weight loss

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #21

After a month-long hiatus of slackitude, I’m back with a vengeance. After gaining back most of my recent weight loss, I managed to lose two pounds this week, bringing me back to 210lbs and 34.5% bodyfat (or thereabouts).

The big deal this week was exercise. I returned to doing my PUSH workouts, and I added jogging into my repertoire. Granted, it was a walk-jog, but it did the job of getting my heart rate up and getting the blood flowing. Even better, Aaron and I went on a walk-jog together on Saturday! If we can make this a weekend habit, it’ll be much easier for us to keep it rolling, I think.

So, the week’s exercise was: Monday, PUSH. Tuesday, jogging. Wednesday, PUSH. Thursday and Friday, rest; and Saturday, jogging. I hadn’t intended to put those rest days in there, but my legs were killing me, and Aaron convinced me that I should let my legs heal instead of going for a jog on Thursday. 🙂 And, as usual, the slackitude rolled over into Friday, when I’d had every intention of doing my PUSH workout. Ah, well. I’ll shoot for more consistency next week.

Food was pretty much the same as usual this week, although I continued to get caught up in my work and ended up foregoing the morning snack, for the most part. Dinner was more protein than usual, though, as I’ve been cooking up chicken breasts for most of the week. I haven’t been tracking my actual calories or carbs or protein lately, which is something I should be doing again. I think I’ll charge up the Palm and start using my Diet Organizer program again.

So, overall, this week was the long-awaited introduction of cardio to my lifestyle. I know I didn’t do nearly as much as I should, but I at least learned that a little cardio won’t kill me. In fact, it feels pretty good.

news 6 Comments

Un-American

Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is dead.

I’m not sure how to react to my reaction. Yes, I understand that he killed innocent people. And I do realize that he was an important ringleader in terrorist activities in Iraq.

But I just can’t make myself happy about someone’s death, no matter how many people they themselves have killed.

I felt the same way when Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed by the military. I just can’t be jubilant about another human being’s death. Maybe this makes me un-American. Maybe this makes me a goddamn hippie, or a left-wing nutjob, or something worse. I just can’t make myself say about anyone, “I’m glad they’re dead.”

Of course, none of my friends or family were victims of Al-Zarqawi. Were I in that situation, I’ll grant that my reaction may have been different. I honestly can’t say for sure.

Even if I hadn’t had an initial reaction of not-happiness, I would have been made even more not-happy — no, make that “disgusted” — when the media began showing images of Al-Zarqawi’s bloated corpse. Honestly, that was unnecessary. The one main identification image was bad enough, with his eyes closed and his face all slack in death. But then I saw another, worse image, even more disturbing, showing his swollen lips and protruding tongue… that just took the cake for me.

There’s a line of decency to be observed here. I’ve seen too many REAL CORPSES on the news lately, without any advance warning of graphic content. I doubt that the media would be so casual about showing the corpses of American soldiers on national television.

I could go into a full-blown rant, but I think it’s probably best if I just end here and go to bed.

drumcorps 5 Comments

Making Things Difficult

So, I finally decided it’s time to get off my ass and work on the LSM page again. Figured I’d start with installing phpBB, the standard generic PHP-based forum. Simple to configure, free… can’t go wrong. Right?

Well, I came across a problem. LSM’s hosting only allows one SQL database. That spot is currently being used by my home-grown content management system, which is kind of important. So… now I get to figure out how to write a forum FROM SCRATCH. Or at least steal appropriate someone’s code.

I’d just gotten myself all excited over figuring out how I might make an alumni database work. Now this… this is a little more daunting. I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but I also don’t doubt that it’ll be buggy as hell. I just hate to disappoint. Shout-out to all web geeks: any help here? Where can I find my holy grail of forum code?

I guess the bright side is that my users a.) will be able to access the forum with their site login, and b.) will *have* to sign up if they want access to the member forums!

Update, 6/9/06: Thanks to Sheryl’s and Dan’s patient explanations, I now have a brand-spankin’ new forum installed on the LSM site! Now all I have to do is write a post about how to sign up, how to play nice, etc; add a forum link to the main site; and email the board of directors so they can be my guinea pigs to test the thing. 🙂

humor 2 Comments

Tonight’s Wrong Number

9pm: *ring*

me: “hello?”
man: “hi. i’d like to speak to an officer?”
me: … o_O
man: “is this the minneapolis police department?”
me: “no, it isn’t.”
man: “oh, i’m sorry!”
me: “that’s ok.”
man & me (unison): “bye.”

WTF?

Google says the Minneapolis Police Dept’s number is (763) 525-6215. That’s only vaguely close to our number — the prefix is similar, and the two’s in the same position. Weird.

recipes 4 Comments

Peanut Butter Chicken

This is a very interesting recipe. Especially with my substitutions.

The recipe called for:
* 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
* 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut into 1 inch cubes
* 1 medium onion, sliced
* 7 fresh mushrooms, sliced
* 1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes
* 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes with juice
* 3/4 cup chicken stock
* 3/4 cup smooth peanut butter
* salt and pepper to taste

I had no onion, so I just did without. I substituted canned mushrooms for fresh. I substituted chunky salsa (medium) for diced tomatoes. I substituted chunky PB for smooth.

I could tell that the salsa added some heat to the dish that was probably never intended, and the person who created this would probably smack me or something if they saw how I massacred their original recipe. Still, it was pretty good. I’ll have to get the real ingredients and try it again sometime to share with Aaron. (I don’t like to inflict my cooking attempts on him the first time I ever make a given dish.)

Does anybody know if peanut oil (particularly Chinese peanut oil) is expensive? I’d like to try cooking the chicken in peanut oil next time, to get the peanut flavor going on even more.

Yep… I think I like it.