I have been exercising everyday, for 1/2 hour a day for 38 days straight. It's called p90x3. I'm supposed to do this for 90 days. I will. I started at about 200 pounds, I'm at 186 now. I feel stronger too. I did p90x years ago, so I kind new what I was in for. For the first 25 days I didn't change my diet at all. Now I have. Instantly I started loosing weight. Just by not eating anything after dinner and not snacking during the day. I eat a sensible lunch and dinner. That's it. I took a before picture. We shall see what the "after," looks like. Forever Labs is about to launch a new product, which we are excited about. It's a more complete version of a PRP treatment. Our patent allows us to add more extracellular vesicles to the therapeutic fraction. It's nice to be able to have a product people will use immediately for therapies. We are excited about it. We finalized a raise of capital and have brought our team back. We launched our consumer marketing this week and we will launch our b2b marketing Jan 1st. My family moved in to a new home. It's exciting. It's the home I will live in for the next 10-20 years, though mk said, "I give it 5 years." LOL. He knows me pretty well, so he may be right. I am sooooo ready to have trump out of office. I just can't believe the negligence. We are in the midst of a major resurgence of Covid and he's MIA. He has no regard for the country, only himself. It's pathetic. I am also soooo ready for the vaccine. Just to be able to sit with friends, have a drink and not be worried that I'll get sick or get them sick would be great. To see my family and not be worried. Prior to all of this my grandparents died and I would love to visit my aunts/uncle and be able to spill wine and trade stories. I want my kids to go to a park and play with other kids. I want my kids to GO BACK TO SCHOOL! I am ready. I know we all are. I really miss traveling. We are planning to go to Hawaii in January. You have to take a COVID test 72 hours prior. I have the place booked. I hope we test negative. I feel like given the requirement for the test, the air travel will not be that dangerous. My wife starts her own clinic in Feb so it's sort of our last chance to do something like this. We cancelled thanksgiving. We will have it solo in our new home. We will make it fun. I hope all of you are safe and healthy. Onward! -tng
Not my best week. Tired, sick of things, hard to muster the energy to do hard things. Difficult conversations at work two days in a row, so today I cancelled my last few meetings and went on a two hour bike ride. That helped. But I wish I didn’t need recovery tricks like that.
I started a new painting. It's a scene I have painted before, but this time I'll be painting autumn instead of summer. This is my first session: Our labrador retriever puppy loves to eat poop. Deer poop, bunny poop, whatever. He doesn't have a refined poop palate. Predictably, it gives him diarrhea, but he hasn't made the connection. I was up a few times last night. Tin-Can development continues apace. The next update will have threads and likes, which are both interesting to implement in an app without a shared database. I deleted all my Twitter replies after getting into a pointless debate about masks and mold with Brendan Eich. I'm just sticking to likes and posting my paintings.
Welp. Washington State is on full lockdown again for at least 4 weeks. Time to leave social media entirely! :) Projects: - The deck building company fired their designer, and sent out another designer to work with me yesterday. Should have full elevation plan and pricing by the end of the week. - I've restarted the project to remove all the old forced-air heating ducts in the house, now that my tennis elbow is less painful and I can wield a pry bar again. (for a bit) - Removing the ducting has shown where all the downstairs heat is going... out through several uninsulated walls. - One of those walls is in my bedroom. So I am in the process of ripping off the wallboard, insulating, and installing EVP vinyl flooring on the wall (for that woody-cabin-look). - Also reorganized the entire storage room with my wife, to bring her elliptical trainer in from outside, since the weather has gotten very shitty. - And replaced all the overhead lighting and bad wiring in the storage room, so now we actually have quality lighting so we can actually see things in storage, rather than having to use a headlamp. - Awaiting the arrival of our new microwave/air fryer/induction countertop oven thingie. Hoping it does at least one of those things well... - Awaiting the arrival of my first synthesizer, the Behringer Poly D - Got my home recording set up organized well enough that I can just sit down and record something when I want to. (Posted about that yesterday.) - Work projects are ramping up, but my company had an all-hands meeting the other day where they say they are going to continue working from home through April... which will probably mean June, because that makes more sense for people with kids, etc. And once the offices do re-open, the only people in the office will be the few who MUST be in the office for business/job reasons. - Called off all the holidays with my family, due to the COVID spike and lockdown. My wife, housemate, and I will have our first holiday season together... despite the fact she has lived with him for 12 years, and I've lived here for 5 now. We are probably going to order out rather than cook, since we all normally cook. Finished watching Ewan MacGregor's latest motorcycle trip, Long Way Up and now I want a Rivian. (Apparently Amazon has decided to move away from the ubiquitous Sprinter van, and standardize on a custom-designed, Amazon-branded, Rivian-built truck, and has placed an order for 100,000 of them. That experience should be VERY helpful in ensuring the Rivian is a fantastic road-worthy vehicle... and the price is right, too.) Can't wait for January 20th.
My family seems to be in agreement with calling off the holidays. My parents are pretty reasonable with taking COVID seriously, but I’d worried they approach the holidays as “yes pandemic, but...” When I talked to them two weeks ago they offered up that a gathering was unlikely. Which is good! They’re 73 and don’t need the exposure risk.
Ugh. I wish my mom could see outside of our family situation enough to realize that we should cancel our holidays. My brother has already cancelled his Christmas trip. As of right now I am still traveling to meet them next week. My family situation right now a great case example of a situation where the public guidance directly contradicts the private family’s desires; with a dying grandmother you can understand why everyone feels there are very poignant compelling reasons to gather, however it’s also very clear that this is exactly what they’re saying people shouldn’t do. I will not be surprised if things get worse by next week and travel bans begin to go up. I don’t know. I am retaining my right to reconsider my decision at any point in time up until I leave. I know how much it will mean to my mother if I am there. She needs all the support she can get right now. I have a lot of misgivings.
Fortunately, my sister is a well-respected expert in elder care and dealing with various types of dementia, and she lives with my parents (74 and 84). So their household is VERY strong and diligent about COVID mitigation. I just wish they didn't have to be.
Im actually worried that its not locked down enough. The only thing that really changed is that gyms and restaurants are closed. Its unclear to me that they were major vectors. I think we will need to do more to stop exponential growth. Thanksgiving is recommended to be canceled but I dont know how many people will follow guidelines with no enforcement i fear cases will explode anyway.
I was out of cream so I used milk in my scones. They came out a lot more cake-like. I also upped the cayenne to 1.5 tsp. Today, two days after baking them, they seem hotter. Is that a thing? Does cayenne age or something? I love the heat in these. Original recipe here. I’ve maintained the 2:1 ratio of cinnamon to cayenne.
Cayenne is an interesting component in cooking because it changes when you cook it. Sprinkle it on something that is already done - like deviled eggs, or whatever - and it is a mild and interesting flavor. Add it as a spice when you are cooking - say, sauté onions in a skillet and use them as a base for your baked dish - and it will be MUCH hotter. Same with paprika, and I expect other pepper-based spices, too. So the timing of when you add the cayenne/paprika/cumin to a dish will make a big difference on the heat they impart and the final flavor.
In my experience that is totally a thing! I hadn’t experienced it with baked goods but I have experienced it when adding cayenne pepper flakes to cooked foods (cucumber salad, collard greens etc). My sister and I had definitely found that as the pepper rests in the food, the food will get hotter!
Well Howdy and Hello! The weather has finally changed, from summer to winter, skipping that pesky Autumn that I adore. Kayaks are put away, house painting is all done (except for windows), new garden completed and bedded down for the winter, pellet stove serviced and running, and yes, at my wife's request, holiday lights have started going up. I have completed some small projects inside, trying to keep the momentum up. My hope is that by Spring all inside projects will be completed. I really, really want to be able to enjoy next Summer without the guild of unfinished projects hanging over my head. I don't truly expect to be done with house projects forever, I just want to be done with the ones that have been lingering for years. New projects are ok. I am hoping that with the change to winter after the gorgeous summer we had this year, that we will get a good amount of snow on a regular basis. The summer was so sunny and dry (great for doing things outside) that we went into drought conditions in August. A good base of snow fall will help get us out of that. And as a benefit to me and my wife, we will get to use our snow shoes that we bought a few years ago. The last few winters have been a complete let down with very few snows that accumulated, and then they melted off before the weekend came when we would have had time for snow shoeing. A bonus this winter (not related to winter itself) is that our son-in-law is temporarily stationed for additional training until February, so my daughter and grandson have come to live with us until they transfer to the west coast. The boy is such a typical boy. He loves rolling around in the dirt and climbing things he shouldn't and then jumping. Had him helping me with the garden and moving dirt to fill in holes and low spots in the yard. Had him on the ladders while doing some of the siding and painting on the house. Lately he has taken a shine to sliding down the stairs, getting brave enough to start from the top, sometimes on his backside, sometimes on his stomach. And the giggles! Working from home has been such a blessing, freeing up two hours a day not having to commute so that I could get more done around the house. Being able to dip out for a few minutes to say good morning to my grandson and have lunch with him. Sneaking in a few minutes to do dishes or do laundry so that I have less to do after work. Our youngest started a medication for acne. It took a couple of months to get it in hand with all kinds of requirements including multiple pregnancy tests. I didn't see anything in the literature that stated there was a hormone component, but there must be. Within a week of starting it she has been more open and connected to me and my wife. She has even expressed interest in decorating for the holidays and watching stupid hallmark movies with us. Two things she has avoided the past few years after puberty hit. Even some of the surliness has gone. Or I guess it could be desperation for social interaction finally overcoming her teenage need to distance from parental figures. Maybe the COVID lock down has a silver lining. I miss getting together with family and friends and brewery hopping and look forward to being able to do that again. While a few coworkers have gotten COVID, none of my family or friends have been adversely affected (for which I am very thankful). Time to count my blessings. Life IS good.
I start my "new" job Monday, just in time to work Monday and Tuesday and be off for the rest of the week. Holy hell closing out three programs is a ton of work. Couple that with the spike it's a rough time out there. Managed a 10 hour day yesterday and should have stayed longer but I need to be able to function for another week still. And cases here are up like 60% week over week so yeah, busy is an understatement. Just in time for everyone to go to their families for the holidays. And the best part is our PCR positivity rate has shot past 5 and is rapidly approaching 10. We're fucked. Have an unlisted music video that I think is being released on Friday: Strawberry jalepeño syrup: 1 lb strawberries sliced thin Throw those in a bowl and macerate with 1 lb superfine sugar for 24 hours After 24 hours take 6 jalapeños slice them thinly and remove most of the seeds and mix those in. More seeds you leave in, more heat the syrup will have. Mix in 1 cup of water to that mix and let it sit for another 24 hours Strain it and you're all set. Cocktail recipe: 2 oz tequila or mezcal 2 oz strawberry jalepeño syrup Juice of half a lime Serve in chilled glass with slice of lime for garnish
One of my colleagues told me it was awesome on her vanilla ice cream. If you manage to get it right please to share!
Tusks Tusks everywhere Clarified with a family lawyer that actually no, New Mexico is not a common-law state which means unless my father decides to write these fuckers into his non-existent will, I'm fucking done with them the minute he cacks. My sister, for her part, went out of her way to clarify that she never asked me not to contest any will, she asked me not to be terrible because on the other side of the family, my aunt blew up relations for a decade by being a selfish shrew who decided that every single heirloom was something "mom wanted me to have." This was useful because it required giving her a backgrounder on why, exactly, I would presume that my parents would leave me out of any inheritance by default. She had never exactly internalized that my father took her on a shopping spree for her birthday and then forgot mine for six weeks the very next day. Or that the physical violence was always mine to absorb, generally as punishment for being engaged in conflict with her. Or that I had a job at 7-11 to pay for college while she had a dorm room and an apartment. It is possible that she's coming around to the realization that we grew up in the same house but different homes. GR, for his part, had all charges dismissed except "receipt of stolen property worth less than $250." This carries a fine that my father will no doubt pay. After all, when SWAT broke down the door, he paid for that. I had a chat with the friend whose wife got a $2m settlement. He said his wife had arrested GR any number of times. When I asked him if GR was an informant, he went radio silent. A secret I've kept close and off the Internet/phone has been a telephone conversation I had with my father in 2005 or so. There was much ado at the time about depleted uranium in Iraq and the cancer it was causing. My father did radiation dosemetry his entire career so I casually brought it up with him during one of our infrequent conversations. He was extremely scornful in a very J Frank Parnell kinda way. Insisted that the type and amount of radiation kicked off by DU was inconsequential. I said something about how there can't have been that many long-term studies and he said "Well you grew up with five pounds of plutonium in the carport and you turned out fine!" "Wait, what?" Yes, I hear you. You are precisely echoing my own response lo those many years ago. "Five pounds of plutonium? Where... was this plutonium?" "In a jar on top of the freezer." "Why did you have five pounds of pluton - no, HOW did you have five pounds of plutonium above the freezer?" He told me that he needed ionizing sources to calibrate his meters, and that a hundred grams or so of plutonium did the trick. Unfortunately he couldn't get more than 50g of plutonium without congressional approval so he just requisitioned 49g per week. Or month. I've forgotten the number. And my father is not the kind of guy to stop at what he needs. Better to get extra. And Los Alamos National Labs was an environment where you took your work home. This is how computers with nuclear secrets get found in meth labs. This has always been one of those half-remembered, never-discussed aspects of growing up as I did. It seemed wise not to discuss the plutonium in the garage on social media, or with anyone I'm not close to personally, at which point I've discussed it two or three times in person. I've had recurring dreams for the past ten years about cleaning out my grandparents' farm and finding bits of missiles. Usually it's a Minuteman III. Sometimes it's an Atlas. Sometimes it's just an MIRV or two. There follows introspection about how, exactly, one disposes of a nuclear weapon you're not supposed to have because it's likely someone will question how it got there. A person in the know, upon hearing of the latest misadventures, expounded on how it's probably not great that a dude with a penchant for tusks has ready access to plutonium. Which initially caused a great deal of hilarity, followed by some real soul-searching as to whether or not my father was kidding about the plutonium. Thing is? He's not a kidder. He threw an older kid in the pond when I was four because the kid wouldn't stop adding an "-ey" at the end of my name. His answer to most problems is violence and/or cheating. He has no respect for authority whatsoever; one does not normally take a 5-year-old past three locked DOE doors when one can't find a babysitter. And that "50g congress/49g requisition form" thing is peak LANL. There was a scandal for a while where it was revealed that roughly 50 people had put brand new cars on their expense accounts. My father had a yearly budget for parts that if he didn't spend 100% of it, it would be curtailed the next year so we'd end up with all sorts of weird shit around the house. Generally tools, but not always. Presume PU239, the easiest PU to get ahold of. Doesn't glow, doesn't kick out heat, has a half-life of 24,000 years. 49g of PU239 is 2.47cc of plutonium. "half a pound" would be 46 requisitions for 114cc. It'd look like chunks of oxidized lead, and probably fill up about a quarter of a quart jar. That's a long way from criticality, by the way - I checked. I also discovered that five of the fourteen known criticality accidents were in Los Alamos, which is literally "oopsie we accidentally got 22lbs of plutonium in one place", twice with the same damn chunk of plutonium. A jar with chunks of oxidized lead in it? I can almost remember it. That's my mind playing tricks on me, probably. PU239 does fundamentally fuckall to you unless you eat it (or accidentally gather 22lbs of it). Considering his whole argument is "radiation! Yes indeed! You hear the most pernicious lies about it these days" and considering he's a passive-aggressive office supply thief who worked at the health safety environmental division of Los Alamos National Labs for decades... He tracked satellites in college. Got to spend three months on the Big Island. Then Starfish Prime took out his satellites and his new ones could only be tracked from Thule, Greenland. So he got there on the last day of sunshine and stayed six months in the dark. He entertained himself with push-ups and stealing butter knives to sharpen and balance for throwing, one a day. His supervisor was an Air Force martinet who objected to his long hair so my father shaved his head bald and grew a fu manchu. He tells these stories proudly. Requisitioning 49g of plutonium just to have the plutonium? Yeah, he'd do that. A friend once gave me a jar of mercury because he knew I'd like it. He was right. Then it was time to move and I went "why exactly do I have a jar of mercury" and took it to the landfill to be disposed of properly. But it wasn't plutonium and I'm not my father. And here's the thing. I've only ever had that one conversation. I haven't felt like revisiting it. I don't now. Could he have made it up to prove a point? Possibly, but not likely. Far more likely that there was less than five pounds of plutonium and he rounded up for effect. Could he have gotten rid of the plutonium? I suppose. Could he have turned it back in? Snowball's chance. He left HSE when his best friend got him fired for drinking too much, after his intervention failed. If it was plutonium requisitioned under HSE, and it would have to be, as soon as he was at ARG/NEST he never would have turned it back in... to HSE, anyway. ARG/NEST? I mean, that's pretty much their jam. Maybe it just... showed up behind the copy machine one day, like the hard drives.And now that I know I'm not written out of any particular will, at some point in my future I'm going to need to go look for a jar with 40-ish funny lead-lookin' chunks in it, up where the jars of bolts are, next to the lawnmower, approximately 25 feet from where I slept every night. So at this point I'm kind of hoping the NSA is paying attention so that I don't have to deal with this shit. My sister and I were talking about what the fuck we do now yesterday. She mentioned my aunt, who lives on the property. I said that she'd achieved her life-long goal of watching television all day every day but maybe her kids could help. My sister laughed and said they were in their own fucked up hell, too. I asked about the magnitude of hell; she said "not sure how to characterize it." "On a tusks-to-plutonium scale where are they?" She laughed. "Oh, just garden variety Jerry Springer shit." I told her I'd pay a lot of money to get back to "garden variety Jerry Springer shit." My wife pointed out later that my own life is a long ways away from any of this, Springer, plutonium or tusks. Be fuckin' hilarious of GR tried to pawn some plutonium tho
(1) I only know, through the assertion of a man who had access and should know better but has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not, that there was plutonium there at some point. (2) I do not know if the plutonium, if it was ever there, is there still. (3) I do not want to invite Mr. Tusks to rifle through my family's shit any harder than he already has. He has already dissipated two generations worth of machine tools. (4) I think we can all agree that the best resolution to this is to leave sleeping dogs lie until the situation has to be dealt with, at which point I will most assuredly look over the remains of 35 years of hoarding. (5) Should I encounter anything... untoward at that juncture, I expect that an understated bit of amnesty will be the best outcome for all stakeholders. By the time we get to (4) I hope to be so fucking done with GR it's not even funny.
Have had a couple people recently tell me that perfectionist tendencies are being destructive to myself and that I need to get out of my own way. So that’s real neat and nice.
Perfectionism is such a weird thing to accept. I’ve got that crippling kind of perfectionism were I just don’t do anything, because I’ve decided in my head that I’m not actually as smart as people think. It feels weird to call that perfectionism, but very worth looking deeper into.
oyster ya know, that was actually a part of the conversation last night. It's not even a laziness thing so much as a "crippling over-analysis of every possible outcome and scenario" thing...which does have it's benefits it certain situations, but I think is more a "using a hammer to solve every problem" mechanism right now.
Ya for me it’s a fear of not being able to live up to expectations, because every expectation anybody has had of me didn’t take into account that I was dyslexic. It always looks like laziness for some reason, I think that’s why perfectionism has to be pointed out by other people. Like I have a great picture in my head of what I want to do, but completely lack the tools to get there. The perfectionism comes in when I am given the tools to do something, meet or exceed the expectation and then still feel like I must be falling short. I started a new job recently and every single time I’ve been asked how I felt about my own performance at work I’ve been told to not be so hard on my self and it’s like...oh? You want me to relax? Meanwhile in my head I thought I picked this super small thing to fix and was super nice to myself. I’ve been looking for books lately on this, if I find a good one I’ll make sure to recommend it.
Yeah, I'm in the process of listening. The problem I'm running into is, I don't really know what a person is supposed to do about that.
I think I get an impression of what something would ideally look like and react strongly to not meeting that ideal or feeling unprepared to achieve that, and am just generally not dealing well with criticism as of late. You are right about the "potential" because another part of this has been the fact that these reactions are unpredictable to the people giving me this feedback.
Well mk, people on this coast are enormous babies. If someone is standing on your foot, etiquette here would require you to say, "excuse me, sorry to bother you, but you are standing on my foot." If you were to say,"Hey! Get off my fucking foot!" You would have to listen to at least an hour of explanation on how no one meant to stand on your foot and that it really hurt their feelings to be asked not to stand in feet in that manner with such strong language. Next thing you know I find I'm trying to figure out if I'm supposed to apologise for having got my foot stepped on. I'll give you an precise example. The other day, someone close to me was ruining some of my things. Of course I said, "Stop doing that to my things, you'll ruin them!" She stopped but gave me a hurt look and sulked away. A few days later my wife said, "You know, when she was destroying your things, she didn't realize it and you needn't have said it like that." Names and things obscured to protect the innocent but the real problem was I didn't apologize at the start of objecting to my shit getting destroyed. Now being that you are a good midwestern, who's also lived on the East coast you wouldn't think about apologizing to someone who is standing on your tits, but that's exactly how it's supposed to be done out here. Sometimes I'm an asshole but other times I am, without malice, very direct and it's taken awful hard. If there is an upside to all this it's that people are very aware of the violence of language and attitude and I've learned a great deal about all the subtle ways we go at each other that I might not have learned if I lived in another place. I'm still learning it today. Another upside is that if you need to get something done or you have found yourself in the middle of something or in a bit of a tight spot, people here are easy to bully. You can bully and bluster your way out of most things if needs be. Oregon my Oregon!