Category: Life

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We’ve got some construction going on at the office, and for the duration, we’ve turned off the alarm on one of the emergency exits to make it easier for the contractors to get in and out of the area where they’re working. This exit happens to be right by my desk, making it very convenient anytime I need to leave, be it for the bathroom, for lunch, or to go home at the end of the day.

The problem is, I can just see myself forgetting after it’s all done and we turn the alarm back on. Go to lunch, set off the fire alarm. Not a good idea.

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(If you couldn’t tell from the title, this is gonna be a rant.)

When I was in college, I was involved with a creative writing club / literary discussion group called the Literary Guild at UCI. I built a website to post club information and collect our writing projects, and we set up a listserv for online discussion and collaboration.

After a while we started getting complaints from people about how they never received their books, or they were sick of getting junk mail from us, etc. and it became pretty clear they were complaining about the Literary Guild Book Club, which at the time didn’t have a website.

Now think: You’ve signed up with a company that lets you order books from a catalog. The website you find is all about college students and weekly meetings on campus. No mention of catalogs, or ordering books, or even customer service (oops, I mean “customer care”). Don’t you think you might wonder if maybe, just maybe this wasn’t the same group of people?

So we put up a note on the home page stating “We are NOT affiliated with the book club!” Over time it became bold, and then red, and when we noticed the “other” Literary Guild had set up a home page we added a link, and occasionally people would still send us their complaints.

Fast forward to today. Continue reading →

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3 pounds gone so far. Yay me!

I’m having way too much fun with this, I think. One of the impromptu group leaders is into eating small amounts of high-point foods (think half a can of full-calorie soup, or a very small serving of lasagna) along with large amounts of the boring kinds of point-less veggies. Another one eats salad all day and supplements it with frozen entrees at mealtimes. And here I am having a portabello sandwich with roasted peppers and goat cheese. (Yeah, it was 7 points, but if my low-point bread hadn’t gone moldy–ONE DAY after buying it–it would only have been 5.)

Hawaii is going to be a challenge, but it’s better than it could be. I’ll be in the land of tropical fruit, after all, and it’s early enough in the plan that there shouldn’t be any willpower issues or getting bored with things. I am NOT going to lose the ground I’ve gained….er, regain the ground I’ve lost….whatever. I wonder if my magic mug will travel well.

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The closer the Hawaii week looms in my schedule, the gladder I am that it’s almost here. The next two days in my war-hawk-populated workplace are going to be bad enough. If there weren’t going to be auditors in the place forcing us to behave, I would feel like handcuffing myself to my chair to keep from throwing down with the large woman across the aisle. I’m making myself take half-hour lunches so that I’m not in the vicinity of the TV when people are bitching about the fact that some people have opinions that don’t match theirs and are allowed to express them. I’ll have to post instead of talking as this thing drags on, I guess. It’s just unnerving when going to choir seems like it’ll be less stressful than surviving a day at work.

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The materials from Weight Watchers had an interesting line near the end: “You’ll be amazed at what you learn about yourself when it comes to losing weight.” Well, they might be exaggerating a bit, but there’s at least a grain of truth in it. Looking over my food logs for the last two weeks, I have learned something.

I eat like a hobbit.

Seriously. I have breakfast before I go to work, which usually means I eat around 7 am. By 10, I’m starving, so I have a snack. This tends to be almost as much food as I had for breakfast. If I have lunch at 12:30, like my official schedule says, then no matter how much I eat, I’m ravenous by 5, sometimes even as early as 3. The one exception to this is if I indulge in food that’s really bad, like greasy-spoon Chinese food or a meatball and cheese sandwich. It does me no good to have a snack when I get hungry in the afternoon–it might as well bypass my stomach completely, for all the effect it has. It has to be a full dinner or my body doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve been fed. And once I get that, I’m fine the rest of the night.

So the main thing I have to watch out for is super-sizing my second breakfast. As long as no PHF’s throw chili fries at me, I think that can be done.

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I had an email conversation with someone over the last two days, which, in another industry, might have gone something like this:

Customer: “My light won’t turn on.”

Me: “Make sure it’s plugged in.”

Customer: “It still desn’t work.”

Me: “Try changing the bulb.”

Customer: “No, it still doesn’t work.”

…

Customer: “Hey, I plugged it in, and it worked!”

I have to wonder: did this person misread my advice as “make sure it’s unplugged?” Did he simply ignore it? Did he think it meant “check to see whether it’s plugged in, but don’t change the situation one way or the other?”

Why do you call up tech support if you aren’t willing to follow the directions we give you?

The worst part is, he probably thinks he solved it himself and we didn’t help at all.

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Next time salsa marked as “mild” beckons from the shelf at Whole Foods, check to see whether it’s made by a company specializing in vegetarian products. If so, do not buy it thinking the heat level is the same as mainstream food marked as “mild.”

I don’t know what it is with vegetarians and hot peppers, but from what I’ve seen, 95% of people who are vegetarians seem to be unable to eat anything savory that’s not doused liberally with their favorite El Scorcho. Some people have suggested that it’s because vegetarian food has no flavor in and of itself, which I know to be complete bull. (No pun intended.) I order vegetarian food from restaurants and pack it in my lunch for the same reason that I order dishes containing meat–because it tastes good. But I’ve heard that a good number of vegetarians started out finding the taste of meat to be disgusting, so maybe their taste buds are just different. How anybody’s mouth could transmit signals of anything other than pain when chewing on capsaicin-loaded food is a mystery to me, but hey, whatever floats your boat. Just so long as people with high pepper tolerance realize that not everybody floats on nuclear-strength Tapatio.

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