Wave Without A Shore

I think among other problems I’d gotten us too carb-short. We’ve been eating very little carb (I’ve dropped 5 pounds in a few days, but heck, I’ve got summer pants I want to fit into!) and I think I just over did it. Last night I added brussel sprouts, cauliflower and carrots and broccoli instead of the usual spinach salad, and felt better an hour later. You really have to watch it on Atkins: you have to drink 8 glasses of water a day and you have to take vitamin/mineral to make up for what you’re not getting, and if you’re getting all your permitted carbs (20 a day, during this phase: your typical frozen dinner has 40-50 a meal) from nuts and vegetables, you have to be careful which veggies, and green leafy ones can be treacherously short on carb. My fault.

I am still adding hyper-salted water. slowly.

You just can’t push salinity up and down fast or you can screw up coral tissues and fishy kidneys, not to mention osmotic shock for shelled creatures like crabs, who can’t ‘sweat’.

I think we’ve found the formula. I’ve ordered more of one and am going to go after the other.

Meanwhile I’m proofing for Jane, and the pond is requiring less and less care. It went all night with the filter in place and didn’t clog.

What I’m using, for those of you who have ponds: Interpet Pond Balance, at recommended strength (binds a nutrient that hair algae needs, but other plants don’t, plus helps condition water) and Microbelift Sludge Remover, which makes the pond look like peatwater for a couple of days, but sets bacteria to noshing down on the bottom crud. I have no UV filter any more; and nothing but regular circulation, the filter pads which take out debris and particulates, and these 2 things. The fish are ever so much happier. If we can maintain it with this alone, life will be good.

I have some hope for this new British stuff…after 2 days the water is clear for about a foot on the surface, and we only have 3 more feet to go to have it in great shape….the turnover is slower on the bottom, but it’ll get there.

I was fascinated by Jane’s foam photos: that neat little hole, that permanent slow-motion hurricane of water-flow, is due to the relative position of the waterfall (in Kent) and the little out-dent that is the lily-well, in Wales. [I believe I've mentioned that the shape of our pond is not-too-roughly like that of Britain.] Scotland (the deep end) is where we have to get down to 3 feet. Wales is only 2.

Meanwhile, while getting our pond in shape, Jane and I have decided that our shape is not the best, either. Both of us have gained back 10 pounds and are not happy, since for both of us those pounds reside right around the waist and are not comfy at all. So…back to Atkins for a couple of months. We figure we’ve been so carb-heavy this is going to be a shock to the system.

The kittehs have now met bacon. They approve. Neither Ysabel nor Efanor liked it. Jane has decided to avoid eggs, which don’t sit well with us. This leaves me scrambling [horrid pun] to try to find something carb-free for breakfast. This morning it was 2 pieces of pepper bacon, 2 slices of deli ham and a bit of extra-sharp Cheddar. That gave us at least something hot for breakfast.  Induction on Atkins is brutally low-carb: we can’t even have yoghurt. But that’s only a couple of weeks. Last night’s supper was (pity us) ribeye steak, salad with Caesar dressing, and 1 oz of mixed nuts. Which did not have us frantic for a late snack, either, so that’s good. Better behavior already. A glass of wine is allowable. My coffee is allowable. I’m not so sure about Jane’s diet soda—I hope it’s made with Splenda. (The Atkins-friendly sugar subsitute.) One real nasty trick is the way diet sodas trick the insulin system into believing it’s had sugar, so you get some of the blood sugar business and possibly a physical signal that goes with sugar. Something happened to the American populace about the time diet sodas became available. Used to be, it was full-strength Coke, or nothing. Now people pack away a half a liter, and I’m not sure it’s ‘free’ in the physiological sense, since they’ve discovered the body reacts to the fake sugars as if it were real sugar. Maybe a ‘store’ signal goes out. Dunno. But as cook, I’m in charge, and I’m going to be suspicious of everything. I’m in label-reading mode. And I’m going to be ‘sperimenting with recipes, seeing what I can convert. And I’ll be real glad when we can go back to strict South Beach. Part of our theory is to use Atkins to get some of the weight off (about 5 lbs would be nice) and by then we’ll be longing to eat a lot of veggies: at that point, about 8 weeks from now, we switch to strict South Beach, which is 2 cups veggies at every meal, and very little carb besides the veggies: for South Beach purposes starches like potatoes and peas don’t count as veggies. So we’ll get our portions and carb balance back under control, because you’re not tempted to eat huge on Atkins: a little goes a long way. This is the plan, at least. All along, of course, we take vitamin supplement and drink 8 glasses of water a day. Jane says I can’t count coffee—so I have to drink (ugh!) water.

As the filk song has it.

Jane is the builder in the house. I’m in charge of destroying things. I get tagged to kill algae, poison weeds, break down boxes…remove tile…you get the picture. So here I am trying to manage a damned sprayer the instructions to which I’ve lost, and I get a bath in Triox, which is so potent weeds won’t grow where it’s sprayed for a whole year—they say. Says not to spray it in the drip pattern of tress, which is pretty well our whole property, but I got the driveway, the side path, and the lava rock below the retaining wall….I’ve got to get the weedwhacker to the line of foot-tall grass which our neighbors’ lawn crew inexplicably left as a barrier between our paving-stone walkway and his lawn. Go figure. It’s on his property. But it’s seeding onto our gravel path. The Destroyer will be after it, with the weedwhacker, not the Triox.

Thank you, Jane!

Jane is co-author on this one for very good reason—as in she wrote some of it….line by line. When we collaborate, even we don’t know who did what.