Dreams

I graduate from college in four semesters - so around May of 2008. I have a pretty strong desire to change what I'm doing then, in one of several directions. One of the possible directions is to go into teaching.

I've always wanted to teach, but back when I was poorer, I was nowhere near having a degree, and once I got near to having a degree (like, in the past few years), I was making too much money to readily consider taking that kind of cut in pay.

But recently, I've worked out that if all of my debts were paid off (which will take either a few years of disciplined effort, or my company's stock price going up by about $1), I could live on a teacher's salary. And when I graduate, I'll have enough math credits to be a secondary (jr or senior high) math teacher.

I won't have a teaching certificate, but both Denver and Houston have alternative certification programs that involve teaching while going to school for one year (Houston) or two (Denver). The pay is not horrendous - in Houston, I'd make about $30K the first year, which includes a deduction for the program costs. In a couple of years I'd be making $35K, and it goes up from there. With a paid-off car, no other debts, and a slightly cheaper lifestyle than I have now, I could live on that pretty well.

The reason I'd like to do this in Houston is that, given that almost everyone I know lives in Houston or Austin, it kind of sucks to live in Denver, even though Denver itself is fabulous and, if I had my druthers, everyone I love would move here instead. If I got my certificate and taught a couple of years in Houston, I could try to get a job in Austin later if I wanted to. Colorado and Texas are also reciprocal with regard to teaching licensure, so I could also move back to Denver if I chose. (Conversely, I could get certified here and then move to Texas.)

What I really don't know is whether I would actually detest and loathe teaching. In theory, it really sounds great to me. But in practice, it seems like a lot of people really hate it and want out. Would I be one of them? It's not as though it would ruin my life if so. I can come back and get another job in oil & gas or GIS, or try to start a new career in computer science - especially if I've successfully adapted to living on $35K or so.

Lately I'm trying to think of money not in terms of something you want to stockpile so you can live bigger and better, but in terms of something you want to cut your dependency on so that you can make your life about other things than having to maintain a certain income level. It's not retirement that I'm after (though being independently wealthy is always welcome, and of course I do plan to retire someday and not have to live on the street) so much as a life that is more fulfilling or more enjoyable or more involved than what I currently have.

Tam Rules the School: CREU Grant

At the end of the last school year, my computer science advisor (Dr. Paul) asked me and another student to apply for a grant under this program ("Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Science and Engineering" by CRA-W, part of the Computing Research Association). Under the program, you do some type of research/computer science project and receive a grant.

So we submitted a proposal. My partner Olga was interested in diabetes research (she was an endocrinologist in Russia), so we put together a research project about creating some type of a patient database to be used by different doctors remotely that would then use some type of artificial intelligence algorithm(s) to recommend treatments based on similar cases.

Well, it's been about a month since I thought we would be notified, but we finally found out that we got it! Yay!

At the time that we applied, the grant amount was supposed to be $1500 per student, but since then it has changed to $3000 per student, so that's extra exciting. We apparently were also awarded $500 for conference travel or other related project costs. (The money is exciting, partly because we had already decided to work on the project next year anyway, for general experience, resume building, and possible independent study credits. So it was a question of "work hard on something all year for intangibles" or "work hard on something all year and get money.")

We are required to keep a weekly journal of our efforts and an updated web site about our project. The three of us are (tentatively) going to meet the week after next to get started.

Edited to add this note: a semester of school costs me about $1000, so this is, in essence, a full scholarship for this upcoming year for me.

Thrive

I've been raving for years about the wonderful Kaiser Permamente "Thrive" commericals, but I've never managed to capture them on video. Thankfully, we now have YouTube, so such things are no longer necessary.

This ("Signs") was my first favorite one. I especially love the Hal Hartley-esque music:



I also think "Be Your Own Cause" is brilliant, both in the message and in the solid boomer targeting. The Dylan music is great too.



Here is a nifty Spanish one:



And here is one I haven't seen on TV, but it looks great too:



I just think the message of these ads is fabulous, and they are so well-executed. Unbelievable :-)

For Rosie

This looks like my mom's dog:
(from www.nataliedee.com)

All of Us Big Healthy Giants

Sally sent me a link to an interesting New York Times article ("So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn't Even Know You", Gina Kolata, 7/30/06) about our health compared to that of our recent ancestors. (Read it soon; the links typically expire after a couple of days.) The information is pretty interesting. I enjoyed how they did the graphs (linked along the left side; click on the link near each one to see the full thing) with plenty of explication to make clear what was being graphed, and nice low-key color schemes.

Breakfast Challenge

I'm having a problem figuring out what to eat for breakfast.

Eating breakfast is a good idea. I started it because it's supposed to help with weight loss, and now I'm used to having something in the morning, so I can't easily go without it.

Lately I've been having a frozen burrito and a cup of milk. It works OK and the plain frozen bean burritos are cheap and not overtly unhealthy (no lard or trans fats, for instance).

But I really want to cut refined carbs from my normal diet (I get plenty of them when I eat out or go off plan), and starting the day with a white tortilla like that doesn't seem like a great plan.

My big breakfast constraint is that I cannot do anything that takes time to put together. I just won't do it. I can't get up any earlier than absolutely necessary, and if I have to do something at all complicated for breakfast (even something like making a sandwich), I'll just stop at McDonald's instead, which is not healthy.

I tried looking at Whole Foods for similar burritos that would at least be whole wheat, but I couldn't find any that were 100% whole wheat. I can't make burritos myself - it takes too much time. (I could make them ahead but (a) what a pain, and (b) I suck at wrapping burritos).

I have considered the following options:

1. a slice of whole wheat toast with peanut butter, plus a piece of fruit - I had this today and found I cannot digest peanut butter toast in the morning; it took about 15 minutes just to get it down.

2. a trail mix of almonds and raisins - this is very high in fat and I'd really like to have some whole grains included

3. cereal, milk, banana - I won't eat any of the cereals that are whole-grainy enough to qualify as being better than the frozen burrito

4. oatmeal, perhaps with nuts and fruit - I can eat oatmeal without a bunch of added sugar, but in practice, I won't

5. eggs and fruit - cooking eggs is too hard; I don't like hard-boiled eggs very much; too high in cholesterol

Any ideas for me?

8-Meal Sunday

Every Sunday, I try to make 4 meals to eat for dinner during the week (I usally eat one after I make it, so I actually have 3 left). I usually make pasta. For the week's lunches, I usually bring frozen dinners.

But this week, I had two ideas I wanted to try, so I made 4 of each, lunches and dinners. This should make for a good week.

First I made a pasta dish out of the following (all weights are raw):

6 oz whole wheat fusilli
1 jar marinara sauce (Whole Foods brand, which I don't like)
5 oz spinach
6 oz mushrooms
1 medium onion
1 can of garbanzo beans
1/4 cup olive oil
8 oz chicken breast

The olive oil & chicken breast need explanation. I usually make the pasta with cheese (parmesan or mozzarella), or I plan to add cheese later, but I'm trying to cut back on saturated fat. I added the extra olive oil to try to make it taste good enough that I'd want to eat it even without cheese.

Removing the cheese also made it too low in protein, despite the garbanzos. I prefer to cook without meat (because it is easier, cheaper, and kinder), but chicken breast was the easiest way to make up the lack there, and I had some in the freezer.

This dish has 531 calories per serving and is very healthy in general.

Once I was done with that dish, I washed the giant frying pan and made a stir-fry. For this, I used these ingredients:

2 cups cooked brown rice
16 oz (one of those bags of pre-washed, cut-up) broccoli
8 oz (half of a normal-sized bag) baby carrots
1 block of extra-firm tofu
1 tsp canola oil
1 medium onion

and, for the sauce:

6 T peanut butter
8 t sriracha hot sauce (the rooster bottle you sometimes see at cheap Vietnamese or thai restaurants)
cornstarch
water

I made a peanut sauce last week that was really delicious, with peanut butter and coconut milk, but coconut milk is basically nothing but saturated fat, so I left it out this week. This is what the sauce looked like after I whisked it together:


And here is my final product:


This dish has 461 calories per (large) serving.

People You Don't Like

One of my pet peeves (I call it "Spot") is when people treat others unfairly because they don't like them.

It's natural that, when you don't like someone, everything they do rubs you a bit the wrong way. A minor annoyance that you'd instantly forgive in a friend is yet another piece of evidence against the unliked person. But I really try to refrain from criticizing someone I don't like for something I would never criticize a friend for. For instance, I don't make fun of people for being fat, or unattractive, or bald, or old, or whatever, so it's not OK to make fun of those things in someone I dislike.

But what I really hate is when this happens at work. One woman that I work with becomes totally suspicious of a person's every move once she takes a dislike to them. The disliked person will visit me with a perfectly reasonable request - something they need for their job - and I'll later be asked, "What did he want?" in a suspicious way, and interrogated about why he needed that thing, and told how he didn't really need it, which will be followed by a reiteration of how & why she doesn't like him.

Even the most disagreeable coworkers often legitimately need things from us in the course of business. It's just dumb to be continually suspicious, intransigent, and difficult towards them. And it sucks.

Computer Science & Work

I realized today that one of the things that bugs me about my job is that my workflow resembles a bad kind of data structure (in the computer science sense).

Many jobs resembles a queue - when you receive new work, it goes to the back of the line, to be handled after current work is done. In some jobs this is literally true, like if you check groceries or work on an assembly line. For other jobs, it's true because nothing that you do is of specifically high priority, so you just process things as they show up.

Most office jobs probably resemble a priority queue - a line in which the order is determined by priority. If an assignment comes in that is higher priority than one you already have, it goes in front of that one. This can require some effort to keep track of, but it's basically functional.

But my job resembles a stack - a structure that is "first in, last out." Oh, in theory my job is a priority queue like it should be, but in fact, it always seems to happen that whatever I am asked to do needs to be done right now, even before the thing I was given to do right now a few minutes ago. I think the main person who gives me work does not mean to structure it in this way, but has kind of a short attention span, so that's how it works out. It means I am continually interrupted in the middle of one task to start a new one, and have to battle to get back down the stack to all the unfinished projects that are waiting.

It makes me a little nutty.

In regular life, tasks that appear as a stack are very hard for me to get started on. What I mean are things where your thinking goes like this:

I need to do a load of dark laundry. Oh, but first I need to gather up all the dark laundry. Oh, but first I'll have to mend that pair of dark pants I wanted to have in that load that are in the drawer. Oh, but first I need to disassemble the chest of drawers so I can get that drawer to open. Oh, but first I need to get my tool chest back from the neighbor who borrowed it.

I tend to give up somewhere around the third "oh, but" and just not do the task. (My example is a little silly, but sometimes household tasks do present in this way.) I don't know if everyone is like this, but the fact that I'm like this makes it even harder, I think, for me to deal with my job in a productive way.

Great Bar Experience

I gave blood yesterday, which was great. (I always get a mental high from it because it's very fearsome to me.) I was glad that the instructions they gave me only told me to avoid lifting heavy things for four hours afterwards, so I could still go lift weights last night (about 7 hours after the donation).

Two of the things I do at the gym are the bench press (where you lie on your back on a bench and lift a bar off your chest) and shoulder press (where, standing or sitting up, you lift a bar over your head - straight up, that is - and then down to your chest). I've been doing these with free weights because the bars for the barbells are 45 lbs, and I can't yet press 45 pounds in either direction. (I'm bench pressing about 30 lbs, which sounds really woeful, but whatever.) But I don't like the free weights because my wrists aren't very strong and they wobble around a lot when I raise them.

So yesterday I finally found out what some of the other bars weigh. It turns out the the "cambered curl bar" (like the one on the left) weighs only 20 lbs. (I was actually told it was 25 lbs, but when I weighed myself with and without it on the scale, it was only 20.) So I put a couple of tiny plates on either end of that sucker and, man, it made my presses really much more enjoyable than before.

I also used weights for squatting for the first time - I did my first set of squats (10 squats) with a 10-lb plate held against my chest. I did a second set (12 squats) with no weight. I think I'll be ready to try a bar soon, and while I was exploring the bars, I discovered that the giant aluminum bar (same size as the regular 45-lb bars, but aluminum instead of whatever heavier metal they are) weighs only 25 pounds. So assuming I had facility with having a bar on my back, I could probably squat that right now, at least a few times.

Overall it was a great session. I really love lifting weights!

Mechanical Turk

Salon has an article about Mechanical Turk today. I had not heard of this before, but it's a site run by Amazon that allows companies to hire people with computers and spare time to perform rote tasks that computers can't do (like looking at shoes and determining what colors they are, or transcribing podcasts). The prices are very cheap because apparently a lot of people are willing to do this type of work in their spare time almost for free.

They call it "artificial artificial intelligence", which is awesome. I think the whole thing is really cool - distributed computing using human brains.

Winter Park Extravaganza!

Yesterday, Mosch and I had an extra-fun outing with two kids in his family. I'll call the kids A and K. They're 10 and 9. K lives in town and we see her pretty often; she's the one who came over to our house recently and spent the day with us. A lives in Austin. They're not related to each other, but Mosch is close with both of them, and he wanted them to meet.

We picked the kids up Wednesday night and got up yesterday morning and headed for the Winter Park Resort, where you can ski in the winter, but where they also have a ton of neat stuff to do in the summer. We got all-day passes, which gave us unlimited access to the alpine slide, a maze, mini golf, a bungee trampoline (where you have bungees hooked to a harness and you bounce on a trampoline), the big ski lift (my personal favorite), etc. I'd been there twice before, with my cousin Erin and my aunt, and it seemed like a great place to take kids. I'd wanted to take Mosch too, and for him this was a good opportunity to get the girls together.

We had an awesome day. The alpine slide (shown in the picture) is the big attraction there, and it's the biggest one in Colorado. It's basically a sort of tube or partial pipe (as you can see). You slide down it on a fancy sled.

The sled has a place to sit, and plastic on the bottom that slides along the track. It has a handle in the middle. If you pull the handle towards you, some braking material goes down under the sled and makes you go slower (or stop), and if you push the handle forward, some wheels come down and you go faster. It's up to you to control your speed so that you don't fly off the track (though I think you can go at any speed safely if you ride properly) or hit the people in front of you.

To facilitate not hitting the people in front of you, there are two tracks - a slow one and a fast one. On the slow one, you're allowed to go as slow as you want, and sometimes there are little kids on there (3 or 4 years old) who go really quite slow. (If the parents are smart, they ride behind the little kids in case somebody comes down too fast behind them. I've been hit from behind, and it's frightening but not actually painful.) On the fast slide, which is otherwise identical, you're supposed to go fast and be experienced.

I only rode on the slow side with my cousin and aunt, but yesterday, after one trip down the slow side, the kids were ready for the fast lane, and we all switched over. Whee!

The slide is LONG...I mean, all the way down a mountainside. It probably takes about 2 minutes to slide all the way down it. There are a lot of turns and dips and things, of course. You take a ski lift to the top.

All kinds of animals live nearby. We saw a ton of ground squirrles (or chipmunks, as I think of them) and marmots (big fuzzies like a badger or a beaver). I saw three marmots on one slide trip alone, all sitting right next to the slide. (I saw a ground squirrel perching on the side of the slide itself, seeming oblivious to me zooming by on my sled.)

We went down about seven times. My worst trip was when I got a bad sled that wouldn't go fast. I was in the fast lane and there was a guy right behind me for a lot of the time - I could hear his cart going click-clack click-clack too close for comfort - but he never hit me.

The last trip down - not just my last trip, but the last trip of the day, after closing time - I actually fell off my sled. I had lost my fear of the slide and could feel that my attention in general was waning - I wasn't paying enough attention to the curves in terms of where I was leaning (there's no way or need to steer). During one curve, I felt that I was leaning slightly the wrong way, and as I continued, I felt it get worse and I knew I was going to crash. You can get really hurt on the slide, so this was bad.

Eventually my sled turned over and I was sliding down on my butt quite fast for a long way until I slowed down enough to put my hand down and stop. (Mosch was behind me, and I was afraid he would hit me while I was sliding down with no sled.) I scrambled out of the track and pulled my sled off. I waved at Mosch as he went by and assured him I was fine so he wouldn't stop. After the track was clear (I could see a good way up at that point, which was good), I clambered back on with my sled (harder than it sounds) and came down the rest of the way.

I managed to only get something like a rug burn on one elbow and a similar scrape on the heel of that hand. I was saved by my shorts, which I bought at a thrift store for $2, and which are kind of cargo-type shorts made of a slightly stiff canvas, so they stayed in place and protected me from the worst of the sliding.

Meanwhile, the two girls got along not fabulously but well enough, and, as they say, a good time was had by all. We dropped them off around 8 and got home at 9:30 after eating dinner, and here I am at work today, a bit sore and exhausted but happy about the good time we had.

Just Remember, Kids...

(from www.toothpastefordinner.com)

Drunk Driving

Today, my coworker buddy and I were going to have lunch together. My boss and her boss invited themselves/each other along, so we had lunch with them too.

Her boss is an officer of our company, a guy who seems really attractive until you get to know what a goofball he is. At some point, he was telling the story of how he paid his wife $5000 to sing with the band at some party they were drunk at.

And then he told how he drove home drunk. He demonstrated how he was covering one eye and squinting down the road. He admitted "I shouldn't have been driving" but was chuckling as he told us of this feat.

My boss smilingly said, "That's not a good idea, you know..."

That was nearly an hour ago and I'm still pissed off about it. I don't think drunk driving is defensible for anyone, but certainly not for someone who is so rich that a taxi fare wouldn't even register. I don't think it's funny or makes for a charming story to tell over lunch. It just lets everyone know you're a fucking asshole with no regard for others.

Upper Crust Sports Weekend

This is how my weekend went.

Friday night, Mosch and I ate dinner and then watched "The Man Who Knew Too Much." I saw this movie at my mom's house around Christmas and really enjoyed it. I'm not a Hitchcock buff, but I find the movies pretty delightfully fun.

Incidentally, the other movie we have at home right now is a silent Charlie Chaplin one, so it's apparently Oldies Week around here.

This weekend there was a polo charity event that my company is a sponsor of, so we employees got some tickets. I'd never seen polo before. (We had the Saturday tickets, when you can dress like a slob; every year I laugh at the Sunday tickets, where you have to wear "garden party attire" - whatever the hell that is.)

We had a really hot weekend; it was about 97 when we got to the polo field. The guests all sat at round tables under a giant canopy. At the edge away from the field, was a big line where you could get (free) food prepared/sponsored by local restaurants. (The lure of free food was too much for me; I ate freely.)

We sat at a table near the field, and watched polo for the first time. Polo is played on a huge field - several times larger than a football field - so the action is not always nearby. The exciting parts are when the horses are running full-out, or when one team is trying to score a goal. (They change horses pretty frequently to keep them fresh for all of this running.) There is also a lot of comparatively dead time taken up by penalties, end changes, horse changes, and so on. They have a lot of rules about what angle you can cut another person off at, what part of their horse you can bump into, etc., and obviously it's not easy to precisely maneuver a bunch of giant animals.

I could definitely get into watching polo, but it's also a fun sport to have going on alongside you while you do something else and only look up when things get exciting or you hear the horses come near. (My favorite part was when the announcer, who announced the whole thing with the assumption you knew nothing about polo, which was nice, explained that polo is played at many different levels so that "everyone can play." Um, yeah..everyone who is rich.)

We didn't stay for the entire event - I eventually had my fill of the extreme heat. At home I took a nap, and then we went to the gym, where I got to do my new strength training routine. (I ran out of slots on my last sheet, so I got to redesign the whole routine and make a new chart; I was really eager to try it out.) It went really well. I was properly tired and weak afterwards (as in, my arms were shaky whenever I moved them). Today I have sore triceps and lower back (I added a back exercise for the first time). But as I went to bed that night I felt the all-over well-being that I get from strength training, which I suspect is really something like extra blood flow as my body strives to heal a thousand tiny muscle injuries...but it feels good, so I'll take it.

I wanted to get in at least some tennis this weekend, but it was so god-awful hot. How hot was it? Hot enough that I was willing to get up early on Sunday morning; we left the house at 8:30 to go play. It was still really hot. We played one set, which Mosch won 6-1 (he usually wins 6-2 or 6-3 these days; he also plays easily for me on purpose). I just could not serve; something about being still and focused was not possible for me in the heat. (I have a low tolerance for heat in general, and it was about 90 degrees and quite sunny.) We decided to play a second set with Mosch serving every game. Amazingly, I won this set 6-4 - a first! I've never taken a set from Mosch before. So we played for about 70 minutes total. About halfway through, I got as hot as I could get and from that point I was just in a sort of heat stasis, but I was able to keep playing, and well.

The rest of my weekend was boring - laundry, cooking, lazing around, etc.

Being Good

I often eat a diet frozen entree for lunch, and one of the brands I buy most commonly is Smart Ones, which are affiliated with Weight Watchers. They're reasonably priced when they're on sale, and tend to be tastier and more filling (per calorie) than most brands (excluding the brands like Amy's that are very good but also expensive and less widely available).

But one thing really bothers me about the Smart Ones, and that is their slogan, which is "Taste so good, you want to be good" (TM). This is on all of the boxes, as well as something like, "Another way you can be good today."

I really reject the view that sticking to my eating plan is "being good" and that making different choices is "being bad," though it's hard to avoid using that language sometimes. (My coworker diet mate uses that type of language all the time, and of course I'm not going to pick a fight about it.)

I think when you use that kind of language, it sets up a view where there is like an adult you and a child you. The child you wants to eat all kinds of unhealthy food - it's a bad, naughty, willful child - and the adult you thinks in terms of controlling the child you with rewards, punishments, lectures, shame, etc. It gives you this whole pattern of thinking that involves morals and deserving. ("I was good today, so I deserve X.")

The way I prefer to think is that my choices determine the outcomes I receive directly - there's no moral link or god to punish or reward me. Some choices satisfy my short-term desires but may harm me in the long run, but I'm fully authorized to make those choices. If I look at yesterday's eating and conclude that it wasn't in my best interests, I will try to choose differently next time, but there's no sense that I was bad or naughty.

I could be totally full of shit about this, but my feeling is that this kind of good/bad talk, which is totally pervasive in our culture, actually makes it harder, not easier, for people to choose well. And I'm sorry that Weight Watchers, which usually has their head on correctly about issues relating to dieting, is sponsoring this other view.

Squat Safety

Many people are concerned that squatting low - that is, with your knee at an acute angle, rather than just to the point that your thighs are parallel to the floor - can cause knee injury. I've seen a few sites (including the one I linked yesterday) that claim otherwise, but the very fact of seeing so many denials made me wonder whether anyone is making a credible case that deep bends are risky.

So I found this article, which argues pretty extensively (with multiple references) that squats are safe for most people, even people with various types of knee injuries, and in general have a protective effect on knees. My squats have been causing me a little bit of knee discomfort and "fuzziness" (both of which go away by the next day), and the article suggests I should do them shallower if that's the case, until I build up strength. (I've been nervous about the knee sensations, but not sure whether they were injuries or just soreness like you often have in your muscles after lifting weights.)

So I'll be keeping my squats shallower for now, but I hope to continue working up to higher reps and more depth over time as my knees adapt. The article also covers spinal concerns, but I won't be worrying about my spine until I actually start squatting with a barbell (or at least a bar).

More About People Eating

Mosch (who apparently follows the links I post more assiduously than I do) directed me to this page by a doctor who thinks the problem with hearing people eat is a form of hyperacusis. It was interesting and does fit my experiences. Mostly it made me feel grateful that (a) my experience is so mild compared to some people's, and (b) this didn't start when I was a kid.

I really don't mean to post about this like it's a big disorder or something I'm stricken with. It is only a very tiny part of my experience of life.

Listening to People Eating

Today's Since You Asked advice column in Salon is about a woman who can't stand to hear other people eat. I'm the same way, though not as afflicted as the letter writer, in that I don't usually hear other people eating if I myself am eating. And it only started to bother me around late high school or college.

I don't think what I have is "hyperacusis" or any kind of medical condition. I don't really know why the sounds of people eating can make me so angry. It's not too bad with strangers, as long as they're not really loud eaters (I could never live in Asia, where the cultural norms allow louder eating, for this reason), but with people I am close to, especially people I live with for long periods of time, it gets really bad. And raging at people for chewing is not really an acceptable behavior.

Denver Buildings!

Today, Slate has a slide show about Denver architecture. Yippee! Fun!

I really like that library he says looks "outdated." I also basically like the art museum (which I always think of as looking like a castle in a pop-up book), and the new addition is fine with me too. I think it helps that I'm not a snob. I like that our city has interesting things like that to look at. An unusual building would probably have to be really hideous for me not to like it just for being unusual.

I used to live within easy walking distance from the library and the museum (and downtown, for that matter). It was a great decision to live so near downtown when I first moved here. Otherwise I don't think I'd have ever gotten familiar with that part of the city.

Our convention center is also an interesting building. Or at least it has some interesting sculpture on either side. On the downtown side, this giant blue bear peers in the windows.

I can see the bear from my office. I look at him (her?) a lot. It's probably too cute for some people, but for me it is just cute enough.

On the other side of the convention center, but actually in front of the Denver Performing Art Complex, there are these two giant figures (surrounded, for reasons that are totally mysterious to me, by rusty scrap metal). (This picture, like the bear one, will expand if you click on it.)

I used to drive by these guys on my way to work every day, and I always thought they were not very good art, but I still liked looking at their white butts as I drove by. (I like to imagine that some people think the opposite: "those may be great art, but I don't like looking at those butts.")

I'm sure some of you (Sally) will notice that these figures also look like the people I draw, like the picture I drew for the "house tree person" test. So maybe I like them for that reason too.

I should issue a big disclaimer here that I'm totally unqualified as any kind of art or architecture critic. But as a person who merely lives in Denver, I enjoy all of these odd things we have around.

Jill Greenberg

Jim Lewis has an article in Slate this week about Jill Greenberg's photo project where she made some toddlers cry (by, for instance, giving them candy and then taking it away) and then took big glossy photos of them. Like this one.

I'm not completely outraged by this the way some people are - I agree that as long as it doesn't happen often, it's probably fairly harmless to make a little kid cry, given how often they cry on their own over the slightest thing (like, er, having candy taken away). It's hard to really call it child abuse. I don't think I'd let my own kid participate in a project like that, though.

At the same time, I can't imagine wanting to have one of these photos on my wall, and not just because that cartoon-like lighting is ugly to me. The idea of making a kid cry for my enjoyment makes me feel dirty.

I know there are great photos that document suffering, though, being a total ignoramus, I can't tell you which ones I'm thinking of. But those photos are documenting something that happened on its own; they're journalistic and tell us about a moment in time. And it's not like I'd want a famous photo of some atrocity on my wall either.

I tend to think that most of our use of children for entertainment is basically exploitative. But I'm not sure it's worth never portraying kids in movies, TV shows, etc., just to stop it. But I wish I could watch the Olympics, for instance, without wondering what kind of abuses the little girl gymnasts endure as part of their training.

Weight Training

In contrast to my not-quite-in-control eating, I've been doing really well with weight training lately. I've been going pretty regularly three times a week and spending about 45 minutes on my routine, which involves a lot of free weights, ab work, and a couple of machines.

I enjoy it in that I (usually) look forward to going and start off in a good mood, and in that I feel very good after doing it. But it's somewhat murderously hard to pick up weights that you can barely move 8 or 10 times. Your body gets into an anaerobic thing where you can't get enough air and it kind of feels like you're going to die all over. Afterwards I am completely worn out.

Last week, I found this awesome website - stumptuous.com - about women's weight training. It has a ton of information, advice, and just general kick-assness about the whole thing. (Almost all of the advice and info is gender-neutral, so guys, feel free to check it out.) I especially like the suggestions about routines and, really, all of the articles on the training page. But just click through the links at the top and enjoy.

Since finding that site, I've added squats to my workout. (You can read all about them here if you want.) I had been using a leg press machine, and doing some partial squats holding onto a railing, but a couple of visits ago I tried a real squat (not with weights). I did about 5 of them (not all with great form) and it murdered my legs. I could barely walk for three days.

But last time, I did 2 sets of 3, with better form than last time (still no weights; arms out in front zombie-style as illustrated on the link above), and my legs were weak afterwards but not sore the next day. People who are serious about weight lifting seem to think squats are super-important, so I'm glad to be headed down this path. It makes me feel like a stud, though I'm pretty far away from being able to do them with a heavy bar on my back. (Once I can do a set of 15 or 20 with my weight, I'll start working on the real thing.)

When I first wanted to do a squat, I couldn't even figure out how to try one. I mean, physically I didn't know how to start. Then I remembered peeing in the woods in snowshoes and a ski bib last winter, and realized I do at least know how to crouch, which somehow gave me the courage to just get down into some kind of a squat. I'm still working on balance so that I'll be reliably on my heels and not forward on my toes, but it gave me a place to start.

So despite the eating thing not going entirely well, I'm having success in an area that is fun and important to me. And I'm definitely getting stronger all over.

Week 10 Update

Is it a bad sign that I had to calculate from an old post what week I'm on of my 15-Week Plan?

Yep.

I haven't totally blown it or anything, but I'm not doing that well either. I seem to be hungry more than I should be (I had a few weeks there where I had no troublesome appetite), and I seem to be stuck on a Doritos kick. (Oddly, I only like Doritos when I am dieting. I much prefer other types of snacks under other circumstances.) Plus I keep eating Twix bars. Crazy stuff.

So overall I have lost about 6 pounds, which is not terrible. My coworker and I went to Weight Watchers today, after skipping the past 3 weeks, and I was the same weight as 4 weeks ago, which is...well, under the circumstances, pretty good, I guess?

Anyway, this has been the most boring post ever, but I thought I should at least post something about it.

"Crash"

Last night, Mosch and I watched the movie Crash.

I try not to read reviews of movies I plan to see soon, but I vaguely remember reading some reviews of Crash when it first came out. Probably Ebert loved it, and probably somebody at Slate or Salon thought its views of race in America were off-target.

I thought it was a great movie, by which I really mean, it does what a movie should do - it's gripping, entertaining, funny, painful, heart-warming, terrifying, tragic, and suspenseful, all in turns. I highly recommend watching it.

I don't want to address its "message" at all, really. It surely has one, or several, but it's really the movie qua movie that I thought was great. I enjoyed watching it. As for the race stuff - yes, I think the movie takes an exaggerated view of racial conflict, but it wasn't annoying or harmful. You don't have to imagine that the director of a movie means for the cast to be some kind of a representative sample of humanity.

Kid Visit

I mentioned a few posts ago that my plan for last weekend was to have our 10-year-old kid friend come over Thursday night and hang out with us all day Friday. So what was that like?

Exhausting! She's a really charming kid, and I enjoyed her a lot, but I was also really ready to drop her off when we did.

Whenever we were at home, she was in my lap, like a giant cat, telling me stories or asking me questions or poking or tickling me. It was sweet but also took all of my attention to keep up with.

Thursday night when she got here, we went out and played tennis for over an hour. It was pretty late - we got to the court at 10 pm - and I was actually ready for bed, but she was full of energy and we all had a good time.

Friday morning we all got up and ate breakfast and then went to the pool at our rec center, which is just a fabulous (indoor) pool with a lazy river, buckets that dump water on you, lots of areas to play in, a big-ass water slide, and so on. I had always wanted to bring a kid there to properly have fun. We stayed there a couple of hours and got completely worn out playing chase in the lazy river (which involved a lot of running "upstream"), among other things.

Back at home, she was all "What's next? What's next?" We ate lunch and then played Monopoly - which Mosch hates but won anyway. Then we watched the Miyazaki movie "Spirited Away", which is probably officially my favorite movie ever. (It's the one where the girl's parents turn into pigs and she works in a bathhouse for the spirits.) And then it was time to take her back home. We stopped on the way and played some more tennis.

It doesn't sound like that much, but I was completely worn out by it. I can only imagine that if you actually live with children (for instance, if they are your kids), you get used to interacting with them so it doesn't take as much attention and exhaust you continuously. (I know babies are continually exhausting, but 10 year olds?)

Super Quick and Easy Dinner

I had a large lunch today (at a Mexican restaurant), so when I got home I wanted to have a small dinner. I also wanted something easy to make. So I made something new that turned out to be extremely tasty and also very easy.

I thought I had a fresh bag of broccoli/cauliflower/carrot mix in the fridge, but it was bad already (no wonder; apparently I bought it in mid June), so I started by cooking up 4 cups of "Normandy Blend" frozen vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, yellow squash - sorry, Momm, it only gets worse later - and zucchini).

When those were done, I stirred in a tablespoon of olive oil (I would use less next time, but I wanted to make sure it was palatable), a 3-oz packet of salmon (one of those new-fangled metal packets), and half an ounce of parmesan. I stirred that in the pot until it was all warm.

It was 370 calories and delicious! And pretty healthy, albeit high in (healthy) fat. Also it was hugely volumetric.

Speaking of those salmon packets, they are really great. The salmon is wild and not farmed, which is preferable for environmental reasons, and the packets are about $1 for 3 cooked ounces (at least at Wal-Mart), which works out to be equivalent to $4/lb if you bought it fresh, which is a fabulous price for wild salmon. Of course, you can't make steaks with it, or throw it on the grill, or use it for sushi, etc., but if you're eating salmon for health and convenience, it's a great value.

Today At Work

I had today off (part of my 5-day Weekend of Wonderment), but I went in anyway, to try to untangle some of my desk, which lately has been a sort of minefield in that every time I try to find anything, I come across a bunch of crap I should already have handled. Between my natural laziness and time-killing attitude at work, the large number of people who can ask me for things, and my boss's propensity for interrupting me all day, it's been hard for me to catch up on any of this at work. (80% of this is completely my fault; only 20% can fairly be attributed to my work environment.)

Anyway, today I sent out some important certified mail things (which I got Mosch to assemble for me) that I was kind of letting people think I had already done a while back. That kind of thing is good to do when nobody is around. Not that I would know.

I also went through some initial surface damage payments we had made (these are payments we make in advance to surface owners before we drill wells) and deciphered the annual payments that will be due, and added these payments to the rental calendar. That took literally hours.

Then I finished some map updates I had been working on before the break. That was the fun part of my day.

Near the end, I went through most of the stuff on my desk and cleaned it up. A lot of the stuff that ends up on my desk can simply be thrown away immediately (recycled, of course) - it's things like drafts of maps and documents I was working on. But there was a bunch of other stuff, so I came up with a New Organizational Scheme, which should make my boss happy to see, though doubtless I won't keep it up in the future.

Basically, I found some legal-size foldery things and, everything I found that wasn't to be thrown away, I decided what hypothetical category it might go in (e.g., "Original Documents", "Arkansas Miscellaneous", "Regulatory Notes", "Current Assignments"), put a label on a folder, and stuck the stuff in there. I ended up with about 15 of these folders. It looks all neat and organized. I even used my nifty little label machine (which is hooked up to the computer and thus is actually easier than hand-writing anything) to make neat little labels.

What with processing the surface payments, doing the certified mail stuff, and sorting through my desk, I was able to foist a ton of filing tasks off on our wonderful receptionist (who was a file clerk in her previous life at our old company), which is great.

I left work at about 8 PM (after arriving around 1:30) and was very satisfied with my day.

Wal-Mart Finale

It seems that Furman couldn't really let Ehrenreich get the last word, so he's posted a final summary of his position.

Weekend Plans

I'm taking tomorrow (Friday) off and, at the last minute, our boss decided to give us Monday in addition to Tuesday off, so I'm looking down the barrel of a 5-day weekend. (Is that the worst use of metaphor ever?)

Tonight, Mosch and I are going to pick up a certain child we know (whose mom is a bit concerned about freaks on the Internet, thus the caginess) and take her home with us. She'll spend the night and hang out with us all day tomorrow too - what fun! She's a very smart, talented, and game 10-year-old, and for some reason, she likes us too.

We don't have any big plans (at my insistence), but she's bringing a bathing suit and a tennis racket so presumably we might swim and/or play tennis. It's a safe bet we won't sit around discussing epistemology all day. ("What do you suppose we should do next?" "Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by 'suppose'...")

I don't have any other weekend plans, but oddly, one of the things I'm most looking forward to about having 5 days off is being able to come spend some time at work dealing with the dreadful things that keep accumulating on my desk. My whole office is like a ball pit full of vipers, waiting to strike at any moment. And for some reason, it's very hard for me to take care of certain kinds of things (organization; filing; my job) while other people are around. Part of it is psychological, but part of it is because some of the people I work with continually disrupt my concentration by talking to me about crap. (For instance, I can be in the middle of an intense, time-sensitive, intense-concentration-requiring project, and my boss will still come in and say things like, "You know...I've been thinking...next week I might have you start working on..." Tell me about it next week!)

Not Being Diabetic

I wish I thought like this all the time:

(from www.toothpastefordinner.com)

Wal-Mart Debate in Slate

Slate this week has an interesting "dialogue" (an exchange of published emails) between Barbara Ehrenreich (author of a few books including Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream) and Jason Furman (an economist) debating the merits of Wal-Mart.

I already posted my views on this topic, and they haven't been changed by reading Ehrenreich's opposing view. I doubt most people who have thought seriously about this issue will find their minds changed by reading the debate (there are four entries so far, two by each writer, with probably more to come).

What is interesting about the debate is how much the two sides (at least as represented by these two) argue past each other. They are really not speaking from the same frame of reference. From my perspective, Ehrenreich is really missing the point and not understanding some basic economic realities. No doubt from her perspective, Furman is missing the point about what is important and what our priorities should be.

Mosch and I argued recently about whether people who support and oppose Wal-Mart do so out of fundamentally different understandings of economics (my position) or because, despite agreeing on the various factors involved, they come to different views on the overall valuation. (I trust Mosch will post a comment if he disagrees that we had a discussion like that, but that was my interpretation, anyway.)

In any case, if you have an opinion on Wal-Mart and really don't know how other people can hold a different one, this article might educate you (probably about how wrong-headed the other side is, that being the nature of opinions, but anyway...)

TracFone

I've had a cell phone for a few years now, first with Sprint and lately with Cingular.

Some people use their cell phone for most or all of their calls. Some people need to have a cell phone to make and receive a bunch of business calls. Some people only want a cell phone to call 911. But I fall somewhere in the middle - I don't like to make "real" calls with my cell phone; I have home phone service; but I like for Mosch to be able to reach me all the time, and I like to be able to call and check in at various times to make plans, etc.

So, for $45/month, Cingular had me on a plan where I got, I think, a couple hundred daytime minutes, plus unlimited nights and weekends. Of those daytime minutes, I probably used less than 30 per month, and I almost never called on nights or weekends. I would joke ruefully that for only $45 per month, I had a device that would always tell me the time, and it fit right in my pocket! Whee.

I lost that phone last week, and decided to look into prepaid service. Tonight, I got my new TracFone in the mail, and it is set up and working. And it rocks!

For $20, I got a phone (a very basic Nokia phone that turns out to be pleasanter, to me, than my old phone) plus 80 minutes of service over four months. The way the minutes and time works is that you can buy more time and more units (minutes of talk time) and everything rolls over, but for instance, right now my phone has 80 units and will go until 10/24, so if I don't buy more minutes by 10/24, I'll lose my service. But if I buy another card by that time, the extra time and minutes will roll over. I think I can buy a year's worth of service, with as many minutes as I'd need in a year, for around $100, which I'll probably do in October.

Activating the phone took a few minutes, but it was pretty painless. I've heard that TracFone's customer service is terrible, but hopefully I won't need it. Since very few people ever even have my cell number, if the thing breaks in a year I can just buy a new one and start over, if I can't get good support. Big deal!

This makes me really happy. My old cell service was costing me $540/year and I bet this new service will be under $150. I hated wasting money on something so dumb, and now I don't have to.

Hail!

Early this evening we had a terrific hailstorm. We have a skylight, so we got tons of crackly poundy sounds. Tigerlily fled and even our braver cat Sammy left the room once Mosch and I sprung up to check it out.

I tried to take pictures. Photographing hail is not easy because (a) the lighting is weird, (b) the hail itself blocks a lot of pictures of the rest of things, and (c) you don't really want to go out into a ton of heavy hail just to take pictures. Nevertheless, here are a few. I think they'll expand if you click on them.

This was my best picture of the actual hail, though you can't see much else. It actually wasn't dark outside either. I think the bright green speck is a leaf that was blowing by:



A bunch of hail accumulated on our balcony (and yes the thermometer is accurate):



And, as is often the case in Denver, we had a flash flood. These last couple pictures show the flooding and also the hail on the lawn:






The storm only lasted about 15 minutes, but it was pretty exciting while it did. A lot of ice was still on the lawn when I left a couple of hours later, though it was 60 degrees outside.

Early Morning Wake-Up

This morning I was woken at 5:30 by the sound of a car horn honking. It was kind of a small, tinny type of honking, so it might have been a small older car or a motor scooter or something.

5:30 is practically broad daylight around the summer solstice, and the birds were in full squawking mode, and we sleep with our windows open whenever possible (because it's nicer and because it saves money on AC), so once I woke up, it was tricky to fall asleep again, what with the bright light, the birds, and...oh yeah, the fact that the jerk kept honking (intermittently) for about 10 more minutes.

We like where we live now partly because it's quiet. Our last apartment, which was downtown, was not only on a busy street, but was peopled with college kids who got drunk at night and yelled up at their roommates from the parking lot and so on. Our current complex is so quiet that when we get home at 10:30 on a Friday night, we whisper until we get inside.

What is hard for me to understand is how a person can think it's OK to wake up a whole neighborhood of people - our street is chockablock with apartments, so it's even more dense than a typical street with houses - in order to get the attention of their carpool buddy, or whatever the honking was about. It's pretty obvious to me that you can't honk a horn for 10 minutes at 5:30 AM in a residential area.

Whatever. I did get to sleep again.

Epic Hike, Part 4

Please see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Do you want to know how tired I was when I got to the car at 7 PM? This is how tired (no, I didn't know my picture was being taken):

I was also filthy, largely because the sunscreen I wore made dirt stick to me all over, but partly from the gallons of Off Skintastic I'd sprayed all over. (Speaking of bugspray, I promised Mosch that I would point out that most of these photos came at the cost of his getting bitten by more mosquitoes. Oh, the sacrifices we make for art!) Mosch was supposed to drive us home, but I needed more of a break than riding in the car, so we stopped at a local Alco store and I washed up, and then we ate Mexican food at a restaurant in Winter Park and then we drove home.

I was sore and zombie-like all day Sunday, barely able to walk. I called in sick to work on Monday. Today is the first day I haven't had any effects from the hike.

The map says it was 8 miles, and you can see there was quite a bit of uphill and downhill in there. It took us over 5 hours, with only a few short breaks. If you'd asked me if I could walk 8 miles, I'd have said definitely not, but apparently I do have it in me. I figure if I did this every week, I'd either develop enough muscles not to be crippled by it, or else develop some kind of crippling long-term injury. But I don't think I'll find out.

Thanks for reading all of this, and I hope it was at least a little bit fun.

Epic Hike, Part 3

See Part 1 and Part 2.

I did not freak out at our position. I think I said something like, "Well, this will make an amusing story later," and, after a brief discussion of whether to go back to the Zoom Trail or continue down the Flume Trail, in which Mosch argued for continuing on because we had come quite a distance downhill (about 500' if you believe the map), we set off down the Flume Trail with a quickness.

We needed to walk 2.2 miles to the intersection with the Chainsaw Trail, and then somewhat uphill to the Zoom Trail, and then a bit downhill to the car.

Most of our path was through woods, with an occasional log to rest on:

And we crossed a big meadow:

And finally came to the one single bench we found along this whole trail, where I had a good rest for about 10 minutes while mosquitoes bit Mosch all over (I looked up at one point to see about 15 just on one of his legs). My feet were incredibly sore by this point, but the scene was idyllic. I'm only sad that the camera didn't capture the blue sky properly.

When we reached the Chainsaw Trail, I thought we were home free, but it turned out that most of the trail was a pretty extreme uphill chug (as you can see on the map) through picturesques woods that I was thoroughly tired of seeing.

Birds sang, squirrels rustled around us, the weather was gorgeous - a bit under 70 all day, sunny and with a cool breeze - but I was just dog tired. That last uphill bit really took the stuffing right out of me. I found myself not crying involuntarily, and not intentionally trying to cry, but involuntarily trying to make myself cry. (I couldn't even do that.) Mountain bikers would pass us, all fresh on their way uphill, and we would say hi, and, yes, great day to be out, and all that, but I really thought I might die.

So we got to the Zoom trail, and even that went on further than I'd expected, though it was at least downhill.

And eventually, the best moment thus far: we saw the car! Can you see it there between the trees? I was almost happy at this point.

Continue to Part 4...

Epic Hike, Part 2

Read Part 1 first.

Eventually, the trail we were on ran out, and we came to a sort of faint car track. We checked the GPS and our map, and it seemed to correspond to some dotted lines that would run up to the main road ("Aqueduct Road" on the map), so we took it. At this point, I also remembered that we had brought the camera specifically for blogging purposes, so here are me and Mosch on this car trail:


After a while, this path completely disappeared. Not only did it disappear, but it disappeared while we were scrambling up a very steep slope, moving a few big steps at a time, with much peril. (I'm probably exaggerating, but I am not great at slopes, and I was wearing tennis shoes, not hiking boots, which didn't help.) Mosch pushed on ahead of me and eventually found the road, which was a big relief.

Aqueduct Road is more or less paved, as you can see here. Reaching it was great because, in my experience, once you reach this road, it's a very quick jaunt home. We had the choice of going left (see the map), which would take us quickly home, or right, which would be a more interesting trip. Mosch urged the fateful rightward turn, so we did that.

I have to confess, I did not look at the map at this point (Mosch did), so in my mind, we only needed to follow this road and it would take us right to the car. In reality, we needed to turn right at the Zoom Trail intersection.

So we continued hiking for quite a while. I was thinking we should be nearly at the car. We had left the car at 1:50, and it was around 4:30, and I had a running bet with Mosch over whether we'd get back closer to 4:40 (my guess) or 5:00 (his guess).

And then the unthinkable happened. We reached the intersection with the Flume Trail. There was a marker for it. I was confused and I looked at the map. I said, "So how can we be here?"

I knew I was wrong, because I usually am when I think we're totally lost or that Mosch is totally wrong about the directions.

But I was not wrong. We had walked past the Zoom Trail by the entire distance to the car from where we should have turned, and our path home was going to be long, long, long.

This was kind of a crisis moment. I was done with walking. Remember I expected to see the car at any moment. (Look at the map to see how laughably wrong I was. We were at the intersection of Aqueduct Road and Flume Trail, which is the southwestern corner of our walk, or just about the furthest point from the car.) Would I freak out? Have a fit? Start crying? Fling myself on the ground and beg to be left for dead?

Tune in to Part 3 to find out...

Epic Hike, Part 1

Saturday, Mosch and I drove up to Fraser, about 70 miles away and on the other side of the continental divide, for an innocent hike - a ramble, really. We wanted to cover the same territory we had snowshoed several times this winter, and Mosch wanted to look for a grate he had lost. The plan was to eat some great New York pizza (at De Antonio's, the best I've ever had, and I don't think that's just the altitude talking) and hike for two or three hours.

I make maps for a living (when I'm not shuffling papers), and occasionally I get to use this power for my own purposes, so here is the map I made of my hike. This started with a scanned-in version of a very nice National Geographic topo/trail map we have of this area, which I tied to geographical coordinates, and to which I periodically add points from our GPS device. (The map will expand if you click on it.)

On this map, the red car symbol is for the parking lot, where we started. The red line is the path we took. The contour lines are 40' apart, and every point along the same contour line is at the same altitude. I posted a few altitude values at significant points.

Things started off pretty well. We left the parking area (proceeding southwest, or clockwise as you look at the map) and followed a trail that seemed pretty close to where our old snowshoe trail had been. (Needless to say, when you hike on top of 6' of snow, you can't see where the trails are, but we're somewhat familiar with these woods.) We had plenty of water and gear - my pack was 8 lbs, which is a fair weight for a day hike - but we didn't bring snacks since we had just eaten pizza.

More in Part 2...

My Net Worth

I was looking at the balance in my (meager) 401K today, and I decided to see if I could calculate my net worth. On the positive side went my two 401K accounts, my savings account, and the market value of my car (I used the middle value at Edmunds.com). On the negative side went my debt, including my car loan. I did not include the value of any of my ordinary possessions like electronics, clothing, etc., since I don't own anything particularly valuable.

To my surprise, my net worth is positive! I am proud to report that, as of this moment, I am worth about

$3,130!

Friday Night's Adventure

I have to admit, after the adventure we had Saturday, Friday night's outing doesn't seem quite as awesome as it did at the time. Nevertheless, it was pretty cool.

We had planned a bike ride. There is a point we can drive to, a mile or two downhill from our apartment, that is right on a bike trail that goes west to Golden and east to the confluence in downtown Denver. It is the trail that Mosch takes every week when he rides to Golden and then up Lookout Mountain and back.

I wanted to try riding to Golden, but neither of us thought we would really make it. It's not a long ride - about 5.5 miles - but there are a couple of steep uphill parts between here and there. And I haven't ridden my bike in years, except once a couple of weeks ago. Nevertheless, we set out in that direction.

Early on, we ran into a young woman with a horse (we were in Prospect Park, where you can ride horses) who wanted someone to help her walk the horse home. She was horsesitting this horse and apparently it was skittish. I volunteered Mosch to walk her home and continued by myself.

When Mosch caught up to me, I was over halfway to Golden, and about halfway up the first of the steep hills. I'd never ridden on this trail before, of course, so I hadn't been at all sure what to expect. The steep hill was pretty crazy for me. I was in my lowest gear and moving so slowly that it took a lot of concentration not to veer off the path. My lungs were working at pretty much full capacity and my legs were hurting too. But I actually did make it to the top, at which point we took a break.

I didn't really want a break - I felt like going downhill would be a better rest - but the next steep hill was close by, so it was necessary. The next hill was equally steep, but not quite as long, and with some breaks, so I made it. After that, it was smooth downhill sailing into Golden, where we had a slice of New York pizza at Anthony's. Joy!

The ride back was physically easy - our car was about 500' downhill of downtown Golden, so most of the ride was very easy - but nevertheless perilous, for the simple reason that my bike currently lacks head- and taillights, and it was dark. Most of the time, I could see the path but not the details of the path, and I was just running along on faith, assuming there would be no rocks, bricks, pinecones, etc., to kill me.

Near the end, though, we went through some woods, and at times the path was made of black asphalt, and I was just watching Mosch's red flashing taillight about 50 feet ahead and following what I remembered of its path. (It was kind of like driving on the highway at night sometimes is, especially in a heavy rain.) If Mosch hadn't been there in front of me, I would have had to walk.

But we made it back without incident. I was incredibly high from the ride and excitement. I couldn't help remembering that when I first started biking in Denver, about 5 years and 60 pounds ago, we would ride 13 blocks, exactly 1 mile, to the park, and I would need two rest stops on the way (because the last 3 blocks were uphill, albeit so slightly that you wouldn't have noticed it if you were walking). Mosch would ride around the park while I rested, and then we would ride back.

So taking off and riding 11 miles round trip with a significant altitude change...that just rocks. (The whole trip, not counting the brief rest at the top of each hill, and of course not counting the time we spent at Anthony's, took an hour and 40 minutes.)

Weekend Plans

Tonight, Mosch and I are eating dinner at home (rare on a Friday night), and afterwards we plan to bicycle. It's been raining here today (relatively rare in Denver, and especially rare during the morning hours like today) and now it's clearing up, so it should be a nice cool evening for a ride. This will only be my second ride this season. I finally got my new padded bike shorts in the mail, so it shouldn't make me as sore as last time.

Tomorrow, we plan to drive to Fraser (pictured above), which is about 70 miles away in the mountains. We snowshoed there a bunch of times this winter, and Mosch lost a grate which he hopes to find (more for fun than because it's very important). The snowshoeing was steep, difficult, and perilous, and it will be fun to experience the same area in its summer aspect. We may have to actually stick to the trails, though - I'm not sure you can hike straight up through the trees the way you can snowshoe (or that it would be proper to do so).

An equally important attraction in Fraser is De Antonio's pizza, a real New York pizza place run by a real New Yorker. He's rude and everything! Hours of snowshoeing or hiking mean permission to eat a few slices and have a real Coke.

Panera Bread

Panera Bread is a chain restaurant. I've never actually been there, but we've had their food brought in for work lunches before, as we are again today. They basically make these sandwiches that are kind of compact and oily and delicious. I always thought they must be on the unhealthy side for sandwiches, but I used to enjoy them a lot.

Fortunately, they have nutrition info on their website (see link above), so you can find out just how unhealthy they are. And the information is scary!

For instance, their Sierra Turkey sandwich has 950 calories, with 14 grams of saturated fat (that is 74% of my daily allowance for saturated fat), and 2390 mg of sodium (more than my day's allowance of salt).

The Tuscan Chicken sandwich is a bit better at 720 calories, 7 grams of saturated fat, and 1530 mg of sodium.

You vegetarians can have a Portobello & Mozzarella Panini for 750 calories, 14 grams of saturated fat (37 grams of total fat), and 1200 mg of sodium.

Now from that, you are probably picturing big honking sandwiches that any sensible person would only eat half of, but no, that's the charming part. The sandwiches are actually very compact (as in the picture above, from their website). When you get the stuff brought in for lunch, they come wrapped as half sandwiches, but nobody would call the half sandwich a meal by itself. If I could eat only half of the sandwich, it would be a reasonable number of calories, but still unhealthy.

Knowing what I do about their nutrition, I'd certainly never go to their restaurant on purpose. I guess if oily sandwiches were my favorite food ever, it would be OK as an indulgence, like eating at Chuy's, but I'm not that fond of sandwiches, and calories are too precious to waste on mindless eating of things that are way more calorically dense than they seem. (Even at McDonald's, you can get healthier food than this.)

Oh, and for people who are concerned about additives and the natural-ness of food, this ingredient list does not inspire confidence (this is for the mushroom/mozzarella sandwich):

Rosemary onion focaccia [Unbleached flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour), water, potato pieces (potatoes, mono & diglycerides, sodium acid pyrophosphate, citric acid), asiago cheese (pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), olive oil, onions, salt, yeast, rosemary], portabella mushrooms (marinated with water, balsamic vinegar, soybean oil, dehydrated garlic, salt, sugar, spices, dextrin, garlic extract, corn oil, red chili pepper, chipotle pepper, natural flavors, natural smoke, xanthan gum and propylene glycol alginate for thickness, potassium sorbate-to protect flavor), carmelized onions (onions, soybean oil, balsamic vinegar, distilled vinegar, water, salt, dehydrated garlic, natural & aritficial flavor, potassium sorbate, caramel color, propylene glycol alginate, spices, xanthan gum, sucralose, calcium disodium EDTA), fresh mozzarella cheese (pasteurized cultured milk, enzymes, salt), basil, salt & pepper.

Week 6 Update

This is Week 6 of my 15-Week Plan. (I am starting to think my readers will probably be relieved to stop hearing about this in 9 weeks. Tough!) I didn't post an update last week, which would usually be a bad sign, but I think was just being lazy.

I actually had a pretty excellent week last week. I stayed in budget, ate a fairly healthy diet (with, as we've seen, a large number of vegetables and a few fruits included), and lost a few pounds. As of the beginning of this week, I'm 6.2 pounds below where I started, which puts me on track to complete my 15-pound goal.

I've still been doing strength training three times a week very consistently. Lifting the weights and doing the ab work is challenging, but I'm usually moderately happy on my way to the rec center, and I try not to think about the specifics until I'm in the thick of things. I leave exhausted, but find that when I go to bed on those nights, I have a feeling of tremendous well-being. I haven't noticed that I'm stronger in any non-gym context, but then again, my life doesn't really require any heavy lifting or I'd already be stronger anyway, right?

This week is going OK so far. I made an interesting vegetable side this weekend for my afternoon snack, but found that, after eating one portion on Sunday and one on Monday afternoon, I just couldn't eat it anymore. (I included sweet potatoes, which are almost the only vegetable I don't like, and I think that's what's putting me off it.) So yesterday I had Doritos for my snack instead. And then I decided to totally blow my diet and eat like a crazy person last night.

But I was able to un-decide it later, which is rare, so instead I had a low-calorie frozen dinner before going the rec center. After the weights, I still hadn't eaten nearly enough for the day, and I knew I needed some vegetables, but I couldn't really think straight (too hungry and tired), so I ate a can of corn. That was perfectly healthy and will help me satisfy my requirement for "starchy vegetables", which are the only category I ate none of last week. (I got in my dark greens, oranges, beans and peas, and "others", but I don't eat much potatoes or corn while dieting.) Before bed, Mosch cut up some cantaloupe for me (thanks, Mosch!) and I ate that too.

Getting Rich Slowly

If I am slowly getting rich, it must be at a geologic pace. But this blog, Get Rich Slowly, has been a consistent daily read for me for a couple of months now. The guy who writes the blog is not an expert, but does seem to have a knack for collecting and publishing diverse information about finance and thrift. Check it out.

Tennis Lessons

Tonight is the third of six group tennis lessons I'm signed up for. They happen on Mondays and Wednesdays for three weeks. The group has about 7 people in it, and we have one teacher. It was $30.

Unfortunately, even though I specifically didn't sign up for beginner lessons (the description says you should be at level 2 - 3.5 on this scale), it turned out that most people who signed up are beginners, so it's being taught as a beginners class.

What sucks is that I'm still only in the middle of the class, skill-wise. We learn shots that I can already make 9 times out of 10 and yet, when we line up and hit balls, I make them more like 2 out of 10 times. It's so unfair. I've realized that I really am never going to be good enough at tennis that I want to get worse in order to get better.

But I'm sticking with the class because, starting this Wednesday, we are supposedly going to get to play doubles. Also, I've learned something I never knew about hitting backhands (that you should rotate your grip) and it seems to have helped my backhands. I can't hit them in the class, but I was really good on Friday night when Mosch and I played for 2 hours.

Right now the class is not even exercise - just standing around hitting balls doesn't get my heart going. So I'm not counting it for the purpose of how many minutes of exercise I get each week, but I am counting it as meeting the requirement of daily exercise, because standing out in the hot sun for an hour is about all I can take.

Fruits & Veggies

One of my goals for this 15 weeks is to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I typically eat a lot of vegetables but no fruit whatsoever. I like fruit, but don't find it easy to fit into my diet since I don't tend to snack and you can't just mix it into a pasta sauce or something.

I went through my food journal for this week to see what I ate.

Overall, I had an average of 1.3 servings of fruit per day, and nearly 6 servings of vegetables. That's pretty excellent. (A serving of fruit is about 1 cup, or a normal sized piece of fruit. A serving of vegetables is 1 cup of leafy ones, or 1/2 cup of cooked or chopped up ones.)

This is what I had, specifically:

11 servings of beans
7 servings of broccoli
2 servings of onions
2 servings of tomatoes
6 servings of spinach
2 servings of mushrooms
3 servings of mixed greens, or salad, etc.
3 servings of cauliflower
4 servings of carrots
1 serving of sweet potatoes

2 servings of banana
4 servings of cantaloupe
1/4 serving of strawberries
2 servings of watermelon

Pretty cool!

Incredible Nutrition Website

"Incredible nutrition website" may sounds contradictory (at least if you're not obsessed with the properties of foods), but this one is truly amazing: nutritiondata.com. It's got a great database with all basic foods included (probably based on the USDA data) and a lot of other fast foods and whatnot included also. There's cool graphical analysis of the properties of various foods (for instance, how good they are for weight loss or gain, how nutritious they are, how complete are their proteins, what their ratios of fat/carbs/proteins are, and how they satisfy all of your vitamin and mineral needs).

It's all free. It seems to be supported by advertising. And you can add it to your Google toolbar, if you use that, or connect it to your search dropdown in Firefox.

But, seriously, stop reading all my blather and go there right now: nutritiondata.com. Even if you don't need or want any of this information, it's just fun to play with. Seriously. I could do it all day.

High Deductible Health Plans

A long time ago, Debbie wrote about Health Savings Accounts. Many are familiar with the type of thing she wrote about - an account into which you can voluntarily put some of your paycheck, to be used for anticipated medical expenses. You lose the money at the end of the year if you don't use it.

I have a Health Savings Account, but thanks to some newer laws, it is much nicer. It goes along with the high-deductible health insurance that I have through work. If your work does not offer health benefits, though, you can still buy a high-deductible health plan with an HSA for yourself.
My health insurance has a deductible of $1250 per year, so every month, $104 is withheld from my paycheck (pre-tax) and put into the HSA account. I can use the HSA funds to pay the deductible when I get medical services or prescriptions, but I can also use it for any other medical expenses (including something like LASIK eye correction surgery, or a weight loss program), even if they are not covered by insurance.

The money in the account doesn't go away at the end of the year; it stays there and as long as I have a high deductible health plan, I can use it as described above. At retirement age, it acts like a 401K and I can use it for anything I want.

Meanwhile, the insurance still serves a purpose. It is a PPO (preferred provider thingy), so when I go to the doctor, her bill for (for instance) $150 goes to the insurance company, they correct it to $80 because that's what she has to agree to in order to be in their network, and then the $80 bill comes to me to pay from the HSA.

Once I meet the deductible, any further expenses are covered by the insurance.

Since my insurance is provided by my employer, I don't know what it actually costs - they pay the whole thing, and all I pay is the money that goes into my own account.

Although this is more complicated than regular insurance, I like it a lot. I like seeing the money pile up in the account. I think spending your own money encourages you not to be wasteful. This is a nice new legal option for individuals who have to buy their own coverage as well. (I had a high-deductible plan years ago and it was pretty cheap - something like $500 for the entire year. Obviously it's more difficult for older people and those with pre-existing conditions to get covered at a reasonable price.)

I'm Back

Blogger has been down for a day or so - perhaps intermittently, but every time I've tried it, in any case. Hence the no posting. I did write one post, which I'll put up tomorrow from work.

The Year in Weight Loss

As many if not all of you know, I've lost about 55 pounds over the past few years. I started off quite fat, so I'm still fat now, but I have a lot more energy and am a lot more athletic than I was at my previous high. So that's good.

But last year, 2005, was pretty bad. I started out by losing weight for a while, so that I was about 12 pounds lighter than I am now, but then I gained over 20 pounds. Eating lunch out almost every single day (Mexican food, no less) with a coworker didn't help, but in general I just couldn't string together even two weeks in a row of good diet behavior.

This year, I joined Weight Watchers with the coworker I was lunching with, partly because WW was what I had threatened myself with if I ever couldn't succeed on my own (now I don't know what to threaten myself with!) and partly because, by enlisting the aid of the coworker, I could resist going out to eat unhealthy lunches and stuff.

We started this on 1/10, and as of today's meeting, I've lost 9 pounds. (2.8 of those have happened since the start of the 15-week plan.) Losing 9 pounds in 5 months is not exactly the kind of result that anyone who goes on a diet is hoping for (no matter how many lies they tell, as I always do, about being happy with a slow and steady rate), and it's been 5 months of ups and downs, little losses and little gains, and it's been hard to see the pattern through the chaos.

But 9 pounds in 5 months is an average of 0.06 pounds per day, which corresponds to a calorie deficit of about 214 per day. That's not an insignificant calorie deficit, and it would mean losing 22 pounds this year if I kept up the rate. I don't know if that will happen or not, the 22 pounds, but if I look back next January and see 20 pounds or more lost in 2006, I'll be extremely pleased.

My Job

Some of you may wonder what I do all day. Well, when I'm very lucky, I get to do this:



This is a map of some acreage recently acquired by my company. (I've removed the labels that would identify where the acreage is - the grid shown is the standard township/section grid used for land survey in most of the United States.) I worked on this for about 4 hours on Saturday, and all day today so far, and I'm about 40% done with this phase of the project.

What makes it take time is that many of the descriptions use metes and bounds - that is, detailed descriptions of the distances and angles that describe the tracts. You can tell these tracts because they are the squiggly and irregular ones.

Here is an example from one of the leases I mapped today, chosen because it's one of the shortest:

That part of the SW/4SE/4 being described as beginning as the SE corner of said subdivision and run North 3.30 chains; thence North 75 deg. West 7.00 chains to a stone; thence South 16 deg. West 5.50 chains to a stone on the South boundary line of said subdivision and thence East 8.00 chains, more or less, to the point of beginning, containing 3.40 acres, more or less.

See! I have a fun job!

Wal-Mart

This morning, after I made my grocery list for the week, I decided to go to Wal-Mart instead of King Soopers (the Kroger-owned grocery store next door) since I needed some underwear too.

Groceries at the Wal-Mart Supercenter (about 2 miles away) are much cheaper than at King Soopers, but the selection is somewhat different. It may be that the selection is of equivalent quality, but I don't shop there as often, so I don't know how to fully exploit it. They don't have items as consistently as at KS, and of course, the place is a madhouse.

But I did well today. In fact, so many things were significantly cheaper than at KS that I ended up stocking up and thus spending more than I had intended. Because I am always thinking about you guys, I lined everything up when I got home and took a picture (which will expand if you click on it):

All of this together, plus a package of gum that went straight into my backpack, was $43.48, which is pretty cheap for Colorado. The organic beans at Wal-Mart are particularly cheap at 88c/can, hence my willingness to buy them.

A lot of people hate Wal-Mart, for both rational and aesthetic reasons. I think the aesthetic reasons mostly come down to a kind of classism - Wal-Mart is filled with poor people with all their kids, and they don't have cute upscale stuff like Target does.

As for the rational arguments against Wal-Mart (for instance that they kill local businesses, underpay and don't provide enough benefits for their workers, and so on), I think Wal-Mart does more good than harm. If people were so fond of local businesses that they were willing to pay a premium to shop at them, they would - and in many cases, of course, they do. And for every person who works at Wal-Mart for "substandard" wages (i.e., the best wages that person was able to obtain, but not as much money as would be ideal), there are 50 or 200 or 1000 people who are able to live better lives because of the money they can save by shopping there.

Week 4 Update

This is Week 4 of my 15-Week Plan.

I'm still on target with exercise. Other than Mondays (my planned day off), I haven't missed a day yet. I've been doing strength training three times a week, and something aerobic the other times. This week, Mosch and I went on a bike ride.

I have not actually ridden my bike in a few years. I injured my neck a few years ago and couldn't do it for a year or so, and after that, I just didn't start again. But we had a wonderful ride down a nearby trail along a stream for 35 minutes. Delightful!

Tomorrow (Saturday), I meet with my personal trainer again. And on Monday, I start tennis lessons! I signed up for two sessions of lessons, each lasting three weeks and meeting twice per week. It was $30 per session, which is pretty reasonable ($5 per actual lesson). They are group lessons, of course. I had group lessons last year (or was it the year before? is that possible?) and really enjoyed them. At any rate, it's guaranteed exercise.

On the eating front, things have not been as smooth. I flipped out slightly last weekend and overate, putting me at something like 1100 calories over budget for the whole week. (I estimate that my current calorie budget creates a deficit of about 300 calories under maintenance per day, so I still should have come out under maintenance.) This week has been fine except that on Monday, at J's house, I snacked on chips all day and then had a large, delicious dinner of things cooked on the grill. Since then, I've been staying even or making it up, but I'm still about 800 calories over budget for the week, and I doubt I'll make up very many over the weekend.

It's hard to stay focused on eating well when I always want to eat more and differently. But life is good.

Small Template Changes

I made a couple of small changes to the template for this blog. (That's the code that determines how the blog is displayed. I didn't write the code myself, but I have experimentally tweaked it.) Let me know if this causes any problems to your viewing, like things running off the screen or crazy fonts or anything.

Red Beans & Rice

This week's lunches are red beans & rice. I made eight small (400-calorie) servings of this over the weekend for less than $4.

I've known how to cook red beans & rice since I was a kid. It's pretty easy, especially if you don't try to get all fancy with it. Ingredients (this time): one bag of dried kidney beans, 1 lb. turkey smoked sausage, two small onions, garlic, olive oil, and spices.

After soaking the beans using the "quick soak" method described on the bag, I put them in a pot with the two onions (chopped up), about 4 tsp of minced garlic (from the jar in the fridge), 2 T olive oil, and seasonings including cayenne pepper, parsley, and basically anything that smelled like it should go in there. I covered all of this with water and let it simmer for a couple of hours. (It takes longer here because of the altitude.)

When the beans were about done, I sliced up the sausage and added that. I also took out a bowl of the beans and mashed them up with a potato masher and added them back - this is how you make red beans & rice instead of bean soup. While all of this continued to simmer, I cooked one cup of brown rice in two cups of water. Then I mixed everything together.

As I said earlier: 8 delicious meals, less than $4 expenditure. In New Orleans, this was traditionally cooked on Monday (washing day, so you wanted something easy to make) using the bone from Sunday's ham (in lieu of sausage).

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Today is my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, mom!