the boy and i are taking the ferry boat to the island this afternoon where we will enjoy the comforts of my mommy's house and, hopefully, i will return with stuff to tell you about.
have a great weekend, everyone!
February 2009 Archives
i KNEW i should have eaten those waffles last night!
so, i'm reading this really fascinating and informative book called "Spent: End Exhaustion and Feel Great Again". i first learned about it via the GOOP mailing list and immediately requested it from the local library. in one sitting, i devoured over half of it!
the basic principles in the book state that there are certain ailments which usually only occur in industrialized societies and the skyrocketing rates of depression, fatigue, joint pain, insomnia and digestive issues aren't a normal human condition. that doesn't mean you have to sell all your stuff and become a mountain man to get back to the natural rhythms of life, though. this book maps out forty-two small daily doses of change to slowly, over the course of six weeks, bring your spirit and your body back to equilibrium and health. you can read more about it here, at their website.
one of the very first and, according to the author, most important changes is ridding your diet of refined sugar in all its forms. in the book, there's a long list of names sugar can disguise itself as in foods. i was a little shocked to find at least one form in almost every packaged item in my fridge!
with a little nudge from my lack of well-being of late, remembering how good i'd felt the last time i quit sugar and caffeine, finding this book and then learning Lent started today, i decided the time was right to go for it! i'm off the sugar effective today! not that i'm Catholic or anything, but giving up something for 40 days seems like a reasonable amount of time to commit to. at least to start with. saying i'm NEVER going to eat sugar again, EVER, for the rest of my life is a huge commitment. giving it up for Lent? not nearly as daunting.
now that i've told the internet i won't eat any sugar (or artificial sweeteners -- those are just as awful for you), i have to confess to a few exceptions i'm allowing myself, at least for the short term.
you see, i have a kitchen-full of food i can't bring myself to just throw away. i'm not so rich that i can empty the fridge and pantry to re-purchase everything. so, things like the three loaves of organic multigrain bread in the freezer i will continue to eat, but once its gone, i'll purchase bread without added sugar. the white rice and pasta i have stockpiles of, those i'll eat but replace with brown and non-wheat versions when it's time. the bottles of salad dressing i'll use until they're empty, then i'll start making my own. the same goes for most of my fridge-full of condiments. some which are more overtly sugar-filled than others (jam, thai sweet chili sauce, ketchup, etc) i'll avoid as much as possible.
so far, i think it's all reasonable to accomplish. my PB&J this morning was sans J. i put a teaspoon of Agave Nectar in my coffee instead of white sugar. i'm going to give away my last pack of chewing gum. the one thing which is killing me though... that box of frozen waffles i bought last week. i haven't even eaten ONE yet! *sigh* i hope my mom enjoys them when i take them to the island with me this weekend.
i guess the fact that i never really posted my review of the boxesful of Dove chocolate i got FedExed worked against me when the people from Matchstick asked me to apply to get clean hair. i did mention it on Flickr, though!
at least Kimli's tresses will be bouncing and behaving in no time!
in other news, i'm going to a play tomorrow night! a photography friend is once again directing a play, which means Christopher and i will be getting dolled up and heading out to Granville Island to see "The Glass Box". i like going to plays, but hardly ever bring myself to go see them. knowing someone who is making one happen on a regular basis has been fantastic for getting me out to the theatre more often. i always like to support the endeavours of people i know in real life.
so, this morning, i woke to find a Facebook friend request in my inbox. i looked at the name and drew a complete blank. i had absolutely no idea who this person was. it took a little bit of rooting around in the boxes in the back of my head, but it turns out it's a guy who i went to high school with. someone i never talked to, but his sister ended up having sex with a guy i'd known since third grade on a park bench in Stanley Park on our grad night (or so the story went).
this is the thing i hate about Facebook. if you didn't even TALK to me in high school, when we were in the same place every day for five years, why do you want to be my "friend" now? almost nineteen years later? seriously! yeah, yeah. i know why, because my profile is protected and you just want to see if i'm as fat and sad as i wasn in the 80's. well, too bad. my new Facebook rules decree that if you aren't someone i want to hang out with on a work night (HUGE!), then you don't get to be my friend.
i feel a friend list cull coming on...
did i mention i'm going away this weekend? i'm really looking forward to that.
well, except when they're in regards to my car.
so, you might have noticed that the blog looks different than it used to. after server upgrades by my webhost broke my original, and very old, Movable Type installation, i started the sucky and obsessive task of upgrading the CMS which drives this site.
it took me a while to decide between upgrading MT or switching entirely to WordPress; but, after test-driving WP and hatehatehating its style system, i went back to what i knew better (not best, as i found out) and went ahead with the MT upgrade. that's when the real fun started.
luckily, my familiarity with MT (from all those hours making it bend to my will) meant that even with a few hiccoughs, i managed to get things looking and working fairly okay in a semi-short period of time. but, for the last three days, the very first thing i do when i sit at the computer is fiddle with something on the blog. now that i've figured out how to make it make permalinks which don't break all old incoming links, i think i'll leave the futzing for a while. i hope.
oh, btw, if you're an RSS subscriber, please ensure you're subscribed to this URL or you'll not be so blessed as to receive my crappy blogging. ;)
in other, non-blog-related news, the car went to the spa again last week. there went my hope to not see the shop more than once in Q1 of 2009. it turned out cheaper than first thought, but it was still another $400 i wasn't planning on spending. at some point, there's got to be nothing left to fix on it, right? at the very least, it feels so much better, Christopher and i actually washed it, inside and out, on Saturday. and, this time, no windows exploded!
also, totally out of the blue, my second-favourite Jim (sorry, but my dad gets first-favourite honours) called this morning to say he had six hours in Vancouver to kill and, hey, did i want to save him from the rain? the answer to which is always, always "yes!" so, after a mad dash to clean, shower and get presentable, Christopher and i took Jim out for some pub food and a short drive around some very crooked corners of Deep Cove before he had to head for his ferry reservation. i was so happy to see him, especially since i missed my chance the last time i was in Victoria.
so, back to work tomorrow. woo? we'll see. the boy and i are headed to Parksville next weekend for a small getaway. it'll be good to get him out of range of his family for a while. i may have to arrange for him to "forget" his cell phone on this side of the water to ensure he actually gets a break, though. ;)
i think i managed to upgrade movable type without breaking much stuff.
please to be reporting any errors and don't mock the stock template. things will change eventually. i hope.
- my website is broken. it's in a subtle way most visitors will never notice, but now that i know of it, i'm annoyed. just not quite annoyed enough to go through the hassle of upgrading my CMS in hopes of fixing it. nix that. after posting this, i discovered it's even MORE broken than i thought. *sigh*
- the blood donation devirginization did not occur on Saturday. when i called for an appointment for the fateful day, i was denied. seems the good people of the province of British Columbia have been opening their veins in record numbers since the blood company's advertising blitz during the winter holidays. never fear, though. i have an appointment all booked for next month and will soon know the joy of saving lives and eating cookies.
- today, i got my third parking ticket. ever. the fucking City of North Vancouver changed the parking signs outside my chiropractor's office. who the hell designates a loading zone from 4pm-6pm, anyway? gah.
- the Vileda mop/Method Good for Wood solution combo worked wonders on my floors yesterday. it was lovely to have shiny, almond-scented hardwood. it wasn't quite so lovely to feel like i'd gotten a severe case of whiplash from all that vigorous mopping. obviously, cleanliness is not all its cracked up to be. bring on the pigsty!
- i could really go for a cupcake right about now. or maybe two.
- due to familial obligations, the boy stayed home all weekend. which meant i was alone all weekend. it's been a very long time since i've woken up alone on a Sunday morning. it was both sad and exciting to have all that time to do with as i pleased. hence the crazy cleaning. honey, don't ever leave me alone like that again, okay?
it suddenly occurred to me today that, over the last year, i've made quite a number of changes in my life to avoid things which bring toxins and other dubious substances into my life.
i used to take Brita-filtered water to work in one-litre pop bottles. i'd re-use the bottles until they were, quite literally, cracked and ready to give up the ghost. i can't even begin to bring myself to imagine the amount of icky plastic particles which i voluntarily drank as a result. some time last year, i recycled the last plastic bottle and bought a Laken aluminum bottle to take to work instead. it's blue with a whole buncha cute sheep acting out around the outside.
shortly before ditching the plastic bottles, i found this website which documented a woman's experiments with rats and Aspartame which really scared me. basically, she dosed her rats with relatively moderate levels of NutraSweet to see if she could get some clear results as to the safety of the artificial sweetener. if i recall correctly, all the rats died. most developed tumours or lost eyes or their offspring had birth defects. it was a frightening thing to read and look at (there are lots of photos documenting it all). after that, i swore off my non-sugar sweetener of choice: Splenda. while i know that white sugar isn't the best for me, it's got to be better than some franken-sweetener made in a lab. recently, i even purchased some Agave nectar to try to get away from sugar, too.
for Christmas, i received a gift card to London Drugs. with it, since it was free money, i bought myself something i'd been wanting but wouldn't have ever brought myself to purchase: tempered glass lunch containers. so, instead of nuking my lunch every day in plastic containers, i now heat it up in tempered glass. no more icky plastic bits are being exited and finding their way into my leftover chicken fried rice. i pretty much refuse to microwave anything in plastic now. sometimes, i'm too lazy and do it, but i always feel guilty afterwards.
next in my quest for less bad things in my life, i've been trying to buy fewer processed food items. no HFCS, no excessive corn or soy by-products, less sugars and salts. generally, i've been moving towards eating closer to the source. maybe it was reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food" (i heart Michael Pollan), but it just makes so much sense to try to eat real food instead of all the packaged crap which marketers call food. gah! it makes me a little queasy to look at all those boxes of shelf-stable food-like substances on the grocery store shelves. oh, i'm FAR from perfect in this regard, but to think back a few years... i shudder to remember what i was putting in my body.
i didn't really MEAN to have made so many changes in my life in 2008. maybe that's the key to continuing them? one small thing, followed by another small thing, until, suddenly, you realize you've actually made a whole bunch of pretty big improvements in how you treat your body!
p.s. do you want to join Kimli, Nelson and I this Saturday when we go to give blood and save lives? aw, c'mon... you can have all the cookies you want!
