Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area

Morning non-sequitur

2008-10-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

This morning at the gym, I saw at the bike racks a stationary exercise bike that was parked there on a hand truck. I found this very amusing.

Godcast

2008-10-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

I thought of a clever word on the way to work this moment: Godcast, a sermon or other spiritual or inspirational spoken word recording in MP3 format. Unfortunately, 43,300 people thought of it before me.

Fabulous in the Seattle Metro Area

2008-10-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

I made an exciting new blog template mockup upon the request of a friend, so I thought I might as well share. Click to enlarge.

(No, I'm not changing my actual blog template to that.)

Locker room advice, sir

2008-10-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

I call people "sir" a lot. Today I began wondering if I did this subconsciously because of my frequent failure to remember the names of people I'm talking to. Calling them "sir" effortlessly sidesteps this problem. I started wondering this while sitting in the hot tub, talking with the locker room attendant.

Ian: How was your workout today, Travis?
Me: Just great. (exaggerated sigh of relief)
Ian: Excellent, that is good to hear. I'll see you around, Travis. Have a wonderful day.
Me: Have a good one, sir.
Ian: Do you remember my name? I don't mind if you call me "sir," but do you remember my name?
Me: Ian! I'm always impressed that you know everyone's names.
Ian: Don't be impressed. Just do it. It's the most important thing you can do at a job. Show people that you respect them, that you care for them, and that you like being around them. That's more important than anything else, right?

Seems like pretty good advice to me.

Gender pronouns

2008-10-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days, I've gotten a few people calling me on the fact that my blog posts don't tend to use gender pronouns. I really didn't even notice—it's just the way I find myself writing. It can be challenging for me, a shy person, to publicize any of the important details of my life on the internet, especially under my real name. So, I guess I tend to use language that obscures details without even having to try. I think that in the back of my mind, it makes me feel a little safer. But, it's admittedly awkward, and seems vaguely deceptive, and I really am trying to open up from time to time (what else would the point of all this be?), so I'll try to be on watch for future incidents. Just so all of my cards are on the table, I'll clarify my previous relationship-related posts from saying that I'm dating a really great someone to saying that I'm dating a really great guy. I've got a boyfriend, for those of you who I don't interact with daily and aren't Facebook friends with me and were thus probably unaware. (I mostly gave up on obscuring that particular detail quite a while ago, but I don't tend to just volunteer random personal facts about myself, so don't feel too out of the loop if you didn't know.)

I will try to be more specific in the future. Until I forget.

Currently listening (really): Katy Perry—I Kissed a Girl

Nutrients

2008-10-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

The multivitamins I'm taking look like those feed pellets you buy at the zoo to feed to goats, and smell like petting zoo pellets too. I'm not sure which of those two things is worse.

But, they're the only multivitamins I've ever taken that haven't made me really sick to my stomach, so that's nice. Based on what I've heard from my doctor and dietitian, it's possible that the prior kinds have all contained iron (a stomach irritant), and these don't. (Men don't need to take iron daily because our vaginas do not bleed monthly.)

Weekend two

2008-10-04T23:14:00.000-07:00

As far as the weight loss is going, this has been a slow week. Getting to eat vegetables has been fantastic for preventing the hunger I was experiencing last week, and I've been exploring other options to replace the horrid protein shakes—soy nuts, premixed shakes (unfortunately with whey), protein bars, and the like. This has made things a bit easier. Unfortunately, this week I'm only down a pound so far, despite my calorie intake being relatively constant and the workouts being more intense. It's unrealistic to expect me to lose another 8 after switching from liquid meals to solid food, but the downside of having such a big drop last week is that it doesn't give me much wiggle room this week for making visible progress. I'm guessing that by Monday's dietitian appointment I'll be down a total of 2. 3 would be lucky.

On the upside, I've begun to feel a little bit of change in my health level and weight. I do feel a little generically "healthier," even though I'm still tired and sore and occasionally hungry. I have to wear a belt pretty much all the time now; I could get by without one on certain pairs of pants before, but now everything's noticeably looser. That's encouraging, even if the numbers don't agree.

Windy city

2008-10-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

Today was a very windy day. The house was creaking, trees were bent out of shape, and this afternoon as I crossed the 520 bridge across Lake Washington, the bridge sections were rocking back and forth and there were waves crashing into the cars in the oncoming eastbound lane. It was all I could do to keep the car headed in a roughly straight line with all of the wind and water. Waves! I'm not prepared for this stuff. We didn't have "water" back in Nebraska. Sure, sometimes the streets would be fully iced over and people would slide uncontrollably through red lights and bounce off of curbs, but at least the road wasn't moving under you.

Suze Spomer's finance tip # 228

2008-10-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Tip: To save money, don't show up at a pay parking lot that doesn't give change with only twenties and a couple ones. Especially not when you're already 15 minutes late and it's the only parking spot you could find.

That was an expensive parking spot. Stupid Seattle. :(

Currently listening: Enigma—Seven Lives (seizure warning; Good Lord...)

Blind

2008-10-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

I can't see very well today. I don't know what the deal is; my vision is just blurry and I've had trouble focusing my eyes. It is quite disconcerting, and makes it difficult to do any work. Yesterday, I was fine.

Currently listening: to people playing Rock Band while I'm attempting and failing to work

Downright acceptable

2008-10-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

That worked out better than I was expecting. I was getting a little bored with my usual dinners, so I decided to mix things up and combine a few sort-of-random diet-safe ingredients I had around. It ended up being pretty tasty, actually.

1.25 pounds ground turkey breast
1/2 jar organic no-sugar pasta sauce
1 onion (I'd probably make this 1/2 next time)
liberally apply garlic powder

I browned the turkey breast, then tossed the rest of the stuff in and let it simmer for a little bit.

Eight days

2008-10-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

I went eight days without Diet Coke (or any pop of any kind). This is the longest I've done so in literally decades—I must have been just starting elementary school the last time that happened. It may have even been longer ago. In the last decade, besides those eight days in a row, there probably weren't even eight more noncontiguous days where I didn't drink pop of any kind. It was a big thing for me.

On Tuesday I had one, and today I had another one. My dietitian seems to think it will be fine if I have an occasional Diet Coke, as long as I limit it to no more than one a day, and preferably have one with food and without caffeine. It's pretty inconvenient and unpleasant to have water with lunch, so that's probably when I'll have it. It's nice to have my addiction back, at least a little bit.

The kids never even call anymore

2008-09-30T14:34:00.000-07:00

A part of me worries whenever I can't connect to my home PC from my work PC. It bugs me all day, and I feel incomplete. I can't check my email! What if someone IMs me? What if I need to get at a document? What if I need to leave myself a note? What notes did I leave myself this morning that I can't see now?

That one other thing

2008-09-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Oh, and the dating thing is going swimmingly, it seems. We're a good pair—a little bit clueless, but that's fine. We saw Burn After Reading on Saturday, and we're meeting up again this weekend. I've been ridiculously happy for the past week, to be frank.

Week two

2008-09-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

I ended up losing 8 pounds last week, which is quite a bit by any measure. It's possible that I may get close to that again this week, but that's probably going to be my record. I think that this week is going to be a lot more tolerable than last week, regardless of how much weight I lose. Being highly allergic to whey, I've given up on the program's official whey protein shakes, and now I'm sticking with 100% soy protein powder. It's nastier than the old stuff and only comes in one flavor ("chalk"), but at least it doesn't make me ill. I've been discliplined and a lot better about getting adequate sleep for the past few days, so things should just move much more smoothly.

The big change, though, is vegetables. I can now eat most vegetables, and pretty much as much as I want to. This should make me a lot less hungry overall, and drastically decrease my chances of flipping out and going on a murder spree. Lunch today was the most exciting salad I'd ever had.

The workouts are fairly tough, but I'm ramping things up. I did 40 minutes of cardio yesterday, and my goal is to get that to 45 or 50. According to my push-up bra, I burned somewhere around 850 calories in this morning's workout.

Day six

2008-09-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

Well, the first week is close to over. I'm surviving. Annoyance is beginning to turn to acceptance, and at this point I'm used to the shakes, even if I certainly don't like them. At the same time, I'm really looking forward to vegetables at this point, which I think will reappear in my diet on Monday.

The workouts have upped in difficulty. Yesterday we put on a lot more weight than Wednesday—about 25% more on average. This put me right at my limits, and it was quite tough. On most of the machines I don't think I could have added one more plate and still finished. I also did some reverse push-ups (I don't know their actual name, but they were basically elevated push-ups facing upward instead of downward), and that was the only time I couldn't hit the goal the trainer had picked for me. After ten he could see that I definitely wasn't going to make it to twenty, so we stopped there.

The lack of energy also really got to me yesterday evening. I actually took a short nap, something I haven't done in like a year, and I went to bed early and got a pretty solid ten hours of sleep. I feel a lot better now, but I'm going to need to be better about getting adequate sleep. When I was consuming 3,000 calories (or whatever; that's a good average for someone like me), I could get by on less sleep and not be this exhausted, but at about 1,600 minus 700 in exercise, I'm going to need to be a lot more disciplined for the next few weeks if I'm going to survive this.

On the upside, it's been effective. I'm down 10 pounds since starting, and about 6 this week. Based on what the doctors have been saying, six pounds in a week is just about the absolute maximum that is healthy; ideally, I'll lose more than 1% of my weight per week, but no more than about 2%. I believe that if I go past the 2%, the fear was that I wouldn't be able to develop muscle at the same time.

Currently listening: Kerli—Hurt Me

Portent past

2008-09-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

It's good that I set two alarms to get up this morning, because I must have turned one of them off when I was awakened in the middle of the night by my smoke alarm low-battery warning, just like I cynically said would happen. I had the battery, and I was going to change it this very weekend... just not in the middle of the night. I stumbled around, and with a burst of I-really-wanna-get-back-to-sleep adrenaline, picked up my minifridge from my storage room, took it to my bedroom, climbed on top, got on my tippy-toes, and changed the battery in my alarm. For those who are wondering, it is difficult to get back to sleep after you just picked up and then climbed on top of a minifridge. Luckily, I was very tired, and tired won out.

Day three

2008-09-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

At the end of day three, I'm already getting really bored with the diet. It's mostly the same thing each and every meal; the only variance is that I get to have some meat at lunch and dinner in addition to my protein shake. I've been mixing that up, at least; I've had chicken, beef, and salmon so far. I started weightlifting with my trainer today, and we're going to ratchet up the difficulty on Friday to see what I can do.

My problem so far is that I'm fairly hungry all the time. Long-term that won't be as much of a problem as my calorie limits increase, but this first week is all about resetting my metabolism, and I'm supposed to have around 1,600 calories a day, which isn't much at all for a tall, fairly healthy adult male. Since I'm burning close to half that in my workouts, my energy levels are fairly low, but again, a lot of this all should change in the next week or two.

I cheated a little tonight, but not too badly. I had some beef that was marinated in a mystery sauce that was likely not diet-approved. But, I didn't eat the vegetables, noodles, or drink anything but water. So, I can celebrate the little victories while chastizing myself for the little failures. It was a calculated cheating, not a spur-of-the-moment lapse in judgement. I just got back from a first date (!), so I didn't want to be too obnoxious about the diet plan. "First date" as in first date ever, actually, in case you're keeping track. (I was never one to jump into things unprepared. I've just been planning all this time, you see...) I was pretty nervous going in, but it was fine once we got started. Okay, nervous may be a nice way to put it—I haven't been able to focus on a thing all week. I was late, too, which always leaves a nice impression: I sure thought that 70 minutes would be plenty of time to get from Redmond to Seattle around dinnertime. At least I was only 10 minutes late.

"This page intentionally left blank." I'm sure I'll have more details to talk about later. For the time being, though, I'm going to be gentlemanly and keep the specifics of my date from being archived on the internet forever, and stick to talking about my diet and exercise.

Day one

2008-09-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

Well, day one wasn't so bad. I won't be starting strength training until Wednesday; I just did 50 minutes of cardio today. 35 was on a treadmill, something I hadn't used in quite some time, and my muscles weren't really used to it. Using a machine for the first few times is always a lot tougher; I'm sure that will get easier.

The diet is pretty unpleasant so far, but the worst part will only last a week. Basically, for this week, I'm going to be living on almost entirely protein: meat and protein shakes. I can mix it up a bit with berries in the shakes, and that's about it. No vegetables or other fruits. I'll be sure to let you know if it's making me insane.

Anomalous

2008-09-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Last night was very anomalous. Instead of waking up with images of my dreams in my head and using those images to reconstruct the events of the dream, I awoke with only characters from the dreams in my mind. I woke up twice during the night, both times assuming it was time to wake up, and I started to think about those dreams and piece together what had happened. Unfortunately, if I don't write it all down somewhere, anything I think of right after waking up is lost a few minutes later, and that is what has happened to the details of those dreams. All I remember from my three dreams are three people, none of whom had ever appeared in a dream before: a person I met Friday, a person I met Sunday, and someone I only remember to be a celebrity. It is possible that, based on the movie I watched on Sunday, the celebrity was Jacky Chan or Jet Li, but I don't actually think it was either of them. And that's it.

It's not a good feeling, really. I have become used to being able to think about my dreams afterward, and I'd very much like to know what happened in those dreams. Even if it didn't make a good story to tell, at least I'd know. I am always annoyed when I don't remember details of my dreams. I feel like I'm missing something; maybe something that my subconscious mind was trying to tell me, or maybe just a reward for sleeping.

The Last Supper

2008-09-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

I have a confession. Part of my reasoning for choosing Claim Jumper (a restaurant with infamously oversized entrees... and patrons) tonight for my last meal before starting my exercise program was so I could say:

"Claim Jumper? The last time I went to Claim Jumper I had to start a six-month weight loss program the very next day!"

Christmas gambling

2008-09-21T03:35:00.001-07:00

Now taking bets on how many people ask me something about Bill Gates when I return to Nebraska this Christmas. Every year a few people ask me how Bill is or how I like working for Bill. I'm guessing that most of them are not at all aware that he left Microsoft three months ago. I'm imagining their reactions already.

Horrible idea

2008-09-21T03:22:00.000-07:00

Free podcast idea for the day: Christian Bale reads a different classic British poem entirely in "Batman chain-smoker voice" each week.

Final countdown

2008-09-21T03:08:00.001-07:00

It's now technically Sunday, and that means I have one day remaining: one day before fitness boot camp begins. One day left to eat actual food. One day left before I learn just how sore one can be.

Finally. Here goes nothing. (Oh man, why am I doing this again?)

On a nice note, I'm down 4 pounds from my stable starting weight, and I haven't even started yet. That's probably mostly due to ramping up my cardio over the past couple weeks. Well, that and random fluctuations. Probably mostly the latter.

Appropriate listening: Europe—The Final Countdown (I think this was the first time I'd actually heard the whole song; it's kind of awesome)

Love Is Dead

2008-09-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Hooverphonic—The President of the LSD Golf Club: 8/10
Trinity Hi-Fi—Fuego: 6/10
Rob Dougan—Furious Angels: 8/10
Kerli—Love Is Dead: 9/10

A while back I picked up the new album from one of my favorite bands, Hooverphonic: The President of the LSD Golf Club. For their last few albums, they've been trying some really interesting and different styles. This one's a weird experimental pop-rock CD. The previous one came in both a light version and a dark version and was more electronic trip-hop/pop. The one before that was orchestral with vocals. The one before that was pop and told a single story of the rise and fall of a fictional international music star. I never really know what to expect from them, and this CD doesn't disappoint. Unfortunately, it's not released in the United States and won't be; I had to import it, but I've had to do that with most of their albums. To get a feel for this disc, I recommend Expedition Impossible (video), Gentle Storm (video), and Strictly Out of Phase, which are all great, though the latter is admittedly not one of my favorites.

I also picked up a CD that's been on my list for a very long time (since Pandora first launched), Fuego by Trinity Hi-Fi. Unfortunately, it's a case of the single Lost You being considerably more polished than the rest of the CD, which is mediocre or a little better. It's sort of loungey trip-hop, but most of the tracks are pretty forgettable. I'd say that the best are Lost You, Inside, and Lazy Afternoon.

I also got Rob Dougan's Furious Angels. I definitely recommend this if you like the standard action movie soundtrack orchestra-and-beats formula—think The Matrix; a couple of these tracks have been used in the Matrix films. There's more variety to the disc than just adrenaline, though; there's a nice variety to round things out. The biggest problem with the album as far as I'm concerned is that the guy has an awful, grating voice that I can't stand. But, graciously, a 2-disc version of the album is available, and the CD 2 versions are all instrumental and better; I highly recommend looking for that version. Sticking to disc 2 drastically improved my opinions of the album. Good examples here are the title track Furious Angels, Will You Follow Me?, Nothing at All, and Speed Me Towards Death.

Finally, the best CD I've bought in quite a while was one of the more surprising, the debut Love Is Dead by a singer no one has heard of, Kerli. I bought this one after hearing the absolutely entrancing single Creepshow (partly in Estonian!) on the in-game radio in Burnout Paradise, of all places. I love just about every track on here, and this is a strong contender for the best album I've bought all year. It ranges from Evanescence Power Girl Rock to bumpin' dancefloor beats to pure pop. Besides Creepshow, the opener Love Is Dead, Hurt Me, and The Creationist (which unfortunately has a bassline that sounds like my phone vibrating) are all gold.

There's actually one more song on the Burnout Paradise radio that I really love that might persuade me to buy another CD: Cities in Dust. The original version by Siouxsie and the Banshees is a somber and weird song about people dying in the Pompeii explosion. This version by Junkie XL and Lauren Rocket is a crazy party song about... people dying in the Pompeii explosion. "Oh, oh, your city lies in dust, my friend" has been replaced by "Oh, all your cities lie in dust, yeah!" Too soon.

I've picked up some older CDs that I'll go through soon, like New Radicals—Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too, and Goo Goo Dolls—Dizzy Up the Girl. People and websites have been recommending Augustana's CD as well, and some new stuff by Enigma, Dido, Keane, and Kelli Ali is on its way soon. I'm looking forward to it.