…we are coming to account. And re-starting the diet.
Walmart had a starter Nutrisystem kit, which seems as good as any. We bought two of those (40.00 each) and then when you open them you find you need, yes, 45.00 worth of perishable food to go with. They cover about a week.
So I’ve just been down to Safeway to get a lot of broccoli and salad and cucumbers, carrots and apples and berries and such.
At least we’ll be eating healthy for a while. And it’ll get portion sizes under control.
I’m also resolving to drink the requisite amount of water. I’m not good about that. I grew up with such terrible water my throat locks up when I try to drink a glass of water straight. So I can go days without drinking anything but coffee. This is not a Good Thing. So having reached that age when things hurt and weight piles up too easily, I figure it’s time to reform. Water it is. Lotsa water. I have discovered I can drink it if I keep a tankard of it handy and shoot about three tablespoons of lime juice into it. Which is not a bad thing. That makes it go down without choking.
Seriously, the water that came out of gran’s house faucets was pink to red…and the pump in the yard was better, but always tasted of iron. Same with the water at our house during my growing up. I wasn’t allowed soft drinks at home, generally, just as a fairly rare treat. So I took to drinking tea and iced tea. A lot of iced tea. And when I was about 16, we got snowbound at girl’s camp for about a week, in a large drafty high-ceilinged cabin with no heat but a fireplace that only heated within 10 feet of it; and a Franklin stove with which we nearly had a disaster. I was cold most of the time, being one of the larger kids who could haul a meaningful log from the woodpile out in back (about 20 feet from the back door). But there was coffee. The leaders had a massive pot of coffee and no shortage of that… [we had had to hike 2 miles to the neighboring tiny town (anywhere but Oklahoma you’d call it a village) to get groceries.] Lotsa coffee. I took to it bigtime.
The grocery getting was a hoot. In a moment of madness, and a blank check from our fearless leader, we got eggs for our breakfasts, a whole sack of eggs, and the whole county was a sheet of ice. We took turns carrying the eggs, because if you fell while carrying the eggs you had to hold them up safe—we only broke a couple, all the trip back.
Anyhow—ice storms and diets make you appreciative of what you eat. It’s going to be an interesting number of days.
Ah yes…all those chickens (and steaks and double baked potatoes and bacon and …well you get the idea) coming home to roost. Have not exactly racheted back on the food quality, but the quantity is less. It gets harder with age.
As for the water..filtered water is quite tasty. They also make flavors that you can add, if that’s allowed by your diet. Sometimes it helps.
Good luck with the diet!
While I don’t mind city water, and grew up on it, I don’t use it for coffee or tea (iced or hot). So, I trudge over to the grocery and get 5 gallons of filtered water for 39 cents a gallon at Kroger, and 37 cents a gallon at Walmart. I have two different containers, both 5 gallon water containers, but one is a cube from Culligan (Walmart), and the other is a plastic carboy (Kroger). I’m considering getting a water cooler rather than try to pour from the 5 gallon container to a small pitcher and then to wherever I want to use the water.
I think my diet from 2 years ago is what I should follow again…not what I eat, just how much I eat. When they weighed me on Thursday for my cardiologist follow-up, I was over 200 pounds again. That’s 19 pounds more than what I weighed 2 years ago. Of course, I was also fighting a very depressing time, having lost my oldest cat to cancer, being very short of funds, and actually being late on a mortgage payment that cost me $29.00 in late fees, during a month when I could least afford it. BUT, the good news was that I was actually out of debt on my credit card – $0 balance! Well, not any longer, with dental work, etc., my balance went up above $1,800 again. Payments per month of $450.00 just don’t seem to do that much damage to the balance.
I got a Brita pitcher years ago, for making hot tea – the filter softens the water enough that I don’t get the mineral deposits that I otherwise would from our hard, hard water.
Sometimes I miss the well water at my parents’ house in Texas. (It was hard water, also, but it wasn’t chlorinated, only filtered to get out the sand.) City water just doesn’t have the right flavor.
I use Brita, too. Bottled water is probably a good test to see if you’d like the taste of filtered water. Brita filters are cheap at Costco, but the one pitcher they offer is sometimes not all one would wish.
I’m still using the rectangular one I got at first. Doesn’t drip, and the lid is better at staying on. The newer pitcher isn’t as good.
When full, however, they fail to successfully bounce. 🙁
One thing tea connoisseurs pay great attention to is the temperature of the water. They never let it boil, driving off dissolved air. In some teas, higher temperatures also extract undesireable, bitter flavors. (We’re lucky. We have dedicated watersheds so effectively drink rainwater coming off the Pacific.)
I’m curious…how come the instructions say to pour boiling water over the tea then? Even my Darjeeling tea has those instructions. I’ll have to do some research on how the Japanese make their tea in the ceremony….
They have different temperatures for different teas.
https://www.twoleavestea.com/water-temperature/
I grew up with a twofold system: we had rainwater for washing (it filtered into a series of giant underground cisterns), and spring water for drinking. Until we eventually got city water in the 80s, we carried 5 gallon carboys of water back from wherever we were getting water at the time. We used to put 8 of the giant glass bottles in wooden crates in the back of the van and schlep them to a county park with a faucet/drinking fountain near the parking lot (this was back when local parks could still use natural springs for public water). Dad would run a hose from the tap through the van window, and we would fill the bottles from the hose, trying not to water the van carpet when we switched targets. Later, we filled the bottles by bucket brigade from the spring that supplied our summer cottage; trudging up and down the path with 2 gallon buckets in each hand in the winter, and trying not to spill anything was no picnic. We traded taste for convenience after the county finally got around to running a line out to our house, but there is a great deal to be said for not worrying about running out of water in winter.
I was reading my grandmother’s memoirs (southeastern Kansas in the late 19th century) and found that she drank tea because coffee in her childhood was both bitter and used for the delivery of medicines.
I keep seeing reports coffee is healthful. What was the latest? MS?
But then caffeine is an addictive alkaloid.
I’ve never been able to stand the taste of anything coffee. Possibly cappucino ice cream before I became quite lactose intolerant.
And speaking of healthful, for me it’s always been tea. I like tea (loose leaf, thank you, not your “sweepings”), green very much. Tea-totaler, when it comes to hot drinks–well maybe cocoa once in a while. (Still remember once over a half-century ago ordering green tea ice cream at a ice cream counter with it on the menu, and the lady asking, “Are you sure?” I was.) Lung Ching, aka Dragonwell, is very good when one can get it. Gunpowder is acceptable. I’ve got a whole cupboard shelf of tea. Green, black, oolong, none of the flavored junk. Once with “bits and bobs” left in old tins, I just blended it. That was successful–now I do it on purpose with fresh. Instead of just one “note”, it makes a flavor “chord”.
Working at the computer a lot, I won’t have anything but a tankard shaped mug. Had one for years, but lost it. A few years ago I had a potter throw me one, a bit larger than what he had at the show–big enough I can get my hand in for cleaning. Well, it’s 20oz! (Sitting on the kitchen counter steeping right now.)
I did the decorating–mostly cobalt and black dusk scene of a small hut, yellow window and door, black conifers, black mountains in the background, and on the other side an oxherd carrying a lantern on a pole, walking behind a couple or three oxen. I wrote a haiku for opposite the handle, playing off Shakespeare to contrast with the image referencing the “oxherding pictures”.
LIFE
On a murky path
an oxherd finds his way home:
light, food, laughter, sleep.
Deep. Rather proud of that–my Aspie “right brain” did it all too easily.
[slurp!]
A bit of Raspberry vinegar in soda or seltzer is also good.
A few drops of Angostura bitters?
Never tried those.
Ah, concerning the lime juice . . you might want to double check with your dentist. I used to use lime juice and lime slices in my water until my dentist read me the riot act. Seems citric acid was eroding my tooth enamel!
glad to know that. I’ll figure something for variation.
The pot, having just had a bowl of pasta salad with chicken, white onions, black olives, carrots, peas, and a big blop of Hellmann’s mayo, will refrain from calling the kettle black.
If you can go the artificial sweetener, those drink mixes like come in the little packets that you add to a bottle of water might offer some variety. You could sprinkle half a packet in your tankard. I’m kinda partial to Snapple’s peach tea one, and Arizona’s pomegranate green tea.
I don’t know who (or why) people convinced everybody that tea is not good for you. The tannins are good for your teeth and digestion, it has antioxidants. Caffeine has gotten a bad rap too. Tea does not have as much caffeine as coffee. Caffeine is a mild analgesic. Just plain tea is not bad for you. Sweet tea, on the other hand . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/upshot/what-the-evidence-tells-us-about-tea.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/upshot/more-consensus-on-coffees-benefits-than-you-might-think.html
I do use the pink stuff (orderline diabetic), but as to the tea itself, what’s wrong with just the leaves of Camellia sinensis? Been in common use for centuries, can’t have many ill effects.
(No, the one in your garden is Camellia japonica.)
My latest evil drinking habit (Ok, not so evil really) is iced green tea with stevia for sweetener. I like Starbuck’s green tea frapawhazit, quite well actually, and found little pre-measured doses of green tea that were just matcha powder to go in your water bottle available at the local Freddies. Makes plain water something very nice to drink without being sugar laden. But at $4 for a box of 10 and only seasonally available, they are quite spendy, as my 32 ounce chug-jug takes 2 per filling.
So, off to the great evil A I went and found an 8 ounce package of Matcha powder (just the ‘culinary grade’, not the mega spendy ‘ceremony grade’) for about $10. One teaspoon (I use a nice fat rounded 1/2 teaspoon measure) makes my jug as green as I could want it, and I get somewhere around 45 servings per package. A few assorted other thingamabobs (such as cat toys or cosiquin for arthritic Bitchykitty) brings it up to ‘free shipping’ level.
If matcha is spendy, look for sencha, which is first-flush leaves (not powder), or bancha, which is second growth leaves. Matcha > sencha > bancha. But for everyday drinking, I find bancha perfectly fine.
Simple truth is I’m lazy, with the matcha powder I can just dump it into cold water and run, no worries about steeping or trying to fish out a teabag or stray leaves later! 🙂
The culinary-grade matcha is perfectly acceptable at $.22 to fill a 32 ounce jug, really about the same price as enough decent grocery store orange pekoe tea bags. The ceremonial grade Matcha is more along the lines of $20 to $30 per ounce, which would be somewhere about $3.80 to $5.00 per jug!
Hmm I seem to have run afoul of the filter, so sorry if this repeats!
The simple truth is I’m lazy, and with the matcha powder I just measure it out and dump it into cold water in my 32 oz jug with a packet of stevia and run, no worries about steeping then chilling or fishing out tea leaves/bag later!
The culinary grade matcha makes a perfectly acceptable every day drink at about $.22 per jug, almost on par price wise with a decent grocery store brand tea. The ceremonial grade matcha on the other hand runs more to $20 or $30 per OUNCE, which makes a jug of tea at $3.80 to $5.
Lets see if it works this time….
Anyway, I’m basically lazy. The matcha powder is easy, I just measure, dump, and run, no worries about steeping or pulling out tea bags or leaves later.
The culinary grade of matcha powder makes a quite sufficient jug of tea for about $.22, but the ceremonial grade runs somewhere around $20 to $30 an ounce, which means a jug of green tea is about $4 or $5!
green tea has a nice flavor. Definitely. I’m supposed to drink pure water because of the diuretic properties of coffee. I wonder how green tea scores in that regard. But worth a try.
Tea is usually considered to also have diuretic properties, but not so much that my doctor didn’t want to put me on a thiazide.
From Wikipedia: Caffeine increases urine output acutely, but not chronically.[52] This increase is due to both a diuresis (increase in water excretion) and a natriuresis (increase in saline excretion); it is mediated via proximal tubular adenosine receptor blockade.[53] The acute increase in urinary output may increase the risk of dehydration; however, chronic users of caffeine develop a tolerance to this effect, and experience no increase in urinary output.[54][55]
Fortunately I’m not fond of sugar under most circumstances and I don’t like any chocolate but bitter chocolate, habits I got as a child. I didn’t have sweet things available—my family was pretty low-budget during my early years—not even Kool-Aid. I appreciated marmelade, but not strawberry jam. I was sensitive to both chocolate and eggs as a child, which I grew out of. But never having gotten the sugar craving, I preferred my tea unsweetened unless hot, with milk; and I preferred no sugar in my cereal. We did have pancakes on Sundays, and predictibly, I would take to my bed with a stomach ache from the syrup. Today’s Nutrisystem offering is chocolate covered pretzels, and I think I had rather go without an evening treat. Those will end in the trash. I dislike both milk chocolate and pretzels—rarely am I desperate enough for either; but together? I’d rather pickled fish.
For several years I was making “summer drinks” from the fancy stuff in the itsy-bitsy little plastic tubs, then I wised up and started making Kool-Aid, with the sweetner I already had! DOH.
are the chocolate covered pretzels individually wrapped? Maybe give them to the church across the street and they can distribute them to kids? I know, there aren’t that many pretzels and a whole bunch of kids….
But I like pickled fish 😛 😀
THere are 3 pretzels.
The filter seems to be in hyperdrive again, I’ve got a couple posts swirling around in there that should be perfectly innocuous….
There’s nothing in the spam filter—but if you position something as a ‘reply’ it can be hard to locate it once the page scrolls. You do have comments somewhere up there.
Thanks, I guess I’ll just try again! 🙂
Water. Even as a little kid, I have never drunk a lot of water, plain by itself. I don’t have any real reason for this, but plain water seems strange to me, the taste, and not so appealing. That doesn’t make much logical, rational sense, does it? Water in the tub, growing up, if I tasted that (you know, not soapy) seemed OK. I just never have drunk water. I know that’s unusual.
My parents asked my pediatrician when I was a kid. (They were hoping for reasons to get me to drink water.) The doctor said that as long as I was getting enough liquids in general, that was OK, that juices, teas, even sodas, and so on, are mostly water with amounts of flavorings and added contents. So as long as I got enough liquids, it wasn’t too big a deal. However, of course, he agreed I needed to drink more plain water.
I tend to drink tea and sodas and juices, and occasionally coffee. I’m not big on coffee, and I tend to drink it in winter or if there’s no other option. I love the smell, though. I prefer tea.
I always drank a lot of milk, growing up, until the process of moving from my parents’ home, after they were gone, to here, this house, my current home. For a while, all I had in the new house was a small dorm fridge (half-size), and it would not keep milk long enough before it would sour. Also during this, the full-size refrigerator went out, still at the old house. So I went for a period of weeks with too iffy or bad milk, really a turn-off to find that, and I got out of drinking it much. By the time I had a new full-size refrigerator, I somehow had an aversion to drinking milk much.
I am just now finally starting to get over that, years later. But I’ll be very glad to drink milk again as a staple diet item, as it always seemed neutral and healthy, along with juices.
As an adult, in college and then in my work life, I got way too used to relying on tea, sodas, and coffee. I went overboard for a while on sodas. I’m finally getting better about that, but it’s still more than it used to be. At least it’s better, and it’s likely to remain at this level or slighlty less.
The home I grew up in, not the house we later had that I moved from, had well water, our own well, on the edge of the city limits and the county. Our water supply was always good there and felt right…even though I didn’t drink water much plain, it was still good.
Water at the former house was filtered and was good, and was also in between the city and county, but public water supply.
Water here at my current home is city water. It’s so-so. I boil it (of course) for tea and cooking, but it’s not as good. Water at my grandmother’s house, only about 20 minutes away, was always fine, and was also city water.
Water at colllege was…awful. High mineral content and it always tasted and smelled funny. When I’d boil water in the little teapot I had, I’d get lots of minerals that condensed out and would crystallize against the sides of the teapot, requiring constant cleaning, and if you didn’t get it absolutely clean, you’d taste it or get mineral residue as grit. … Not good. (I occasionally had trouble with Montezuma’s Revenge with the food on campus, for the same reason, I think.)
So I can easily relate to why you’re not a big water driker, CJ. 🙂
Heh, that iron taste and the pinkish or reddish or rusty quality to the water in Oklahoma and north Texas, I’m sure you know from geology, is because of the high iron oxide content in the soil there. All that red dirt and red clay is red, red ochre, from the iron oxide in it. But hey, you’d get your RDA supply of iron in your diet!
You might even develop a magnetic personality!
Yeah, I know, bad pun. 😀
You didn’t live in Flint, MI for any length of time, did you? 😛 I went to school there for a while, and the water was definitely not as good as what I had grown up with, full of minerals and not very good tasting. Now we have the kafuffle with water-based lead delivery.
Nope, I’ve never been to Flint, or Michigan. 🙂
The problem with Flint, MI, is an article of faith “in some circles”, that everything runs better if it’s managed like a profit-motive business, and nobody responds, “Prove it.”
I think if the STATE of Michigan won’t step in massively and fix this, the feds should, if they have to mobilize the National Guard to truck in water, and run it until it’s fixed. It’s a national scandal that citizens can’t get safe water. Fix it now or expect to pay for the medical consequences for decades more than we already will.
Oh, boy! I have hit upon a unique character for a science fiction story.
I think I have another character or two to get things going. Now if I can just come up with a *complete* plot that’s original enough.
I’d tried a similar character in a partial story draft about two years ago, but set it aside. Reading back over that, it looks better than I thought, but again, it needs a full plot past the chapter I had going.
What I have in mind now is a somewhat different character, and I think this needs a different story. I’m not yet sure if it’ll merge with the earlier draft, or if that should still be its own story.
I will be attempting to get down as much as I can on it today and over the next few days. It would be a breakthrough for me if I get a full plot in mind, or get it past a few chapters, past, say, 5000 words of a first rough draft.
I think I’ve got something with that character and possibly a second. I’ve always before felt that the plots or drafts I’ve tried either bogged down and reached an impasse, or were not original and exciting enough. But in reading over some story ideas / drafts recently, I’m encouraged that I think I have been doing better than I thought at several of these. They’re just not complete short stories or novels, with a full, original, exciting enough plot that carries that through all the way.
I have always liked pretending and thinking up stories, but… Y’know, this writing fiction stuff isn’t as easy as it looks! ;D
Even though most of what I have is in chunks or small bits, lots of them that are a few pages to a few chapters, and they haven’t gone outside my writing ideas / story drafts folders — Still, I’ve enjoyed doing that, and there’s been world-building going on for one or two story-universes along the way. (My inner editor shudders at the too-long introductory parenthetical clause for this paragraph, by the way.)
I’m still working on font production, as that’s still my best, most immediate chance to improve my situation.
I thought I’d share my enthusiasm about the story character, though. 🙂
As a reader and when I’ve been an editor, I know when I read a story and it feels like the story is pulling together, a cohesive whole, or when I feel there’s a bump where the plot / chars don’t hang together as well, where it drops before it picks up again. I know what excites me and holds my attention for a story, in plot and characters. (I tend to feel stories are character-driven more thna plot-driven, but of course, there are arguments for both.) I know what I like in my favorite authors. I also know when I’ve seen stories that did not seem to work, to me, even though they should have. Why they don’t (to me) is a good question.
But as a still-wannabe, still-newbie fiction writer, I look at what I’ve produced, and I see long sections where I think I’m hitting on all cylinders (or most of them) but then I still see places where I didn’t, and still have trouble figuring out why or how to fix it. I still have too much tendency to think some section is “perfect.” (I may be getting over that nonsense.) Mostly, I just wish I could get past my plateaux and get a complete plot, start to finish, and work out the kinks from there.
This had made me really admire my favorite authors more, because they always produce a bang-up tale with good characters and good plots that just really shines. And as someone still learning, who still feels like a newbie, I really am still learning how much goes into crafting a great story, whether it’s a short story or a novel or an epic novel or series. I had plenty of literary criticism in English and in French classes. But…and this might be heretical…it so often felt like we were picking apart the tiniest shreds of meaning and so often ignoring what was actually there, by focusing down on some odd notion or some tiny details, when it felt to me like that wasn’t what the author intended. I’ve seen language theories like that, that seem to miss the evidence that’s right there in the historical text, too. So I have not always been sure that either the literary analysis / criticism I was taught, or my own (contrarian?) take on it, was helping my own attempts to grow and write.
I think I might be seeing another step up from the current plateau, but it hasn’t happened quite yet. Still, I like seeing that what I’ve been doing, after setting it aside for awhile, feels like it holds up better when I reread it fresh. Er, freshly, remarks that internal editor. 🙂
Just thought I’d share.
I also love that some of my favorite writers not only love sharing about their art and craft on their blogs, but share what makes them regular people too. What’s also curious is how very, very different each author is as a person, which informs what they write, but how great the quality is, and what neat people they are. So…thank you, CJ, Jane, Lynn, and a number of other fantastic writers, for doing what you do. It’s humbling, when I consdier what I’ve been doing to approach even a fraction of that so far. I have a long way to go. It is, however, a lot of fun trying. 🙂 So I have some sort of writer’s bug, I just haven’t quite got the hang of it all the way yet.
I’ll be very surprised if I get a short story sized piece completed, and thrilled if I could get a novel done. A series is only a long-held dream so far. 🙂
FWIW, my solution to the water question is to turn it into fizzy water. I start with water from the Reverse Osmosis filter we installed, but that’s fairly (OK, totally) flat. So, I add the salts to it that mimic the salts in San Pellegrino, my preferred carbonated water, and then use a Sodastream to carbonate it. Now I can have a glass/mug of my faux San Pellegrino always available as I work through the day and can take little sips regularly. The only catch is the cost of refills on the Sodastream, but I found the solution to that with an adapter that lets me get refills from anywhere. (Think paintball cylinders.)
The long missing text from Paul:
“It really shows like with everything else (weight loss anyone?), we’ve
been grasping for the “magic pill”, one simple thing we can do that will
fix the problem. “For every complex problem there is an answer that
is clear, simple, and wrong.” (HL Mencken)
I worked the Home & Garden show for the local ARS rhododendron chapter
Friday. Awareness of lace bug, Stephanitis pyrioides (another one of
those invasive species), is growing. We are recommending use of
imidicloprid, after our once-blooming rhodies are finished
blooming. Most people got it, but it took us three tries to get through
to one woman who wanted to treat immediately.
—
Paul”
That was commentary on modern agriculture is hazardous to bees’ health; banning neonics ain’t gonna fix it. But did it pop out of the filter, or did you copy and paste from private email, as the carriage returns imply? I sent that so you could see if there was something in it that didn’t look right to you. I think WP’s probably buggy.
I cut and pasted. Never have found it in the filter. But then I just had e-mail 2 weeks old turn up, so I don’t know what the server may be doing.