First iPhone Entry

This purely falls under the category of just because I can.

Things I Could Do With My Tax Refund

While I wait for the lunar eclipse to reach maximum totality, I will get this off my chest. I am reaping the benefits of home ownership and am getting a rather large tax refund. These are the things I think I need:

iPhone

Canon Digital Rebel digital camera

replacement battery for current digital camera

new, more comfortable desk chair

new, larger monitor

digital TV (don’t really care if it’s HD or not)

go to the doctor to get my wrist checked out (I think it’s a wrist ganglion cyst)

pay my parents more of the money I owe them (am already sending an extra chunk, yay, direct deposit)

open a savings account *gasp*

—————–

Feb 21

Apparently I was so excited about the eclipse last night that I failed to actually click on the Publish button. This gives me the opportunity today to expand the above list.

enter a few bowling tournaments I’ve been eying

go on a trip (England, Twins spring training, Redwood City CA, etc.)

pay for my Twins season ticket

get some extra internal hard drives

take 18-year-old cat to the vet for a check-up (she’s doing fine)

new hot water heater

Today’s Yays, Nays, and Tips

Just got back from errands. When I’m overloading on Twitter, I should remember that I have this actual blog. That doesn’t limit me to 140 characters.

Tip: Plan ahead for running out of rabbit pellets. Then you don’t have to drive farther to a different store.

Yay: Went to different liquor store in the same strip mall as second pet food store and found the cheap but tasty Pepperwood Grove Zinfandel.

Nay: The cheap but tasty Pepperwood Grove Zinfandel was up $2 from a year ago when I last had it, to $8.99.

Nay: These stores are in my old neighborhood. Absolutely don’t miss the yuppy SUV-driving me-first motorists. The African emigre majority in my current neighborhood drives by its own set of rules, but it’s generally slower and and a whole lot more considerate.

Tip: Don’t grocery shop at Lund’s unless you want to pay a third again as much as Rainbow. For example, the previously mentioned Kraft Singles were $2.75 “on sale” compared to the $2.19 (recently up from $1.99) regular price at Rainbow.

Yay: The baggers at Lund’s are much more skilled than those at Rainbow.

Yay: Any salad that includes those mini fresh mozzarella balls. The best so far is the Caribou Coffee/D’Amico caprese salad with grape tomatoes. To die for. Well, really good, anyway. Tried a version from Lund’s with marinated red peppers rather than tomatoes. Not quite as divine.

Nay: There are about four loads of laundry waiting to be done.

You Should Pay Full Price

Usually, I find that the store brand of things is perfectly adequate and you save quite a bit. However, for the following items I highly recommend forking out for the name brand: Kraft Singles, soda pop,  and tampons.

Travel Blog, parts 1, 2, 3

Travel Blog (part 1, Thursday, 3:30pm)

 

It’s Thanksgiving Day 2007. After a rough and busy start to the week, it’s finally me time until Tuesday. That’s because I’m taking my first vacation in three years, other than the occasional weekend trip to Madison or Chicago.

 

Over the last few weeks, a plan has been developing with people I don’t even know! My friend RM left the comfort of his Midwestern life to embark on a new career path two years ago. It turned out that one of the guys he went to work with, EV, has the exact same birthday (day AND age) as Rob. Since this year is the big 4-0, I thought it would be the perfect excuse to finally visit Rob and his new life in California. DV (wife of the other birthday boy), AR (third work colleague and friend), and I have been conspiring for it to be a surprise!

 

So my flight was scheduled to leave at 1:20. I got up at 8:30 thinking, oh, I have plenty of time. Next thing I knew it was noon and I hadn’t even finished packing my bags. I grabbed Dhia to give her a quick dose of fluids, sprinted a bag of trash back to the dumpster, and finally ran out the door at 12:20, well after the time I had intended to be at the airport—through security, checked in, at my gate, casually getting a little work done while I bided my time.

 

Minneapolis’ light rail RAWKS! I boarded at 12:31, and 17 minutes later was deposited at the main terminal at the airport. Plenty of time.

 

Well, it turns out that 30 minutes goes by pretty quickly when 1) you have to ride several escalators up from the subway to the concourse level, 2) you have to check in and get your boarding pass, 3) the D-ring holding the strap on your carry on bag breaks right off and you can no longer sling it over your shoulder, 4) you have to go through the security point (which mercifully didn’t have a line, though I did almost forget to put my shoes back on), and last but not least 5) your departure gate is at the exact opposite location as the light rail station.

 

But dear lord in heaven I made it! Though I was about ready to pass out from walk/running with two small but well-packed bags, I got to the gate right as the first boarding announcement was being made. So I even had time to go back to a nearby vending machine to grab a bottle of water.

 

Then the joke was on me, a little. It turned out that we were delayed about 15 minutes anyway waiting for a few people from a connecting flight. Then we had to de-ice as it had been snowing very lightly since last night.

 

In the air now, probably over Oklahoma. (I used miles rather than money, so I got the efficient Minneapolis–Houston–San Francisco route.) The pilot said we’re about 20 minutes late, but that should still give me about 75 minutes to make my connection. Must remember, if there’s wireless in the Houston airport, to connect to my home or work computer and grab a font (yay, Leopard and Apple Remote Desktop). 

 

Stay tuned…

 

(Of course, I’ll have to wait until the surprise has happened to post this, on the outside chance that RM would happen to have finished making his pie and had nothing better to do than see if I posted a few-and-far-between entry to this blog.)

 

Part 2 (6:30pm CST)

 

Back in the air, seriously wish my iBook G4 had one of those snazzy backlit keyboards.

 

Left Houston early, pilot says we’ll arrive about 15 minutes early in San Francisco. Woo hoo!

 

Had time to eat in Houston airport. Looked for Chik-Fil-A, there was none.

 

Wonder if my own headphones work in the armrest. The plug seems to be a slightly different size, but it’s good enough for one channel which is good enough for me.

 

(6:30 PST)

 

Longest. Flight. Ever.

 

 

Part 3, Friday morning

 

In spite of its being the longest. flight. ever. we landed in SFO about 20 minutes early. Got to AR’s house just before 10pm. The surprise worked. There was an awesome moment when Rob glanced up and said “oh hi” and then another awesome moment as the confusion set in. Bloody fantastic!

4:45 p.m. CST: Ah, another line at the Apple Store (Southdale). This time they’re giving away t-shirts to commemorate the release of Leopard, unlike for the release of the iPhone. So I volunteered to come and get the office copies.

I got here with an hour and 15 minutes to go, and there were only eight people in line. Now, five minutes later, a whole two more people have come after me. Guess those 500 shirts will be plenty!

Hmm. I seem to be hungry. Also forgot the list of items I was going to photo search for while waiting. Guess I’ll have to play Text Twist instead.

5:02: Dearly wish I had a cup of coffee but didn’t bring any cash. Now 18 people in line, including me.

5:04: Great. The wife and fussing infant of the guy behind me just showed up.

5:13: Hey, that’s what I can do— I’ve been putting off finding an airfare.

5:23: 41 people. Bad news: Ow, my ass! Good news: Airfare is within range I was hoping for.

5:32: Rah rah speech by store employees. Sweet! The t-shirts actually come in M, L, and XL.

5:39: Okay, I’m bored. Short attention span today. I think I will post this and read The Rake magazine for the remaining 15 minutes.

Rabbit Eats Spider (Plant, that is)

Finally—the perfect thing to unnecessarily blog about! Last night, I arrived home from work only to find that a very lovely spider plant had disappeared from the pot on my windowsill. Well, not exactly disappeared, more like eaten. It was no mystery who the culprit was, even before he came back for leftovers.

My sweet, adorable bunny rabbit Robbin is a firm believer that when he gets hungry, anything is fair game. Apparently this is why yesterday he took it upon himself to trim the hedge.

Robbin must have been a mountain goat in a former life, as no location is out of range as long as there are steps to get to it. I thought it would be safe to put the cat food kibbles in the bathtub. Then I thought it would be safe to put the cat food kibbles on top of my scanner on my side desk. I figure it’s only a matter of time until Robbin realizes that it won’t take much additional effort to go from the scanner to the opposite end of my regular desk, the current location of the cat food kibbles.

So the unnecessary blogging will come as we follow the rebirth of the shorn spider plant, this year’s Little Vegetation that Could.

(I’m very happy to say that Robbin doesn’t seem to be suffering any health repurcussions as a result of his marauding.)

Gentlemen, Start Your Tomatoes

It’s that time again, when the tomato buds have appeared. I have two plants in large pots. One is the Patio variety, which I was successful with last year. The other is Early Girl, a hybrid apparently. Patio is a compact plant, and Early Girl is a sprawling, normal-sized plant. There’s nothing like a homegrown tomato and the ones I got last year were mighty tasty.

Of course, last year’s effort was hampered by the actions of the Furry Fiend. Its activities provided much of the material for last year’s Tomato Blog. This year I anticipate more dastardly squirrel deeds. There is a juvenile squirrel in the yard who has been warming up with digging deeds to the new grass I’ve been trying to grow for nearly two months. It turns out that I’m good at growing grass, but for some reason, there’s one area where Junior feels the need to dig. As far as I can tell, he’s not burying anything and he’s not retrieving anything, so why, why, why?

Last year, I did the Tomato Blog with Apple iWeb, which is all flashy and pretty. This year I’ll try it here because as I said, I want to be more serious about my blogging. And by serious I mean professional, hopefully not stuffy. The easy thing about iWeb though is that creation of photo pages and such is all tightly integrated. Now, I guess I’ll have to do the photos on Flickr and just provide a link. That will make it more difficult to give individual tomatoes their own photo pages, but maybe that’s not necessary anyway. Last year was an experiment, I guess this year will be too.

Getting started

I’m 10 days into Phase 1 of the South Beach way of doing things. Unfortunately, the monthly bloat has set in so one and a half of the seven pounds that I was down so far have returned. But still, already my pants are very noticeably looser and my belly no longer leads the way. My goal is to lose 25-35 pounds, which would be from the current size 16 down to 12 or 10. For my height, medically, I should be at 140–145. I’m taking action because I’ve never been this big and I was finding the weight to be more and more intrusive in my physical activities.

I chose South Beach because I recently saw my friend RM for the first time since December who had lost about 30 pounds the South Beach way and is now a wisp of his former self. If he could do it, so can I! So I bought the basic, blue South Beach book, read it, and got started. As I planned my first week’s meals I was excited to find that the recipes are things I like to eat anyway, the way I like to eat them. Well, except for beer being the biggest no-no on the list. Ever. But it’s beer and a steady reduction in home-cooking over the last four years that got me to this point, so if I have to switch from beer to my other favorite, red wine, then I guess I’ll mostly make the sacrifice.

So this first week and a half, even though it’s Phase 1 which is supposed to be the strict phase that rids you of your icky refined carb dependence, has been so easy. I can’t believe this is a diet! Well, it’s not really a diet, just a healthy way of eating that has the fringe benefit of weightloss. This is pretty much the way I used to eat, except for tons of versus some salads, and zero white rice and potatoes. I mostly don’t eat white bread anyway, unless I’m out and something crusty and good comes with dinner, and I don’t have a huge sweet tooth. Potatoes I can take or leave, but I’ll miss white rice. And beer.

I haven’t felt like I was starving. I get hungry, of course, but especially after I got through the first couple, it hasn’t been that craving, I’m-gonna-die kind of hungry, which I now think of as the carb-withdrawal hungry. Instead, it’s a gentler reminder to put a bite or two in my mouth and then I’ll be fine. I no longer feel stuffed after eating like I frequently used to. You know, like after eating a whole frozen pizza or something. Which means that I haven’t been waking up with food hangovers. Or beer hangovers. I like that! Today—when I ate two each of mini-sized Doritos, Crunchy Cheetos, Sun Chips, and pretzels after sweating in my un-air-conditioned office for the first six hours and just wanted to taste something salty—was the first time I’ve cheated. My other transgressions are only related to quantity, but not even that much.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that whatever change is taking place in my body, I’m drinking a lot more water. That’s one area where I’ve always been good, but since I started South Beach, I’m probably drinking 2–3 times more water than I used to, because I’m that thirsty. I’ll have to research whether that’s a known side effect.

This is going so well and I like what I’m eating so much that I might just continue Phase 1 for an additional week or two. Since I cook for one, I have lots of leftovers and so have gotten through only about three or four days’ worth of recipes (I’m mixing and matching). They’re so yummy I want to try as many as possible! Plus, like I said, it doesn’t even feel like I’m trying so why not keep going.

I’ve gone legit …

In an effort to be more serious about my blogging, I’ve signed up for this snazzy WordPress blog.