

US sends 3000 troops to fight Ebola in West Africa

No kidding? The civilized world is under attack from the most vicious, pernicious enemy we have faced since World War II, and we’re sending the army to try to fight a disease?

That’s all very civilized and humane, of courses. But one wonders what, exactly, armed troops are supposed to do against a hemorrhagic virus? Confine the population to their homes and see to it that none of them ever pokes their noses outside their doors?

Okay, we’re going to build hospitals and provide treatment and training. Again, that’s altruistic and good. More to the point, it’s self-defensive: sooner or later this disease is going to cross the Atlantic and end up in the US. To say nothing of Europe and Asia.

That of course raises the question of whether Europe and Asia are sending troops to help out in this effort, and if not, why not?

Fox Play-Gnus quotes Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey as saying, “The Department of Defense’s number one priority is combating Ebola.”

Izzat so? When did that come into being? Shouldn’t our number one priority be trying to control the spreading cancer that is ISIS? What part of “we are at war with this bunch, not just in the Middle East but all around the world” are we missing here?

Sending US citizens into a plague zone and then, shortly, bringing them home guarantees that the disease will soon arrive on our shores. Now it’s true, it will be here eventually, anyway. But the puzzled news consumer is left wondering why hurry it along? In fact, there is some evidence that in some circumstances Ebola can already be transmitted by air, even though it is not presently airborne among humans or from other species to humans — that we know of. All we need is to have a US citizen exposed to a slightly mutated Ebola virus and bring it home.

Okay, that’s a “maybe.” What’s not a “maybe” is we have a homicidal enemy with increasingly deep pockets that sooner or later, speaking of crossing the Atlantic, will bring its hate-saturated war against the West to our shores. It has already done so in a small way, with the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon attacks. It would be naive to imagine that these maniacs are incapable of building a nuclear device. (It’s really quite easy — see, for example, John McPhee’s Curve of Binding Energy…but don’t do it unless you’re into alarming reality checks. In light of current events, it’ll scare you sh!tless.)

Poverty Rate Drops for the First Time Since 2006.

It’s a miracle. Actually, it’s the result of a few full-time jobs coming available. And about time it is.

But…uhmmm…take a closer look at this. We’re talking about a drop from 15% (say what? more than one in ten Americans lives in poverty?) to a mere 14.5%.

A half-a-percent change is not exactly cause for a ticker-tape parade, eh?

Okay, it’s better than a .5% increase. But still…

Interesting. The median income in this country is now $51,939. I hardly know anyone who earns that kind of money, except maybe for a couple of professionals and some affluent choir members.  My income is about 61% of that, long as we’re revealing our paychecks. Possibly that’s explained by the fact that “the wage gap between men and women showed no change. Women on average had an income of $39,200 last year compared with $50,000 for men — meaning they earned 78% of what men earned.”

Moving on.

Scots  to Vote on Whether to Peel Off from England

Where do people get ideas like this? For sheer shoot-yourself-in-the-foot élan, that one takes the cake. And other than demolishing the country’s economy for the sake of a nationalistic ego trip, one wonders what is the point?

Dump Your Hubby to Profit from Your Ex’s Social Security Bennies

The definition of bureaucracy is “bizarre.”  Well. Assuming you buy everything Larry Kottlikoff says, o’course…

Thai Woman Flings Self into Crocodile Pond

Here’s an original new way to off yourself. I have no imagination when it comes to this sort of thing. About the best I can come up with is collecting all these Oxycodone Rx’s and enjoying them with a nice bottle of wine.

US Religious Extremists Continue War on Women

One thing’s for sure, we have nothing on the Moslem crazies: our home-grown version of religious extremist is just as virulent, even though they haven’t started chopping off people’s heads. Yet. Firing the head of St. Joseph’s Hospital because she OK’ed an abortion to save a woman’s life is comparable, though: let her die for our beliefs. That seriously is the stance of the religious group that runs one of the largest regional medical centers in the state of Arizona.

 Net Neutrality Back on the FCC’s Table

As of September 10, the FCC has received over 3 million comments about the net neutrality issue. In case you’ve been napping with Rip Van Winkle, the FCC proposes to allow ISPs to charge users for faster speeds, leaving the rest of us to crawl along at a land-line pace. “If net neutrality is completely done away with,” we’re told, “then it means that companies with deep pockets will be able to get their traffic moving along at a fast pace. Meanwhile smaller companies will languish in the slow lane, unable to grow their traffic because they don’t have the funds available to do so.”

So much for American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, eh?

MIT Faculty Gets Paid to Build Erector-Set Cheetah

Okay, it’s toooo easy to make fun of this bouncing fake cheetah. But it is entertaining to watch. Compare the gait of the mechanical “cheeetah” with the real thing, which comes out on the other side of “entertaining” to enter the realm of “fearsome.”

It does have some practical applications: in the design of better prosthetic devices, for example. And think of how it could chase those ISIS crazies around the desert!

Republicans Say “Yes” to Obama

Aw…say it ain’t so, Politico!

Well, anything’s possible, I suppose. Could the cheetahs be changing their spots?

Too much time spent in front of the computer screen here…it’s time to move along.

What’s your favored News of the Day?

Ugh! I spent THREE HOURS on hands and knees yesterday, trying to scrub Ruby’s puppy pee stink off the living room floor.

Ruby, who is about as un-housetrained as a dog can get, has stealth-pissed repeatedly in the living room. A couple of times it seeped under the bookcases and the baseboards, and once it went under the folding desk in there and saturated at least one of the ball-shaped wood legs.

Of course I frantically wiped it up as best as I could, and I’ve sprayed the floor several times with the ridiculous enzyme spray. Luz mops every two weeks, too, leaving the place looking — if not smelling — great.

Now, for the first time in years, come the rains. And what with all that moisture in the air, the stink wafts into the atmosphere. WHAT a stench!!! I couldn’t walk into the room without gagging.

So I started scrubbing, trying to get that out of the grout. Eventually the ceiling-to-floor bookcases will have to be emptied and moved and their “feet” scrubbed with something (what, I can’t imagine) and the tile under them scrubbed and the baseboard pulled out and new strips put down and painted. But for the nonce, deodorizing the parts I can reach will have to suffice.

Understand: this tilework was “sealed” by the previous owner, who installed it. He used one of those goopy grout seals that lays down like a coat of acrylic paint — it is impervious. And STILL it stinks. You can tell where the stuff is saturated by putting your nose down near the floor and sniffing. Phew!

Here’s how the various chemicals I tried worked:

• Simple Green: useless
• Enzyme spray: laughable
• Straight vinegar: helps a little in places that aren’t too badly saturated. Dissolves and lifts some neglected patches of urine up. Gets the smell off the tiles pretty well, but leaves the tracks of grout still stinking.
• Peroxide: hard to tell…all I had on hand is the stuff for contact lenses, and not much of that.
• Baking soda solution: nearly useless
• Vinegar puddled into the grout line with baking soda sprinkled over it, then scrubbed into the grout and over the tiles and then washed (and washed, and washed) with clean water: helps a little more than just straight vinegar. Worst spots still stink enough to choke you.
• BUT: tile and grout cleaner, when sprayed to puddle into the grout lines where the worst of the stink is identified (French art books  to John Irving; Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes 8 to 16), allowed to sit for 8 or ten minutes, and scrubbed off: that works!

So if you have a dog stink on your floors, you might want to try the stuff made specifically as tile and grout cleaner. It’s readily available at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and hardware stores. Obviously, this is intended only for tilework, not for carpets or wood flooring. I don’t expect I’d put it on natural stone, either…

Don’t know if it would work on cat pee, which is much stronger and more persistent than dog urine. But it’s surely worth a try. Also the recipe described in this post about wood floors supposedly is effective on cat urine. I’ve never tried it, but it’s all over the Net, so apparently some folks have had success with it.

Ruby, an exceptionally unhappy dog, is now confined to her X-pen or tied to a leash all the time she’s in the house. Period. She’s not getting loose to stealth-pee or dump again!

She’s getting two weeks (2, ii, II weeks!) to shape up, or she’s outta here. I am puppied out! And I believe this particular dog to be essentially untrainable when it comes to figuring out where the doggy bathroom is. She’s seven and a half months old and still peeing and dumping all over the house.

In my time on this planet, I’ve raised eight puppies and never had any problem housetraining them within a reasonable length of time. One of them was house-trained in two days. Okay…that was some kind of World Dog Training Olympics Record. But the others all got the idea within two or three weeks. The problem is, she’s so adept at sneaking that you can’t catch her in the act. The other day M’hijito and I were in the same room with her and she managed to deposit a puddle without either of us spotting her!

And no, just now she does not have a UTI. She stopped peeing every 15 to 30 minutes as soon as she went back on the Clavamox.

So, as a last resort, I’m using a technique I applied to Anna the German Shepherd when she was in her furniture-eating phase: Tie the dog to myself or to a doorknob in whatever room I happen to be in, and NEVER let her roam free in the house, ever. When I’m not here, she goes in her crate. When I’m doing something where I can’t attend to her and watch her every single living breathing minute, she goes in her X-pen.

Add to that the standard puppy house-training gambit: take her out every two hours and encourage her to do her thing.

If she doesn’t have the picture after two weeks of that, she’s going back to the breeder.

I’ll discuss this with the vet when I go in for another financial fleecing this morning. Yesterday I thought she had some conjunctivitis, but now it’s cleared up. Still have the 9 a.m. appointment, though. We’ll see what he says about this scheme. If he doesn’t think it’ll work, then she’s going back to Zion Corgis forthwith. Today!