Month: November 2016

My Own Private Miracle

I am losing weight. My blood pressure is dropping to the normal range and even lower at times, due to my blood pressure meds. (Note: I see my doctor for my semi-annual checkup in a few weeks and in the mean time I am sending her logs of my blood pressure readings every week.  If it dips dangerously low, I will call her immediately.) My fasting blood sugar is below 100 every morning, something that hasn’t happened in years.

Why is all of this happening? I only have my own personal experience as evidence but I think it is because I am following Dr. Joel Fuhrman‘s Eat to Live lifestyle. I’ve been eating according to his recommendations for a little over a month and I’ve lost over twenty five pounds so far, in addition to the lowered blood pressure and blood sugar. My cholesterol is 140 and my LDL is 98. Strong evidence.

How did I happen upon this wonderful book? Another wonderful, and very funny book, Penn Jillette’s (of Penn&Teller fame) book Presto!: How I Made 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales. In it, he tells about his own moment of truth where he decides he has to change how he is living if he wants to live. His blood pressure was dangerously high and his doctor was suggestion he have surgical weight loss intervention (a lap band).

As I read the book, it started making sense. He had a personal coach, Ray Cronise, that helped him through his phenomenal weight loss odyssey. But toward the end of the book he mention Dr. Fuhrman’s recipes and books. He even called his dietary lifestyle Nutritarian, a term coined by Dr. Fuhrman. When I looked for publications by Ray Cronise, I didn’t find any.

Eat to Live is a great book. It is well written and heavily referenced to the medical literature. In places where he believes that studies were flawed he explains exactly what data they neglected to collect an sites other studies that collected that data and refuted the flawed studies when they exist. In short, while he makes some remarkable claims, he has evidence and a functional model of human nutrition to back it up.

I know, I sound like an evangelical preacher. I also know that some people may not choose to eat this way. I am not judging how anyone else chooses to live their life. I am just thankful that I am finally starting to lose a significant amount of this excess weight that was killing me and making me tired all of the time.

I expect to keep dropping weight until I reach my target. Then I’ll adjust my diet slightly to maintain that weight and still eat a nutrient rich, plant centric diet. Spoiler alert – Dr. Fuhrman recommends you eat mostly leafy green vegetables, raw vegetables, and fruits. He discourages eating much if any animal products such as meat or dairy. He emphasizes low salt, low oil, and low sugar. He also suggests avoiding highly processed, nutrient poor foods such as white flour, white rice, etc.

I eat all I want, I’m not hungry, and I’m losing about a pound a day. I’ll update you on my progress in a future blog post.

Don’t take my word for it. If you’re interested, read the book, Eat to Live, and give his plan a try for six weeks. I believe you may find a solution to weight loss and healthy living that you can live with.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

An Olive Branch Offered Before the Returns are In

Today, me, Pam, and the dogs went to vote. I told several people at the polls that we were educating the girls about democracy. Everyone seemed to think it was funny.

I am so glad the election is over today. We won’t know who won until later but at least we’ve got this horrible campaign behind us. It has ruined so many friendships and caused so much heartache. Maybe now we can begin the processes of rebuilding our society and find some long term solutions to the flaws in our election system.

I know I’m being naive. There is too much money involved in keeping the system the way it has been to expect any quick fixes. I have heard some good ideas though. Maybe if enough of us got behind them we could start a dialog and get some of the archaic misfeatures of our system changed.

One important change would be to either hold the election on a weekend or declare election day a national holiday. Then people wouldn’t have to take time off without pay to vote. The current election day was selected to cater  to voters that had to spend a day traveling to their polling place.

Another change that I’d like to see is to change the rules so that if somehow two candidates got on the ballot that you absolutely hated, there would be a “None of the above” selection. If “None of the above” got the majority of votes, the election would be automatically rerun and none of the candidates from the first election would be allowed to run in the new election.

The most glaring flaw in the system is the electoral college. It might have made sense in the eighteenth century but it makes no sense at all in a modern democracy. We need to change the system so that the president is elected by straight popular vote. If necessary, we need to amend the constitution of the United States to do so.

Of course the major parties will fight this tooth and nail because they have used the system to their advantage numerous times in the past. But they answer to us in the long run. All we have to do is keep voting people out of office until we get people in that will listen to the will of the people.

There are other possible improvements to the system but these changes would go a long way to making the system more to my liking.

We could also nominate candidates that treated each other like civilized adults instead of junior high school bullies but that might be asking too much.

It’s good to have this election behind us. Let’s be kind to each other no matter who wins today.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Memories of Family

Tonight we watched clips from What’s My Line on YouTube. It was extremely entertaining and kept the evening light and upbeat. It started out when Pam found a short film encouraging people to get out and vote. It was hosted by Bob Hope and must have been from sometime in the late forties or fifties.

It had just started when UPS delivered the new console table that Pam ordered. Some assembly was required and as it was a little bit heavy and bulky, I was elected to do the deed. When I got it together it was absolutely beautiful.

By then, the video had changed to a series of clips of What’s My Line. It was funny and great to see so many celebrities from my childhood. I remember watching What’s My Line with my grandmother. We also watched Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, Dobbie Gillis, and My Favorite Martian just to name a few.

I was a big fan of romantic comedies. We watched a lot of movies too. My dad was a big movie fan. He had been a theatrical projectionist in the army. He got to watch all the latest movies, several times a day for however long the ran at the post.

When I was in high school I got several of my friends together and we petitioned the school to offer a class in film making. The only person qualified to teach it was my dad. He spent the whole summer preparing for the class.

On the first day of class I was worried that I was going to run in to the same kind of accusations of nepotism that I had experienced when I took his drama class the year before. On the first day of class he came in and said, “You all have an A. Now, let’s learn how to make films together.”

That was the best thing he could have done for me at the time. By making the class about learning and not about grades, he allowed me to be as good at it as I could without risking the persecution of my peers.

That was part of what it was like to be the son of a Speech and English teacher in the midwest in the late 60s and early 70s.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Do Not Go Gently…

The time change has happened. Tomorrow I am going to try to get up at approximately the same time that I have been. That is to say an hour earlier by the clock. I need the extra time to keep the novel rolling.

It is going well. It is surprising me but I think that’s the best reason to write a novel. The NaNoWriMo web site has a badge to recognize the kind of person I am, a plantser. That is someone who plans their novel for a little bit before they start writing and then when the sit down to write, they write by the seat of their pants.

Doing that is liberating, fun, and informative. You never can tell where your subconscious will take you. It also results in more believable characters. Think about it. Do you know what you are going to do before you are in the situation that dictates what action you are going to take? In other words do you know exactly how your life is going to go and what mistakes you are going to make?

Neither do I. Nor do my characters. They are all complex individuals that take life as it comes to them. I’m sure there are people that live their lives differently but I don’t know any of them. Or if I do, they haven’t told me about their master plan and how it is working out for them.

We bought a season pass to the new BBC show Dirk Gently. It is written and produced by John Landis’ son, Max Landis. It is outrageously good. It is inspirational for writers like me. It is obvious that Max is a pantser. It is not nearly so obvious whether there is any aspect of planning in his writing or not. I suspect that there is at some point. It is unclear what, if any, impact the technologies that are brought to bear have on the story.

I’m scaring myself. I am beginning to sound like Dirk. I believe that we must all, individually make our own decisions and accept the consequences for them. But the universe steers things in our direction. We are allowed time to develop the skills we need before we actually need them. When we need money, that is another thing entirely. But it comes.

Who knows where these things come from? It manifests like Mana on the desert overnight. We partake of it and are creatively nourished. And don’t forget to throw challenges at your characters. It is the only way we get to see the kind of stuff they are made of. It spices things up and keeps your readers interested.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Come Saturday

As expected, the band was great. They started a few minutes late and the first set lasted a little bit over an hour. I talked with my friend and he introduced me to the singer. We talked for a minute. I had been planning to stay longer but I realized that I was tired. So, I declared the evening a success and came home.

Today was Double-up day on NaNoWriMo. I made my donation and managed to write three hundred extra words. Not quite double but there is always tomorrow. I have other things to do tonight. My nephew’s birthday took a big chunk out of the middle of the day. It was fun.

It is “Fall back” tonight. We get an extra hour of sleep thanks to the folly of Benjamin Franklin and the people that are swayed by his errant reasoning. I am going to try to stay on the summer clock for the rest of the month to make it easier to write my words in the morning. If I get up at four thirty, I will have an extra hour to write.

I discovered unsalted sunflower seeds today. I am on the Dr. Furhman, Eat to Live program. I don’t think of it as a diet. It is a lifestyle. It has served me well so far. I have been eating this way for three weeks and I’ve lost twenty five pounds so far. Anyway, I bought the sunflower seeds the other night and I got a small bowl full of them this morning. I have snacked on sunflower seeds all day and I still haven’t finished the bowl. They taste good and are good for me too. Who would have thought I would be a hippie health food nut but here I am.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Friday Night in the Big City

Friday night is always so full of potential. It’s a demarcation between the nose to the grindstone attitude of the work week and the anything is possible promise of the weekend. Far too soon it is Sunday night and you haven’t accomplished half of what you planned and it’s time to flop back into the attitude of the workweek.

It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s just always the way I’ve thought about it. I think it is a hold over from when I was in school. There were a lot of things you weren’t allowed to do on a school night that were perfectly allowable on the weekend. Somehow, I missed the memo that informed me that I was adult and wasn’t subject to the constraints of adolescence any more.

So here I am, about to enter into my so called Golden Years, whatever that means, and I’m just realizing that I’m a grown man. If I want to do things during the week, I can do them. Of course I have to take responsibility for any consequences, like being tired the next day from staying up too late.

I guess I’ve known that for a long time, but there is a difference between knowing something and incorporating it into your operational world view. I have been discovering a lot of things that I hadn’t incorporated into my world view lately. Like, if you try you might fail but if you don’t try you’re sure to fail, and the phrase that became the famous Nike logo, “Just do it!”

So tonight I’m going to go home and make some dinner, spend some time talking to Pam and maybe watch a little bit of TV. Then, about 8:30 I’m going to go see a friend’s band play at a local watering hole. I’ll be drinking tonic water, but I hope to hear some good music and maybe meet a few new people while I’m at it. I’ve been severely neglecting my social life lately.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Why is Their Air?

Why do I write? It is a way of preserving my thoughts, of saying I was here, and here is what I thought. It is a sort of immortality, maybe all that I will ever have. I think about who will read my writing. Given the nature of the internet, there is no telling who will stumble across my blog. Or, when they will stumble across it. It depends on whether anyone continues to pay the bills.

I wish there was a way that you could set up a site on the internet so that it would be preserved in perpetuity. Then my writing would have a chance of surviving me. Who knows what person in the future will read my blog and learn something important to them from it.

Physical books are not much better. They have to be stored someplace. They have to be fostered by someone. They aren’t as expensive as web sites are but they definitely have to be stored and taken care of by someone.

Well, that’s my musings for this evening. I’m going to say goodnight and go snuggle with my puppies and my sweet heart.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Of New Toys and Fur Children

The first component of our new computing environment arrived today. We now have 8 Terabytes of storage for backing up our new computers. As for our MacBook Pros, they’re still being assembled “overseas” as the Apple help person put it. Our USB-C to female USB-A adapter cables arrived today as well. They will be useful when the computers arrive but right now, they are just sitting there in the package. Reminding me of the fact that the computers are still en route.

I wrote the second installment on my novel today. I’m starting to feel the rhythm. I got started earlier and made it to work on time. I will have my schedule down by next week when I have a nine thirty meeting to make four out of five days a week.

Tonight Pixie, our Maltipoo puppy, was begging for a bite of my orange. She thinks if I’m eating it, it must be good. I gave her a piece. She sucked the juice out of it and left the pulp. It wasn’t as interesting as she had hoped.

Every night at about nine o’clock, I take Belle, our adult Maltipoo, out for her evening walk. She knows when it’s nine o’clock and will come get me if I don’t call her first. Pixie is not allowed on the ground outside until she is six months old. Her six month birthday is November 9th. Every night when Belle and I get ready to go out, Pixie goes nuts. She wants to go too.

We tell her that she isn’t big enough to go outside yet. She protests that she IS a big girl. We keep  telling her that her birthday is coming and then she can go outside with daddy and Belle.

We have become those people that treat their dogs like children. They are our fur children. And they are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for.

I can’t talk about my fur children without mentioning our other fur child. His name is Cory and he is a gray and white American short hair. We tell Belle and Pixie that Cory is adopted but don’t tell him that. We fail to mention that they are adopted too.

Cory loves to come into the spare bedroom of the apartment where my computer is and sit in the window and look outside while I write in the morning. After a while he will come over and start getting into things to get my attention. On rare occasions he will jump up on the back of my chair and sit there while I write. I praise him a lot when he does that. I love it when a cat sits on the back of the chair while you write.

Well, that’s our menagerie. We love them all. They are good companions. Belle alerts Pam when she’s about to have an abdominal migraine. Pam registered Belle as an Emotional Support Animal. She is training her to pass the test to be a registered Service Animal. Belle is training Pixie to be her relief and eventually her replacement. We felt like it wasn’t fair to make Belle work her whole life so we are planning for her to retire in a couple of years. Sort of like some other people I know.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

And They’re Off!

NaNoWriMo is off and running. I got my quota in today on my novel. I am going to have to compress the schedule a little bit. I was a little late to work. I am still on the fence about this novel. I need to loosen up a little and let things happen.

Having won NaNoWriMo once, that is having written fifty thousand words and told most of a story, I am now confident that I can string fifty thousand words together in a thirty day time frame. This time around I am much more concerned with finding fifty thousand words that tell a compelling story.

I have a good premise. I’ve sketched some main characters with a lot of potential. I have figured out some of the abuse that I’m going to put them through. I know what the characters want and what kind of tension that will generate between them. At this point all that remains is to kick back, let loose, and enjoy the ride.

It’s heartening to note that NaNoWriMo is getting more attention from outside of the writing circle. It has been featured on the Twitter feed Angry Santa Elf.

14h14 hours ago

Starting first day back at work with and finally writing my tell-all “Why Do the Good Die Young But Santa Lives to Be 946?”

Well, I better get to bed. There are a lot of words to be written tomorrow, not to mention the coding that must be done. And a bit of paper work here and there. Nothing major.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.