I got a letter today that I at first assumed was a practical joke or a fraud (of the pre-internet Nigerian 419 scam variety -- and Yes, those were on paper before they hit the Internet).

The letter has a return address "CENTRAL VIOLATIONS BUREAU" (could you be any more vague) with a return address of a P.O. Box in San Antonio, Texas. I immediately smiled, thought "Well, they've got the wrong guy -- I haven't been in San Antonio, or Texas overall, for a few years now."

Inside, it still looks rather like a fraud or joke, but now that conclusion is fading. The enclosed letter (one sheet, badly printed, no official seal or anything similar) is a Notice to Appear for arraignment in the U.S. District Court in Bellingham on August 11th of this year (at which point I'll probably be in Nebraska) on a charge of improper parking. Or, as it looks like I'll have to do instead, I can pay them (oh, so kind) $55 by credit card, check or money order. That payment goes to the U.S. Courts Central Violations Bureau, at an address in Charlotte, N.C. (It benefits a "crime victims fund," they say on the web site. Way to add insult to injury.)

(No traffic court? It jumps straight to U.S. District Court, complete with threats of arrest warrants for no-show? Great use of tax money, esp. for someone to whom this letter is a first notice.)

So, I'll take the option which waives any further rights (counsel, or contest, etc) by paying them directly. Thanks, I love it.

Looking at the Central Violations Bureau site, I learn that "The Central Violations Bureau (CVB) is a national center charged with processing violation notices (tickets) issued and payments received for petty offenses committed on federal property." I wonder which federal property I visited then to commit my petty offense. Post Office, maybe? Some other government building? No idea.

The date listed for this claimed violation notice is May 25th; I had to double check that I had actually already bought the car at this point (I had), because I've certainly never seen a violation notice. Did I see one and forget about it? Doubtful -- this is a new car (new to me, and nearly new overall), and I'm feeling a bit hyperobservant of things to do with the car right now. Besides which, if I *had* seen one and forgotten, surely this would spark the memory. (The CVB site also links to a sample Federal ticket -- quite sure it's the first I've seen one.)

May 25th was a Monday, but I have nothing on my calendar about where I might have gone or done; odds are at least middlin' that I didn't go anywhere or even move the car, but not sure. I might have seen a movie, or gone to eat, something. I tried to refresh my memory by looking at online crumbs: I have no Slashdot journal entries that day, either, or for several days on either side, and no email sent or received. (I may have received some email, but then deleted it when dealt with.) Looks like I went to Olympia on the 24th, but that was a one-day trip, just down, studied for a few hours, and back. Now *that* could have been the 25th instead, I suppose -- my email about that was written as I was planning to go, and I could have postponed for some reason no longer in mind.

The people who created this little corner of Kafka's castle deserve to be mugged in dark alleys. Not killed, mind you, just mugged. Every day, until they pick some more honorable profession, such as pickpocket.

NOTE: I am not happy about the tone, style, content, or simple fact of getting this notice. That does not mean I deny its claim that I parked improperly in some place with federal meter maids ("U.S. Park Police, U.S. Fish & Wildlife, Department of Defense Police, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Provost Marshal, Airforce, Marines & Navy Security Forces, U.S. Postal Police, U.S. Customs, U.S. Border Police, and V.A. Police.") -- I suppose that's possible; they even have my name, address, and plate number right. OK. What I *do* deny is having any previous knowledge of a violation being issued. As a driver for more than 15 years, I've gotten a handful of parking tickets, but I think I can recall all of them, incl. a few from the hateful parking robots in Philadelphia.

p.s. For the record, and my future knowledge, I have not moved the car yet today, but I'm about to -- going running at Roosevelt High School's track.

[expanded from a facebook comment]

When I was (very) young and no less foolish than now, the neighbor girl named Jennifer and I recklessly played with an air rifle to which she had access. I think this was with the vague permission of her mother, but with no instruction in the Four Rules of Gun Safety* or any instruction generally.

This usually worked out fine. The game of "stuffing bits of plant matter in the end and firing at each other at close range with the gun empty" was great fun! Naturally, we pumped up the thing many times, in order to give those leafy bits even a few feet of travel. (This was the sort of gun you could pump until you no longer had the strength to, which was our usual system. 7 or 8 pumps, probably.) This game was disrupted when a BB was dislodged from some recess within the "empty" gun's ammo store, when it was my turn to shoot. Luckily, I was aiming at her belly, rather than her face, and even more luckily, this was before the age of constant petty lawsuits. (Also, she -- softball pitcher -- had on another occasion and without warning or provocation pitched a rock the size of a softball at my head from behind: big white flash, needed stiches. So maybe this was just fair trade. Probably could have killed me -- in retrospect, I am confident that it did not.)

Upshot: Jennifer yelped and clutched at her abdomen after I fired. I first thought she was playing around, just hamming it up. Then I thought that some piece of twig, seed, or wadded leaf had hit her hard enough to startle her. Nope -- there was a small hole right near her belly button, where the BB had entered and stayed; I think she had it removed by a doctor that same day. Maybe it's still there.

If in fact either of us *had* learned about gun safety, it's possible (not laws-of-physics inevitable, I realize) that we would have been a little smarter. As it was, we treated an air rifle firing tiny spheres of copper or steel more like a cap gun. I won't say that it wasn't a *toy* (I hate that distinction), but it certainly wasn't a toy appropriate to the way were using it. It was just my luck that I was the one firing (we tended to alternate, though she got it more, since it was hers) when it actually launched a BB, esp. since sometimes we were taking head shots! A very slight twist on the order of operations, and Yep, you could lose an eye.

* There are various permutations; I've seen lists of 3 and of 5, and there are no doubt others, but the list of 4 as I think of them goes like this (these are the rules as expressed by Jeff Cooper):

RULE I: ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED (didn't observe)

RULE II: NEVER LET THE MUZZLE COVER ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO DESTROY (*really* didn't observe)

RULE III: KEEP YOUR FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOUR SIGHTS ARE ON THE TARGET (surely I didn't observe this one, but it's sort of irrelevant, since it was the *selection* of a target that was the bigger problem)

RULE IV: BE SURE OF YOUR TARGET (I was sure, but I wasn't right)

1 banana: Eh, I've read 130 cals for a medium banana, but I suspect it's all guesswork. Maybe this was an especially fattening or slimming banana. But I'll say 130.

4 oz OJ: 60 cals (plus some water, for zero additional).

1/2 raisin bagel (the skinny half; ate the fatter half last night with coffee, a righteous combination), but I'll say 100 cals anyhow (online rumor has cinn/raisin bagels at @ 200) + 80 for the tblspoon of cream cheese

Egg, size, medium, prepared, boiled, taste, delicious: 75

Totalling 445, near enough, let's say 450.

Not a *bad* breakfast-lunch-whatever, but something more like a 4-egg cheese omelet with spinach and onion, swedish pancakes with lingonberries, a small carafe of OJ, 8 oz of pure cranberry juice, 6 slices of bacon, fresh smooth coffee, half a cinnabon and some buttered rye toast would have been slightly better. (And since it's only half a cinnabon, I could count it as calorie restricted!) Hopefully on Sunday I'll find a good breakfast place in San Jose.

I like Gnome, and I like quite well the Gnome-ness (intentional simplicity, user-friendliness) of most Gnome apps. I also know that very little in life is actually perfect, but I still carp and moan about things that aren't perfect. In that light: SoundJuicer, the Gnome CD ripping program, has two flaws that really bug me and required some googling to resolve. Neither took long to fix to my satisfaction, but in case this is useful to you, or me when I forget these things and want to do the same on a different computer or installation ...

(Both of these apply to SoundJuicer as installed via apt-get on Ubuntu 9.10 alpha, and the fixes are as of the date of this posting -- I make no claim as to universality of my complaints or solutions ;))

1) MP3 support not included by default, for reasons that are sadly understandable. So I realize this is not a "flaw" from the developers' point of view, only from the user's. To fix this, a rather cool web site will let you install the right codecs with a click, and as far as I know or suspect, is not simultaneously causing your flowers to wilt, hair to recede, nose to fall off, etc. (I found this site when I was still using SoundConverter, before I realized that SoundJuicer could in fact be used to go straight from CD to MP3.)

2) The process for adding a new profile (collection of settings that affect the output format and quality of ripped tracks) is not as clear as it could be for a user as naive as am I, and in fact seems to me downright opaque.

I wanted an even lower quality setting than the "low quality" option, which has a target bitrate of 128mbps. (Actually, I just wanted a smaller size, and for spoken stuff like audio books, the resulting lower quality is perfectly listenable to me.) To achieve this:

a) In SoundJuicer, Go to Edit / Preferences. Click on "Edit Profiles" (Just above the Close button, in the lower right-hand corner), then click "New" in the box that pops up, and give your new profile a name in the next box that pops up, titled Edit Gnome Audio Profiles. (I called my new profile "mp3-64.") After you assign a name, the name of your new profile (not yet complete) will show up on the list of available profiles. This is not especially intuitive (at least for me), but take heart: You're almost done!

b) Now, click once on the name of your new profile to highlight it, then click on the Edit button. Yet another little dialogue box appears, but there are only two fields you need to worry about within it, which are the ones labeled "Gstreamer pipeline" and "file extension."

For the field labeled "Gstreamer pipeline," to get the combination I wanted (namely, a stereo MP3 at 64kbps), the following line works for me and I hope does for you as well:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=0 bitrate=64

I would even have gone with 32kpbs (which would be the same line as above, but with "32" at the end instead of "64," where it says "bitrate=64"), except I understand that some players have trouble playing such low bitrates, and at current storage prices, it's not worth the trade-off.

For the "file extension" format, put in "mp3." Not sure if it's necessary, but it's not really worth the time to explore deeply. Put it in, and enjoy life.

Now, my biggest complaint (and the most serious) I suspect is at least mostly the fault of my hardware rather than anything about SoundJuicer or Gstreamer, which is that I've found that some of the tracks thus created have some serious audio glitches; most of them are small, but a few tracks are basically unlistenable. Might be fully the fault of Gstreamer, but I choose right now to say it's because of a combination of imperfect disks, aging optical drive, low RAM, and cosmic rays -- using SoundJuicer on other machines convinces me that SJ itself is quite competent.

Today, from a spammer with the handle (if not the name) "Zamri Ibrah," I got some spam that starts like this:

"Dear Colleague, We are currently handling collection matters in your jurisdiction on behalf of our clients and it gives us immerse pleasure to engage your professional services being a local attorney to handle this matter."

I wonder if they somehow got my name from a list of (say) law school graduates, or from the state bar association, or what. Or, as I suspect is more likely, it's just random shotgun spam that happens to have a profession as a hook. Pretty clever, actually; more people are ruled out (if they're not in that profession), but those who are may actually think that it's directed towards them.

Breakfast started last night: I was too hungry to sleep, even after a nice dinner (bok choi, 2 corn tortillas w/ 1 oz cheese, fruit salad, one scoop ice cream, OJ, pineapple juice), so I ate the rest of the danish I'd meant to have for breakfast. But it was after midnight, so I had it "in the morning." Probably ... oh, not sure. 300 cals?

Actual breakfast-time breakfast:
- 8 or 10 prunes (120 cals, maybe)
- bunch of cherries
- lime yogurt (90 cals)
- one matzoh (110 cals)
- one ounce of cheddar (110 cals)
- water

And while it was more than I meant to eat, yesterday I did ambulate 4+ miles, as follows:
- 1 mile walking
- 2 miles alternating 500m and then 300m. (That is, for less unit mixing, 5/16 of a mile running, then 3/16 walking, then repeat, repeat, etc.)
- 1 mile walking
- a bit more, to the house of some friends, where I accepted w/ glee one bite of Chicago-style pizza, from a place called the Wallingford Pizza House. Quite good!

Next meal will probably be a mix of broccoli and the remaining bok choi, plus tortillas (maybe just one + half-oz cheese, which makes 100 cals), plus cherries. Might add some black coffee, too.

I had two interesting, detailed dreams today! And then promptly forgot them. So instead, there's this one of the other day, which is clearly inspired by things like reading David Friedman:

I dreamed that I visited a friend at an apartment building in a big U.S. city. (NYC? Chicago?) The apt bldg had a sort of bouncer / security guard, who charged a fee to visitors as they left, for no visible reasons, other than that he was slightly intimidating.

Mostly because I didn't feel like causing trouble for my friend, I was resigned to paying the not-quite-thug his nine dollars, even though I resented it and knew it was just petty extortion. It was a sort of compromise that the residents had reached, which was considered normal: the guy really did exert an influence against intruders, but he constantly squeezed what he could from innocents, too.

However, when I gave him a 20-dollar bill, he handed me back only $1 in change. I protested; he denied that I'd paid him with a $20. So, we got in a fight, and I prevailed. I *should* have tried to get back my whole $20, or other people's money and given it back to them as well, but a) I had in fact agreed to pay the $9 initially, even if that was dumb and b) only on reflection (within the dream) did the larger unfairness sink in; mostly I was mad because he'd just baldly ripped me off, and I wanted to get my correct change back. So, once I had my $11 back, I was content to stop, and pleased that I had won.

Breakfast:
(reheated) rolled-grain cereal, cooked w/ a bit of soup stock in addition to the water, 160 cals
1 boiled egg, 75 cals
1/4 cup black beans 50 cals
6 oz pineapple juice (@18cal/oz) + 1 oz ginger ale (10 cal - can this be right? That's what Canada Dry says ...) over ice. (so, eh, maybe 120 cals)
I'm going to round it (slightly) down to 400 cals.

I think this would be a good breakfast before a day of hard labor. Not greasy, and the rolled grain cereal is like a time-release capsule. The beans improve the texture / contrast, too.

Lunch, likely will be bok choi steamed w/ vingar / soy, and a corn-tortilla quesedilla, along w/ the remaining black beans (perhaps a tablespoon) mixed w/ a bit of feta, and a small fruit salad consisting of pineapple and strawberry, probably half a banana, too. Pineapple (canned) is cheap, tasty, and much lower in calories than I realized -- makes a good sort of pickle on the side of savory items, too. I am not about to start putting it on cottage cheese, though.

EDIT: Indeed! Bok choi, brie quesedilla w/ a bit of red onion, fruit salad (w/ one scoop of coconut ice cream), 2 oz of pineapple juice, water.

One benefit of all this nonsense: My semi-boring, semi-varied diet food plan I think is saving me money on food ;) The staples of my (loose) regime are:

Beans: cheap, whether canned or dry, but canned is way easier
Cheese (expensive, but I'm eating only small amounts)
Broccoli, other greens: quite cheap
Cottage cheese (as opposed to actual cheese)
Water
Fruit juice (cheap because in small quantities)
Tortillas
Hot cereal
Eggs
Fruit (cheapish now because it's summer, but by flowing w/ sales, not so bad the year around)
Theoretically, rice is on this list -- I even just bought some brown rice -- but I've not yet gotten around to cleaning my rice cooker. I hope it is salvageable.

No meat (incl. fish) for the stuff that's at-home ingredients, though when I go out I'm not an abstainer on this front. Eggs and dairy are obviously OK, though.

Breakfast:

Yogurt, 90 cal
Banana, eh, 100(?) cal
Carrots, perhaps 50 cal
Cheese, small & thin slice, guesstimate 75 cal
Green tea, ZERO
Water, ZERO

== 315 or so

2d Breakfast (about to make)
Quesedilla (200 cal, givertake)
Orange - avg / small -- first online random source says @ 35 cals
Cottage cheese (40 cals)
Bit of broccoli, microsteamed, 1 tsp butter (100?)
Green Tea
Water

That's 375 or so cals. Will have a few raisins, perhaps one 50-cal cookie along with.

Last night, fantastic sushi at Mashiko, one of my favorite places. As I've said before and said again to my dining companions, I don't think I have the capability to comprehend / appreciate differences in quality beyond a certain point, and I think Mashiko is a good marker of that beyond which all is for me, for practical purposes, perfect. Not sure how many calories, and don't care -- this was a planned off-course excursion. (However, I was slightly greedy, and should have ordered one less item. It's all so good, it seems a shame not to just order like the Monty Python diner whose request for one wafer-thin mint goes awry.)

My order:
Lemonade (tuna, avacado, with lemon)
Wolf Eel (this is nearly a dessert)
3 handrolls ("no mayo") -- fantastic
Alaska (salmon, cream cheese)
Also had some edomame, rice crackers, pickled vegetables, one bite of Purple People Eater (vegan).

Drank only water.

For dessert, at home, 1 scoop ice cream, 5 frozen cherries.

Exercise (later today) planned to be 45-60 minutes of walking, probably without dog. Walking w/ dog is rarely aerobic, because there's a stop every 30 seconds.

Last meal of the day was the largest, as is my preference. It's a lot easier to sleep when I'm only a bit hungry rather than extremely hungry.

- 1 quesedilla: (2 small corn tortillas,* 1 ounce cheddar, bits of red onion) @ 200 cals
- broccoli: microsteamed, w/ 1 teaspoon butter, vinegar: @ 100(?) cals
- 1/2 cup cottage cheese @ 80 cals
- 6 oz carrots @ 70 cals
- 10 oz OJ, 8 oz tea, water, ice @ 150 cals
- small scoop ice cream + banana + 12 cherries: @ 200(?) cals

= around 800 cals in total

The three previous meals of the day were all smaller, snacks were a few rice crackers @ 45cals, one banana, and carrots, and one even-smaller scoop of ice cream; the all-day total I guesstimate was just about 2000 cals. Perhaps even slightly more, but since my current system is still "about half what I'd like to eat" that's at least not a cardinal sin.

Also, went running / walking, total of 5 miles. The first three miles were alternating my own uniquely slow jog 400m and even slower walk for 400m. 6 of each = 3 miles (and I had one extra 100m run at the end of the last running phase). Except for that 100m, the last 2 miles were all walking. The pain of this locomotion was mitigated by the sounds of: Sam Spade, Private Eye (a fairly weak episode, sort of an April Fool's Day feel to it), New Order, Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter) and the scintillating wit of Mike Munger and Russ Roberts discussing the business logic of car dealerships. Interesting stuff! See econtalk.org, as I often recommend.

Left hip hurt after a while, both knees were a bit sore (not screaming, though), and calves as well as thighs felt pretty abused. But, according to the health freaks, that's awesome! I need to do some more biking to round out the pain -- pushups, too.

* I used to wonder how anyone could eat corn tortillas -- they seemed some mix of dry, rubbery, granular, and bitter. However, as my friend Paula demonstrated, when they are heated over an open flame, and browned a bit, they take on a totally different character. The smell is like popcorn. I'll take an unheated flour tortilla over an unheated corn one, but if there's a gas stove available, corn wins by a landslide.

So I'm now a few days into the eating-less plan, and about a month into the slightly-more-exercise plan. Results on weight, so far, approximately zero. (I need to get a more accurate, friendlier scale!)

However, it's no doubt good to eat healthier even at the same weight, good to increase however trivially my ability to run 1/4 mile without collapsing on the track, etc.

Breakfast:
2 corn tortillas, toasted on the stove - 80 cal
something near an ounce of cheddar cheese - 100 cal
1/4 cup cottage cheese - 40 cal
1/4 cup black beans - 50 cal
approx 6 oz OJ - 100 cal
1 boiled egg - 75 cal

If I'm counting that right, it totals 445

Yogurt: Rather than the 90cal "lite" ones (with the distrusted artificial sweeteners) that I bought this week, I'm about to eat a 220 cal blueberry house-brand yogurt, fruit on the bottom.

Really, that was part of breakfast, so I'll say bfast total is 665, or (I probably had an extra calorie somewhere) 666.

Note: it's amazing how many sites there are w/ calorie information, diet tips, etc. Googling for "calories in $food-type" is illuminating.

Interesting stuff learned this week re: food, etc:

- tortillas are more calories apiece (40+) than I realized, even nice corn ones w/ no lard.
- cottage cheese, the low-fat (or is it fat-free?) kind is only 80 cal per half-cup, not so bad.
- Unless I've misread a label, actual butter and peanut butter have a similar calorie count per unit of volume (100/tablespoon) -- will have to double check this. I can't imagine eating a sandwich made w/ as much butter as I would use peanut better.
- Canadian 5bX system looks interesting, a no-equipment, graduated exercise program for the Canadian military, no longer the official standard but widely known about.

Also, started (again) to read The Hacker's Diet. "Again," because I've on at least one prior occasion started the book (reading as PDF), enjoyed it -- All instructional books should be so well-written! -- then set it aside to finish later. Why? The usual -- distraction of some kind. However, I'm now further in than last time, and again enjoying it. The basic idea / approach of it, as I understand from what I have read, and from the Wikipedia entry, matches my own intent.

20090603 - nap dream

Dreamed I was living in a place what seemed to skip between Austin and a N. California coastal town.

Part of the time I was traveling w/ dad, who was his usual accidentally infuriating obstinate self, causing arguments which I then stupidly fell into.

Happily, this part slipped away, and I was hanging out w/ a girl of ambiguous ethnicity / background, who reminded me by turns of M.D, M.B, P., MLM, and others beside; we were years-long friends -- she had either worked at the Texan or just knew a lot of people who had, and more recently than I did. Black or dark-brown hair (slightly curly) of shoulder length, short and petite but not skinny. I was driving around town w/ her, having lots of fun, and slowly realizing that I found her somewhat attractive (Duh). In the dream, her name was obvious and never left my head; on waking up, I can't even recall except to rule certain ones out. Two syllables, though. Sounds like ... I dunno. I will arbitrarily go with "Sonja" as diplomatically adequate, since I don't know closely many Sonjas, and none on whom I have a crush.

In part of the dream, we were driving around the "Austin" part of the geography; she was driving while I read the Statesman (something I hardly ever did while I was in Austin), and I noticed a familiar name, an Indian fellow who had worked at the Texan, in the dream world. I mentioned that he had a story on the front page of the Statesman, and she scoffed. "He can't really write! He's just good at manipulating himself into the position where he gets work handed out." The story was pretty weak -- about how a particular professor at UT was in some sort of trouble, or at least controversy, because his textbooks were considered inadequate; it was clear that he hadn't reviewed the materials very well, and students were mad because they'd spent hundreds of dollars on them. It was a professor I had had (again, in the dream world), and I was unsurprised by this, because I recalled that his class's textbooks had all been terrible, and even though the writer had been someone who annoyed me, always seemed a self-important blowhard, I was glad to see a recent Texan staffer with a front-page story.

My attraction to Sonja manifested clearly only when we were accidentally trapped together in a huge machine at a -- do-it-yourself? industrial? -- laundry (how exactly, I don't know). It was basically a giant robot that cleaned clothes in multiple stages, then pressed them flat (two of the walls were set up to move towards each other, pressing liquid out of the clothes. We were inside the machine, and laughing, when we realised we were trapped inside of it until the current cycle was over, but since it was a low-temp machine, we thought it would be easy to pull a lever somewhere and get out. We started to worry only when the press-flat feature became apparent. It started to rain, and I thought, non sequitur-style, that Sonja looked esp. good with her hair wet; she was wearing two dark shirts, layered (a t-shirt, and a sort of thin-strap tank-top), which looked good in the dream.

Inside the dream world, I knew that these machines were actually designed w/ safety in mind, had many failsafes, specially chosen chemicals, etc. I thought that it might be like an elevator, with sensors that would prevent it from closing if it hit an object as massive as a person, but then I noticed a little space perhaps the size of a closet, projecting from the wall we were standing against, and I realized that even if there were *not* sensors, that area of the wall was recessed (it faced some of the works, rather than the racks of clothing) such that it would never get squashed.

At this point, I manoevered both of us over there in case the motion speeded up and we were trapped by the advancing wet clothes. No smell of detergent; there was some sort of ionizing light administered by a device a bit like a pool robot (Hey, dream logic) that actually killed bacteria, and a combination of water and moving air to refresh the clothing generally. Maybe some other chemical bits applied; I know it was supposed to be very low-pollution and gently on the clothing, though. The advancing walls reached their clothes-squishing minimum, we were hugging tightly in the tiny alcove, and she was crying w/ fear. I felt the fear, too, but abstractly. The danger we were in (even potential) made me realize how much I appreciated this girl and would be heartbroken if she were to have been injured or killed, but I said nothing to her until some hours later, when a conversation turned to rumors of romantic love among various mutual friends, and I blurted out something incriminating (that I had a crush, or something stronger, on her) but also mitigating (that I didn't expect it to be mutual); she reacted with a sudden thoughtfulness, which left me a bit chastened, but glad she didn't instead put up a wall. There was some room left for hope at least.

Later in the dream, Sonja and I were in the California part of the landscape, in a town not far from San Francisco, and nearly as hilly. Famously, it contained the longest stretch (in the region, at least) of "horizontal street-car tunnel space" (if I recall the phrasing correctly) which the local radio station kept talking about with pride. There were some other subway / street-car tunnels nearby, but they used either steeply ramped segments at either end (to clear existing structures' foundations) or an elevator arrangement, where each train / car was lowered straight down before moving forward on the underground tracks. With this long stretch, the entrance was partway up a hill, so that the streetcar climbed only part of the hill before entering the tunnel, and exited at a similar point on the other side. Previously, there had been several of these straight-shot, mid-hill tunnels, but now most of them had been converted to the elevator ones, in order to accomodate more and deeper construction on the town's hills. Bicycle riders were esp. fond of this tunnel, because it had a nice path through, was protected from weather, and was pleasantly cooler than the summer temps (in the '80s).

Though I was interested in walking through the tunnel, didn't get a chance to. (This was allowed for a small fee, or with a sort of badge that locals could buy, rather like a system of zoned parking.) We met a bicyclist, a guy who looked in his late 50s or perhaps 60s, who was resting with his bike beside him on a small park-like stretch of grass nearby, and I asked him about it. "Oh, it's cheap for me, even though I'm not a resident," he told me. "I just pay the actual cost, which is very low, because I'm a citizen." "A citizen of ..." "Of California." Turns out, state residents had a special deal, and he might have had a senior citizens discount, too. The money I think went partly to maintaining the historic tunnel, but mostly to insurance. (Also, this conversation is how I know that part of the dream was definitely in California.)

On the same evening we met the bicyclist, I had dinner w/ Sonja and her parents, who were both visiting town. Her father insisted on paying, even though I had plenty of money for the pleasant al fresco place we picked. He was more Irish looking than I had expected from her own coloration. Pleasant dinner, though I don't remember what we had.

That's all I can recall ...

I'm not the first to notice it, but for the record: all those required nutritional labels on foods (about which I have mixed feelings, rather than straight opposition) are annoyingly inconsistent in their units.

Ice cream: cups (suprisingly, only 300 cals / cup for the one I just had a bit of)
Vingar: oz
Others: grams
Chocolate chips: chips

It's hard to measure ice cream in cups without melting it a fair amount, and I couldn't find a kitchen scale, so I guesstimate I just had 3 ounces, from the cup measure I attempted to squash it in ;) That makes 100 calories, which fits easily into my half-as-much-food plan.

I don't like how big these labels are, nor that there isn't (say) a less obtrusive labeling requirement, in the mode of TinyURL-generated web addresses -- so the info would be available but not stealing quite so much space, unless the maker *wanted* it to (which could only mean that the maker thought that the customers wanted it). But, eh, it truly is a weights-and-measures measure.

I wonder about things like farm-stand jelly, and apples bought at market ... they don't have such labels. Do you think they should? Do you think that current U.S. labeling laws overstep, or are generally misconfigured?

I finally prepared some of the rolled-grain cereal I bought a few weeks ago -- oats, millet, barley, birdseed, hayseed, whateverseeds they could find around the petfood factory. Not too bad, but 12 minutes of cooking / stirring is an annoyance. Wonder how it would do w/ the thermos-cooking method.

160cals for a 1/3 cup serving (they say to make 2 at once; I think I will switch to 4, though, to cut down cooking hassle); I added 1/2 tbsp of butter (50 cals) to the 2-serving portion, making it 185 cals per serving-w-butter.

Lunch will be at 4 pm
3 small toasts (guessing equiv to one real piece of toast -- rounding up to 100 cals)
w/ cream cheese (one tablespoon) 70 cals
2 eggs @ 75 = 150 cals
celery
320 cals

Dinner will be yesterday's planned dinner (unless I saw it for lunch), namely:

Amy's frozen vegan burrito: 250 calories (dressed up w one thin slice of cheese, cilantro, red onion ... might have added another 50 calories)
One boiled egg: 75 calories
5 oz OJ: 75 cals
Water
totaling approx 450 cals.

My sister in law doubts that my ordinary intake is anything near 4,000 cal, but ... eating something near (I think less) than half of what I would like to eat (and generally *would* eat), it's quite close to 2,000 cal / day. Certainly not *every* day has been a 4k day -- some no doubt are under 2k, and some (like eating buffet at the Rio ;)) probably 6 or 8k, maybe even more than that.

Right now, it's a bit of a novelty to eat so little, and taking notes like this helps me list some common calorie values, etc.

I hereby absolve myself in advance of any sin if they drop off to mere bullet points, or fade out altogether, so long as it's not out of shame at eating an unscheduled buffet or going too long w/ no exercise.