February, you've outstayed your welcome

I am bored with winter.
And with trying to exercise in winter.
And with whining about trying to exercise in winter.

But wait! I know how to cheer myself up -- I'll write something brilliant and funny and heart-warming and endearing and totally, like, interesting and all that stuff! I am creative! I can write anything!

Um... no. Not today. Thus the urge toward self-expression is thwarted and diverted into the default behavior of searching on Google to see if someone else has something interesting to say.



I thought there might be some good sites out there on How To Make Exercising Interesting Even If It Is February, but they all involve me doing something that resembles hard work. So I found some other sites instead.

Equine Insanity wrote a good post about fear and animals.

The Ironic Catholic noted that a worldwide chocolate shortage brings people closer to God.



My new love Chart Porn posted a graph that charts women's earnings against men's earnings in the same field. Useful tip: don't go into banking if you're female.



An old post from An American Girl in Singapore led me to a fascinating study. You know how people of European ancestry used to complain that all Asians look alike? Turns out from the Asian perspective all Europeans look alike too. Caucasians and Asians don't examine faces in the same way.


A humorous site, stolen leveraged from PastaQueen, is the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator. Create a best-seller, just by clicking!



And a video: Don't you ever interrupt me while I'm reading a book! (Stolen shamelessly from Librarians are weird.)


Photos of a hibiscus and condo on Maui, plus a random beach on Molokai. Sigh.

Peaceful thoughts

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. -Buddha

Good positive thoughts.


There are 1,950,000 people in the Portland area.
I met 1 who was a jerk.

Therefore, there are 1 million, 949,999 other people around.
Math is not my strong point, but I'm willing to bet that the odds are good a large number of them are fairly decent people with good will and peace toward their fellow human.

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A thank you to all the kind supportive people out there! I really do appreciate all the positive thoughts. That woman in the red sedan probably doesn't have any friends; I am lucky.

And thank you Keziah -- I did run tonight after all. Frosty clear night, moon rising behind the trees, beautiful experience. I would have missed all that.


Also -- iPods are really neat.
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Thank you

If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice. - Meister Eckhart

• Thanks for kind friends who cheer me on even when I don't feel like I'm making progress.
• Thanks for giving me plenty to eat, and help me not to eat it all at once.
• Thanks for this beautiful day.
• Thanks for this body, which is adapting to running and dancing and cycling and becoming fit.
• Thanks for the time to make myself into who I really am inside.

This list could stretch on a lot longer, but it's time to go running. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and thank you for coming here.

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Ran 30 minutes 1/2 jog/walk. Why was this so much harder than the last time, which was twice as strenuous? (At least the last session looked harder on paper.) This was like pulling teeth, getting blood from a stone, insert-your-own-harder-than-unpleasant-analogy-here. I hated every minute. I don't feel good at all, just glad that it's over and I'm out of the wind.
(There, Crabby, was that enough whining for you? I just wish I knew why this time was more difficult.)
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Thanks for people who rescue animals, such as in the photo above from flickr.

I'm sweet enough already, thanks

What are all the food producers out there trying to do?

All I wanted to do was buy a loaf of bread. Seemed a simple enough mission to accomplish: I had the money, I was in the bakery section at Safeway, each loaf had the words "healthy" or "whole grains" on the label.



What could possibly be wrong with this picture?


The problem began when I started reading the labels. I rejected loaf after loaf, brand after brand, because each and every one of the dang things had sugar as one of the first ingredients. High-fructose corn syrup, at that. Who the heck puts sugar in their bread? Why would you want to do that?

It's like the frozen pre-made pancakes that I saw in the freezer section. Now I was raised proper, I was. About the only thing my Southern-born daddy taught me how to cook was pancakes, but I learned that good. You do not put sugar into the mix when making pancakes. If you want to add syrup or powdered sugar on top, more power to you. But you don't mess with the pancake itself.

I truly do not understand. I've got a sweet tooth, like everyone else. Doesn't mean that I want everything to be sweet all the time. I like popcorn with salt & butter just as much as caramel popcorn. Even sour foods taste good sometimes. (Pickles, anyone? Argh! No, not sweet pickles!)

Gilroy, California, is famous for their annual Garlic festival. Anyone who's been there has probably tried the garlic beer, or garlic chewing gum, or something similar. But the one food item that the festival is notorious for is the garlic ice cream. Yes, you read that correctly. Not a typo. And people will even admit, reluctantly, that it "isn't all that bad." The problem is not so much the taste as it is the idea of ice cream that's garlic flavored. That's how I feel about high-fructose corn syrup in bread or pancakes.

To me, it's a freedom of taste issue. If I want to go home and put sugar on my toast in the privacy of my own home, well, I'm an adult. It's not against the law (yet). This is not something that should be decided for me by some mindless profit-seeking company trying to corrupt my taste buds, ruin my palate, and restrict my choices all for their own profit. Huh.

Why am I here? For that matter, why are you?

The trouble is that I always want there to be a Reason for everything.

There has to be a point for a blog. I've read that most blogs have only one author and only one reader -- and they are one and the same person. Basically they're online diaries. Why are these people posting their private lives online, making them public?

• Many blogs out there are exercise/diet diaries; the poster putting the minutiae of their daily life out for public view for anyone or no one to see, presumably as a way of keeping themselves on track for their goal.
  
• Writers post blogs that serve this function too, as well as keeping their readers involved in their progress.
• Some blogs are public rants; the poster holds forth on their opinions about all and sundry.
• Some blogs are private parties; the poster or posters hang out online with their physical and virtual friends. (I've enjoyed a couple of these blogs myself; you meet some good peoples online.)
• Some blogs are the online year 'round equivalent of a Christmas letter: the poster uses the public forum to keep their friends and family au courant.

Some of these blogs are well written, some are not. A lot have spelling errors and typos, so many that the impression is given that the poster doesn't care what they look like to the world. (It's the editor in me, but I can't fathom that. Would these people go out in public with their hair unbrushed or their clothes wrinkled and askew?) But all of these blogs seem to be posted by people who really believe in what they're doing. There's the rub.

Maybe the problem is that I can't quite believe in myself enough to think that my musings will hold much fascination for anyone else. Even the dog curls up for a nap when I start telling her my troubles. My family nods politely, eyes glazed over, when I tell them about my exercise schedule or dieting struggles. Why would posting a blog be any different?

Perhaps the only way to find out is to blog about something. Here. I'll tell you what, Dear Reader. (I'm presuming you exist.) I'll try a slice of life (low cal, just a dash of chocolate on top):

I'm sitting here typing and out my window I can see planes flying back and forth, jets passing low overhead, helicopters buzzing the trees. (Okay, one helicopter.) You'd think I was in the middle of a Baghdad neighborhood, but in reality it's just the local air show. The small airport is actually about four or five miles away, but there's always some overflow. Usually I enjoy looking at the planes going by. When I go shopping, I can see the acrobatic biplanes doing loops and crazy stunts, safely thank Heaven. I'm hoping to catch sight of the Blue Angels. But this year I'm also a bit nervous. My newly developed fear of flying has extended to when I'm on the ground and they're in the air. Last year a friend of mine went on a garden tour with another friend. When they got back to the other woman's house, they found it on fire. A plane had crashed into it, killing the pilot and setting two neighboring houses on fire. My friends had been running late that day; they'd originally planned to have returned about fifteen minutes sooner, in which case she wouldn't have been around to tell me about it. The moral of the story, to me, is that's it's not always a good thing to be on time.

There. I've now created a slice-of-life blog post. Maybe next time I'll try posting my diet and exercise schedule.

p.s. I've just discovered a blog that has tips on how to blog, if you're interested.