Camy Tang's Blog, page 127
May 28, 2012
SparkPeople.com Secrets of Success page
I didn’t know about this page until I saw the mention of it on my Start page today. This is really cool! I only browsed the Healthy Eating topic and found a couple really good tips, like this one:
Isn’t that a great tip? I never thought of that, but it totally makes sense that if you bring half home, you can automatically know fairly accurately how much you ate.
Here’s the link to the Secrets of Success page.
When eating out and not having nutrition facts available, I d
first try to choose a smart meal choice. Then when my food arrives I automatically divide it exactly in half. I take the remaining half home. Then I measure or weigh the remaining half so that I can best estimate the contents of my meal. It is a good method of portion control and helps me eat out without losing track of my daily intake.
Isn’t that a great tip? I never thought of that, but it totally makes sense that if you bring half home, you can automatically know fairly accurately how much you ate.
Here’s the link to the Secrets of Success page.
"Altered" Protection for Hire trailer
Did anybody else notice something different about the Protection for Hire book trailer? My Zondervan marketing director told me they’d do this, so I was kind of expecting it.
The words on the trailer applied for both books because the trailer was introducing the premise of the entire series. So rather than making a brand new trailer for book 2, A Dangerous Stage , which would have a lot of the same stuff in it, they instead changed the background coloring and design of the existing trailer to mesh the color and art schemes for book 1 and book 2. Originally it was all green and yellow, and now they’ve added more of the red and yellow from the cover of book two.
Check it out:
What do you think?
Preorder A Dangerous Stage ! It’ll release November 2012!
May 25, 2012
Reading a Grace Livingston Hill novel sent me on an internet search ...
For 1929 women’s fashions, and I found this webpage with stunning gowns from 1928-1931.
The book I was reading was Ariel Custer , which has a copyright date of 1929 so I’m assuming it was written around 1927 or 1928. In the book, the hero is rather put off by the bold, brassy flapper girls his mother keeps pushing on him, but I wanted a picture of what they would have looked like, hence the internet search.
Some of the gowns on the webpage (the photos are from a charity fashion show) are absolutely beautiful. They’re also in much more vibrant colors than I would have expected, but then again I might be influenced by the fact there were only silent black and white films produced at the time, so maybe a part of my brain was thinking everybody walked around in black, white, or gray colors. :)
My favorite is the first gown, the tangerine beaded one. I wonder if all that beading was hand-sewn? It’s gorgeous! A close second is the 1929 green silk crepe. Yes, not the pink one (gasp!) because I don’t like the rather ugly diamond pattern of the fabric right over the woman’s chest. Really, so many of those gowns are absolutely beautiful.
The book I was reading was Ariel Custer , which has a copyright date of 1929 so I’m assuming it was written around 1927 or 1928. In the book, the hero is rather put off by the bold, brassy flapper girls his mother keeps pushing on him, but I wanted a picture of what they would have looked like, hence the internet search.
Some of the gowns on the webpage (the photos are from a charity fashion show) are absolutely beautiful. They’re also in much more vibrant colors than I would have expected, but then again I might be influenced by the fact there were only silent black and white films produced at the time, so maybe a part of my brain was thinking everybody walked around in black, white, or gray colors. :)
My favorite is the first gown, the tangerine beaded one. I wonder if all that beading was hand-sewn? It’s gorgeous! A close second is the 1929 green silk crepe. Yes, not the pink one (gasp!) because I don’t like the rather ugly diamond pattern of the fabric right over the woman’s chest. Really, so many of those gowns are absolutely beautiful.
Anyone looking at my internet history might be alarmed
I searched for “symptoms of depressions” and “cancer treatments” yesterday, but I promise I’m okay! I’m doing research for a book I’m writing for Guideposts’ Miracles of Marble Cove series. It’s a feel-good Christian women’s fiction series with a light mystery thread. Here’s the series blurb:
Discover what's possible when four friends, bonded by shared secrets, delve into life's mysteries and begin the adventure of a lifetime! Escape to Marble Cove, a quaint seaside town, and see how these courageous women discover God's plan for bringing them all together.
My books will be books 13 and 17, but you can subscribe to the entire series here.
Discover what's possible when four friends, bonded by shared secrets, delve into life's mysteries and begin the adventure of a lifetime! Escape to Marble Cove, a quaint seaside town, and see how these courageous women discover God's plan for bringing them all together.
My books will be books 13 and 17, but you can subscribe to the entire series here.
Calcium supplements might increase risk of heart attack
I was completely shocked to hear this on KLOVE yesterday and then I saw this article on WebMD.
I don’t get how they say the increase in risk is “moderate” but then they say there’s an 86% increased risk of heart attack. Maybe because out of 24,000 patients, only 354 of them had heart attacks.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll stop taking my calcium supplements and drink milk instead.
I don’t get how they say the increase in risk is “moderate” but then they say there’s an 86% increased risk of heart attack. Maybe because out of 24,000 patients, only 354 of them had heart attacks.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll stop taking my calcium supplements and drink milk instead.
May 24, 2012
Review: The Joy of Pasta
The Joy of Pasta by Joe Famularo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love pasta, so naturally I picked up this book and I'm so glad I did. There are several tomato sauce recipes alone, and tons of different pasta sauces. There are also baked pasta dishes and recipes for making homemade pasta, and what types of sauces to pair them with. Each recipe has a wine suggestion, but I haven't really paid attention to that. I've tried maybe 20 out of the 100 recipes in this book, and they've all been good. I'm eager to try some of the more unusual recipes when I have more time to make the homemade pasta for some of them.
View all my reviews
Tips for saving time
Right after blogging about limiting my online time, I found this article on SparkPeople.com with tips on how to reduce time wasters during the day.
Some of it is common sense, but others are good reminders, like setting rules for checking email, and going grocery shopping only once a week. Right now we go twice a week because we often forget to think of what to make for lunch for college Bible study until a couple days before, but we could certainly think ahead and go shopping all at once.
Any other tips you have for saving time?
Some of it is common sense, but others are good reminders, like setting rules for checking email, and going grocery shopping only once a week. Right now we go twice a week because we often forget to think of what to make for lunch for college Bible study until a couple days before, but we could certainly think ahead and go shopping all at once.
Any other tips you have for saving time?
TMI warning: Two steps backwards
I should have known it would happen, that I’d had too many “good” days, but yesterday I completely binged on sugar and carbs. I mean, SERIOUSLY binged.
SparkPeople.com gave me a daily calorie range of 1200 to 1550 calories a day, and I had been doing pretty good for almost 4 weeks in keeping my calorie intake to around 1300 calories a day, mostly through eating more slowly and changing my food choices and portions through looking at my nutrition tracker on SparkPeople.com.
I only had one day where I went over the maximum (I ate 1800 calories that day) and only three days where I went up to my maximum of 1550 calories. The rest of the time for the past 27 days, I’ve been at 1300 calories a day, so I guess only four days of straying is a really good thing.
But then yesterday I was simply DYING for sugar and carbs. I’d never felt a craving like it in the entire 4 weeks I’ve been tracking my food. I had been really good at staying within the carb range that SparkPeople gave me, even keeping to the low side most days, and I hadn’t craved any sort of sugar or carbs at all for a month.
But yesterday, the carb monster came roaring out of me and I downed half a bag of tortilla chips and 8 cookies that I had thought were rather sweet only the week before. Yesterday, they didn’t taste too sweet at all. In fact, they tasted pretty darn good.
So in my efforts for full disclosure, I ate over my maximum calorie count by 900 calories. Yes, you read that right. That is the equivalent of 9 miles running. Very hard.
Ai-yai-yai. Why do I always do this? I must have a latent self-sabotage hormone that fluctuates with my period.
But no, I am not going to self-flagellate myself. It happened, I will get over it (and maybe go for a slightly longer run, although it will not burn off 900 extra calories).
What kind of scares me is how intense my carb cravings were yesterday. I had thought that keeping in a healthy carb range every day would make those cravings go away forever. Before, when I was training for the Honolulu Marathon and I had eaten too few carbs for the amount I needed for my running, I didn’t have a craving for sugar, I just felt muscle-tired. So I don’t necessarily think the craving yesterday was my body telling me I needed more carbs.
Oh well. Pardon me, I’m going for a run.
SparkPeople.com gave me a daily calorie range of 1200 to 1550 calories a day, and I had been doing pretty good for almost 4 weeks in keeping my calorie intake to around 1300 calories a day, mostly through eating more slowly and changing my food choices and portions through looking at my nutrition tracker on SparkPeople.com.
I only had one day where I went over the maximum (I ate 1800 calories that day) and only three days where I went up to my maximum of 1550 calories. The rest of the time for the past 27 days, I’ve been at 1300 calories a day, so I guess only four days of straying is a really good thing.
But then yesterday I was simply DYING for sugar and carbs. I’d never felt a craving like it in the entire 4 weeks I’ve been tracking my food. I had been really good at staying within the carb range that SparkPeople gave me, even keeping to the low side most days, and I hadn’t craved any sort of sugar or carbs at all for a month.
But yesterday, the carb monster came roaring out of me and I downed half a bag of tortilla chips and 8 cookies that I had thought were rather sweet only the week before. Yesterday, they didn’t taste too sweet at all. In fact, they tasted pretty darn good.
So in my efforts for full disclosure, I ate over my maximum calorie count by 900 calories. Yes, you read that right. That is the equivalent of 9 miles running. Very hard.
Ai-yai-yai. Why do I always do this? I must have a latent self-sabotage hormone that fluctuates with my period.
But no, I am not going to self-flagellate myself. It happened, I will get over it (and maybe go for a slightly longer run, although it will not burn off 900 extra calories).
What kind of scares me is how intense my carb cravings were yesterday. I had thought that keeping in a healthy carb range every day would make those cravings go away forever. Before, when I was training for the Honolulu Marathon and I had eaten too few carbs for the amount I needed for my running, I didn’t have a craving for sugar, I just felt muscle-tired. So I don’t necessarily think the craving yesterday was my body telling me I needed more carbs.
Oh well. Pardon me, I’m going for a run.
The (slightly odd) traits of a book collector
I was reading a book on my Nook the other day,
Blue Like Jazz
, which we’re going through in the college Bible study my husband and I are leading. After I finished the two chapters I needed to read before this coming week’s Bible study, I went to my Nook library.
I must have spent a good 10 minutes just browsing through my Nook library, looking at all my lovely books, most of which I haven’t read yet, feeling such joy just to have them ready to read anytime I want (assuming I actually have time to read them all--at this point, I might have more books than I can physically read in my lifetime).
I kept seeing a cover and thinking, Oh, I forgot I had that book! How wonderful I have it!
Then I took a step back and looked at what I was doing. I see nothing wrong with it, but Captain Caffeine would probably roll his eyes at me, mostly because he’s not a book collector. (Actually, he’s not really a collector of anything, unless it’s empty boxes that he can’t get himself to throw away. :)
Does anybody else relate to my love of having all these books????
I must have spent a good 10 minutes just browsing through my Nook library, looking at all my lovely books, most of which I haven’t read yet, feeling such joy just to have them ready to read anytime I want (assuming I actually have time to read them all--at this point, I might have more books than I can physically read in my lifetime).
I kept seeing a cover and thinking, Oh, I forgot I had that book! How wonderful I have it!
Then I took a step back and looked at what I was doing. I see nothing wrong with it, but Captain Caffeine would probably roll his eyes at me, mostly because he’s not a book collector. (Actually, he’s not really a collector of anything, unless it’s empty boxes that he can’t get himself to throw away. :)
Does anybody else relate to my love of having all these books????
