Afternoon, had 2 small bananas, a few hours apart. By small, I mean these were bananas that had been shrunk to the size of standard-issue popsicles, recognizable by color and taste, but with a total volume of no more than half of a normal banana. Midget bananas. A random website tells me that bananas of that stature are about 75 cals, so, 150 together.

Dinner: Ethopian -- split w/ all the currently in-seattle housemates Ethiopian dinner at Queen of Sheeba, a short walk from the house. 2 veggie platters (on one big platter, but hopefully the quantities work out correctly) and one extra mound of Spinach (which cost nearly as much as a veggie platter). To drink, water. How many calories? Not sure -- there's lots of butter in most of it, I think, but then the spinach is pretty low-cal, and I did eat about half of what I would have liked to, so it fits in the plan.

I will offer a wild guess of 1000 calories on that meal. Quite a bit, anyhow!

HOWEVER, the hitch is that this idea was floated just as I finished making my putative first dinner, which was to have consisted of:

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.

Remember, though, that's for tomorrow, not part of today.

I decided to join for the Ethiopian, though, and relegated the above mini-feast to late-night food, but have now decided to make that either breakfast or lunch tomorrow instead, made my last food of the day instead:
- one miniature piece (3" longways) of toast w/ garlic and less than a teaspoon of cream cheese (guessing: 100 cals)
- one of today's boiled eggs (the other's still in reserve): 75 cals
- 5 oz OJ: 75 cals
- water: 0 cals
- celery, less than a tablespoon of cream cheese. Guessing 50 cals, based on 35/tablespoon and rounding up to nearest 50 ...
Total, 300 cals. Not too bad.

Hmm, as lunches go, this might be well below half-rations :) Not as ascetic as a bowl of rice w/ one roach for protein, but it's a fine line between bearable and ridiculous.

Therefore: lunch!

one slice of sourdough toast, w/ a thin spread of cream cheese, some cilantro, and red onion. Delicious. I dunno ... 100 cals, maybe? Can't
be much more than that ...

6 oz Dannon coffee yogurt -- only 160 cals, vs. 220 for the raspberry-on-the-bottom. Coffee yogurt is great; it's too bad prune is no longer a widely available flavor. Yes, yogurt can be made at home, but I happen to like the store-bought kind better so far. But if they have "coffee" (which is pretty weak), why not *espresso*?! Maybe one day I will experiment with making it, in order to get flavors I prefer, but it's the *texture* that turns me off of the homemade stuff generally, not the flavor.

5.5 oz spicy V8 -- tons of sodium, but (amazingly), only 30 calories for the can. I consider this a soup, not a beverage :) The spiciness / saltiness makes it a lot more stimulating than the regular kind of V8, which I don't much like, unless I've added some herbs and tobasco.

Ice water. Zero cal, nice. I'm sure my caveman / peasant ancestors would be really proud and all. The ice is important -- makes it easier to drink, for me at least, and the more water I drink I suspect the less food needed to do to reach the not-quite-as-hungry stage.

17 regular-sized bittersweet chocolate chips, mixed w/ peanut butter. The chips themselves, about 80 calories. The peanut butter, for about a tsp in total, around 50, so 130 together. (There were exactly 17 left in the bag, and it so happens that Ghirardelli's nutrition information is about 16 chips. Tough noogies.)

Total calore count: 130+160+100+30+0 = 460; quite a feat, IMO. Let's see how many hours it lasts before desperation.

Next meal, planned for around 5 p.m., will include a smaller piece of bread, a boiled egg, some veggies, and some cheese. One more of similar size at 8 or 9. It's hard to get used to going to bed hungry, but that's how it goes. Need to work on eating breakfast; I got some rolled-grain hot cereal which I hope will make this more enticing.

Lunch today, on my about-half-what-I'd-otherwise-eat plan:

- 2 slices sourdough bread (not four); one, rather than both, had a bit of brie, the other had just a bit of butter, plus a sort of cilantro relish I made w/ mortar & pestle (onion, kosher salt, sesame seeds, thin slice of onion)

- about 1/2 cup of pasta salad (basalmic vinaigrette) -- the last of leftovers from dinner Sunday. I hadn't made pasta salad in years, was pleased w/ the outcome. I would enter this one in a contest, in fact: snow peas, and sugar snap peas, bits of orange pepper, cilantro, olive oil, red onion wedges, tomato, feta cheese ... it took much willpower to eat the leftovers over four separate meals rather than all at once. Also, making it even better, some fennel salad bits got mixed in there, which was great.

- 5 or 6 oz. of orange juice, cut with nearly an equal amount of water

- one store yogurt ("dessert") w/ raspberry goo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Next meal on the list: one not-overthick slice cheddar cheese, apple, water, celery, boiled egg (just one), and *one* slice of sourdough. Anticipation builds, the crowd is hushed ...

Funny thing, I'm so used to using the right-click menu in Firefox to select "open in new tab" (in Firefox, it's the 2d choice down on right-clicking) that in playing w/ Chrome, I keep opening links in new *windows* by accident, because in Chrome -- and this is overall probably a smarter choice -- the order is reversed, and the 2d link down is for open in a new window, rather than a new tab.

C'est la vie.

Within the last 24 hours, I have learned that two friends of mine (from totally different domains of life) have been professional video gamers at some point. Unexpected! I wonder if there are more ...

I wrote the basis of the notes below as part of an email to my sister, after encouraging her to listen to the EconTalk interview about the new car market (as mental armor for enduring the process of buying one). Since I end up praising this show to a lot of people, I thought it would be good to reuse / revise relevant portions of that email.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

These might not be to your taste at all -- I know that, on paper, "people talking about economics" sounds to most people about like "watching people play football" or "learning about the varieties of lint" sounds to me. But when I drive, especially, these keep me interested and my brain nicely awake. (Most of them, at least.) And in some circumstances, like learning about forensic investigation, I guess the varieties of lint could actually be interesting.

It is hard to boil these down to just a handful, but the ones that make me smile most so far are these:

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Munger on Recycling:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/07/munger_on_recyc.html

Munger is interesting and funny, and this one is a bit jarring, conditioned as all people under the age of 40 are to the religion of Recycling Ueber Alles ("for Gaia"). Munger has an odd sense of humor that I like. Esp. interesting to me is the stuff about the recycling of glass, green glass especially: pretty easy to do (unlike much recycling), but close to worthless in energy terms.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Boudreaux on Buying local
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/boudreaux_on_th.html

"Is it better to buy local than from a seller based out of town?
Is it better to buy American than to buy foreign products?"

Remember, if it's not grown in your own ZIP code, then it's unworthy! One thing they don't talk about but I think is worth mentioning is that a certain amount of "local pride" (the pleasure of knowing that you're enjoying the taste of the apples you've seen growing, or using products the production of which employs your friends and neighbors) probably compensates somewhat -- quite a bit, in some cases -- for the downsides in price and variety of preferring local products.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Munger on the political economy of public transport:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/07/munger_on_the_p.html

With recent examples from S. America -- Interesting conversation! I *enjoy* certain public transit systems (some are smooth, efficient, reasonably priced at least for visitors), but note there's a difference between *mass* transit in general and "public transit." (Namely: who pays, and how?) About mass transit via bus (more roughly, "anything with tires") vs. anything on rails; buses can reach more places, and their routes can be changed pretty quickly; urban rail systems, at least in this country, generally mean more comfortable seating etc (riding on CalTrain is great), but the build-out is slow, can't help being 106pct political, seem always to go way over budget (counterexamples welcome!), and expanding their service means tearing down a lot of houses, expensively buying a lot of land, disrupting *other* forms of transport for a long time, etc. There are different advantages to them each, too, when it comes to changing the way they're powered: if a rail system is electric, more efficient generation systems (a big switch to nuclear, say) benefit the train system all at once; buses usually have each their own power-generation source, running on gasoline or disel. They can be switched out piecemeal, though, and experiments with efficiency can be done on a much smaller, ongoing scale. (And buses can be electric, too, given big enough batteries, or power-via-overhead lines as in Seattle -- I have no idea about whether any city is using battery powered buses right now, though, or how much sense they make if so.)

I am by no means (none at all) a programmer. Like Derek Zoolander, "Just thinking about it [is] one of the best things I've ever done."

However, I can handle a bit of light HTML, the sort for which a low-end Dell computer might be disdainfully marketed, and so long as I go slowly can tell sed to do some interesting things. This JavaScript tutorial seems to be written for people at my level of intense ignorance, so I am using it to sand away at least the top level of know-nothing-ness, perhaps make a slightly less boring web page. (And hopefully not a disgusting, blinky mess. However, my aesthetics are not everyone's.)

1) dreamed I was living in a house (a townhouse, I think -- could have just been a large apt) with some friends / acquaintances, and moving out of that place into another. The one of us with greatest ownership interest, though none were actually owners per se, had hired a cleaning service to prettify the rooms after we moved out, but hadn't told the rest of us; we were still in the process of packing and removing our stuff when the cleaning crew arrived, anxious to get started in order to get their next assignment. It wasn't world ending, but everyone was a bit unhappy about it.

2) Visiting CTY, middle weekend, dance, with some friends who were also visiting, and new-to-me friends of theirs, incl. a rather attractive one. There must have been some students around, but that was basically just a frame story. Though I do not generally dance, I was persuaded to join a conga line (and made a point to be next to her), which was fun for a few moments, when the whole thing took a comic turn; the conga line slowly morphed into a horah (or some other variety of dancing that I know came from the movie I just saw about orthodox and Hasidic Judaism), and as my dream's "camera" panned back, suddenly everyone in the crowd was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, black pants and glossy black shoes -- and dancing in unison. It was still mixed-sex, but all or most of the men now had on wide-brimmed black hats, bobbing parallel and in synch, and as the dream faded, all the dancers were in silhouette, with the last bit of sunset behind them.

My usual desktop environment is Gnome; I like to have a terminal handy (Yes, even handier than in the menu bar at the top of the screen); with the use of a plug-in, a command to open a terminal can be added to the right-click menu, so I can just click anywhere on the desktop and open one up.

This is one of those things that I always forget about installing, and (related) forget that it's not installed by default -- it should be.

This time, after yet again googling for the answer to the question "How did I get that goldanged Terminal option in my right-click menu, durnit?!", I am supplying the answer here, too, at least the answer as of June 2009. Do this:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal

That's it.

Quite lucid. Dreamed I visited w/ a friend from Temple (S. Cheng), with whom I have in fact fallen out of touch. She had moved to NYC, and I stayed at her apartment. It was mid-summer, and hot. The dream opens as we're leaving to walk someplace else in the city. Near her place, I started to walk into a sort of amphitheater that surrounded a reservoir (perhaps better described as a pond, or perhaps a pool) with a small island in the middle.

However, rather than regularly spaced, wide rows of seats, the interior of the bowl was lined with steps no more than 6 or 8 inches wide, and even these were irregular in their construction, with gaps, narrowings, odd meeting corners. I sort of slipped down the edge of the water, where there was a flat area surrounding the pool itself.

There were plenty of people swimming in the water, which was shallow and appeared clean; some people were also lounging on the small island in the middle (concrete, but with some grass in the center on a little rise). I noticed some people in small inflatable boats, too; they were scooting around under power, but their engines were quite quiet.

I decided to go swimming for a bit -- I wanted to get to the island, which was perhaps 30 feet from the edge where I was. I got in the water (pleasantly cool, not cold), swam over toward it. The pool, and island, were so crowded that I just rested on the edge with my arm on the side, rather than try to stake out a spot on it.

An alarm sounded; no one seemed to panic, but everyone with boats started to move toward one side of the water (the right, from my orientation). The boats were trying to squeeze that direction through rather a lot of people, though, and they ended up bouncing into each other like bumper cars, turning sideways etc. as their riders tried to correct with their small outboard motors. Suddenly I was scared of their propellers, because some of them were swinging their bows within feet of me, and getting closer, while their operators seemed completely unconcerned about it. I wondered if they had some sort of soft / flexible material for propellers, but didn't want to find out by losing a finger.

[fade]

Lucid dreaming 1) Driving a sportcar, early fall, with someone (who? All I can remember is that it was a woman) in the passenger seat. It was fun, but I kept driving faster and faster, with the thought that "Hey. this is a dream, eh?" ... until my brake pedal stopped working, and suddenly my awareness of it as a dream started to fade, and I started to panic, thinking that perhaps belief that it *was* a dream was in fact a defense mechanism to prevent greater mental trauma in a situation was was dangerous and not a dream. I could still steer through, and the road I was on (2-lanes, nicely surfaced, not heavily trafficked; for no reason I can now tease out, I was under the impression that I was heading north) was next to a placid river or canal, and I tested the nature of things by steering left into / onto it; good thing that bet paid off -- I was instantly steering the same car, but as a hovercraft or perhaps just a shallow-draft speedboat, in the same direction, very fun. I still couldn't control the speed, but a) I could turn and b) having established that it was a dream, I was suddenly less worried. Not sure where it was set, but felt a bit like being in Europe.

Lucid dreaming 2) In "my" apartment (in my dream), which had at least three rooms along a narrow hallway adjacent to a larger open area / living room. In my dream, I was in the middle room, noticed that my looking at some small object (pen? paper?), I was able to move it by just imagining its path. In this dream, the sense that I was dreaming was not so strong, though my in-dream self suspected it and wanted to test it out, so I started working on telekinetically moving different, increasingly weighty objects, and then (test of tests) to see if I could look at the night sky and "rearrange" the placement of the stars and moon (quite clear, through a window in the 3d room of the hallway), which, unsurprisingly then or now, did not work. However, I realized within the dream that this did not disprove that I was dreaming; rearranging the stars would have been a giveaway, but being unable to move the stars, while being able to type on a laptop (concentrating on each key, mind-clicking) only proved that my powers didn't extend all that far.

Dream 3) Also fairly lucid, but not as impressive wrt controls: I was at a gas station in PA (could have been NJ by the scenery, but I got to fill my own tank) while on a driving trip there, with the Impreza.

I bumped into Dean Owens there; after both expressing surprise, saying Hi, shaking hands, exchanging pleasantries, we talked about Pennsylvania vs. Washington. "So you're definitely not a PA resident any more?" he asked, and I pointed out that for law school, I wasn't even a PA resident for tuition purposes. We chatted for a bit; he was clearly doing well, was driving a large black SUV with dark-tinted windows.

Dean then took out a small black flashlight (AA sized) with a big magnet mounted on the end, and I heard him say "I wonder if this has any anti-magnetics?" as he wiggled the magnet end of the light around part of the rear passenger door on the opposite side of the car (in relation to where I was standing). I heard the clunk of the lock being disengaged, and saw him smile: "Nope, works fine." I was startled by this, asked him to demonstrate what he'd just done, which he did -- showed how a certain spot on the car door was vulnerable to a strong magnet moved in a tight circle, which caused the electronic lock to retract the lock, and he said that it worked on most new cars. I asked where he got that light / magnet (thinking it was a single tool), and he showed that they were fully separate. "Actually, the magnet came with the key-tools set," he said, bringing out a small set of lockpicks all hinged inside a common frame like a pocketknife. "Made by Andy."

A backstory, inside this dream, was that he and I had had a conversation in the basment of Klein, outside the big classrooms there, about a semi-pro tool-maker he knew named Andy (last name started with K, but it wasn't Koopman), who made custom knives, etc, for people he knew. So I asked "The same guy you told me about before?" He said Yes, brought out another tool, a flattish multitool, something between a leatherman and one of the credit-card sized knives with scissors, etc. It wasn't perfectly rectangular -- had rather an irregular outline -- and the chrome finish was rubbed through in parts, revealing that the base was of a yellower metal. "Had that one for a while," he said.

[fades]

I always forget or put off joining frequent flyer clubs (or, in at least one case, enough information to revive a previously established but little used one); this year, though, I've flown more than usual, and a few months back signed up for American Airlines' version, in order to get some credit for the domestic leg of my trip to Israel.

Bought tickets today to house- and dog-sit in Seattle while the other Alohahausers are at Burning Man, and so decided to take a few minutes to sign up for those airlines' plans, too. (Delta and US Airways -- a two-airline plan worked out to the best price / schedule, and since I went through an online booking program, it was no harder than using just one.)

1) 5:19 called US airlines at 800 428 4322

Talked with "Rawanda"(?) -- a bit clipped, but not actually rude.

Added to account upcoming flights from Seattle to Philly, Philly to Hburg (she didn't say, and I forgot to ask, how many miles that actually means ... should be something like 3000).

Hang up at 5:23 (4 mins total)

-------------

2) 5:27 called Delta at 800-323-2323 (cool number) -- twice flubs on voice recco with only easy options ("representative," "Do something else"), which is disappointing. I think I speak quite clearly on the phone, esp. when I'm trying to, and the gushing apologies of phone robots I could do without.

When I do reach a representative, she's polite, but quite hard to understand (very strong accent). Still, it got done.

However, while US Airways was able to credit my account for the upcoming trip immediately, Delta says the acct won't be active for updates until 10 days after it's established. What sense does that make? Isn't this a line in a database? A few *minutes* I'd understand a lot better. But since the flight's not until late August, that's fine.

Hang up at 5:34 (7 mins)

--------------------

I don't fly often enough that I'll be collecting a free trip any time soon, esp. scattered over various airlines, but perhaps over the next few years it'll end up bringing some minor dividends.

Postscript: Both of these airlines offer the ability to sign up for their programs online; I chose not to, because I wanted to ask about the already-booked flights, and I suspected that their online signup programs would not well account for this possibility, which would mean the (slight) hassle of calling for a human anyhow, so I decided to just *start* with the human.

While I didn't have them anything like every day, I recall having a few nosebleeds as a child, but don't recall any recently (as in, near enough, the last 20 years).

Is there some special reason that kids get nosebleeds, or that adults don't? I seem to recall that it was a common occurrence on the bus, or in classrooms, etc. Some kids were persistent nosebleeders, and for others (like me) it was a once-in-a-while event. But I've not noticed this happening much among adults (in restaurants, airplanes, offices, etc).

As a bad comedian would say, What's *up* with that?!

https://www.buytopsyturvy.com/flare/next

This looks really good to me. I would like delicious homegrown tomatoes all season long.

Tim

Actually, just one potato.

But a smallish red potato (not quite fist-sized) cut into spoon-sized chunks, and nuked in the bowl for a few minutes (took longer than I'd expected -- perhaps 2.5 minutes in total, whereas I'd expected 1.5) with:

- 2 sliced button mushrooms
- a nice fat pat of butter
- 1/2 garlic clove, minced
- splash red vinegar
- splash soy sauce
- sprinkle of Herbes de Provence

makes a very rich sauce; maybe I should have used two potatoes, three potatoes, or. The herbs, butter, liquids, all blend together nicely as they boil. (Cover the dish with a paper towel.) Glad I forgot to sprinkle on any additional salt; even low-salt soy sauce has plenty. Butter + vinegar + soy, yum. If I were making something similar on the stove instead of in the bowl as a quick tide-over, I might have added some red cooking wine, too. Also would have been good with some kale or similar green -- this would make a nice wintertime snack after playing in the snow, too.