The Speckled Jelly Egg Diet

Did you know speckled jelly eggs have no fat? It's true, according to the packaging anyway, and considering that they are basically gummy dense marshmallows with a hardened sugar shell they'd better not have any fat. They also have 150 Calories per 13 eggs, so if you eat all 8 servings that come in one bag, you'd still get 1200 Calories from your snack, but no fat. You'd also probably get a few cavities in your premolars, since they stick a lot worse than marshmallows. Considering that over the past few days I have mostly just eaten speckled jelly eggs, bacon, and a few turkey sandwiches, it looks like I might be well on my way to being a new spokesperson for this new lowfat diet. Vitamin B-complex from the turkey sandwiches, plus a little vitamin E. ( I still am eating the Good Bread with all the nuts and extra grains in it, and turkey has some vitamin E.) Vitamin A from the turkey and bacon, and the bread. Not much vitamin C, but a supplement should work for that. Vitamin D comes from the sun, and the reaction that its light initiates in my skin, assuming I get any sun, of course, but I have been outside easily enough over the past few days to gather enough vitamin D for the week. There's at least some iron in the bread, and maybe a trace of iron, plus anti-oxidants in my dark coffee.
At this rate the government may have a point about that any reasonably caloric diet is bound to be a sufficient source of nutrients by their standards.

Small Worlds and Piriformis muscles

I always love days when something interesting happens, especially lately. I actually made it all the way down to Boulder to see a possible new apartment in Southeast Boulder. I used to think commuting between Longmont and Boulder was intolerably slow and inconvenient, before Washington, but I got used to their ideas of commuting, I guess. There commutes of 15 miles are always long, with all the hills, weird curvy streets and lakes that slow down traffic and lengthen actual trip distances. I was commuting a distance that ought to have been just 12 miles for a while, and yet with a ridge in the way the buses took a 21 mile route instead, and took almost 2 hours to do so. But I walk at about 4 miles per hour, so it would still have taken longer just to walk, unfortunately. After all that, taking the Bolt into Boulder is so easy and fast! However, it took just $1.25 to get me to work transferring through two counties in Washington, and $2.25 to take a much longer trip to the other side of the lower end of Lake Washington. Here it takes $3 just to get to Boulder. Very annoying.

Anyway, I liked the place I went to see, and instead of meeting complete strangers, I met up with two ladies I already knew from some of my classes at CU. The only one I didn't already know is the one who is looking for a subtenant for her room. I'm hoping that works out.

Unfortunately between my very lumpy mattress and all the walking I have done all of a sudden this week I seem to have given myself a case of pipiformis syndrome, which feels a whole lot like I tore a small muscle in my butt. I only really notice it if I lean forward while my legs are more or less straight, so the act of sitting hurts, but once I am seated I feel fine. If I am putting weight on that side while moving through that conformation I lose feeling and motor control in the back of that leg, so it is definitely a pinched nerve. So I am rebuilding my mattress yet again, and stretching, and maybe I have learned my lesson about not getting so sedentary again in the future. Maybe. After all, if you have similar aches and pains in a leg or your back, there are ways to treat it with wrappings and massage, but asking someone to massage your butt is just ... Ok, I can see how that might be a great excuse to get a cute guy to become a much more intimate acquaintance, but if you have to have an injury in your butt before a guy is willing to touch your butt, either he's gay, or he's really not interested.

Connectivity

It is funny how easily people let themselves be isolated from even those they care about, let alone the rest of the world. Every day or so we are bombarded with messages about making the most of life, and concentrating on the people that matter to you before worrying about material things or status, yet we rarely as a society think anything of the idea that one could be busy and thus not talk to best friends, children and spouses for weeks, or longer. What do we do instead of keeping in touch with the people in our lives?

Many people keep hobbies that are fairly isolating, by habit if not by necessity. Reading, watching TV, scrapbooking, painting, and just about every other hobby people do alone can also become a shared activity with at least one person without losing anything of the pleasures of that hobby. Even the most introverted quiet person can share something of their life with friends, if only by sharing great books, since the books a friend recommends to you are always a reflection of that friend. Email makes it even easier to keep connected, since an email can be written in minutes or less and sent off as soon as it is written, and costs virtually nothing, yet few people really make an effort to write to friends they haven't heard from in a while, let alone keep regular correspondences.

Alvin Toffler, in his book FutureShock, makes an argument for friends and acquaintances being more temporary in the modern era, and does little towards discussing the necessity of this. At the time, of course, when he was writing, email didn't exist yet, but literature is full of letters from people who kept regular correspondence across oceans well before motorized travel was possible. expectation is as much a part of the dynamics of friendship as technology and circumstances, and intention trumps all three. If someone really intends to keep a friendship going, there is a much greater chance it will last, and if both parties have this intention, they are sure to remain friends for life, no matter what distances separate them. Perhaps our society is not dominated so much by technology and innovation as by laziness. The same lazy habits that lend themselves towards buying automated appliances for everything so we can sit around watching TV and getting fatter may easily be behind our ready acceptance of lost connections and bad relationships.