wombat_socho

Probably one of the worst things about being unemployed, as I may have mentioned before, is that you've lost the externally-imposed structure that gives some order to your life, and if you're not very disciplined,* losing that structure can really mess you up. To cite just one example of this, since you don't have to get up early in the morning to be at work by 0800/0900, there's nothing to keep you from staying up late at night doing nothing in particular or hanging out online with e-migos from the Mountain states or the West Coast. And then you sleep in until 1100/1200, and stay up later the next night...and the next thing you know, your sleep cycle is exactly backward from everyone else's. That makes it hard to deal with the rest of the world, which is still running pretty much on a 9-5 schedule.

In my particular case, screwing with the sleep cycle throws me off my proper dietary habits because I get tired and stupid and eat stuff I shouldn't in large quantities. Then the BG goes up and the weight goes up, and Bad Things happen. That's been the story of this weekend, starting on Friday with a trip to Costco while I was in Fatigue State 4, a late-night strategic op with Goonfleet (we all died, op success) and a Saturday spent mostly in a semi-catatonic state playing Farmville In Space. So the weight is up 15 pounds from its low point back at the beginning of April; fortunately nothing else is out of whack. Except for my head, and I'm working on that.

The lack of cash flow means that I probably won't be going up to Balticon again this year, whether or not they're doing a memorial to Richard. Yes, bin Laden may be dead, but gas is still around $4/gallon and I still don't have a job. Thanks for nothing, President CarterObama.

Got an 89 on my last Government & Nonprofit Accounting test, which means I passed the course; results for Auditing will probably show up today or Monday. I'll going in for my last Management test then, will be turning in some essays and a project as well, and that'll be it for the semester. Summer semester starts next week, IIRC, but I only have one class and it's online. We'll see how that goes.

I haven't really been spending a lot of time here, really, what with working three days in the tax mines, two night classes, and doing a sub assignment tomorrow on Jackson-Lee Day. Which is good because, you know, bad for the head to hang around the apartment all day on the internets, which is inevitably what I do unless I'm eating or sleeping or tending to personal/apartment maintenance. So I haven't been posting much here or on E2. Lots of Cityville posts at FB, though. #^_^#

Managed to get a handle on the eating situation; carbs are back down where they should be, blood sugar numbers ditto, and the weight is heading down as well. Weighed in this morning at 357.4, which means I'm back below my start weight for December. It's progress, and progress is good. Pretty confident that I'll hit my goal of 350 by the end of February, if not before. I have a freezer full of meat and a few veggies, though I might run out of bacon. We'll see how it goes.

Business at the tax mines is pretty slow. We're expecting things to pick up Saturday, which will be the first day we can e-file, and I'll be spending the day in the office playing loan officer, maybe even doing some taxes, or more likely manning the front desk. Things will start picking up toward the end of the month as more people get their W-2s and come in looking for their refunds. Be interesting to see how many of them don't qualify for the new Emerald Loan which replaces last year's Refund Anticipation Loans, and how many of those slope off to Jackson-Hewitt. Me, I'm not too concerned. I have about half a dozen returns I'll be doing for friends and family, and I'll probably pick up enough simple/easy returns from the senior tax pros to keep busy.

I spent most of the day inside dealing with a cold, which has returned to plague me after one day wherein it appeared to be done with me and then crept back to bedevil me in the evening. That was the day of the wake, of course; the wake went very well with a large turnout, many stories about the dearly departed therevdrnye, and a quite remarkable picture of him in a suit, which looked most unnatural since a) he was wearing a suit and b) his hair and beard were relatively short and well-trimmed. Anyway, it was a good wake. There are extremely tentative plans to do another at Balticon for the benefit of people who couldn't make it to Friday's wake, which after all was called on short notice and during the Hanuramakwanzmas season to boot. We'll see what happens.

Aside from fighting a cold, I went out to pay rent, rebuild the essential pork rind stockpile, and get a little exposure to the Great Fusion Bomb In The Sky, which exposure is alleged to be good for one's health. Sauce for the goose, and all that.

Speaking of health, I started December at 357.6 pounds, down about a pound and a half from November's start. Only eight pounds from my goal of 350, and most of three months to do it. I reckon I can whup it. :)

The afternoon was partially taken up with making Heroin Thighs, since I messed up and got thighs instead of breasts when I went out looking for wings a while back. Don't ask. Anyway, I messed around with the recipe a little bit, adding eggs to the butter because I didn't think 1/2 cup melted butter was going to be enough for four pounds of thighs. Also added garlic because the coating was vaguely Italian (Parmesan cheese, parsley, oregano) and substituted chili powder for the salt and pepper. It turned out okay, I guess; not the awesome can't stop eating this results others claimed, but it sure beat plain baked chicken. Also cooked a couple pounds of cauliflower, added butter and garlic, and mashed the crap out of it. Also yummy.

So of course after I finish this, P summons me forth to wings. I only had one basket since I was pretty full from dinner, and wanted the wings mainly for the therapeutic value of spicy Caribbean sauce. Wings delivered.

This post at Power Line reminded me of this song: Fallin' In Love by the Souther-Hillman-Furay band, which got a few minutes of airplay back in '74. It's held up pretty well, and I was glad to find it again; also glad to be warned that Chris Hillman had gone back to his bluegrass roots. I like me some country; bluegrass, not so much.
(Cf. my quip to stuckintraffik that bluegrass was what NPR listeners called country music so they wouldn't be embarrassed by association with rednecks.)
Anyway, it's a nice song which captured a mood for me back then, and you might like it too, for the same reasons.

Now I'm going to take a couple Nyquil and rack out. I got a long day of driving, Ukrainian prayer, and law readin' ahead of me tomorrow and I really ought to get a decent night's sleep.

Justin Stoneman: America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation:

What strange event happened in 1977? Elvis died; perhaps the aliens who took him started to replace his fellow Americans with clones of fat, singing, hamburger-addicts? The truth is no less remarkable.

I graduated from high school and began my career of evil. :rimshot:

Seriously? I think this guy is one of those corporate-conspiracy tinfoil hat types, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about the way Anglosphere diets have changed, and not for the better. As previously discussed in this post, a lot of dietitians and public health types think they know what's going on in the body based on various studies, but as Taubes points out in his books, the science underlying those studies is shit, and we'd be getting equally valid guidance if we went downtown and spent an hour with one of the homeless crazy people. So do yourself a favor: start eating more meat and fat (and more fatty meat), and less bread & taters. You'd be surprised how much better you're going to feel a month or two down the road.

(h/t digex )

Very seldom do I come across a book that so enrages me that I have to put it down and go do something else for a while because I'm SO FILLED WITH RAGE that reading further at that time would be a Very Bad Idea. Usually when I come across a book like that, the rage comes from reading something so mind-bendingly stupid that it's hard to believe that any sensible person could believe crap like the book is trying to sell. On the other hand, there's Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories.
( Cut for spoilers )

Finally finished the second unit in ACC212; going to try and get the third unit done later this week and (if at all possible) the last unit before classes start next week. I wanted to kick myself after finishing the unit; it's mostly about financial reports and various ratios used to estimate the health of a company, none of which are unfamiliar to me, and I really shouldn't have put it off so long.

Blood sugar and weight seem to be dropping off again, most likely because for the last few days I've been keeping the calories under 3000 and the (net) carbs under 50. I'm also trying the Greek yogurt again, this time not from Yoplait but from FAGE and Chobani. FAGE has a 2% lowfat yogurt with a lot more protein and way fewer carbs than the Yoplait version (WTF is the high fructose corn syrup in there for?) while the Chobani is nonfat but also has the higher protein. Looking forward to ordering some liquid sucralose (Splenda) so I can do some interesting high-fat/low-carb things with cream cheese, heavy cream, and maybe peanut butter, if I can find any peanut butter around here that isn't loaded with sugar and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

I rewarded myself for finishing the second accounting unit by installing and playing some Bioshock. Couldn't play much of it; I don't do well with first-person shooters on the PC, and this game is no exception. The motion sickness gets aggravated by the fantastic art; the map is so detailed, it makes me wish there was a mode where you could just walk around Rapture as a tourist.

Last and almost certainly least, I've risen (if that's the word) to head of the nascent EW special interest group in Goonfleet. We haven't really had the opportunity to do much besides tag along on strategic ops, practice doing separate warpins, and make nuisances of ourselves by jamming friendlies, but it's good training. Something interesting may yet come of this.

I'm kind of in a holding pattern with the weight and the blood sugar, if three days at the same weight and (more or less) the same BG counts for anything. Right now I'm at 375.6 pounds, and the morning BG has been oscillating between 95 and 105 for the most part, mostly in the 90s. Which is okay, I guess; while I'd like to see the BG drop a little further so I can cut down the insulin some more, I can be patient. The same is true of the weight. If I keep my calorie and carb intake down, the weight will come off.

Made two discoveries this weekend: one, I do in fact have the discipline to eat dinner in a Chinese buffet and avoid all the dietary landmines therein; two, Waffle House hash browns (scattered, smothered & chunked) are not much worse for me than an English muffin, which they don't serve there anyway. Waffles, however, are definitely right out.
( Cut to protect the squeamish )

Well, despite appearances, this LJ isn't ALL about ill-tempered political commentary provoked by things seen on other peoples' blogs. Not even mostly!

Most of today is going to be spent gearing up for the second accounting test this evening, with a little bit of time taken for personal maintenance and apartment cleaning. I got a 91 on the first one, and while I don't expect to do nearly as well this time around, I'm pretty confident that I'll pass by a comfortable margin.

I've moved the bulk of my baseball commentary to over here at Beltway Baseball, which will be mostly about the Nationals and Twins but also include some entries about the local minor league teams. "Local" is kind of an expansive term, since I'm hoping to go on a road trip with P up to Washington PA to see the Frontier League's Wild Things, but this isn't Minnesota and the independent leagues are still mainly creatures of the Midwest. As for the Suburban League, my stab at founding a fantasy league on Fantrax, I'm afraid it's died of apathy. There haven't been any transactions there in the last month, and I've been derelict in tending the robots. My Dukes are in third, half a point out of second, for what that's worth.
Meanwhile, the Nationals pounded the Tribe for nine runs yesterday to give wunderkind Stephen Strasburg his second win in as many starts, but everybody else in the NL East won too, so we're still stuck in last place behind the Fish. Only six games out, though, and two under .500, which is a lot better than most folks thought we'd be doing.

I am continuing to stick to the low-carb diet. Can't quite pull the trigger to go whole hog and cut the last few dozen grams out of the diet...but still, I've excluded all the starches from my diet except for an English muffin with my morning eggs; the only dairy foods I have are yogurt (pinch-hitting for the eggs on occasion) and half & half for my coffee. Fruit likewise is pretty much gone. I ate half a mango the other morning for breakfast, but it's an open question whether I'll finish the rest of it before it goes bad. The results are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself: as of this morning, my weight is 380.8 pounds, and the morning blood sugar was 95, after dialing back the insulin from 16 to 14 units last night. P thinks I'm going to hit my interim target of 350 pounds well before the end of next February, and she may be right, but I am a pessimist and am allowing for epic (albeit temporary) fail at some point along the line. For those of you scoring at home, this is a loss of almost 60 pounds since May of 2008, with most of it having come off since February of this year. With no additional exercise. The easy weight loss won't last forever, but I'm enjoying it while it happens.

Got the results of the first AC211 ( Fundamentals of Accounting) test back tonight; scored a 91. This made me feel better about showing up an hour early for class and then realizing I'd grabbed the study guide instead of the actual text. Welp. I'd already read chapters 6 & 7, done the assigned homework (and brought it along), so I was in pretty good shape. Wish I'd felt better, though; despite a full night of sleep, I was very tired during the drive out to Annandale and nodded off for a little bit once I got into a parking space. Didn't really wake up until after I'd put down a couple bottles of Lipton's Diet Green Tea (which is like drinking 3.2 horse piss after the glorious experience that is Arizona Diet Green Tea) and even then I wasn't really feeling too alert.

Finally got my former sponsor's character back into GoonfleetWaffe yesterday in time to fit out a covops, go on an afternoon raid led by our Am0k brosefs which resulted in a nice bump to our collective K:D ratio even though everybody died. I would probably have been more useful in an interceptor, since I never got called on to do the sneak & peek thing that covops frigates do so well, but I'm getting my loss reimbursed anyway, so w/e. Had fun, would x up again.

Back in real life, I got my weight down to 382.6 over the weekend, but portion control failures have wanged that good and hard. As of this morning, I'm back up to 385.8 (ugh) but my BG numbers have been pretty good all through this. I just need to stop pigging out on nuts, which for me are kind of like potato chips - I can't eat just one ounce and let it go. Going to have to learn how, though.

On the other hand, my friends who hosted me for a weekend in Ocean City last summer found the sunglasses I lost, so I'll be seeing them (and the sunglasses) tomorrow night at Mango Mike's, a Caribbean joint across Duke Street from Foxchase that I've managed never to visit in the 2.5 years I've been living here.

The Public Humiliation Diet: A How-To:

So that's the Public Humiliation Diet. If you're trying to lose weight, I applaud you and wish you nothing but the best of luck. And if you're the kind of person who can stay skinny no matter how much you eat or what you eat, I hope you f*****g die in a fire.

Funny, although NSFW due to R-rated language and lots of it.

(Aaron Gleeman, who is also fighting the Battle of the Bulge)