C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 165

The diet's working…an update.

15 lbs down.

We started on Atkins, then slipped over to REAL South Beach, and from that point on, though occasionally eating more than we want, we're losing. Why REAL South Beach?

Ever since South Beach licensed their name and logo to Kraft, people have gotten a bad impression of how the diet actually works. We, female and at that stage when weight loss is nearly impossible by regular means, cannot buy those South Beach foods in the grocery store and lose weight. REAL South Beach involves only non-packaged foods. If you want to try it, go to the South Beach site and sign up: it's not expensive. You get the recipes that way.

The essence of it: at every meal you eat a little protein, 2 cups of veggies that do NOT include any veggie with starch, and twice a day, a half a cup of dairy. You're thus getting your carbs directly from vegetables like lettuce, cucumber, radishes, summer (but not winter) squash, cauliflower and broccoli, green beans. You get your protein from beans or meat or eggs. You can have 2 pieces of Canadian (but not regular) bacon.

And you have 2 snacks, typically a sugar free Jell-o cup with fatfree Coolwhip; or 2 celery sticks with either hummus or Laughing Cow cheese; or half a cup of cottage cheese.

Breakfast: 2 Canadian bacon, egg, 6 oz V-8; snack: 2 sticks celery with 2 tsp hummus; lunch: 2 cups of spinach or regular salad with vinegar and oil or Caesar, with mozzarella and tomato slices; snack: Jell-o or stick of string cheese; supper: steak, 2 cups of salad or other veggie; dessert: ricotta cream (ricotta with flavoring set in cold fridge).

The theory runs that you eat ONLY this way until you've lost significantly. Then you start working in a little more carb, in the form of whole grain bread (1 slice) or (not 'and'!)half a cup of brown rice (cooked measure) daily. If you gain weight on that, you back off, and immediately go back to the prior way of eating until you lose it. Then you try again. Ultimately, you get your body used to the notion that a little carb is not an invitation to go hog wild. You gradually increase the carb until you can eat a sandwich with 2 pieces of bread, or enjoy wholegrain pasta in a moderate amount. And you go on inching your way (with occasional retreats) toward a normal eating pattern, but never again unbridled access to starches. It takes a long time to accustom your body to moderation in that regard, and you'll have to watch it.

Yep, it's strict. But after trying every diet on the planet, I can say you're not hungry on this diet: you begin trying to duck 'snacks', because they're too much trouble to eat; but you should go on snacking: the idea is to keep your blood sugar up, and keep your body working.

Work, oh yes. We have to go fix breakfast, two hours later fix a snack; two more hours, fix lunch, which involves salad-making, AND fix the dessert for the evening, which needs to set; and for supper, you have to fix a main dish from scratch, and you have to slice and cook or salad-prep two cups of veggies apiece. It is WORK, my friends. But any diet that has you both losing weight and strongly wanting to duck a meal just because you're not hungry, is good, in our book. We take our vitamins; and we both eat things we don't like. I'm not fond of lettuce. Jane's not fond of tomatoes. But we cope. Clothes are getting beyond loose: I'm going to have to find a belt. I refuse to buy intermediate clothes. But I'm now wearing Jane's castoffs, and if anybody gets to buy new clothes, she should, because she's the smallest, and I can wear what she's dieted out of.

So hurrah for 15 pounds. That means I've lost 55 pounds from when I was at my heaviest (when we moved up to Spokane) and I have my heart set on losing more. I have a trunk full of perfectly good size 12 jeans. I am now under a 16 and headed for 14. Due to my height, I'll never get into a 10-anything. But I'll work my way into a Misses 12 if at all possible. Hurrah for us!

Bear of a day!

Some days it just seems mother Earth has slipped on the axis. Or that you have.

I have worked since near 8 am this morning til, now, 3:32 this afternoon on one problem: making Win 7′s eccentricities (it won't erase some files, or will, but it tells you it hasn't) AND Mobipocket Creator's idiosyncrasies: who knew we want UTC and not Western and European?—AND Namo [we're sorry: another user has this program in use. Bye!]—into just giving me a flippin' simple conversion of my not very complex [no special fonts] file of Rusalka.

I have loaded the program and unloaded it; updated it; repaired it; thrown it off the disk and re-loaded and installed it AND its reader-program, which it did not deign to move over to this computer from the old one…I have done that for a significant number of times, intermittent with trying to make this program behave. The key is—and Jane, bless her, finally helped me with the final set of glitches—it wants a huge cover file, poster-sized. It wants you to be UTC if you have any odd characters. And it wants to put the files where IT wants, not where you had them, and then wants to fuss about it. In the kerfluffle, I had a .png and a .jpg, and the .jpg was what was in the html 'call', and was in a folder not now being used, and the .png was where the .jpg should have been and the 'call' didn't want it. Jane's sharp eyes on the problem found that little detail (with html, it's always something of the sort) and bingo! the last of the problems went away.

It's been months since I ran MPC, and it's reminiscent of the old word-processing programs from before menus: you're on your own, kid: it's wrong, but you have to guess why.

Any rate, the Reader part of it behaves flawlessly, which is the part you'll see; it's the creator part that drives yours truly nutz.

Tonight I sit watching telly and running the rest of the file conversions, and Jane will have hers in good shape, so we should have our two spooky downloads for Closed Circle right before Halloween!

If you've wondered why the progress graph hasn't advanced lately…

Sometimes you suddenly realize you're approaching the ending…

…and sometimes you realize you've got elements to pull together.

This necessitates thinking.

A lot of thinking.

So……….I've been thinking. And thinking. And watering the plants. And thinking.

I needed certain people to fess up what they're up to and talk to me, if not to Bren.

It's amazing how, once you've gained that, you realize the answer is in there and has been, and that's what your hindbrain has been seeing for a week that your eyes just haven't spotted. Lizard-brain has a lot to recommend it.

Meanwhile Jane's river-viewing lantern has fallen over, dumped its top into the pond, and dropped the protective net down onto the surface, so I am going to have to go out there in the cold and the rain and fix it: having the net on the surface is hazardous to the fish, the lantern can't spend the winter in the pond, being only painted concrete, and I'm going to have to put on the rainsuit (if you have to work outdoors in spring and fall I cannot recommend these suits highly enough: get them in the 'hunters' section at Walmart) and do some postponed maintenance. A high wind threw over Jane's pretty new garden swing and bent two of the canopy supports. I think we can get a new bit of aluminum tubing for that, painted with Rustoleum.

Jane's helping me get Rusalka into shape for release. I'd done the original file straight into html, and it turns out there's no way to coerce that into a 6×9 inch fixed-page format for PDF. PDF hadn't been one of the formats we were using when I set this text up; but it is now, so Jane is fixing it—she was ahead of me in that. So I'll do the wandering around in the rain and the cold.

We are both soooooooo tired. The 'vacation' we had wasn't a vacation: it was a working trip, and I exited it twice as tired as before. She was tired-er than I was. So we're both just falling on our faces. We haven't gotten back to the rink yet—the living room is a mess. I have a stack of boxes of books to sign that came I think in July and those need to go—but sometimes things just become karma, and they're depressing. We had the kitchen all cleaned up and then all the plants came inside for the winter and occupied the breakfast table, the plant table, and now the side table, besides sending Jane to the ER and shedding all over the kitchen, and now I barely have room to work in there. We're just drowning in things we have to do, and there seems daily something that we just concentrated all our effort on that's become inundated in another tidal wave of 'stuff' that's not where it needs to be and shows no inclination to move on its own. I'm behinder than I was, which is going some. I'm oversleeping by 3 hours every morning, and it's still not helping…whine, whine, whine.

Just gotta get off my butt and do it, is all.

NASA program to protect Earth from CME's…

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/26oct_solarshield/nasa plan

A CME (coronal mass ejection) is not uncommon. But there ARE uncommon CMEs that can really ruin not only your day, but possibly your decade. No phones. No lights. No heat.

This program looks to protect our grid. It is darkly amusing that our grid was declared hard for terrorists to strike, because it is so incredibly chaotic and a wee bit backward. But the Sun is capable of harming it. And NASA thinks it can prevent that.

Color comes to reader tech?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.g...

The rumor is…Nook has it.

Anime…our favorites…

I got Jane the traditional black cat for her birthday—a lovely kitteh in a snowglobe.

And I found a couple of Bleach movies on Amazon. Bleach is one of our favorites…we have stacks and stacks of it.

We are so disappointed in most American drama…very little guts on the part of the storytellers; very simplistic plotting, suspense that unravels and becomes tedious on a re-watch; just a general lack of really good re-viewable material, so that if you've seen it once, you've seen it all. And probably all its relatives.

We disdained anime for a long time—all we'd seen was figures that looked like plump baby dolls. Then we found the right one or two, and found a) it's not all transforming robots and flying kids and b) it's got re-viewability. There are moments you just wait for. Convolute plot, complex characters, and very nice animation.

What Western viewers have to capish is the 'chibi' figure that suddenly takes the place of a character: this represents a childlike behavior, and is done for humor. Puzzled us for a long time, and then we got onto it, and find the chibis a lot of fun. They make great keychains.

So we're quite into certain anime: we're very picky. Gotta have good-looking people. No robots. Minimum of 'cute kids'. Gotta have a good storyline. We don't tend to like kids as characters—but made an exception for Kyo Kara Maoh.

Most of the ones we like tend to have a mythic element: Bleach, or Saiyuki (Journey to the West).

The other thing is—don't use the English sound track. Go for the English subtitles. Trust me. The translations are not that good on the English track. Most people who watch a lot of anime do prefer the Japanese track. And you'll pick up a little Japanese in the process. Very serious writers and composers devote their activity to anime—and manga. If you've never tried it, it's worth your time. As a music form, I've gotten quite fond of Japanese pop.

We also have a fondness for Chinese historical series, again, with the subtitles. Laughing in the Wind is one we own.

We

It is Jane's Birthday!

Black cats are her thing. Remember Efanor.

OSG has already struck.

I have several things in mind.

Our favorite pub has 'free steak dinner on your birthday,' and she is set on that.

We have been in Seattle the last week, visiting her brothers. Now we are back and settled in, once we diminish the pile of suitcases. I agreed, since we are on a strict diet, to bring the gear and cook for the crew during her stay (she and her brothers were going over and assigning names in 6 hours of family movies, for archive purposes) and I had a suitcase full of pans and knives, and did extensive grocery shopping in a strange store—you know what that's like. But I got us out without blowing the diet. And the bachelor brothers (who don't cook, nor even possess a pan, let alone proper pans, ramekins, or even useful knives) were appreciative of homecooked meals.

So we are back now! And that job is mostly done!

You'll have noticed a little service issue…

…with the server. They assure us all is now well: it was a structured shutdown, and all is in order. It came back up pretty well on schedule, so we apologize for the outage, and hope that that's that.

Jane's doing fine…

…got hit in the other eye today by a mini-model plane. Sometimes it's just your week. But we think she's fine, and she says she's showing no ill effects.

Thank you all for your expressions of concern.

I'm being driven slowly crazy by allergy: even wearing glasses, teary eyes spatter the lenses with salt. It's fire season in the Pacific NW.

This was an Interesting Evening: Jane in the ER…

…from trimming a plant.

It seems everything about euphorbias (spurge) is poisonous. She had trimmed the euphorbia we brought in, and began having eye pain. A fast check of the internet turned up "sap in the eye: blindness," seeds–death. Fumes off the living plant can be harmful to the eyes. Etc. We called OSG for advice and headed for the ER.

Two hours later and several hundred dollars the worse, I fear, we are back. Jane is fine. We at least provided a fast education on euphorbias for the ER staff. A stain test turned up no lesion or abrasion, and Jane's action of a warm water rinse proved the right thing to have done.

So…take it from us, dear friends. We have swept the floor to be sure there are no seeds for the cats to get into: the plant will be trimmed outside the house, wearing gloves and goggles, and all pieces discarded.

And Jane has a prescription and a wad of instructions.

We are very glad to have found out about euphorbias, which are a gloriously beautiful green plant, the delight of bees, and just very nasty to those to trim them. The word from the US Poison Center: if you get the sap straight in the eye it is epic pain, and goes downhill from there, including blindness.

So wear goggles and gloves, fellow gardeners, with this one.