Rancid-Tea

Sleep

With all life has to offer there’s so much to be enjoyed, but the pleasures of insomnia are ones I can’t avoid

— Barenaked Ladies, Who Needs Sleep

For the last week I haven’t gotten enough sleep. Either the cats wake me up, or it’s too hot and stuffy in our room, or I can’t fall asleep when I go to bed (or all three!)

The perpetual lack of sleep has made me irritable, anxious and kind of slaphappy. Perhaps tonight I will take a few Tylenol PM (I really ought to get whatever the sleep-aid in them is, and skip the acetaminophen) and fall into unconsciousness around 7 tonight.

After being alive for 23 years, I’m pretty sure that I require about 10 hours of sleep to feel well rested. When I haven’t slept enough for a few days, I can easily sleep for 12 – 14 hours. Hopefully I can do that tonight.

A Neat Find

I have been keeping a hopeful eye on the yogurt aisle at the Rainbow foods we shop at, hoping for something without high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweetener, or artificial flavors (or all three!), and was finally rewarded. They now carry Danon All Natural. It’s still not ideal, as I’m pretty sure it has gelatin, but I can cope with that. It at least means I get to have yogurt on a regular basis.

Running With Scissors

Last Summer, I saw previews for ‘Running with Scissors’ the movie, and thought it looked like a very entertaining movie. I ended up missing it while it was in theaters, but Ethan and I put it on our netflix queue. I found the book that the movie was based on (also called Running with Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs) and I bought and read it. It is one of the most entertaining books that I’ve read, and I already want to read it again, but my friend has borrowed it, and she’ll be passing it on to our mutual friend before I get it back, so I’ll have to wait.

The movie came from netflix yesterday and I was so excited to get to watch it. I was sorely disappointed. In the film, the characters all vacillated between bored nonchalance and violent conflict. The book was much more lighthearted. Things happened, and you felt a certain way about them, and you could tell how Augusten felt, but he was a very non-confrontational observer.

For reasons unknown, they also took some creative liberties, like changing the Augusten’s age… something quite important to the story. Now I want my book back more than ever, so I can erase the movie version from my head and re-enjoy the memoir story.

Prosper

Ethan and I discovered Prosper.com a few months ago, and we recently went through the (not very speedy) process of becoming lenders. We are now investing about half of our combined income tax return in other people. It’s a very neat idea, I think, to lend money to other people directly and not have a bank taking a huge bite out of it.

To defray risk, instead of loaning one person $1000, with the chance that they will default on the loan, you can loan 20 people $50, partially fulfilling their loan request. That way, if any one person defaults, you’re still likely to make a decent return.

It’s a really neat system for anyone who is looking to invest or someone looking to get a short term loan without going through a bank.

Eyes of the Blind

I started wearing glasses in second grade at the ripe old age of 8. At that point, I could no longer see anything the teacher wrote on the board. Every year after that until I was 17, I had to get a new prescription for glasses and (since I was 13) contacts. After 17, my eyes stopped getting worse, and I got to stick with the same prescription.

I recently went to the optometrist to get new contacts because I was on my last pair. It usually takes about a week to get them in. Right now though, my particular brand of contacts is back-ordered for 8 – 12 weeks… You’re only supposed to wear them for 4 weeks, and I usually go for 8, but they are flimsy little pieces of plastic that can tear easily, and if one of them goes, I’m without contacts until the new ones come in.

I could simply switch to another brand of contacts. Unfortunately there are only two brands that make lenses for people with a bad astigmatism, and that’s what I have. I’ve been wearing this brand since I was in 8th grade, and I don’t really want to go through a whole new fitting session with trial lenses of another brand… which could potentially mean driving with poor fitting lenses for a few days. Not a good option for someone who can’t see past her own nose without lenses.

So for now, I’m stuck with the lenses I have while I wait for the new ones to come in. My glasses now have my newest prescription in them, so if push came to shove, I could wear those, but they distort my face pretty badly, so I don’t like wearing them out of the house. Also, the glare on the lenses, combined with my vision halos mean that I still don’t see as well with the glasses as I do with contacts.

I’ve been considering getting refractive eye surgery for some time now, but it’s very expensive for people with astigmatism, and some eyes can’t be fixed (yet?). Being in this situation does make me want to go get an evaluation though. It would be so nice to wake up in the morning and actually be able to see the alarm clock from bed, or be able to fall asleep watching TV without having to put away my glasses or wear my contacts just to see. Now if only I had more time to schedule something with anyone…

Further Proof You Can Eat Well On A Budget

I found this blog where a woman is trying to feed her husband and herself on a foodstamp budget of $75/week (total, not per person), and she’s trying to eat as much organically as possible. It’s called Rebecca’s Pocket and she just finished her second week. So far, she is succeeding.

High Fructose Corn Syrup Vs. Sugar

It’s estimated that in 1999, each American consumed an average of 158 pounds of sugar. In 2007, the USDA found that Americans are consuming around 20 teaspoons of added sugar (this does not include sugar naturally present in fruit and dairy) every day. Sadly, sugar is a very major part of the American diet.

The caloric sweetener of choice in manufactured foods is high fructose corn syrup, which was first created in 1957, and became widely popular as a sweetener in the US in the late seventies and early eighties. You read it right: created. Natural corn syrup contains no fructose at all, it is purely glucose. To get fructose from corn cornstarch is subjected to three enzymatic treatments, which break it down into a 90% fructose/10% glucose mixture. The bacteria and fungus used to create the enzymes used in the manufacture of HFCS are genetically modified to produce ‘more stable’ enzymes.

Sugar, by contrast, which is practically only used in home cooking and some bakeries, is made through simple processing of either sugar beets or sugar cane with simple processing. All of the steps could easily be performed in your own kitchen, were you so inclined to make table sugar. Also, all of the byproducts in sugar production can be reused.

One of the major reasons that high fructose corn syrup is more widely used than sugar in manufactured foods is that it’s cheaper. You might ask how a product that requires expensive enzymes to create can be cheaper than something you could make in your own kitchen. The answer is simple: tariffs and subsidies. Sugar is highly tariffed when brought into the US. Since sugar cane doesn’t grow well in most US climates, a lot of sugar cane and sugar production happen elsewhere, and our government puts a high tax on that sugar to make it easier for our farmers and manufacturers to sell their goods. Because the US produces more corn than it can use (and for various other reasons) the US government also pays farmers to grow corn, because they would not be able to make a profit on it otherwise. This means that corn grown in the US is very inexpensive, and that in turn means that the final price tag of high fructose corn syrup is pretty small.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t want to consume lab sweetener just because it’s cheaper.

Roommate woes

Ethan’s brother had the unfortunate timing to discover he would be moving to Ireland ONE DAY after resigning the lease here. Woot. Now Ethan and I are stuck with the dilemma: find a roommate or suffer the financial consequences.

One would think this wouldn’t be a difficult decision, but after my bout of roommates, I would prefer to live without one unless I know ahead of time that I we have compatible living styles. Neat freaks probably wouldn’t want to live with me, and I can’t stand to live with slobs. I like the happy medium. Also, I would like to live with someone who doesn’t think that they are exempt from washing dishes, to the point of not even running the dishwasher (seriously, what the hell?)

If anyone that we know (Steph? Erin?) is in the market for a new place to live, we’re about to have an empty bedroom! Convenient location right on the light rail! You’d even get your own bathroom. You could use all of our cool kitchen stuff too! Two wonderful cats!!! I think the kid upstairs might be slowly growing out of stompy-tantrum phase too. Anyway, the offer is out there.

Soup Could Help You Lose Weight

A new study shows that eating low calorie soup before a meal reduces overall calorie intake, but I wonder if they did any research to see if people were more likely to eat more later on in the day. Sometimes, after drinking a large glass of water before a meal, I will feel full sooner, but then within an hour of eating, I feel hungry again, because I wasn’t able to eat as much during my meal. The overall effect in that case is probably that I eat more, because two smaller meals are generally larger than one large meal.

Rooster’s Foot, Part 3

So… about a month ago, Rooster injured his foot somehow, leaving the top of it quite raw. I brought him to the vet and they gave me antibiotics to give him for two weeks. I did this, even when I started to worry that the stress of it was possibly making him worse (he didn’t mind at first, but after a few days, it started to get to him, and by the end, I felt like I was torturing him).

So, with the antibiotics done, his foot looked much improved, but not all the way better. There was still a large raw spot on it. After a few days, it started looking not-so-good again, and I decided to take a few drastic measures: I gave him a very gentle bath, because his foot crusties were stuck in his fur, I removed his hammock/bag from his cage, feeling that it was probably harboring some infectious bugs of its own, and I started putting neosporin on his foot once a day. His foot still has a long way to go, but it looks noticeably better today, compared to two weeks ago. At least one third of the wound has healed over, so that makes me feel like some progress is being made.

He still doesn’t seem very bothered by his injury, so hopefully he’s not in a lot of pain. On the other hand, once this heals, he could very well live another 15 years, so a few weeks of pain doesn’t seem so bad (who knows if some people would just have their chinchilla put down over such an injury).