Burgers and Donuts?

There are times when I miss being able to indulge in oddball foods. Take a look at this Donut Burger.

I know...disgusting, isn't it? It's only 1,500 calories. A bacon cheeseburger with a glazed donut instead of a bun. I'm repulsed and intrigued at the same time.

Alas...trying it could have repercussions with my modified stomach, so I'm forced to admire the photograph and not try it in real life.

The web site "This Is Why You're Fat" has all sorts of food that I have, at times, wondered if their concoctions taste good or not. Most of the items photographed are things that I think would have been right at home in my stomach during my college years.

One thing featured recently was Velveeta Fudge. As it happened I talked to a coworker who actually HAD that. He said that if you weren't told it was cheese fudge you'd never had known. Apparently the fudgy sugar mix was enough that you don't taste the cheese. That made me all the more curious.

I don't remember coming up with any really "weird" food combinations, although there are people who are repulsed that I put ketchup on eggs and mashed potatoes. Two separate dishes. I don't put all three together at the same time.

What's the weirdest food combination you put together? Anything adventurous?

Tasty Fried Food

I avoid fried foods now. I've had a bite once in a great great while, but overall I avoid it simply because fried foods make me feel a little queasy (psychosomatic, maybe?), but fried foods aren't very good for you anyway.

One of my guilty post-op pleasures is following the This Is Why You're Fat site. Every day, a new culinary concoction. Such as this one which sounds intriguing and scary at the same time.

There's so many things that people have whipped up and posted. I admit I've made some oddball things in the past, but I don't think I've come up with things that these people do. I'll also admit that I've seen a couple of these things at county fairs and carnivals, though.

In case you never actually looked around the site the This Is Why You're Fat site is listed on the side panel of this blog. Every day. New scary food. Take a gander. Recoil in horror. I won't tell anyone that you secretly wondered what it would taste like.

Quick Thoughts: "You're an Idiot!"

This is going to be a short entry because there is a thought that just won't stop racing through my head for the past few days. I'll share it here. Maybe someone else can comment or clarify. Consider this a fun day for the entries.

As an Aspergian, there are concepts that just don't make sense to me. Why is it a social faux pas to tell someone they're an idiot, but it's not a social faux pas to be an idiot? It seems Aspies get in trouble a lot when the idiot should be getting into trouble.

Maybe it's just a quirk with neurotypicals. Sometimes I wonder if Aspies are a window into reason, that maybe neurotypicals should stop and consider that if Aspies are driven by reason and less by emotion then they (the neurotypical) should ask themselves if an Aspie's opinion is something that they should more closely consider. It seems as if following emotional responses tends to lead to more drama and trouble in life and make things more complicated than is necessary and thus leads to more stress.

It could possibly be more reasonable if people made it a social grace to point out when someone is a dumbass instead of making the Aspie out to be the gorilla in the room for saying what others should have been thinking. Maybe you're providing a service. Some people are too dense or full of themselves to understand that they're an idiot. Aspies don't mind being told when they're missing something that neurotypicals find absurdly easy to catch in social situations. It seems reasonable that if an Aspie catches something in the social spectrum of behavior then it is so blatantly obvious that something must be wrong with the idiot to not see that they are an idiot.

What do you think?

Driving Traffic to The Blog

I've talked to my wife on and off about the website. Once in awhile I just sort of babble out whatever's on my mind, and one I commented on was that the Google Analytics seemed to show a steep drop after I had decided to spend more time working on things like my story instead of the blog site.

I've been posting things in spurious sessions, scheduling them ahead of time and trying to keep things ahead just enough that I can dedicate some other days to focusing on exercises and story time or whatever else is going on that day and not worry about trying to keep my one-post-a-day records.

At the same time I see that my audience is something like...three people. Which is fine. I hope people who do read it enjoy it.

My thinking is kind of split on this. On one hand it would be nice to have an actual audience that follows what I'm saying...it's a wonderful bit of mental stroking that keeps the ego fluffed up. What I mean to say is that this would be validation that I have some kind of talent for expressing myself and it would validate to my own screwy mind that I somehow matter; I mean, if Glenn Beck has an audience that pays for mansions and he's an arrogant blowhard, jiminy jillickers I should be able to get some of that type of following for spewing my brain droppings, yeah?

On the other hand I'm one voice among a sea of people that are whoring themselves on the Internet for...heh...attention and validation. I'm guilty as charged.

My wife said that I tend to be too verbose and wordy, so that may be a drawback in a time of twitter tweets and sound bites. She additionally suggested that I needed to separate my blog into several blogs, one for bariatric surgery, one for technology, etc...

This goes back to the original reason I started the blog. I started this as a place to chronicle my life as I adjusted to the bariatric surgery, so people considering such a procedure could see what it was like in my case. A the same time, a blog that is so one-tracked will grow boring. How long would someone keep reading about my weight routine or eating routine when I even know that it's very repetitive and I live this routine. That would have drawn the blog to a conclusion fairly quickly and simply faded out into obscurity, unless there's some sequel where I'd either cheat the surgery or need to have it reversed (or some other complication...which can happen a couple years out...)

There's another name for that; it's a book. Or really long article. Maybe a novella. But there's no need to continue chronicling the surgery after the twelfth time I mention my workout routine or need for an adjustment to my supplements.

Instead I sprinkle just parts of me into the blog. I mention things that maybe my son would want to read someday. I mention things that are of interest to me, that show facets of my personality. I don't have anything like this for my dad and there are times where I'd have been interested in seeing what he was like at my age, not to mention that someday maybe I'll be unable to function the way I do now and this is a kind of addon to my journals.

If I did keep multiple blogs I thought it would be a pain in the buttocks to keep track of everything. Plus, as a person who follows multiple blogs, I know that there are times I look forward to a blog that I can rely on being updated periodically whereas others seem to have simply faded away...are they no longer blogging? Are they just on vacation? What's the deal here?

By mixing topics I try to keep the blog somewhat interesting while at the same time keeping content flowing. You never know what I'll comment on. One day politics, the next day it's commenting on a local fair's choice of food. Maybe the description should be tweaked a bit since I don't discuss comics as much as I thought I would but that's something I'll probably evaluate with looking back near New Year's.

I suppose this sounds like justification for doing it the way I have been. It is. I thought about these things as I started the blog but I don't really have a lot of feedback from a lot of people as to what they're looking for; the people I have heard from (and I thank you!) have generally reacted with positive comments (although people who don't like it may very well just mosey away and not bother saying anything).

Most of all I do this blog for myself. I try to use it as a forum for practicing my wordsmithing and trying to improve my voice in "written" form. Most of all I have to enjoy doing this or I would simply quit altogether...in that respect, my audience is myself. And potentially my family should the inevitable happen someday.

Yes, I admit I get a bit of a creepy kick from the thought that should I be incapacitated these posts will continue to pop into the feed once a day for a couple of weeks. It's like something from a horror story plot.

This blog is a tangent to the journal I have to keep for my surgery-mandated psychologist visits. I can't get too personal here. I work under a pseudonym, I have to obscure certain details, I can't discuss things that are way too identifying (but let's be serious...if relatives stumbled into this blog and put two and two together it's not like it would take Mr. Monk to solve the mystery of who I was). It's one more facet to my personality and a reflection of who I am.

I've come to accept that I won't get validation from doing a blog. I'm not an Internet celebrity, I don't have mad l337 skillz in programming that draws an audience the way Mark Russinovich or Aaron Ballman do. I'm not cutting edge on rumors like Perez Hilton while hobnobbing with socialites. I'm just one of the faceless fat guys trying to lose weight, and that's hardly a rare finding in America today. I'm one voice in a sea of people.

My chances of finding validation doing this is one of the few aspects of me that are slim. But there is definitely a very good chance that I will find posterity through my expression here on this blog. I suppose that's what, in the end, keeps me coming back to this keyboard working on these entries. It's for my wife, my son, and my daughter. I'm giving them something that I never had from my parents.

I'm nothing special. But this is who I was. This is part of who your dad was, and hopefully I'm not as horrible a guy as they may have thought.

Best Thing Since Fried Butter

Well, actually it is fried butter. Click the link to check it out.

Comes in different flavors. You might think this is crazy...well, I'm not so sure.

• It's a pat of butter. I don't know how many you get served, but it's one pat of butter rolled in a dough. Probably less calories than (or on par with) your average restaurant dinner roll. With a pat of butter.
• It joins the ranks of fried Oreos, twinkies, Coke, pickles, Snickers, Gummi Bears...basically anything that can be dipped in batter and stuck into a fryer.

One or two pats of butter isn't going to kill you. I probably can't have it since I don't know what the surgery effect would be with such greasy fried goo and I'd rather not end up doing Chunk's Truffle Shuffle at a fairground or even around the house. I'm thinking that even if I asked my surgeon or doctor about it they'll tell me it'll put me in the hospital if it means keeping me from even being tempted by a doughy buttery pat of love.

Still...tempting to think about it. Is it as bad or as good as it sounds like it could be? In my mind it could go either way. I thought the same thing about fried Coke but it seems to be selling somewhere...(Insert smiles here)

Vacation Dining

My wife and I recently celebrated our fifth anniversary. To celebrate we made arrangements to go to a rather large city several hours away for a night.

I noticed that there were several restaurants right near our hotel, some of which I was familiar with (chain restaurants we have within an hour of our home) and others that we hadn't heard of before.

We were in the area for just one night= and we only visited one restaurant at which we made reservations (a haunted castle built in 1860!). The other restaurants that were near our hotel (and even the ones in the hotel) we skipped over. I had prepared most of my meals ahead of time to make sure I had the "proper" foods and didn't have to worry about my intake amounts.

We drove by the other places and I watched them float by in the window; I wistfully thought about vacations past where one of my highlights of the trip was in sampling cuisine of the area. Now,...not so much.

I'm curious about them, but I no longer can make restaurant exploring a highlight of our trips. I don't have enough space for the leftovers if we went to all the places I'd have wanted to visit. Even at the restaurant I did go to I ended up eating just enough to experience discomfort (chicken sometimes triggers that in me...something with chicken breast seems to cause that).

So now when I go on trips or vacations I need to reframe my focus on enjoying attractions or events more than enjoying restaurant experiences. On one hand I think it's a positive step in developing a new attitude towards food. On the other hand, it's kind of melancholy or bittersweet in that this is a passing of a chapter in my life. It is also hard to adjust to the idea of not anticipating trying some new Italian pasta dish or some grilled chicken at a new restaurant when I pass by a new place near whatever hotel we'd be staying in.

But adjust I must....and off I go instead to a museum or mall for a few hours.

Evidence That The New Enterprise Is Truly Huge

I had blogged before with a post that mentioned that the new Enterprise NCC-1701 from the JJ Abrams reboot is supposed to be substantially larger than the previous Enterprise on the Original Series. There was some controversy about that on some message boards (believe it or not).

Today I found proof in print that it is indeed larger. At Barnes and Noble this evening I found an issue of Cinefex (number 118, July 2009), which had an article on the new movie. If you didn't know Cinefex is a magazine dedicated to special effects in films, mostly the digital aspect of it. It had articles on the models used in the movie Moon and and behind the scenes shots of green screen effects inserted into Terminator Salvation, for example, and has advertisments for computer render farms and 3-D body scanners if that tells you the audience the magazine appeals to.

On page 42 (I know, totally coincidental) in the second column embedded in bits from the ILM people it said:
*****
The reconfigured ship was a larger vessel than previous manifestations-approximately 1,200 feet long compared to the 947-foot ship of the original series. "Once we got the ship built and started putting it in environments, it felt too small. The shuttle bay gave us a clear relative scale-shuttlecraft initially appeared much bigger than we imagined-so we bumped up the Enterprise scale, which gave her a grander feel and allowed us to include more detail."
*****

So there you have it. The new Enterprise is indeed larger than previous incarnations.

Biking for Fun

My wife and I went to a park late yesterday to try breaking in the bikes a little. We first stopped at a grocery store and picked up a few items then headed out for a picnic and bike ride. Here's some of what we saw while in Eldridge Park...

I'm not sure how long the path is that circles the park; my wife thought we traveled a mile or mile and a half. Her knee...still injured from when the idiot dog pulled her off the porch many months ago (and she'll probably need surgery to repair it)...was bothering her after the first circuit around the park, so we packed up and headed out.

There was a band playing at the meeting area near the lake. The band wasn't bad, the weather was nice, the park was pleasant; it was a pleasant way to spend the late afternoon.

Adsense activation

I've been curious about this for awhile...I finally activated AdSense on my blog. I have been curious to see what Google would select to show for advertisements now that the search engine is finally showing signs of indexing the content and analyzing information from it; I've been hesitant because normally ads are SO intrusive and annoying. The account is free as in money cost, but there is an annoyance and user-friendliness cost when you're bugging readers to buy buy buy while hoping they'll read and get some information from the content of your words. The default was trying to stick ads in the sidebar and under each posting...I personally find that it interrupts my reading of a blog when it goes post-ad-post-ad, but that's me and I understand the idea that if you're trying to make money from your site you want to try sprinkling as much ad content as you can without annoying your readers.

In the end I opted to stick one hopefully unobtrusive bar just below the title of the blog. Readable, should get some attention, while not being too intrusive.

I hold no illusions that this will make me money. Maybe once a year I could buy a comic book or something.

At any rate if you have any opinions or feedback please feel free to leave comments. I'm still experimenting and with a small readership I'm pretty sure that the void AdSense will fill is my curiosity of what ads Google thinks fits my content rather than any void in my wallet.

With Star Trek Coming Out Soon...

...I started wondering...do you think Vulcans all just have Asperger's?

Made It Through The Day So Far

I was determined to make this a terrific day. So far, it really has been!

We woke up, got around, and headed out to grab a quick breakfast of greasy goo at a BK (I had eaten my puree in the car when we first headed out; I wanted to eat it while it was toasty warm from the microwave, wife wanted the french toast sticks, little guy wanted two breakfast sandwiches; we have a policy in the family now where he got one and was told he'd like that because he didn't need that much fat in the morning) and then we went to the festival for a little while first to meet with my parents so they could hang out with the baby dude.

We had the visiting out of the way and little guy got to ride a few rides before we went to FREE COMIC BOOK DAY at the nearby comic store. We had plenty of good books picked up there including a couple for the mini dude and handed off a card to the owner of the comic store as a thank you for helping with the tire during our last shopping trip there; we stuck in a couple Darden's gift cards so maybe he and his wife will have a free evening out on us.

My wife was looking for a book that was supposed to be released recently so we headed to Barne's and Noble. I was proud of myself for not going too crazy with yet more books...I literally have a bookshelf filled with titles I've yet to get through...but I got a magazine and a couple relatively inexpensive titles to add to the shelves. Little Guy got his fill of trains including a new set to add to his own collection and a book or two, then we headed off to lunch at Panera because they have a customer microwave that let me heat up my puree and my wife really loves their food. A quick stop at Target was taken after that and the it was back to the art festival so we could leisurely meander around on our own time.

We picked up my painkillers waiting at the local Walmart pharmacy and we were good to go. I also had spent quite a bit of time on Percocet since I knew it was going to be a big and busy day and I wanted to keep the soreness I've been feeling from getting to me.

Today was really a wonderful, wonderful day. The kid got a little cranky at times but I think he had fun too.

Notice there was just one kid?

The daughter made arrangements to take the SAT's today. I was proud of the fact that she paid for the test herself, followed up on getting things ready for it...although I don't know if she ever prepped or studied for it...she managed to get up on time, she arranged for a ride, and I'm assuming she had supplies but I don't know. When I took it many moons ago I had to bring pencils and such for the test. I don't know if it's still the same way.

I noticed, though, that she got a ride with her boyfriend this morning to the test. The boy has never expressed an interest in college. I thought she'd be driving herself, but I wondered if he was taking the test because she was. Afterwards she went to the art festival with him for awhile; we met up with them there for her to ride some rides with her brother, seeing as she was half the weight we were.

However, all is not gummy bears and rainbows. She had an attitude about infringing on her free time with her boyfriend by having to play with her brother, who utterly adores her. She texted her mother asking if she could go to her boyfriend's house or if she had to go home...mom didn't reply, and instead of assuming she should go home, she went ahead to do what she wanted to do and hang out at her boyriend's house. When her mother did note this in a semi-snarky text message observing that she went ahead and did what she wanted to do, instead of coming home she continued hanging out with boyfriend, and I'm pretty sure the movie's been over for a couple hours now.

This was on top of her hanging out with boyfriend last night after being told to make sure she did the dishes after school...and she didn't bother.

She's also on student council at school and was supposed to be planning some kind of kickball game to take place Friday afternoon; apparently she did zilch planning and zilch work on it, blaming her co-commitee members and saying she couldn't get ahold of them.

I was just starting to get mad there...this girl sent over three THOUSAND text messages on her phone last month. She has instant messaging. Telephone. Skype for free chat/voice/video conferencing. She's at school with these other people. She has access to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, even the school has its own forum server where she could ask for permission to add a topic to host a virtual pow-wow session for planning items. But she couldn't find a way to get in touch with these other kids, the most connected generation in history.

So she's got a surprise ready tomorrow. She's going to be mowing...we need to refill the gas tank and add oil before she's ready to go, as well as remove an apparent mouse nest in the air intake on top of the engine, but when she gets out of work at six tomorrow night she's going to have some mowing to do. After that she can help her brother pick up his room. She's been slacking, pushing her freedoms a bit much, and it's time to pull on the leash a bit.

I kept asking myself if I was justified in being rather angry with her after her recent behavior. I was proud of her for following through with the SAT thing until I found out she was basically using it as an excuse to hang out with boyfriend some more...my wife seems to be agitated with her as well for her behavior so I don't feel too bad. I became more irritated when the wife went to the shed to check on the state of our gasoline stores while I checked the oil on the mower. My wife found that the things the daughter was supposed to have organized a month ago consisted primarily of throwing everything right at the entrance rather than actually organizing things and we were basically idiots for trusting a then-16-year-old with having done the work she said she had done.

So...irresponsible in living up to the resume-padding title of student council member, not doing dishes after she was told twice to do them yesterday, hanging at boyfriend's instead of getting the work done she was supposed to get done, ignoring the not so subtle common sense precaution of coming home first when she didn't have an answer of where she should go, giving the exasperated attitude when asked to spend an hour with her little brother who adores her and hadn't seen her all day, not actually following up on organizing some bags of salt and a couple bags of recyclables and such in the shed (which is her primary chore in the house; trash and recyclables), not taking the not so subtle hint to get her arse home after she finally did ask about it...I'm not feeling too bad about having her spend her non-working hours tomorrow at home doing penance.

Overall this was a fantastic day. The daughter wasn't doing enough to ruin the day. The son had a few moments where the lack of a nap triggered a few fits that threatened to ruin part of the shopping trips, but he settled down after basically learning that whining was going to get him nowhere in getting his way.

I don't know if I could have asked for a better day that didn't involve being on vacation so as to escape our worries for a few days!

I'm tired...extremely very much totally tired. The daughter came home and got a long rambling speech on her future and responsibilities and etcetera etcetera...and while I'm healed quite a bit, I'm still finding those times that surprise the hell out of me where I think I can do something simple and end up going woozy from bending over to pick something up. Apparently running around as much as we did today took a lot out of me; I nearly fell asleep on the couch around seven o'clock. So you can imagine that I'm in dire need of sleep right now. I probably have a number of typos in this post that right now I'm not caring enough to fix...so goodnight, everyone.

Life Is Good

While this is the name of another blog on Blogspot with a similar name to mine, this is more a reference to the fact that I am totally psyched about this weekend. I've had good news regarding my wound healing, my pain is far more managed and tolerable, I'm getting up and around more with less pain, and this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day and an arts festival!

I was in such a good mood after the evaluation of the CAT scan that I stopped at my wife's favorite mealspot, Panera Bread, and picked up a to-go meal for her lunch (the aroma of the dressing on the asian sesame salad is divine).

I told her recently how much I was looking forward to the weekend. She replied with something to the effect of, "...as long as we do what you want to do, everything great..."

Well, that was kind of a killjoy. I asked what she wanted to do, and she said, "Nothing."

I know I've been difficult with the recovery and surgery and the ensuing issues, and I thought she'd be relieved that I was finally having a good week, being positive about something going on. Instead, I was being self-centered.

sigh

I am hoping it's just the fact that I've been so negative for so long that when my mood finally swings the other way her mood lags behind.

But no matter; I'm still psyched for the weekend, and feeling better about the promise the doctor made about having the "fullness feeling" after switching to solid foods and that the wound is indeed healing...slowly...but getting there.

Something Arrived!

It's always fun to get deliveries. Unless it's something like a summons or a bill collector. But this wasn't anything like that.

Several people gave me get-well wishes and cards and I've appreciated all of them; I hung up all the cards on a wall while I'm at home recovering. One of my friends sent me a gift certificate to ThinkGeek, an online store geared primarily at selling unusual and geeky toys for scifi and fantasy cubicle dwellers.


I spent a lot of time deliberating on what to get. I wanted to get the Jedi deluxe robe and a ForceFX lightsaber, but the robe and saber were too expensive. Plus the ForceFX doesn't have a detachable blade. What fun is that to walk around a Renaissance Fair in if you can't have just the hilt? I found another blade/hilt combination available but they were going to take time to get in stock and you lost the fun sound effects. Bleh.

There were other fun toys I considered there but decided I wanted something that would be useful, utilitarian, that I would get use out of after the novelty wore off.

And they arrived today.

One neat thing...the packaging is whimsical. Here's a picture of the inflatable cushions put into the box to protect the product...can you read what was used to inflate the pillows?
It's a play on the thing about having your order packed by trained monkeybots. It's fun!

Anyway...here's what I ordered...
Whenever we have family dinners, sometimes we have to take our own silverware. Or if we're going on a picnic, or most common I have to take silverware in to work with me if I pre-made something for lunch. These are "light my fire" sporks, one large utensil and one four-piece multicolor set. It has a fork, spoon, and knife edge all built in!

I know, I know...I'm odd that way. This is the perfect combination of fun and whimsy and utility combined with the irony of the fact that I can't eat "real food" for another week and a half. I loved it! These were also the only things that in my deliberation I consistently returned to while considering the wifi shirt and various games and cube toys I could get. Almost got the keychain multitool but...just not enough need for it...

The big one is a little bigger than I thought it would be, but I don't care.

Speaking of which...I didn't realize the time. I need to get my scheduled lunch in now...I think I'll try one of these babies out!