Monthly Archives: February 2009

The Kind of Low-carb Encouragement That WORKS

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So, I took a late lunch, to run to our local HEB store, to look for a few things, in general, and specifically stuff I couldn’t find at Albertsons yesterday. Found the Queso Blanco (frying cheese), found the Carb-smart Breyer’s Ice Cream, and when I stopped to look at the sweeteners section out of curiosity, found a down-right hottie.

 Albertsons had one kind of Stevia-based sweetener. HEB had about 6, plus some other stuff other than the huge Splenda display and some Nutrasweet and Sweet’n’Low and your standard Sugars. I was looking at a couple to compare them, and this woman walked up and started looking at a couple of the different varieties of Stevia-based sweeteners.  She was, at a guess, 5’5″ish, brunette, late 20s to early 30s, very nicely sized and shaped (not too damn thin, but certainly what I would call “slender”), with probably 34D or so breasts.  Believe it or not, I didn’t look at them too much.  Oh yes, very pale blue, sort of icy, eyes.  

After half a minute or so, I asked her if she’d tried any of these before.  She hadn’t, we talked for a while about the different kinds, she asked me if I’d tried them, mentioned a couple kinds she’d used that she got from the “Health Food Store,” talked about how in (cold/cool) tea one of the ones she used sort of stayed clumpy and didn’t dissolve very well, etc.

I took heart in seeing this hottie there, talking naturally with her, and seeing her, in the shape she was in, going for the same sort of diet plan.  That’s the kind of thing that grabs one’s attention, and encourages you (well, me at least) to stay with this, to stay strong, and think that given a couple of months, you’ll be in the shape that looks like it belongs with such a sexy woman.

I regret being distracted and not taking note of whether or not she had a ring on, and of not being smart/brave enough to say something like, “hey, why don’t you call me sometime and let me know how whichever one you decide to try is?”  Also, probably would have been a smart thing to ask which “Health Food Store” she was tired of running to, “all the time.”  Hard to try to facilitate another run-in with this hottie if I don’t have any other idea of where to try to find her, other than “randomly in the weekday afternoons at HEB.”

Semi-random Thought

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The health care and the clothing industries need to get together, and introduce a stealth fat-tax.  

Why?  Because presently (with the exceptions of grossly larger food bills for whale-class folks), it’s more expensive to be healthy and slender and fit, than it is to be out of shape and overweight.  This is fundamentally fucked up.

Huge money industries are passing a stupid tax on to us as a whole because they’re going for shorter-term profits instead of more financially responsible and beneficial long-term ones.  It’d be cheaper for them, in the long run, and in turn, cheaper for us as a people, if they fiscally encouraged being healther and fitter.  I’m saying these things with absolutely no active research, no cited facts,  no specific figures to back them up. See if my chain of thought makes sense to someone other than myself:

Eating healthier costs more than eating cheaply and less healthily/unhealthily.  Yet being less healthy makes a person a higher health risk, be more expensive to care for medically.  

Bigger clothes, for the most part, cost the same as smaller clothes.  This one really makes no sense to me.  A Small shirt costs the same as an Extra Large shirt, but there’s significantly more physical material involved (which, at some point, equates to more time or labor involved as well – more stitches to sew, longer to cut, etc.  It may be a small amount per garment, but with thousands as a multiplier, it’ll add up).  Sometimes that same-cost-as thing extends up beyond Extra-Large.  Kohls, one of my more tempting places to look for clothes at, have no price differences between Small and XXL.  The only place that I can remember, offhand (I’m sure there are more), that differentiates a little here, is Walmart, where for “extended sized” it’s $2 more for some things.  This one really makes almost no sense to me.  Sure, I’m sure some folks in our quick-to-offend, self-absorbed, hypocritical, prudish society would be quick to bitch and moan about “size discrimination” or some such idiocy – but it’s a basic fact, there’s physically more (or less, depending from which side you approach it) actual, real, phsyical goods there.  Where else do you see people buying  different amounts of things for the same price?  Certainly not food – 9 chicken nuggets costs you more than 6 chicken nuggets.  Not gas – 3 gallons costs more than 2 gallons.  A queen-size mattress will certainly cost more than a full-size mattress.  

This concept is almost as if garments are being treated like intellectual property or entertainment.  You’ll pay the same ticket price for that 86 minute mediocre brainless comedy as you will for the 140 minute thought-provoking, emotion-rending drama.  280 page mass-market paperbacks may cost the same as 560 page mass-market paperbacks (not always, but it can and does happen).

So, the healthy, fit guy buying a large shirt for $20 is paying more for his clothing – per ounce, or square inch of fabric, or whatever metric you wish – than the guy who’s less healthy and bigger (we’ll presume same height for each and similar bone structure) buying the XXL shirt for $20.  

This just all seems stupid to me.  By not financially incentivizing being in better shape, healther, etc. – which tends to cost less, overall, medically –  it’s a sort of tacit encouragement for people to be lazy unhealthy drones, who have higher risk of health problems, higher cost of treatment, and thus, by aggregate, drive up the costs of health care for everyone.

But no, let’s continue overcharging the people who need less physical clothing for the same degree of decency and protection, and let’s continue profiting on cheap, processed, refined flour based and other cheapo carbohydrate laden foods.  Drive that carb addiction for short-sighted profit!

There’s This Nifty Thing, it’s Called a Turn Signal

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I hadn’t planned on going anywhere for lunch today.  However, due to my not reading the cooking directions Tuesday when I bought the pre-cooked, frozen, nuke’n’heat lemon-pepper chicken breasts, I lacked freaking plastic wrap.  Ok, so I’ll take the back road, run to Walmart real fast (hah!) and grab some plastic wrap . . . and maybe some pepperoni for home . . . oh, and a bigger tub of whipped cream for home . . . 

Anyway . . . leaving the megalith of wage-slavery, I was behind this guy in a big black truck.  I signal and start changing over to the leftmost lane (we both turned out into the center lane) of our side of the 7-lane road.  Big Black Truck Twerp also begins to change lanes – no turn signal – and sees me, swerves crazily (covering about 2 lanes of total width taken from all 3 lanes) and straightens out, slows down, and then changes lanes behind me, this time using his turn signal.  For the first lane change, anyway – not for the change into the turn lane, or his left turn into the Town and Country.  Oy, frigging idiots.

Random and Various Updates: Windy Dusty Edition

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So, yeah, life and stuff.  Things have been going ‘OK’ for me.  Not great.  But, overall, not crappy.  This post may be a little disjointed, I’m pretty much more or less randomly spewing thought onto the keyboard.

Work is going well.  I like this job. It’s kept me really pretty busy the last couple of weeks solid.  I’ve not really had that much time to take for myself (also known as: goofing off), and when I have had some time for that, I’ve mostly spent it trying to amuse, inform, or educate myself online (Reddit is my friend here.  I barely even LOOK at Digg anymore).  Thus, I’ve not dedicated much time lately to trying to sit down and write anything.  Hell, I wanted to just sit down and fire off a quick post this morning to vent and feel better about almost getting killed (as well as having my time wasted) this morning on the way to work.  Then I did something silly and tried to “upgrade” WordPress, and it trashed things, and wasted half an hour of my time, and about 2o minutes of James’ time, fixing it.  Hell, I should really honestly know better, backups before upgrades are, ya know, a good idea for a reason.

I’m making an actual, conscious effort to try to use tags on this post.  That’s probably why there are so many.  I’ve been really bad, sucking, really, about using tags.  It’s a Web 2.0 thing that I’ve just so very rarely found useful; in counterpoint, though, the few places I’ve found them useful they were VERY useful.

I started on a low-carb diet yesterday.  Not quite exactly Atkins, though very heavily influenced by Atkins.  It got hard for a bit last night, but I got past it.  I expect to have a few more days where I’ll have periods of intense carb-craving.  I’m determined to stay strong and will my way through it.  There’s a lot of things I want to do, and pretty much everything in my life I think will be easier if I can get down closer to my ideal weight.  The whole feeling better about my body and self-image thing will certainly be nice (and should give me more confidence, of course), but having less weight on my body to lug around will make things like trying to do pull-ups on the Iron Gym I bought and haven’t gotten anywhere near my $30 worth out of yet.  Less weight to power around trying to walk/run/jog should make it easier for me to do those things too.  I’ve basically just bitten the bullet on the expense thing . . . it’s going to cost more, period, but my health and attitude are worth more to me than maybe another two week delay before I move into my own apartment.

Moving into a place of my own again is certainly something I very much want to do.  Just the feelings of independence, of not having my cat relegated to a small travel trailer, where she only gets attention from me one visit a day, where she can run and play and be happier (of course, needing to pay freaking $450 or so for pet fees/deposit is ludicrous), where I don’t have to drive anywhere near as far everyday, where I could, if I so desired/needed, bring a woman home . . . all good and needed things.  But I’m trying to be smarter about things, listen to my dad, save up extra money, Just In Case, before I jump into a lease and a large chunk of monthly expenses that will leave me with very little discretionary income.  Being able to game again on my own schedule, with regularity, have a constant cable modem connection, etc., all very appealing.  But, my dad and I are getting along ‘OK’ right now, though I still handle a lot of things as if walking on eggshells so as not to piss him off and upset that.  

I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately.  Been trying a couple of different clients for it, TweetDeck and blu, and neither does quite just what I want, but if I they could be combined, with another little feature or two added, they’d rock as the ultimate Windows Twitter client.  Corey suggested I write it myself.  Hah!  That’s not quite what I’m going to tackle as my first project getting back into programming.  I like TweetDeck more, but it crashes all the damn time.  blu is stable, but lacking.  I’ll be adding some kind of WordPress Twitter plugin to the site here when I find one I like well enough.

Well, that’s probably enough time wasted for now.  I need to get back to work, wrestling with Advanced Installer’s inadequate documentation and the limitations of .msi files until I can get them to submit to my will.

Stuff of the Day, Tired Headachy Monday Version

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Spam of the Day: “Love yourself” (Ok.)

Pic of the Day: The Spinmallow

Link of the Day: Blogs aren’t money-makers.  Gosh.  Really now?

Quote of the Day: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein

(Note: I started this Monday morning, when I had a horrible throbbing headache.  It was so bad, I didn’t get back to it until today.)