1. Went to my first voice lesson in, oh, 11 years last night. Woooo! It's about time. Looking forward to specific coaching for a show I'm doing in March (an Irving Berlin songbook show), but also getting back to regular singing and having something to look forward to.

2. Got an awesome idea for a book. Or maybe a blog? Hmmm. Either way, it's intriguing. (Will it come to fruition? In the words of Citizen Kane, "NO MAN CAN SAY.")

3. Been working and/or planning an article on my friend's awesome opera (it's about Nigerian email scammers, people!) for a really long time. Now it's finally due. I've edited the interview, thinking it would make a good Q&A-style thing, but it's not quite working. I am not really feeling the traditional-style article, but I may not have a choice. Oh, and my editor hates the pictures that go with it, so it might not go in the prominent place I'd hoped. GRAR.

1. Senyar, I've been sick, too! Felt it hitting me Monday afternoon; yesterday I stayed home, laying on the couch doing the I'M FREEZING! NOW I'M BURNING UP! NOW I'M FREEZING! thing, unable to breathe through my nose, head pounding, etc. Today I'm not 100%, but was well enough to come to work (late), and I've actually felt better as the day wears on. Now I'm going home a little early and plan to take a nap as soon as I get there.

2. Being home and feeling lousy all day made me want to do a major spring cleaning in our house. It's way overdue. One tough thing is having a significant other who protests over throwing ANYTHING away, but damn, I'm going to have to call the folks from that "Hoarders" show if we don't get things under control soon.

3. This photo has kind of made my day.

This photo has kind of made my day.

posted by BoringPostcards

Bopo, me too!

Senyar, I want an easiyo now myself. I can't Greek yogurt where I live, so why not make it myself?! Genius!

1. Today is my husband's birthday, so I am making a shrimp Cesar salad for dinner. I've never made Cesar dressing before, but mine turned out really nicely!

2. Bought a ticket today to travel up to São Paulo to visit my verybestestfriendintheworld and my god daughter. They are moving into a new place tomorrow, and I can't wait to see it!

3. I am in an unusually good mood. As expressed through my liberal use of exclamation points!

1. Still waiting for the USPS to deliver my books from Fresno.
2. Lemon in water is fine, but lime in water rocks.
3. Sookie just sat on my sandwich. She hasn't trained me very well.

OMG, that glass painting is AMAZING! Thank you, BP, that's made my day. Hoping you're soon feeling better, m'dear.

msali, you'll probably find Easiyo on eBay or Amazon.

1. I feel much better after my bout of food poisoning that mid-Sunday night and lasted until Monday evening. Heed my warning - lactose free milk does not go bad like regular milk and will fool you into thinking it's still good! If you ignore my warning, be prepared for the most disgusting and uncomfortable 24 hours of your life.

2. I got a new computer at work today. After fretting about having to switch from XP to Windows 7, I ended up with another XP machine anyway. This is either really good (it didn't take me long to get my preferences reset) or really bad (when I do end up having to switch to a new OS it's going to be something like Windows 15 and I'll have no idea what's going on). At first I was upset about having to give up my old keyboard because it's not USB, but then the BF told me we have an extra adapter at home that I can bring to the office tomorrow. Woo!

3. I don't know what my last point is so I'll just say that the glass painting is awesome, I hope BP & Senyar feel better, I don't think I like greek yogurt, and I LOLed at Sookie sitting on a sandwich.

1. Last Tuesday I got a terrible cold that kept me home for several days. Finally this morning I felt like I was completely better. This afternoon, I feel like I'm getting another one. Grar.

2. Because receiving packages via UPS is such a horrible experience for me, I try to avoid that experience completely. One of the places I order from recently started using UPS so I wrote to them asking if I could specify that a different shipping method must be used. They said I could, and followed through on it, EXCEPT that one of the five boxes on its way to me has been shipped by UPS! Grar. I also ordered some books from Amazon at the same time, and today found out they are also using UPS for this (they never have before). So now I have two orders that, if I want to get them for the weekend, I will have to make a 50 mile round trip through the worst traffic my city has to offer to get to the "convenient" UPS pickup location nearest me. Grar.

3. I have a lot of stuff on my plate right now, which is generally OK except my scumbag brain is doing that thing. You know the one. Where it is a reasonable hour and you are feeling relaxed and have almost drifted off to sleep, and then it goes "Psst... don't forget you have a deadline at the end of the week that's going to be almost impossible to meet." And then you think your way through that one, it seems ok, and then "Psst... don't forget you have to clean up the entire house before you have visitors on Saturday, and there's not enough time left to do that". And on and on it goes like that until it's 2:00am. Then "Psst... you're going to have to get up and go to work in 4 hours and you'll be too tired to do much." SHUT UP SCUMBAG BRAIN I'M TRYING TO SLEEP! (Grar.)

1. Sympathies to all you sickies! I'm fiiiiiinally bouncing back from a cold that began at the end of 2011. Yesterday I left the house for the first time since late December. (Sometimes, being unemployed is mighty convenient. Not often, but I'll take these small conveniences when I can.)

2. I tossed and turned for a few hours last night, nursing a story idea. Finally I got up and started writing. It ain't great but it's written, which is better than nothing, if only because you can't rewrite nothing. In the words of Lynda Barry, "It turns out you can't write a book by thinkin' about it, 'cause I've tried."

3. I ordered the Stephen Fry Good Morning to Sir alarm clock for The Fella's birthday next week. He HATES his current alarm clock, which he bought to replace the previous alarm clock which he HATED also. What does he LOVE? Stephen Fry and P.G. Wodehouse.

Oh, wow, looking at that link: I am SO DANG GLAD that I ordered that clock when I did. When I finally decided to splurge earlier in Jan, it was sold out. They notified me when it was back in stock, I ordered it (it's shipped and expected to arrive tomorrow), and now it's sold out again. Phew!

Oh dear, it seems like everyone is sick! More chicken soup! And orange juice! And cuddly blankets and/or animals!

1. I've been wandering through AskMe and Foodgawker for the past few days working on finding better food things and I think I'm slowly getting a handle on some positive food changes that I can come up with. (Left to my own devices, I really will just eat cheese, bread, noodles, and chocolate all the time.) I made stuffed shells on Monday since a friend was coming over for dinner, but they're missing something and I don't know what it is. However, I may have discovered what it is that I need to add to my cinnamon roll recipe to make them awesome. (Unfortunately, I have to eat all the shells and wash that pan before making cinnamon rolls since they both go in the same pan.)

2. Still not at all enthusiastic about going to the gym. Or the pool. Or even walking outside. This is not good. I'm trying to decide if I want to just do a drive by and peek at the busyness level after work today. I know that some of this because it is cold, but I also feel this way when it gets too warm in the summertime. Ugh, exercising is hard.

3. I'm getting my very first eyebrow waxing tomorrow and I'm quite nervous about it. I'm still working on developing my BECOMING AWESOME plan and one of the things that is possibly on it is to work on being a bit more pulled together. I figure that if it's awful, I never have to do it ever again. Then I have a friend date that evening, NARA on Friday, divination share Friday night, then probably shopping with mom on Saturday, and work all day Sunday. I worry that Anubis feels neglected since I'm sure he has abandonment issues. (On his paperwork from the shelter, the previous owners who gave him up because he didn't get along with dogs said that he was abandoned by his mother at 6 weeks old.)

1. Had a great weekend.
2. Struggling with work deadlines.
3. Have a few potential job opportunities in the works.

1. Healthy and enjoying a gorgeous snow day today.

2. Brought home in anticipation of snow day and finished my reading, with some Grar from me too as the reading appears to be well scrambled and partially incomplete. I love my assistant but can tell he wasn't paying attention. Will have to try to untangle and complete all reading tomorrow if we are open. Or wing it on Friday when the presentation for which the reading was prepared will be given.

3. Got an extremely stupid call from one of wine.woot's stupid customer service people, asking what they should do about the local UPS store to which they mailed one of my shipments without providing my name on the package. Uh, have you considered telling them my name so they will know it is for me??

I'm sorry to hear so many of y'all are sick.

# I think the yoga instructor last night was trying to kill me. Which meant various muscles that are normally quiet said hello to me when I did the four flights of stairs trek today.

@ I dislike sales guys. Really really dislike them. So the new account manager for one of our vendors is plucking my last nerve. Plus he's from the CT/NYC area which rarely jives well with my mid-Atlantic/Southern style.

! I am also very tired of meetings and talking to people. I need to win the lotto so I can be a hermit.

1. It's the end of the first semester for my students Friday. Then there's a week of state Regents exams before the new semester starts, which serves as a bit of a break for us weary teachers. My 10th grade English students don't take their state exam until June, though. None-the-less, I gave them a full sample exam over two days as their semester final. It's a good time to get even my most reluctant students to do the work. Occasionally, you get someone, though, who refuses to even lift his or her head off the desk to at least try the exam. Sometimes they'll bury themselves under their coats (I call it the turtle effect), and no amount of coaxing will get them to come out. (I teach in a high poverty area in the Bronx and a lot of the students have motivational and/or emotional issues).

2. Apparently our mayor would now like to fire half of all the teachers in the city and double the class sizes with the remaining so-called "good" teachers. I'd have to stack the kids up like Curious George, but, hey, I'd get a raise. I just can't listen to these idiots anymore. It's not the teachers who need the incentives and help, it's the kids. On a nice note, the other day, I was sharing the elevator at my school with an older delivery man missing a few teeth who asked if I was a teacher, and when I said I was, bracing a bit for why he was asking, he said, as we were getting off, "I just wanted to thank you for all the good work you do." I was floored. You just don't hear much positive these days. I thanked him very much. It really made my week.

3. On a mildly upsetting note, my poor mom's quarantined. She's not sick, luckily, but apparently there's some illness going around the independent living facility she's at, so she's confined to her apartment (they bring food in) and no visitors are allowed. Meh.

pips: What does your mayor plan to do? Replace desks with old-style bench-desks?

[Ugh, the old reverse-quarantine. No fun.]

[pips, I am always SO glad to see you here, even when your updates are about sucky things you are going through]

1. We missed all the snow. It just rained here, other than a Monday morning dusting. Sorta jealous, sorta not.

2. Making split pea soup. . .making stock out of a chicken carcass and some veggies, and boiling the peas, then will drain off the pea water and add stock. Not sure if this is going to work but it all smells OK.

3. Had this a month ago, and the nearest place I can find it is Portland. Seriously good.

I tried Three Twins sample at my favorite grocery store (PCC) recently. You are so right, danf. Also, rather cool, my iPad spellchecker just tried to turn your username into " fanfare".

OMG Elsa, mr. gaspode is SO getting that clock for Father's Day from our daughter. (if she had her way, I suspect he'd get another box of doughnuts, a la xmas).

1. Finally caught up with my backlog of work that's been dogging me since Christmas.

2. Getting a long overdue haircut and color on Friday. I hate that my phone phobia is such that it took me about a month to make the appointment.

3. About to launch into the mess that is getting my kid into a public pre-K. Ah, NYC schools.

1. Had court yesterday with my first exhusband because he wants to reduce the child support that he hasn't paid in four years. I didn't have to say a word; the Hearing Officer put the whole thing on hold because the medical papers my ex submitted didn't list the nature of his "inability to work" and under the heading of whether or not he can return to work they wrote "unknown". So until he gets an actual diagnosis, the matter has been shelved.

2. My oldest son has passed the entrance exam to the Air Force (by a large margin, I may brag). I'm so excited for him and so scared at the same time.

3. I want snow. I love it (not driving in it, of course) and this year (except for the October snowstorm) I haven't seen anything yet.

1. Holy crow, I thought today was Tuesday.
2. We just watched a movie (nothing much, but Karl Urban was in it *swoon*) and had our first fire in three years.
3. Have to go to the library tomorrow to return videos and pick up the first season of Six Feet Under, yay!

pips: What does your mayor plan to do? Replace desks with old-style bench-desks?

Good question, Ardiril. I don't think he's thought it through, as usual. What he's also failed to mention is that, according to an email from my union, some 66,000 NYC teachers have left, including retirements, in the last ten years (about the length of the mayor's reign), which represents about a 75% change in teaching staff already, so how come the school results, like test scores or graduation rates, aren't 75% better? (They're at best, with fudged stats, 15% improved; math and reading scores on national tests remain flat. Basically, they dumbed down the state tests so more students could pass.)

(Thanks danf... That's nice of you to say. Sorry to be such a gloomy gus.)

I've been watching a lot of weight-loss reality TV shows since New Year, which are really helping me to stick to my low-carb eating.

Senyar, Senyar... carbs are your friends, as long as their not simple, processed carbs like, for example, a McDonalds hamburger bun that's so processed it's going to digest as quickly as sugar. Before taking on a low-carb diet, everyone should check out this link.

Please don't hate me, but consider a couple things, then I'll shut up?:

Without carbs, tryptophan cannot metabolize properly into seratonin = anxiety, depression. A high protein diet increases your body acidity, promoting osteoporosis and other maladies. It stresses your kidneys.

You can eat tons of COMPLEX carbs and not gain weight, since they digest slowly. But simple carbs will digest quickly, overload your blood sugar, and prompt an insulin reaction that pulls the sugar out of your blood and stores it as fat.

Also, when you restrict your calories by dieting, you put your bod in starvation mode, slowing down your metabolism to avoid burning too many calories and hoarding calories as fat.

You can also eat as much fruit as you want and not gain weight from it. I know fruitarians who range from a pro-cyclist and his marathon runner GF to sedentary couch potatoes, and they all eat at least 3,000 calories/day, 80% carbs, 10% fat, 10% protein, yet remain "sveldt". Fruit, despite being a fairly simple sugar, does NOT overload blood sugar but instead replenishes the almost limitless storage space of your glycogen (sugar stored in muscle fiber and the liver). Almost all plant foods are at least 10% protein, so as long as you're not calorie deficient, you're never protein deficient. And fruit like bananas is high in tryptophan, keeping your mood and brain function healthy.

Just eat GOOD FOOD, whole grains and fruits and veggies, cut way down on the processed junk and meat and milk and eggs, and get moderate exercise like walking, and be SURE you're eating ENOUGH and are not calorie deficient. You'll lose weight and feel good, too.

Thanks Shane. I never eat processed food, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I do. I stay well away from refined, starchy carbs (particularly wheat-based carbs) but I eat at least a pound of vegetables a day, about half of them raw, and probably the same of fruit (all raw). I eat oatmeal every day and rice (either whole grains or rice noodles) once or twice a week. If it's a really special occasion I'll allow myself fries (the last time I ate fries was 22 December, and they were cooked in truffle oil, mmmmm...) I eat out maybe once a month and I'll treat myself to a dessert, but even there my tastes have changed and I tend to choose the fruity options these days, or ice cream, rather than the chocolate fudge cake.

So I'm definitely not calorie-deficient, and I'm also taking more than moderate exercise (running), so it's all good.

Hmmm, you should write a book, Shane. (I know I do just about everything wrong. Probably why I look and feel like crap. So no more fluffernutter (peanut butter and marshmallow) fudge, huh? But it's soooooo good.)

I see the staying off the internet idea was not so popular yesterday.
A carb comment: for years I ate high protein, high veg, virtually no carbs, and then I got to a point where I just needed to make myself eat something (because I had no appetite) and so I started eating carbs again, in part because I thought they were bad for me. I got better, started to like food again, but was eating like total crap, for a variety of reasons. While I totally expected to blow up like a balloon, it just didn't happen. I stopped exercising, eating healthy, didn't gain any weight or feel crappy and was really being unhealthy.
Only now after all this time have I started to gain weight, and it's from gorging myself and being virtually immobile.
Now, I lost enough weight to form an reasonable child or an anorexic over a couple years and I have tried to be really nutritionally and health conscious for ages, so it's been quite a shock at how crappy one can treat themselves to little to no effect.
I'm not really sure what to think.
If I hadn't just loaded up on relatively healthy tacos, I'd have some bread.

I'd do my three points but I'm finally relaxed and don't have the necessary fire they deserve. Let me just say this: young, privileged white conservative guy telling me how oppressed he is and how stereotypes are based in fact. This last part he knows because he took the Stereotypes and Prejudice class. Or should I say, this is what he took away from a social psych class. Dunning-Kruger effect. It's just stultifying.

Heh, thanks, Pips. It's good to eat good stuff and feel good, but we all need a little of our fluffernutter, whatever it may be, as well. I guess there's food for the body and food for the soul.
;-)

I am very late to the party as usual, but I love these threads.
1. BF just got back from his writing retreat and I am happy to see him and have someone to talk to other than these animals in my house. They don't appreciate my witty tv commentary.

2. Got some awesome hot orange/pink nailpolish at the drugstore and I like it every time i look down at my hands. I might write a blog post about it.

3. College friend is visiting this weekend and we are going to a concert tomorrow night whcih I've been looking forward to for a while.

4. I've been taking a wax carving jewelry course and I'm really enjoying it. We finished making a ring with points like spokes and now we are working on a curved hollow piece. I am making a stylized bird and I bought a tiny but real $5 sapphire for the eye. Once I'm done carving, I'll bring it to a foundry to have it cast, and then I refine the cast and set the stone and make it into a pin or a necklace or whatever. The teacher is a nice australian jeweler who works downtown and was telling us about a popular author who comes in all the time to have him set stones that the author has found. It's always fun to hear a celebrity story when it's more than "one time i saw nicole kidman on the street" (I did, by the way, once see her on the street)