1/19/13 instagram success!

When you give a girl an iPhone, chances are she'll want to take a picture.

And if she takes a picture, chances are she'll want to filter it in Instagram.

And if she tries to filter it in Instagram, chances are something will go wrong and she'll obsessively deconstruct the app in order to figure it out.

And chances are, once that happens, she will have to blog about her triumph.

True story...unlike that one about giving a mouse a cookie.

1-18-13 Happy Birthday A.A. Milne

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

1-18-13 Enter the IPhone

Samantha started the push last month. We were out of our contract and going month to month, which qualified us for a lot of perks if we recommitted to Verizon, including four free IPhone 4s. I ignored. She persisted. And then she took the fight to Bob, who is much more of a sucker. 

Yesterday, I had lunch with Tanya, while Sam came home with Erin. They had gone back to school when I returned. A few things to note:

1. I always lock the front door by the dead bolt. 
2. This is the one day in the entire school year that I haven't taken Sam back to school after lunch myself.
3. Sam, who has a key and could turn around the lock the deadbolt, chose instead to flip the door knob lock as she left.
4. Katy barks and whines and growls like crazy when the doorbell rings and/or anyone is at the front door that she doesn't know.
5. She doesn't know the FedEx guy.
6. You have to sign for IPhones from the FedEx guy. 

So I run downstairs in my socks to answer the doorbell, push Katy out of the way, step out on the porch, and close the door behind me to sign for the phones. 

It is only then that I realize Sam has just locked me out of the house. I'm not taking the fall for this time, no sir.

The FedEx guy is trying not to laugh and asks if he can help (assuming that would entail using his cell phone, since the four I am holding the box aren't very useful.) 

I tell him the back door is open and I'll just get in that way and proceed to walk over very sharp, pointy rocks in my socks to get there, thinking, "Did Sam lock the backdoor when she left?" 

Thus the IPhone memorably arrived at the Mask house.

There were four identical phones in the box, but each was already assigned to our respective numbers. Wouldn't you think there would be some way to tell which phone was which number? There wasn't. So I opened one and thought I'd get it going and get it to tell me which number it was. Nope. 

You could tell Sam was hot for these, since she got home and immediately went to work on activating the one I had opened and not figured out. She got further than I did, to discover that I had hit the one in four shot I had of blindly picking my own phone. I should've headed to the grocery store for lotto numbers at that point.

Bob got home and called Verizon and got past the "We're sorry. There was a problem activating your phone." His set up right away. Then Sam took the phone to get talked through her set-up and, sure enough, Miss Electricaltoxicity had problems. But after a few more tries, we were in business. 

At which point, Sam downloaded DrawSomething onto my phone, and we started playing. Who needs to mess with contacts and settings and email when you can draw the word Gangham for your daughter to guess?

First IPhone picture taken is, fittingly, of the IPhones.

1-17-13

This, strangely more than any piece of music, makes me miss playing the oboe every time I hear the opening.

1-16-13 Exhaustion of Misinformation

It's so disheartening to see the spreading of false information. The current cause du jour, of course is the debate on gun control.

This week, two different friends posted these pictures:

I'm not going to get into the insanity of comparing Hitler to O'Bama. It's not worth a single brain cell. But if you're going to call the president a socialist AND a fascist, you should probably review what those terms actually mean and pick one. 

The problem I have with this is . . .  HITLER NEVER BANNED GUNS IN NAZI GERMANY. 

The gun registration laws were in effect in 1928, years before his rise to power, and, in fact, these laws were created to try and avoid the problem of a Hitler taking over the very precarious, nascent democracy of Germany after the first World War. They imagined a world in which a Hitler would take over by force, not one where propaganda and hatred would sway the hearts of the population. Silly them.

But this doesn't stop the propaganda machine today from trying to make a case that Hitler's power rested on gun control. Little things like actual evidence cannot be allowed to get in the way. When I tried to point out that this was a false argument, do you know what the replies consisted of? Boiled down: "Uh-uh! It's TRUE!!!!" with multiple exclamation points, each one designed to put me in my place.

Why wouldn't you, if you were trying to mount an argument against a policy find it useful not to engage in false claims that can be shot down in an instant? Don't you want to base your opinion on something a little bit stronger?

And today, Marianne Williamson posts what was intended to be a counter-attack on the power of the NRA  entitled, The Audacity to Wield Power and rests her entire argument on a quote by Abraham Lincoln that he never said. 

Gah!!!!!!

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No, but we do enact stricter blood alcohol limits, raise the drinking age, ramp up enforcement penalties, charge bartenders for serving drunks, and launch huge public awareness campaigns to stigmatize the dangerous behavior in question, and we do all those things because it might just help bring drunk driving rates down, I don't know, by two thirds in a few decades.

1-15-13 We are not eating food any more.

"We are not eating food any more. We are eating food-like products." ~Hungry for Change

This sentence in particular caught my attention because it's been something I've started paying more attention to. (See the video below to understand more.)

These past two weeks I've made a concerted effort to eat only fresh, simple food. And even then, I know that there are probably too many pesticides and antibiotics used in the production of my turkey, chicken, fruit, veggies, and eggs, even when I buy organic whenever I can. 

But it is a huge change from my willful ignorance the amount of processed foods I was consuming on a daily basis. 

My goal is to use only single ingredients in as many of my meals as possible. If' it's in a package, it needs to read "Oats" on the ingredient list and nothing more. No fillers, or preservatives, or multi-syllabic chemical compounds need apply. Did you know, just because a package reads "No MSG" it could still have it under a different name? Toxicity, be gone.

Yesterday as a sample:
Breakfast: Oats cooked with water, and a handful of blueberries, almonds, and a teaspoon of raw brown sugar tossed in. 

Lunch: (I posted a picture of this one earlier this week) grilled chicken breast, fresh cilantro, black beans, sweet red pepper, lime, cherry tomatoes, and salsa (which has too many ingredients. Need to make my own fresh, but one step at a time.)

Snack: shelled pistachios. I love that I can play with my snack, and studies have shown people tend to unthinkingly eat 40% more nuts in a sitting when they do not have to shell the nuts they are consuming.

Dinner: Taco soup made with ground turkey, black, pinto, and kidney beans, salsa, garlic, cumin, onion, chili seasoning, and -- FAIL -- a package of Mexican rice that I've been told by the family is essential for good soup. I let it settle to the bottom and avoided it, but am plotting to change their minds about this soon. 

All I've been drinking is water, except for the one glass of diet coke I tried yesterday that made me feel bloated and gross within an hour and it made me want cookies something fierce. I've gone from 4 liters of that poison a week to 8 ounces, and after last night's experiment, the last of the bottle is going down the drain. I can't begin to innumerate the number of dangers diet soda poses to your health and, if you're as much in denial as I have been, you don't want to know.

It is nearly impossible to avoid high fructose corn syrup in any processed food. (click to enlarge)

And don't even get me started on milk. I've switch to Almond milk. One more infographic to overwhelm you with. Let me ask you, if the average cow produced 9700 lbs of milk in 1970, and the average today is 19,000 lbs, what do you think is fueling that rise? Whatever it is, you're drinking it.

Even with a not-completely-clean menu, it is amazing how much better I feel, in just two weeks. I've been eating and drinking badly for decades and within half a month, I can tell a difference. I sleep more soundly at night, which my Fitbit data proves, waking far less. I am not tired in the afternoons, wondering if I'll be able to keep my eyes open another hour. I have very few cravings.  I am losing weight, with only minimal cardio work so far, although more is on the horizon in next week's "step it up gradually" plan.

And I am not hungry.

Although I am counting calories, I have found myself more motivated and intrigued by counting ingredients. 

It's only a start. But it is a start.

  Seriously. It's astounding.

1-13-13 Katy and the Dryer

Downloading things off of the phone today and I'd forgotten about this one.

Katy loves the dryer. Every time it comes on, this is what you get.