Texts are like Cows

I kind of hate text messages.  Do you kind of hate text messages?

Let me tell you why I feel so. 

But before I do that, I may as well say what they're good for.  Text messages are great for relaying one small bit of info, such as, "The dog has been fed", or, "Your house just burned down."  Or asking a simple question, like, "Can I eat your last doughnut?"  That's probably easier than making a phone call, right?  And obviously texts are better when no noise is allowed, such as during a dance recital.

Text messages are also less time-sensitive than phone calls, which can be nice if you're busy baking a pie.  (And even if you're not busy, you can always pretend you're busy....like when a girl you don't like texts to ask about your weekend plans.  This has not happened even once, though.)  And perhaps what texts are best suited for, something that really makes them worthwhile, is mass communication, such as inviting a 100 people to a fondue party on short notice, or changing the details of a rendezvous involving 600 people. 

And that's all nice.  Pretty nice.  But I still kind of hate text messages. And that's because far too often we lose our way as a society, and use text messages for what they are very poorly suited:

Extended conversations.


I hate it when text messages are used to have an extended conversation.  In fact, I loathe it.  But I don't abhor it, that's going too far. 



Here's the point.  When used for long conversations, texts usually become:

1. Distracting.  They're like an interrupting cow, and especially so if your ringer sounds like a "MOOO!!" (Kudos to you if this is the case.)  I generally have a pretty one-track mind (1.5 on a good day), so when I settle down to a task only to be interrupted over and over by a cow, it really slows me down.  If it were a mule it might not be as bad. 
2. Extremely inefficient.  An unofficial experiment just now showed that it takes about six times as long to enter a text message as to just speak it.  That's not so bad if it's a one-word message, as it doesn't take long to say a word like "Freakazoid!"  But imagine if you had to enter this entire blog post into your phone.  Or better yet, imagine if you were part of the hypothetical experiment where you place infinity monkeys in front of infinity typewriters until one of them types all the works of Shakespeare; only in this version, you are one of the monkeys, and you're using a cell phone instead of a typewriter.  Imagine how much faster you could inadvertently produce the entire works of Shakespeare by randomly talking instead of randomly enterting text on your phone?!  
3. Expensive for people with crappy cell phone plans.  
4. Inducers of tendonitis in the thumbs.   
5. Characteristic of teenage girls:  I would ask, who is most known for their dexterous and voluminous production of messages comprised of text?  That's right, girls aged 13-17.  So do you want to be more, or less similar to a teenage girl?  Or perhaps you literally are one, in which case you get a temporary pass on this point.  You also get a prize, because I doubt anyone of your demographic will read this.
6. Social Impropriety:  If you've ever read a Jane Austen novel, you know she's all about propriety.  And one sure way to violate her rules, and to lessen your chances of a happy marriage with Mr. Darcy or Elizabeth or whomever, is to send a lot of texts while in social settings.  I'm confident she would not approve. 

The bottom line for me is this:  You can be an interrupting cow, or you can not be an interrupting cow.  And don't forget there are pros and cons.  While "moos" can be annoying, even a cow of the interrupting variety can likely produce milk, and by association cheese and ice cream, which are always good, unless you're lactose intolerant, or trying to lose weight, or a vegan, or otherwise at odds with the dairy industry.

Or to put it another way, is the following your destiny?

"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Interrupting Cow."
"Interrupting C....."
"MMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

Diaper Advice from the Masses

A few months ago I asked my facebook friends for advice on what diapers are best.  Diapers are a big part of my life, so I needed to know.  Actually it was for my sister Annie, who's due to have her first baby....tomorrow!  Since old facebook statuses disappear into an unsearchable abyss, I'm posting the responses here for a handy reference.  Read on to expand your diaper knowledge.       

Additional suggestions welcome, thanks again to all those who contributed!

(The picture to the right is just shameless promotion of my cute niece Adriana...who happens to know a lot about diapers.)

All you mother-types out there, which disposable diapers are the best?

JJ says:

We go with pampers. They say huggies causes rash and they did to josie. The cheap ones are flimsy like paper. Never tried luvs or whatever the other one is. If you have newborn try the swaddlers.

Jodi says:

It depends on the baby. Huggies or Pampers though.
I loved the pampers swaddlers when Kristen was a baby. Now I use the Costco brand diapers though. Just as good as Huggies to me!

Eden says: 

We like the Huggies for Newborn-Size 2 then at Size 3 we like to switch to Luvs. Pampers gave my oldest a bad rash.

Jaron says:

We have tried them all and the ones that we prefer are the Target Brand diapers. Right now we are using Huggies, but that is only because that is the only brand available on this stinking island.

Ronnie says:

Huggies seems to work better on chubbier babies- but they have worked well on my skinny kids. I like the way Pampers smell. And recently I've gotten into Target diapers. I think they changed the material or the cut or something but I love them. They do a great job and it's a dramatic difference in price. Why pay a lot for something you throw away?
 
Actually though- I'm seriously thinking about getting into cloth diapering though- sure there's clean up- but my eco-friendly side would feel better about it. I also hear it's better for toilet training...

Amanda says:

Wow, I'm shocked to see good reviews of the Target brand! They totally leaked for my kids...but I'm glad they worked for you guys. I think it totally depends on weight and age. BUT I've tried the Costco Brand, Huggies, Pampers, the WalMart brand and the Target Brand. I like Pampers Swaddlers HANDS DOWN for newborns. They are soft and they fit well. After that I switch to the Costco brand. Huggies were good for my baby girl, but have leaked a lot more on Rio. 

So if it's a boy I'd say Swaddlers, then Costco or Pampers. Girl- Swaddlers then it doesn't really matter. I think the main difference in diapers are:
A. How comfortable they seem for the kiddo and
B. How often you have to change them

So, Target diapers were cheaper, but I had to change the kids 6 times a day to avoid leaking...they are also super-bulky for my skinny kiddos. With Huggies/Pampers I can change em 3 times a day and they seem like they'd be more comfy. Costco ones are almost as good as Huggies, I think. maybe one more change per day.

Okay, so there's my way-too-much-info analysis of the Diaper market. I should try LUVS then I'd have tried pretty much everything. :)

Michael says:

This is totally different for each kid. Ours can only use Huggies without getting diaper rash.

Marie says:

For newborns I think we used Huggies and liked them. We used luvs sometimes too but I didn't like the of them. I mainly used the walmart brand when Lilly grew bigger though and never had any problem with them. I was lucky cause I didn't have a baby prone to diaper rash

Ashley says:

Pampers Swaddlers for newborn to 6 months... In my opinion!!!!

Becky says:

IN CASE you haven't received enough answers...

I agree that Pampers Swaddlers are best for newborns - so SOFT! But then we switch to store-brand because they're loads cheaper and do the job credibly. Huggies are decent but seem to soak through easily. TMI?

P.S. I'm a little shocked Jaron responded to this. :-)

                                          *****

Addendum:  Several additional diaper suggestions can be found in the comments to this facebook note (the imported version of this blog post).  

Hooked on Phonics is overrated

I've got this really cute and awesome niece, Caslea, who's five years old.  She's also really smart. Recently she was asked to write down all the fun things she wanted to do over the weekend, and using her prodigious phonetics skills, this is what she came up with (I understood all except one):

1. go swimeeg
2. go to a reschot
3. woch a movy
4. hav fun
5. play the spanish game
6. ol uv us get a penny
7. be nise
8. play with eech uther
9. go bulleeg
10. go to the pork
11. play gams
12. eet canndy
13. go to chuckee cheese's
14. bee happy
15. by donut's
16. eet food
17. mak lemenad
18. get lecerish
19. do a pordy
20. mac stuff
21. blow bloo's
22. mace a cayk
23. go to disnlee land
24. have a pnicnik
25. play with zeeko
26. if someone left, mak a spis
27. go to the museeume
28. go on a chresher hunt
29. jres up
30. go to sleep
31. jreec lemunad

My favorite phonetics:  "chresher hunt", "jres up", "jreec lemunad"

Activities I most want to try:  "go to the pork", "ol uv us get a penny", "do a pordy"
 

She's only in kindergarten, but it's pretty awesome how she figures this stuff out.  She's obviously smarter than I was, I don't think I learned how to write like that until second grade....if ever.   

Also, I think her list would make for an extremely divertive weekend; next time I need some quality fun I'll refer to it.  Thanks Caz!

The Color Orange: How I almost turned into a carrot, and what I learned

I just got done eating a pound of carrots every day for a month (March 6th through April 4th).  Actually I got done over two weeks ago, but I've been on a really long road trip ever since and couldn't share any of my findings.  Now, at long last, the moment one or two (or even three) of you have been waiting for: 

What happened?

Eating a pound of carrots every day was difficult, much more so than I had anticipated.  But I did it anyway-I was dedicated to the Carrot Cause.  For the first 28 days or so, as I was plugging along, testing out new methods of eating carrots, and hoping my GI tract wouldn't implode, I didn't notice any change in my skin color.  On day 28, however, I compared my palms with those of a few other people, and we all agreed mine were a little more orange (or red, or both) than the others.  I kept looking around and asking people what they thought, and over the next few days I became convinced that:

1. Both my palms and my soles were more orange than before.  Not overwhelmingly so--no one stopped me on the street and screamed, "You have orange palms!"--but noticeably more than other people's.  
   
2. My face had more color to it - It seemed more red than orange, but it looked like I had spent a day or two outside, when in reality I had been living like a vampire for the prior several days and seen very little sun.  I also wasn't wearing any blush, so we can rule that out.                                                      
   
3. No other part of me changed color in any noticeable way.

 That's the good news--I observed some modest changes on certain parts of my body.  The bad news is, the pictures don't show it very clearly, and maybe only the keenest of observers will notice.  Whether it's because I have zero photography skills, or because it's hard to photograph one's own palms, or because I can't figure out when to use a flash and when not, the pictures are inadequate to really show what happened.  However, they aren't without merit--you can probably see at least a little color in the "after" pic of the palms, and when I looked at the enlarged "after" pic of my face I could see a tiny bit of red.       


Pictures (click to enlarge):

                  Before                                                                                            After

What else did I learn? 

First off, a pound of carrots is both more and less than you think.  It sounds like a lot, so at first you might say, "Wow, a whole pound of carrots every day!"  Then you look at the bag and you're not as impressed.  But then you try to eat them, and about halfway through your jaw is aching, your stomach is distended, you think you're turning into a carrot, and you still have half a bag to go.  That's when you say, "I don't think the human body is meant to ingest this many carrots in one day."   And you're probably right. 

Second, carrot smoothies are, for reasons unknown, anathema to my stomach.  The first few days were fairly smooth, and on day four I tried putting most of a day's carrots into a smoothy with some fruit (banana, apple, orange).  The smoothy tasted surprisingly good, and I thought I'd found a great way to get get the carrots down faster, and with less likelihood of developing jaw arthritis.  But a few hours after drinking the carrot smoothy, my stomach went crazy.  I had all sorts of bloating and pain.  Nothing could calm it (I tried a ton of remedies).  I didn't even blame it on the smoothy at first, I just thought I had exceeded some "carrot threshold" and I was paying the price.  And I almost gave up as a result.  But as my stomach very gradually calmed over the next five days or so, I kept thinking back to the smoothy and growing more suspicious of it.  I tried making a similar smoothy one more time to verify my hypothesis--this time I carefully spread the smoothy-consumption out over the whole day--and sure enough, I had some of the same symptoms, though they were less severe and didn't last as long.  Who knew smoothies would be the bane of my carrot existence? 

Third, it's really hard to eat a whole carrot cake in one night.  It's also hard to eat a whole loaf of carrot bread in a day.  I tried the cake once and the bread twice, and though they were delicious (except the second loaf, which I screwed up),  it was really, really hard to get it all down in a single evening (so much so that I gave away the last fourth or so of the cake and ate some more carrots to make up the difference).  And that was after substantially reduced the quantities of the non-carrot ingredients in both the cake and the bread - before the reduction, the cake would have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 calories; my changes likely chopped off over 1000 of those.

Fourth, the easiest and most enjoyable way to eat carrots that I tried was the All Carrot No Potato version of this recipe, using Lipton soup and oil.  Those were some tantalizing carrots! (see below)  

Eventually I quit trying so many recipes and settled on just sticks.  After all, this project was supposed to make me more healthy, right?  Cake and dessert bread don't usually do that.  And while I was trying to use the new recipes to calm my stomach, all it really needed was no more smoothies!    


Other tidbits you can take or leave:  

During the second half of my experiment, I divided the carrots into AM and PM carrots, trying to eat the AM bag before lunch, and the PM's after.  Spreading them out helped my GI tract, not to mention my sanity. 

I made a habit of drinking water coolers (zero-calorie drinks that taste kinda like diet Sprite) with my carrots almost every day to make eating them more fun, though I discontinued this practice during the the stomach-craze of weeks one and two.  

As Thomas Culwell recommended, I reported a subjective "healthiness level" each day, on a scale of 1-10.  The results were pretty unremarkable - they dipped after each smoothy, but otherwise seemed to depend mostly on how much sleep I'd gotten.

I tracked the research in my notebook, checking off carrots and recording observations.  There's a picture of these pages att the bottom, but I warn you it's not for the faint of heart - a couple parts have what for many people would be Too Much Information.  One day early on I wrote, "[I] feel like a carrot".  Another day much later I wrote, "Getting really tired of carrots now for some reason."  Go figure. 

I've decided that eating a pound-a-day for 30 days isn't the most effective way to turn orange--it might take more than 30 days for the color change to really take effect, and you probably don't need a whole pound each day for it to happen.  I postulate that half-a-pound every day for 60 days would be more effective.

Turns out, there are a lot of carrot recipes out there.  


Conclusions:

• Eating a pound of carrots every day, like crocheting and garbage-collecting, is harder than it sounds. 
• Carrot smoothies are dangerous, and sometime in the future they may be used for biological warfare.
• I may be less prone to turning orange than your average Joe Shmoe.     
• Eat fewer carrots for a longer period of time if you really want to turn orange. 
• I will never eat another carrot.   At least not on purpose.  At least not very soon.  

Carrots in pictures:

 the carrot research journal (repeat warning: TMI):

Scrabble Scores

I finally broke 500 points in Scrabble!

Mind you, it was on facebook Scrabble, where the rules are a little different (you can try crazy words and look up words within the game), but I'd never gotten that high before, on probably a few hundred previous attempts - a typical score is around 300.  This time I got 526 points!  And I won by over 300 points, something else I'm sure I've never done before.  Other than perhaps the time I got a bingo with the word "bingoes", this may be my crowning achievement in Scrabble to date.

Some of the words that got me there:

• WATERING  for 76 points
• QUA for 63
• JOTS for 44
• VOWELS for 39
• ZONED for 39
• a handful of others worth around 30

Here's what it looked like at the end (opponent's name removed to protect the somewhat-innocent): 

A different game that I'm in had something really funny happen.  In the game (seen below) my opponent played the word "toile" (apparently a type of cloth) right next to a triple word tile, where all I need to do is add on one letter to get a triple score.  Perhaps she didn't realize that "toile" is one letter short of spelling "toilet", "toiled", "toiles", "toiler" and maybe other words....or perhaps this is all an elaborate joke.  I can't be sure, but I'm going to add a 'd', use a couple more letters to make two words, and rake in about 40 points.    

Carrots are orange, are you?

Will carrots turn me orange?  I'm not sure, but I'd like to find out.

See, I've often heard that if you eat enough carrots your skin will turn orange.  My college roommate Jake wondered about this, and even designed an experiment in which he was to eat a pound a day for a week; only he gave up after a couple days.  Was he sick of carrots, or did he just not want to turn orange?  And would it have worked anyway?  More importantly, how would having orange skin have affected his dating life?

Questions lingered.

Lately I've consumed copious carrots.  And while enjoying this carrot bounty, I've oft been reminded of the carrot questions of yesteryear, and the unfinished experiment.  Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."  Well Jake's kind of a giant (he's about 6'4), so I'd like to stand on his shoulders and sample the view.  Not to mention finish the carrot experiment that he started.  In doing so, not only may I advance the frontier of human knowledge, I will also find out if carrots can turn me visibly orange.

So here's the plan:

Starting today, I will eat a pound of carrots every day for not just a week as in the original experiment, but for a month!  I'll only stop if I turn clearly and grotesquely orange before the end of the month, or I become deathly ill.  Afterward I'll post my results, with a picture                                                     

Related things I've looked into that you may want to know about:

Turning Orange:  When your skin turns orange after eating carrots it's called carotenosis.  The compounds that turn you orange are carotenoids, and carrots have a lot of them.  Many other foods contain carotenoid (mostly vegetables and fruits), but in widely varying amounts.  So you might be able to turn orange from eating, say, mangoes, but it's a lot less likely (and maybe impossible) that you would eat enough of them for this to happen.  Carotenosis is benign, and the treatment is to stop eating carrots.

Vitamin A & likelihood of Death:  One thing that's not benign is getting way to much vitamin A.  It gets stored in your liver and can have detrimental effects.  Will I be getting way too much during this experiment?  Maybe but not really.  First of all, vitamin A consumption is cumulative, so if I ate a pound of carrots every day for the rest of my life, it might build up to toxic levels.  But in the short term, I'm probably ok.  Second, the natural precursor to vitamin A that you get from carrots is not as likely to be harmful as the preformed kind you get in some vitamin supplements.  And that's why toxic doses of vitamin A come almost exclusively from either overdosing on vitamin supplements, or from eating liver.  As a safety precaution, during the experiment I will not take any supplements containing vitamin A, nor eat even one liver.

Will my Whole Body Turn Orange?  It's possible, but most often the visible color change is limited to the palms and soles, with honorary mention to the knees and the skin on either side of the nose. 

Price of Carrots:  Did you know carrots are free?  That's right, you can go to the grocery store and pick up as many carrots as you want, and you don't have to pay for them!  That will be really convenient for the next month or so.  Ok, I'm lying.  But in Weight Watchers, the ever-popular diet plan, carrots are considered a "free" food.  That means that while there are limits on how much you can eat of most foods while following Weight Watchers, there's no limit on how many carrots you can eat!  This is because they have so few calories that the positive benefit of the fiber is equal to or greater than any detriment derived from those extra calories.  So carrots are free.  You couldn't get fat off them if you tried.  

Price of Carrot Cake:  Carrot cake is not free.  

Last and probably least, a couple "before" pictures, with focus on the palms:     

UPDATE:  Here's where I talk about the results of the experiment. 

Sandwiches Revisited

This is a photo response to Nathaniel's photo response to my original post about sandwiches:

And it was oh so good. 

a little birthday cake

Sometimes cake is fun to make.  Here are a couple I made recently:

(3 layers, all chocolate cake, half vanilla frosting)

(4 layers, all lemon cake and frosting)

Fun times.

Some things I learned in the process:

• Cake tastes really good
• Cake will make you fat.
• Cake will make you really fat.
• Looking at pictures of cake may make you fat.
• You are now fat because you read this.

Another thing I learned:

• Frosting is even more unhealthy than I thought.  I knew it was full of fat and sugar, which is always good, but I didn't know it has 1.5 grams of trans fat per serving!!  And even though the cake doesn't list any trans fat, it's made with partially-hydrogenated oil, so you know it has some.  And cake (with frosting) is one of my favorite desserts....I will now light myself on fire (if I don't get a heart attack while looking for the matches).  

An old adage I learned:

• When life gives you lemons, make cake and frosting out of them if possible. 

And by the way, if you wanna see some cakes that are legitimately impressive, take a look at this sampling of birthday cakes my Mom made over the years.  Just don't use it to try and calculate how much trans fat I've gotten from cake and frosting in my life...I not sure I want to know.