Will a salad a day melt my spare pounds away?

If you've been paying attention, you know that as part of my effort to be fit and healthy I've been trying to lose weight. Those of you who know me know I'm not overweight; in fact, I'm nearly smack dab in the middle of the "healthy weight" range for my height on all the charts. But I'm much more physically comfortable when I'm at the lower end of that category, and my clothes fit better. In fact, I'm down to two pairs of pants that fit me. (I just had a denim casualty: a pair of jeans ripped in the butt. RIP, favorite jeans.) So my goal is to lose a pants size, as I have stacks of pants in my closet that I will then be able to wear. All I should need to lose are about 10 pounds to achieve this (though I'd like to lose 15, giving me a little room in the butt so they don't rip).



So I track my daily food intake at FitDay.com, and my daily calorie goal had been 1200-1500 for some time. That amount of food worked for weight loss. I wasn't losing quickly but I was losing consistently, and if I had a "bad" day when I splurged, it didn't even really register. (Thus avoiding the mental setback involved when one "gains" a few pounds overnight.)

But I was always hungry. Not quite as hungry as I was when I tried NutriSystem for several months last year, but hungry enough to notice. It was sometimes hard to concentrate, hard to sleep. And I tended to have more than my fair share of "bad" days.

So a few weeks ago I adjusted my calorie goal. Instead of 1200-1500 calories a day, I started aiming for 1400-1600 calories.

It fixed my hunger problem. As soon as I hit 1500 calories, as long as I spread my food intake out over the entire day, I was in a safe place where I knew I'd make it to bedtime without hunger pangs. It felt good.

But for my first two weeks at that level, I gained weight. This was right before my trip to Hawaii, so you can imagine how put out I was. I had stuck to my diet guidelines (minus one splurge day, which wasn't particularly bad) and exercised 5 days/week, so I really can't figure out what the problem can be other than to say: my metabolism sucks. If I had any disposable income, I'd hire a nutritionist right about now to help me out of this rut. But I don't, so I need to figure something out on my own.

But I'm not going to lower my calorie goal again. Well, I think I'm going to tighten up the range to 1400-1500 calories/day, just to try to get my ass a little more disciplined. But going back to starvation is just not a part of my plan. Instead, I've decided to try replacing some of the calories I've been consuming with different calories.

I eat pretty decently, at least for an American. Cookies, chips, candy, donuts, and even crackers make up a miniscule portion of my diet. I don't ever buy those items when I go grocery shopping, so the only times I have them these days are on a purely opportunistic basis. Such as when I'm at a party, or at a friend's house, or when I'm stuck at work late and the only food available lives in the vending machine. A routine day's diet for me goes something like this:

Breakfast: 2 hard boiled eggs
Morning snacks: 1 banana, 1 nutrition bar (Balance, Zone, etc.)
Lunch: Frozen meal (I know, this isn't high cuisine)
Afternoon snacks: 1 pear, 1 apple
Dinner: This varies drastically from day to day. My only real guidelines are that I won't repeat a frozen meal if I've already had one, and I only have around 400 calories left to play with. Because I'm not cooking for anyone besides myself I don't cook as often as I'd like, so sometimes dinner will be a hodgepodge of things like some yogurt, another nutrition bar, more fruit. Sometimes I'll have a big bowl of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. Sometimes I'll have some fish. It's a daily puzzle: "What does Jen have in her kitchen that she can put together for 400 calories?"

So I'm thinking: I can't cut calories, and I can't cut junk food. But I can cut processed food and add more natural foods. Namely: vegetables.

If you've been paying attention you also already know that I've been trying to add veggies in to my diet. Looking at my sample day's diet above, you can see that I haven't done a good job. But sometimes I do. It's a matter of good planning. The last time I bought vegetables for myself at the grocery store I wound up spending ungodly amounts of money on several pounds of organic spinach, much of which didn't get eaten, so I went a bit gun-shy after that.

And my vegetable garden is ... not doing well. (That's another post for another day.)

But I figure, I'll cut down on my nutrition bar spending, and use that money toward veggies instead. Then I need to find some good veggie dishes. To start, I'm going to concentrate mainly on salads. The thing is, I don't like salad. Because to most people, "salad" is a tiny plate with a few lettuce leaves, onion slices, tomato wedges, radish bits, and if you're lucky, carrot shavings, and the only good thing about it is that it acts as a dressing delivery vehicle. Yuck. My salad needs are much more sophisticated than that, and much larger. I'll eat my salads out of mixing bowls. On the ingredients front I know where to start, and that's with more interesting greens (spinach, arugula, or at least, for the love of god, baby field greens, NOT just lettuce leaves), avocado, onions, but maybe cooked a little, tomatoes, but sliced thinly so their juices can marinade their neighbors, and ... after that I'm at a loss. At the start, I'm keeping it to veggies-only, so no eggs, meat, nuts, raisins, etc. I'll use tiny amounts of dressing, I'm thinking a little virgin olive oil and extra vinegar. And pepper. Amazingly, this is sounding good right now.

But before I do any shopping I need to scour my cookbooks for some firm ideas. I don't want to waste any more vegetables. If you have a recipe for a good salad, please share it here!

To sum: I hope to replace one meal a day with a big, honkin' salad of comparable calories. Because I can't cut my calories any further, and I already exercise about 5 days/week, so I don't know what else to do.

Desktop calendar selections for June

As I blogged at the end of April, each month I visit Smashing Magazine to choose a new calendar image for my desktop wallpaper.

I'm not overwhelmed by the quantity of choices I'm seeing for June. Luckily, I'm quite whelmed enough by the quality of the first candidate: Vlad Gerasimov's Whale.



I'll happily stay in the little cottage by the lighthouse until July.

How do you work this thing?

This blog has been live since November 2007, but I haven't actually announced it, formally, to anybody. It gets linked from comments I leave on others' blogs, it's listed in a couple of my online profiles, I've linked to it on my Twitter feed, and my posts appear on Facebook. But yesterday I went and added a link to Mad Mad Life in my e-mail signature, so all hell is sure to break loose as more people I actually know will now have access to it.

So I wanted to explain why there has been no formal announcement. These are my issues:

1) I'm not satisfied with my post consistency. It would be just like me to announce this great, new thing, only to abandon it. (See Turtles All the Way Down, currently on hiatus.)

2) I'm not satisfied with my voice. Neither my range of topics nor my quality of writing have yet lived up to what I had in mind. But at this point I've decided that that's OK. I think it takes all writers a couple years to find their voice (voices?), and I certainly have never been a consistent writer. I have time to improve.

3) I'm not satisfied with the site design. I'm currently using a modified template, and have always planned to create a new design. But I was never really worried about that. Content is king, and there are plenty of successful blogs out there that use completely unmodified templates.

4) I'm not satisfied with the site's functionality. I'm a Blogger n00b. I label each post meticulously, but where is the list of labels in the right column? And where is the "Older posts" link at the bottom of the home page? And why doesn't the logo link back to the home page from all other pages? I actually code web sites for a living so these are things I'm sure I can figure out how to add in, but I have yet to take the time. (But shouldn't they have been included in the template?)

Anyway, I have readers, and I even get some comments now and then, so I still probably won't be making that formal announcement just yet.

I hope you'll keep visiting...think of it as our secret little corner of the web. An exclusive club. (But I'll understand, really, I will, if you want to spread it around anyway.)

XOXOXO, Jen S.

You, your bed, and your cat. Or: The pain of sleep deprivation.

So there I was: in my bed, snuggled up in old, well-worn pajamas and an oversized sweatshirt, my body underneath a sheet, three layers of overstuffed comforters, and one 10 pound tortoiseshell cat, and I was shivering uncontrollably. After a few minutes my mind caught up to the situation and acknowledged that warmth would be not far off, so I was able to will my shivering to stop. It was 5:00 a.m., and I needed to concentrate on getting my one last precious hour of sleep.

Ninety minutes earlier I was in precisely the same situation minus two layers of overstuffed comforter, and I had been able to curb my body spasms just long enough to fall asleep, only to wake up an hour and a half later again shivering unconsciously, my back clenched into a state of anguish and pain that would last well into the day. That was when I got out of bed to retrieve a second comforter, which I folded in half and added as two sources of ammo in my body-heat-containing arsenal. My house was 66 degrees, its normal overnight temperature.

I am 36 years old and in the cushy lifestyle I have engineered for myself, it seems that my body does not react well to sleep deprivation. While I was enjoying the warm weight of my cat, my last 48 hours had seen less than six hours of sleep, and I knew my body was in for more of the same abuse. I had gotten myself into a fix on a project, and working full steam ahead for as long as I could stay awake was my only hope for survival.

And as I lay there I could clearly remember my old college days, when sleep deprivation was all the rage. Mind you, I didn't work very hard in college, but pulling all-nighters was a feat that earned you some sort of badge of honor. Once I didn't sleep at all for three days. Once I had to move to a new apartment with the aid of only my Ford Explorer, and I packed and moved myself for 30 hours straight without a single nap. Afterwards, I felt compelled to visit my friends in the computer lab to show them my strength, rather than collapse in a heap on my laboriously-lugged futon.

It seems those days are gone. And I've only aggravated the situation over the last four years by freelancing, as my main motivation for leaving the full time lifestyle was to be able to make my own hours. Like most freelancers, I do get up in the morning, bathe and dress, but I can almost always afford my eight hours of sleep at night. (Some lucky nights I even enjoy nine.)

Interestingly, I never suffer from jet lag. All you have to do when you reach your destination is conform to the new time zone, enduring a maximum of one day of pain. If you arrive early in the day, just keep yourself busy until evening when you can return to your hotel and get a long night's sleep. If you arrive late in the day and can't sleep during sleeping hours, your second day will be your day of pain. But after staying awake those few extra hours, one good night's sleep is 100% healing.

It's day-after-day sleep deprivation that does me in. I'm now working with 11 hours of sleep since Monday morning, and I broke down and picked up my first coffee of the week on my way to work. Ironically, I purchased it to give me something to do to help keep my eyes open at the wheel (which can be a problem for me), but I somehow missed every coffee shop until I was only about a mile from work. My venti now sits here at my desk, mocking me. It knows I'm running on diminished faculties, and it does nothing to help me. I should have saved the two bucks and more importantly, the ten minutes, which I could have applied to future sleep time. One good night's sleep is all I need. And a warm cat.

The intimacy of friendship

Not too long ago a friend sent me a note that said, among other things, "You bring out the best in me."

I had to read it again to make sure there was nothing I missed. That there were no words or context that I didn't notice the first time. But I found nothing new, and I sat and stared. It bothered me.

It didn't bother me in a negative way. It was a positive feeling, but not one that could be characterized as joy, either. I felt confusion. Because if our friendship is founded on anything, it is founded on the premise that he brings out the best in me.

We met a few years ago as a matter of happenstance, as people do. And as our friendship gradually grew, he (unwittingly) led me to see in myself the person I wanted to be, a person I think I used to be. It was as if his presence expressed genes in my DNA that had gone dormant long ago. That was the way it went: he improved me. I didn't think it made sense the other way; it didn't apply. He is this person who, as-is, motivated me to improve. How could I have done, or be doing, anything for him, when he was already "that way" -- the way he is now -- when we met?

Regardless of the fact that I was making far too big a deal over a single sentence that my friend wrote, this was something I needed to figure out. Because the way I saw it, one of two things was going on: either he feels the same deep, sincere gratitude for our friendship that I do (something I never really considered), or he is lying. And I wasn't sure I was comfortable with either option.

The truth is that I lack intimacy in most of my personal relationships. Even with this one, though it has the potential to be a real, honest friendship where everything is on the table and there is no fear or regret, we live too far apart to cultivate it that way. There is no meeting for coffee a couple times a week to share our thoughts and bitch about our colleagues or our families. (Not that either of us would bitch about our families.) No dinner parties where we get too drunk on wine and build the kinds of memories that we'll all joke about forever. With work, families, disparate locations: we've always had too many obstacles to get as close as I think many friendships are. But then, I'm not sure how much I know about that, because I have precious few close friendships. Even if we could take our obstacles away, could I get that close? And back to the topic at hand: even though I feel as though we should be that close, or kind of are, as much as we can be from afar, is it possible that he feels the same way about such a, let's face it, superficial relationship?

Learning how to build and maintain intimacy in my personal relationships is something I need to start figuring out. Because if I can't even believe that a friend has the same genuine feelings for me that I have for him, well, I have a lot of work to do. I need to start redirecting my time to some back-to-the-basics lessons in friendships. What are some of the things you do to keep your friendships genuine? Or is it as effortless for everyone else as I presumed it would always be for me? You know, like when we were kids, showing up at each others' houses unannounced, running down the block through the neighbors' sprinklers, eating gooey candy and getting dirty without apology or a care in the world? What is the equivalent of that as an adult? I think this may be what they call "unconditional love," but it gets tricker to maintain in adulthood. I certainly haven't done a good job proving to myself that it's possible.

Meanwhile I hope my friend knows how much I value him, and that he's usually on my mind. Especially when I'm feeling like I'm not at my best, because that's when I think about him for inspiration. Especially now that I know that he thinks about me in a similar way, because I'd hate to let him down.

How replaceable am I?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 10 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

According to the above information, I'd say I'm quite rare indeed. If I die, my countrymen are left with only nine of me. So I'm only slightly more replaceable than a house cat, which is born with nine total lives.

Actually, it's interesting having my name. For a long time when The Internets were young, I couldn't find any other Jen S.'s* at all.

*Here I must interrupt my own post, just for a moment: I'm still trying to decide where I'm going with my anonymity, or lack thereof, on the web. Pretty much since 1990 I've practiced full disclosure on the 'net with my name and location, as I think practicing anonymity just breeds fear and possibly even predation ... kind of like what Michael Moore talks about in Bowling for Columbine with guns, fear and violence in U.S. society being inextricably linked. I may just be rebelling against my mother who always kept our names unlisted in the telephone book, which never made sense to me either. If everyone were listed, wouldn't the phone book be much thicker, and the victim pool be much larger, thereby making our chances of becoming targets smaller? You know, the larger the pool, the smaller I am? Well, that's the way I see it, and anyway, I wasn't born with the fear gene. So, despite the fact that my full name and location can be found with very little Googling, and possibly with only a click or three from this very page, I'm still deluding myself and others by sticking with the "Jen S." pseudonym for a little while longer. I don't know why. I'm confused and I'm OK with that.

So anyway, for a long time when The Internets were young, I couldn't find any other Jen S.'s at all. I lived my life in the early 1990's believing that I might be the only one on Earth. My last name is rather uncommon. It's not unknown, but it's the kind that is mispronounced and misspelled more often than not. There were no other S.'s in my school, and I mean not in any of my schools, through the time I graduated college at age twenty-*COUGHgagAhem*. I have yet to meet another S. who is unrelated to me.

Yet the name Jennifer is exceedingly common. Mike Doughty went to school with 27 Jennifers, and while that may be a record number, I knew quite a few myself. When I hear my first name, I usually don't look up. There is always a mug, or a key chain, or a fake license plate, or a t-shirt with my name on it at the dime store. (Do they still call them that?) I'm Jen, there are a million or more just like me, and that's completely normal.

So I'm absolutely conditioned to hearing and seeing my first name everywhere, but to believing that my last name might as well be made up. It may as well be Swernylzipizlillamasteaksammich. Hearing my last name spoken aloud, and I mean in a place where people don't know me or my name, like if I were crossing a crowded street or in a shopping mall, is much like hearing someone say, "Hey, Swernylzipizillillamasteaksandwich!" It's weird, and it makes you turn around. And I mean you, too. What I'm saying is, in my mind, I fancy that if you heard that name, you'd turn around and think it was just as strange as if I heard that name. It's just. That weird. To hear. To me.

So weird that when a movie came out a few years back and the main character had my last name, I found it downright difficult to watch. Because they kept saying his name, and it was my name, which I never hear, to the point where it doesn't sound like a real name to me, and watching the movie I was just so distracted by hearing the name because, isn't everybody else also thinking, "Wait, so that's a real name?"

Why couldn't they just have made his name Jones?

I guess this is kind of like how your birth date is special to you. The combination of your month, day and year sounds "right" to you, doesn't it? It's fairly unique, at least among most people you know. You might feel slightly more connected to someone who has a birthday a few days away from your own, but you know that your date is the "right" one. So when you see your birth date used for something else, like when they show the date on an episode of Law & Order, or when some newsworthy event happens that becomes forever tied to your birth date, you feel some kind of ownership of it, like it has something to do with you, and perhaps like your privacy is being invaded. Or not. But that's how I feel about my birth date, and that's how I feel about my last name. Because through my entire life, my last name has actually been more unique to me than my birth date. I've been able to name other people, both celebrities and people in my schools and workplaces, with the same birth date since I was a child. But never with the same last name.

So now I know that there are nine other Jen S.'s in the United States alone. And I find myself wondering, when are their birth dates? What color hair do they have? What do they like? Are they tall? Are they young? Are they better than me?

It's rather neurotic, to say the least. But I know for sure that it's ME, no matter how many others share my name.

Your what hurts?

For you, my body parts, three haikus.

My raw, red knee-pits:
I know that I used sunscreen
Why did you shed it?

My upper buttocks:
We hiked downhill and back up
Chi-town has no hills.

My perty tummy,
Burnin', rumblin'; di'gnosis:
"Food, the volume of."

Aloha from Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii

I took an unexpected blogging break the past few days as I was getting ready to go on vacation. I really got a good roll of the dice in this life because a person close to me has umpteen gazillion air/hotel miles/points that she gives to me every year or two so we can vaycay together. (Is that an accepted term these days, "vaycay?" You know, "vaycay" ... "to go on vacation." I vaycay, you vaycay, we vaycay.)

If I can figure out how to upload photos using my Mac (Do I have an SFTP app? Who knows!) I'll show you what you're missing ... later. Now it's time for breakfast and BEACH!

Slow down. Save gas. Save earth. Spread the word.

As a follow-up from yesterday's post, The slow down, save gas experiment, I am offering you a way to help spread the word about this simple thing that we can all do to help save gas.

Remember, by using less gas, you will:
1) Save money
2) Use less of a finite resource
3) Stem global warming

So without further ado, I am offering three bumper stickers that you can proudly display to let others know what you're doing to help lessen our use of oil:



A portion of proceeds will be donated to Environmental Defense Fund (see also their Charity Navigator rating).

The slow down, save gas experiment

I am a lead foot.

I like to drive fast, and by that I mean, I always drive fast. I pick the fastest lane and keep up with the fastest car in it (except for those guys who zigzag through traffic at 100mph; they're just nuts), passing cars on the right that have no business being in the fast lane. Friends call my car "Tardis" because when we drive somewhere in it, we always reach our destination faster than anybody previously thought possible. I was pulled over seven times before even graduating high school, so early in life I knew what I was and that there was little use in fighting it. [Sidebar: although one time it was for blowing through a stop sign (a tree branch was hanging in front of it, I swear; I couldn't have possibly seen it in time to stop at the speed I was driving) and another time it was for changing lanes without using a turn signal and cutting off a cop. But I am anal retentive about using my turn signal and there is no way I wouldn't have seen that cop, as my convertible's top was down so there were no obstructions. I fought the cop on that one and won, which is a good thing, because I didn't have my driver's license due to a recent speeding incident. But I digress.]

Driving fast is how I behave naturally, anyway. That's the way my genes expressed themselves. Left to my own devices my favorite speed is 85mph, and I have been overheard asking slower folks if they are actually interested in reaching their destination.

Before you jump down my throat, understand that on the highways around where I live, I am not alone. Not only am I not alone, but it actually does feel a little dangerous to travel the speed limit, which is 55mph. (On I-294, 75 is about average.) And there is nothing worse than the traffic buildup that occurs when a cop pulls onto the highway and everyone slows down to the speed limit. People do not know what to do with themselves when they can't pass that cop. Their right feet twitch. Their blood pressures rise. All you see is a visual cacophony of flashing brake lights ahead of you because each driver is chomping at the bit to get out of the cop-traffic-buildup.

But as I age into an older, gentler person, I find myself becoming wiser as well. And there is simply no denying the fact that, if nothing else, lead foot driving wastes gas. With Earth's finite amount of oil and with our political barriers to obtaining all that our little American hearts desire, gas is something that we really should be proactively trying to conserve. In addition, gas is expensive already and the faster we drive, the more we use and therefore spend. With today's gas prices, the current factoid you'll hear is that for every 10mph you travel over 60mph, you're spending at least $0.50 more per gallon.

So in my current gung-ho mission of conservation, sustainable living, saving the environment and all that jazz, I decided to try changing my ways. I decided to find out just how much gas I am wasting by driving the way I do. So I've begun an experiment wherein I am tracking my driving and the gas I use, calculating both how much money and how much gas I can save by slowing down to 60mph. (I still ain't messing with 55mph, sorry.)

Of course this has been done before, but not by me. Nobody knows how much gas and money I am wasting by driving the way I do. And I suspect nobody really cares how much I am wasting, but maybe by making this contribution to the blogosphere, I'll help inspire somebody else to try the same thing, and in the end we'll be using a little less gas than we were before.

The experiment will be slow going, as my driving needs are erratic. Some weeks I drive only a few miles through town, and other weeks I drive 95 miles on the highway each day. So I need to compare comparable driving situations when doing the math. I will, of course, post my progress here.

Meanwhile, here are some related links for your educational pleasure:
Slow Down a Little, Save a Lot of Gas
Drive 55, save gas -- get flipped off - This one is great because it's from three years ago, when gas prices were hovering around the $3 mark (which was appalling at the time)
Airlines slow down flights to save on fuel
20 Tips to Save Money on Gas
How to Save Money on Gas - 29 Tips
Ask MetaFilter: Tricks to getting better MPG
Hey lead foot, if you want to save gas, slow down
How to save $0.54 per gallon on gas
Save More Gas by Safely Following Trucks
Gas May Finally Cost Too Much

The evils of antibacterial hand soap

On my shopping trip last week I purchased antibacterial hand soap.

Before I go any further you need to understand that for me, saying "I purchased antibacterial hand soap" is nearly synonymous with saying, "I drank the Kool-Aid."

The basic premise of my belief is that we do not need antibacterial, antimicrobial, or antifungal agents in our hand soap. Our bodies are literally covered with millions of living nasties at all times, and we are naturally equipped to deal with the situation. There are times when it is appropriate to be super-clean, such as when visiting someone who is sick, or when performing surgery. But consider the gratuitous amount of hand washing people do these days: after using the bathroom, before eating, after touching food, after touching dogs, after touching doorknobs, after touching anything that isn't the inside of a white glove. Remember when we were kids and we'd spend an entire day at the amusement park, hanging on railings and touching picnic benches, with maybe one or two trips to the restroom to (maybe) clean up? That's a pretty damn disgusting situation. And we were fine. All the hand washing we now do as adults, with or without antibacterial soap: that's enough. Really, it is.

The danger, in case you have been in a coma for several years and are unaware, is that the wanton use of antibacterial soaps and the over-prescribing of antibiotics is creating "superbugs." That is, germs that are resistant to antibiotics. This is why I am against antibacterial hand soaps. Not only do I believe them to be unnecessary (we're clean enough), but dangerous.

And there is a plethora of scientific data to back me up on this, and I'll link to just three articles:

CDC Foundation: Superbugs
Should antibacterial soap be outlawed?
And most recently: Scientists find host of antibiotic-eating germs

So. Why did I purchase antibacterial hand soap?

I was weak. I needed a new bottle of hand soap for my kitchen. So as I browsed the shelf of pump-soap, my eyes locked onto a bottle that said "Kitchen" on it, that had new, recently-modified packaging, that was a pleasing yellowish orange color with bubbles, and that was all-around pretty. I eventually noticed that the label said "antibacterial" but decided in my mind, without checking the back label, that it is probably an alcohol-based "antibacterial" agent that does not lead to antibacterial-resistant germs. (More on that later.)

A few days later I finally bothered to read the back of the bottle and learned that the antibacterial agent is Triclosan, which is an antibacterial and antifungal. Damnit. I was roped in by the pretty packaging. I usually think of myself as more marketing-resistant than the average person, so this hand soap must have gotten me at a moment of weakness. Or maybe I'm just the same as the average fool after all.

I should expound on the issue I touched on above: alcohol-based hand sanitizers are A-OK. I'm not sure if there are alcohol-based hand soaps available, but the alcohol-based hand sanitizers that you don't rinse off are really, really good. Here is an excerpt from one of my linked articles that explains why they don't come with the danger of creating superbugs:

Why haven't bacteria adapted to the agents found in bleach, alcohol and lemon juice? The reason why bacteria aren't resistant to these agents is because they do not leave a residue. There is no chance for surviving bacteria to adapt within the residual environment, so bacteria are just as susceptible to bleach and alcohol as they were 100 years ago. Skip the antimicrobial smart bomb and go for the big bleach blockbuster.

Studies have also shown that alcohol-based hand sanitizers kill much, much more bacteria than antibacterial soap. See here: Coming Clean: Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizer vs. Antibacterial Soap, Which Cleans Best?

All the hand washing is really OK. There are good reasons to keep your hands clean, the most important one being to reduce the spread of germs. And I understand that our society in the United States likes to be clean. We like to look, smell, and feel clean, and when we're at work all day the only thing we can really do to keep the dirt at bay is to wash our hands. It's part of who we are, and I wouldn't want to change that.

So please do keep on washing your hands. Use alcohol-based hand sanitizers if you wish. But please lay off the antibacterial agents.

The incredible, edible frittata

The amazing thing about the above photo is clearly not its award-worthy composition, lighting, or focus.

The amazing thing about the photo is that what you see contains only two eggs.

I could have scrambled up a couple eggs for dinner, sure. But scramble two eggs and you get a few spoonfuls of mush. Oh, I really enjoy a scrambled egg. But they don't go far.

But take a few eggs and throw in some spinach, onions, and red peppers, and suddenly you have an overflowing panful of frittata goodness.

And this just goes to prove that you don't have to be anybody resembling a good cook to make a good frittata. Here's what I did:

In a 12" pan, I heated some oil. I added half a yellow onion (chopped), and waited about 5 minutes for them to soften. Then I added about a half bunch of spinach, and maybe half a jar of roasted red peppers. Because I don't know anything about flavoring with spices, I added a dash of paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper, and even nutmeg. I stirred it up, covered it, and let it simmer until the spinach cooked down to nearly nothing (as spinach does). Meanwhile, I beat 4 eggs and salted them liberally. Then I added the eggs to the pan. Stirred again, and then poured it all into a little 8" frying pan, coated with Pam. Covered it and let it cook for about 12 minutes.

And I then had a 4-egg frittata sitting there, sure as the day is long. So I cut it in half, ate that half blob of fluffy egg-n-veggie goodness, and that was dinner. And since it was 2 eggs and some veggies, we're talking about 200-something calories and some fiber and vitamins.

Even the spices were OK. I overdid the cayenne a little, but I did like its effect. Probably the cumin and cayenne were most prominent, and they worked.

Today is RSS Awareness Day: Free RSS Icons!

And you didn't even know there was an RSS Awareness Day, did you? According to rssday.org, today is that day. Please join me in celebrating this special day by clicking on my gigantically enormous RSS icon on the right side of this page! Then you will have this blog at your fingertips in your RSS reader, and you can learn neat things like this all the time.

You can read all about RSS here, and you can rest assured that all the information there is 100% accurate and true, because it's a Wikipedia page.

As a special treat, today I am offering links to gobs and gobs of free RSS icons that you can use for your blog. I hope you enjoy them!



Free Glass Style RSS/Feed Icons



snap2objects - 30 Free RSS Vector Icons



Free Custom RSS Icons For Your Website



Icojoy - Free web 2.0 RSS icons



Fasticon.com - royalty-free icons



Grunge Style RSS Feed Icons



51 RSS Buttons For Your Blog



Free RSS Feed Icons



Color RSS icons



Feed icons for blogging guitarists



RSS Icons Orb v2



RSS Feed Badges/Icons



A Nice Collection of Feed Icons



Rss Icons



NewsFire Icons



4 RSS Icons



Smashing Magazine - Fresh, Free and Gorgeous RSS/Feed Icons



The Real Christmas RSS Icons



Christmas Feed Icons

The book meme

Here's one that's making its laps around the blogosphere. Which of these books have you read? Here's the legend:

Bold if you've read it
Italics if you started it but never finished it
Plain text for "I'm an idiot" ... er, that is, for "I haven't read it."

On the two blogs I've seen this posted, the authors added their own classifications, too. So I'm adding:

Green if I own it, but haven't gotten to it yet
Orange if I've seen the movie! (Ha ha!)

Usually I'd post an item like this if it made me look particularly good, not particularly mediocre (as is the case). But I never really became interested in reading until a few years ago (well into adulthood) so I'm overly pleased when I've read anything.

Here goes:

The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela's Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault's Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity's Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver's Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Time Traveler's Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

Now I have a new reading list.