Hey, I found this crazy thing called Mood Tap after I got the FireFox extension. People say what mood they’re experiencing and then it does sort of an average of them and you can see how the world (or your country) is feeling. One of the best parts is that you can look at photos that people feel are representative of each emotion, and submit your own photos. Fun times with silly stuff and the Internet
Morgan had an intriguing post recently which lead me to try and find more information about baby hair. I did a google search for neonatal hair which turned up many many things about drug testing babies using their hair to convict mothers. Ha! You can use their hair to test for drug use (of certain drugs) up to 4 months before they are born. Craziness.
I can finally say that I really enjoyed Thanksgiving this year, and not just because I had a day off. In fact, with as much cooking, dish washing and other preparations, I don’t know if I could call it a day off. The food was wonderful, and for the first time in 10 years or so, I could eat all of it. Ethan and I made roasted squash risotto, wild rice (a lot of wild rice), wild rice soup, a cranberry, orange and apple pie and cranberry ginger ale. Jessi and Chris made corn pudding, two pies, lentil and wild rice pilaf, marinated portobello mushrooms, portobello gravy, mashed potatoes, garlic and herb sweet potatoes, cabbage salad, cranberries, and probably a few other things I’ve forgotten. If anyone says that Thanksgiving can’t happen without turkey, or that it wouldn’t be filling and delicious, they’re dead wrong.
– In a strange turn of events, a Baptist minister and his wife joined us all for our vegan Thanksgiving. They are not vegan but seemed more than happy with all of the food. Towards the end of dinner we were sucked into a discussion about why none of the younger four of us don’t go to church. I wasn’t thrilled with the conversation, but at least no one told me I should be going, or that I was a bad person for not. I won’t say it wasn’t implied, just not said outright. All that aside, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’ll have to get some recipes from Jessi for next year.
– It looks like my christmas cactus is about to bloom. I’ll have to keep an eye on it and get pictures. This year its at the top of the shelf, so my cats cat feast on the blooms like they did last year…
Yesterday, Ethan finally got a response from the Reverend Anthony (after he apparently didn’t get Ethan’s previous email, but somehow knew we were getting married) and said that yes, he would be happy to ‘do’ our wedding. I’m sure there’s a word for what I’m talking about, but I couldn’t tell you what that word is. At any rate this is very good news as I’m not sure how else we would handle that whole aspect of our wedding. The whole not being religious thing makes it interesting to find a similarly non-religious person to perform a wedding.
– On a similar note, a Baptist Minister will apparently be attending Thanksgiving at Jessigurr’s place. It will be interesting to see what kind of group dynamic four non-believers, a minister and his wife have. In any event, Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday, so I’m not too concerned about what might happen. We’ll all be hanging out to have a good time, and hopefully that’s exactly what will happen.
Hmm… In the spirit of the ever-changing nature of this site, I have been working on a different way to respond to posts (and also to respond to responses). At this point I have all of the code worked out, but I need to make some tedious and time consuming changes to the database to make everything look pretty and be somewhat accurate. I also haven’t quite decided how I want to lay everything out so there will probably be some head-banging before it is up and available.
Oof! What a long weekend! Ethan and I went to the cities to continue our ring shopping, and to visit people and places… We got in to the cities fairly late, with an Invader Zim disc in tow. On Saturday morning, we got up, had breakfast and headed to a strange pawnshop/jeweler that I’ve been to before, and thankfully we both felt good about the shop and the jeweler. She was really willing to work with us and didn’t try to make us buy anything that day. After talking with her for quite awhile, we decided to send her some information and then have her get back to us.
– We went back to my parents’ place and decided to give Ethan’s brother and sister a call to see if they wanted to get together for lunch. They were both available so off we went to eat some yummy Thai food. We hung out a bit with Beth and Keith and then decided to check out the Carpenter Nature Center. The weather was not terribly pleasant on Saturday, being windy, cold and cloudy, but we really needed to have a look before deciding if we want to have our ceremony there. Ethan and I walked around a few of the paths which run right along the St. Croix River. The bluffs completely blocked the wind and it was really pleasant. Eventually, when I could take no more walking, we came to the River Outlook. It’s a small platform with raised seating that extends over a bluff and has a spectacular view of the St. Croix. We decided right away that that was where we wanted to have the ceremony. Now we just need to set a date…
– We drove back to my parents’ place and went out for dinner. My mom kept making comments about the fact that we had already been out to eat once that day and then was really bitchy all through dinner. I don’t know why she acts like that. We managed to enjoy our dinner anyway, and then headed home.
– We made a last minute decision to go see the new Harry Potter movie, which turned out to be… well, scary. I was kind of surprised that people had younger children there, even though it was PG-13 and a late showing (8:30). I liked the movie though, except for this whole relationship between Hermione and some older guy, which I thought was creepy and inappropriate, but apparently I’m the only one…
– For whatever reason, Ethan and I were discussing our future pet situation, and good names for Old English Sheepdogs. I finally found a picture of a trimmed OES so now any of you who have had to listen to my ranting about how cute they are, you can finally see it for yourselves! I have to imagine that makes their summers a bit more pleasant.
As a vegetarian, I am asked the same questions by many of my more carnivorous counterparts all the time: how do you know that you’re getting enough protein? Do you eat fish (chicken, eggs, milk, cheese, etc)? Well what do you eat? Are you still a vegetarian? There were also all kinds of annoying comments and jokes I get as a vegetarian. Some people think it’s really really funny to shove a plate of meat in a vegetarian’s face and ask if they think it looks tasty (or if they’re going to be ill). I’ve had a few people say there is meat in something I’m eating when there is not. Those people always seem to expect me to freak out and spit out the food, as though I can’t tell if there is meat in it.
At some point when I was young, I started to find the idea of eating dead animals quite disgusting. Around the same time, I started to hear how animals in slaughterhouses are treated. I wish I could say that the stories you hear are isolated incidents, but they are not. In every single factory farm, and every single slaughterhouse, animals are mistreated, neglected, and tortured every day. While I find this horrible and inexcusable, it is not why I stopped eating meat. As I said, I started to find the whole idea gross. I’ve seen how chicken live (those that can actually walk around usually do so in their own feces, and then eat food that gets scattered in their feces), and I’ve seen free range animals slaughtered. Both of these images brought home the reality that the chicken on the plate is just a cooked version of the chicken in the barn yard. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted that in my mouth.
By the time I was in 7th grade, I was only eating a few kinds of meat, sparingly. Venison was one of them. My dad hunts deer and usually shoots one every year, so our family always had a freezer stocked full of venison. By 8th grade, I had completely cut meat out of my diet. I haven’t looked back since.
Now to answer the questions I’ve been asked so many times (as I’m sure many other vegetarians out there have too). Most Americans (and Eastern Europeans) consume far too much protein on a daily basis. The average American adult consumes around 100g of protein every day, almost twice as much as the recommended daily allowance (55 – 60g). Protein that is not directly used by the body as amino acids is broken down into fat and used as energy. This is why the Atkins diet and other ‘low carb’ diets don’t kill people. Our bodies are able to cope with too much daily protein. This also means that if you are consuming too much protein and you are not using all of the fat calories your body produces, the fat is stored in your body.
Because meat is the most abundant source of protein in many people’s diets, they are consuming more protein than they need, plus all of the fat and cholesterol that come from a meat rich diet. By eating a diet rich in vegetables, nuts, and beans, it is easy to consume a healthy amount of protein, while avoiding the fat and cholesterol that comes from meat. In fact, you can get ‘complete’ proteins from consuming many kinds of beans, including soybeans and food derived from soybeans, like tofu and textured soy protein. When most or all of your protein comes from vegetables and not meat, you are also benefiting from the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants naturally found in these foods that you don’t get from eating meat.
I am an lacto-ovo vegetarian, which means I eat eggs and dairy products. I do not eat poultry or fish. There are many classifications of vegetarians, but the four that I hear of most often are as follows:
Next time you meet someone who calls themself a vegetarian, instead of asking what they do and do not eat, instead ask “what kind of vegetarian are you?” They’ll appreciate it.
When people ask me what I do eat (instead), I am usually baffled. Back when I lived with three meat-eaters, including my parents, the response was usually “what you eat, just without the meat,” because my family did not go to any lengths to provide me with a variety of meat free choices. Most of the time I had to just pick the meat out of my dinner, or make food for myself. Since then I have lived on my own as a vegetarian, and now, with my vegetarian fiancee, and I would be lying if I didn’t say that I eat a larger variety of foods that most meat-eating people I know. Besides a plethora of salads, it is easy to prepare numorous flavorful and healthful meals. There is really no shortage to the number of meals a vegetarian can eat.
As for people asking me if I’m ‘still’ a vegetarian, I can only say this: vegetarianism is to me a way of life, not a fad or a phase. I doubt that I will ever, under my own power eat meat again. The benefits of my diet far outweigh the drawbacks, and it has been years since I even thought of how my life is different from others. This is who I am, not who I’m pretending to be.
Web giants back anti-spyware push – I think this is a major step in the right direction. I see computers every day that are just riddled with adware and spyware. The worst part is, most people don’t even know that these programs exist and think their computer is slow and glitchy because it’s old or has “too much stuff on it.” I think the “Trusted Download Program” is a good idea, just because it will help bring awareness to consumers. It’s hard to say what sort of impact this will have though, when you consider the adware and spyware that use security holes in Internet Explorer to download onto your computer without the user’s permission. Also, most people don’t really read any disclaimer information or end user agreements, they just click next until the program they want is installed. It is very easy to unintentionally download something that wreaks havoc on your computer, and most people never even know what’s happening.
– Yesterday it suddenly became winter. It got very cold and very windy and snowed. With the way the wind was blowing yesterday, I was surprised our garbage can was still in our yard and our house is intact. The screen door doesn’t latch very well and blew open and against the house for who knows how long, and in the morning the little piston that swings the door shut was bent. Amazingly the door still shuts (but still doesn’t latch). Brrr.
– This year we’re going to spend Thanksgiving with our friends Jessi and Chris, and possibly Jessi’s family. Our friends are vegan which will hopefully make the whole Thanksgiving thing a little easier on Ethan and I. It’s kind of frustrating (though perfectly understandable) to sit down to dinner and have all of the food contain meat, or worse, be a vegetable dish that has so much sugar added you would think it was candy. Why aren’t vegetables good enough on their own? Hopefully Jessi wants a ton of food at her Thanksgiving bash, because Ethan and I are planning on bringing mashed potatoes, roasted squash risotto, wild rice soup, and anything else that pops into our heads by the time next Thursday rolls around. Speaking of which, I should probably email Jessi and make sure she knows what we’re planning…
Woot! I did it! There are probably little links on some pages that don’t work, and I’ll have to spend the next few weeks finding and exterminating them, but it says right on the home page that this is a work in progress, so who can complain?
– I’ll be adding more skins I think. I came up with one today actually (curtain), and similarly, it has a few things that still need doing, but overall it’s finished. I really need to write something up for all of them, like what browsers/settings each is best for. If you are using Internet Explorer, now is the time to creep into a corner and cry, and not just because your computer is inevitably infected with all kinds of malicious crap, but because the makers of your browser don’t love you enough to make IE standards compliant. (try something better). Anyway, here it is! Please let me know if you find anything horribly wrong so I can fix it ASAP.
I’m getting close to switching over to version 3.0 of this site. I might actually be able to do it tonight, depending on how busy I am. I think it will take an hour or two to do… and that’s assuming everything goes well. I’m really excited about switching over. It will make it easier for me to add new features, skins and content. It’s also easier to make certain parts of the site members only, so if you are a frequent visitor, and you haven’t become a member yet, you should! In the new set up, I have a gallery of pictures of me and my friends which will be members only, among other things.
– Yesterday Ethan and I let the chinnies run around the kitchen. We decided to let Pester in on all the fun too. Of course Rooster came out first, and ran happily around the kitchen, chasing Pester if he got too close. Bella only came out once or twice, and then hung out in Rooster’s cage for a while. I think Pester was really freaked out. Rooster seems to see everything as climbable, including cats. He made a few attempts to scale Pester, who would immediately run away. There isn’t much funnier than a cat afraid of rodents. I took a few pictures, but no one would sit still very long, so I couldn’t get many.
