…you know, the company that claims to get it right when other companies can’t? Took us 2 and a half hours to make a simple check order through their incredibly bad site-navigation…and then had them screw up the credit card. We aren’t even mentioning their changing the price on Jane while she was in the act of ordering: another call to them got that right. In the latter instance we got hold of a supervisor and made clear our opinion of their website. They then offered us other products with the fervor of a merchant in a tent bazaar…and when we had shaken off all those, they wanted to send us (for a price) some address labels with our company name treated as a personal name. How do you do, Mr. Inc?
Idiots. I then tried to call the credit card company on another issue. Sorry. The phone company is down.
Then we tried to install the printer to the ‘new’ office computer (Jane’s old laptop) and it needed the disc—then complained it needed more drivers. Then Quickbooks, to which we thought we had gotten ALL the other patches—needed more patches.
I was trying to get all these packages of returned items and bills and such and our primary votes all gotten to the post office—but no sense going without the quarterly state Business and Operations tax forms, so I delayed for that.
But we need the printer for that, and it’s still installing patches. Arrrgh.
The really great news is—really good news, actually—we have hit on a method of diet that does seem to be reversing the weight gain and peeling the pounds off fast. It’s very simple. We have a modest breakfast (small slice of bread, butter, jelly); a slimming lunch (diet powder from Costco, with almond milk); and whatever we want for supper. Anything. The trick is—I’m using the salad plates for a dinner service. I found a modest 4 place set of dishes with an 8 inch flat salad plate (our regular ones are 12″) and I am putting onto those plates ANYTHING we want—steak, fish, chicken, meatballs and spaghetti, porkchop—with a veggie and salad. The deal is—you get an 8″ plate.
A lot of the weight gain is my fault: I love to cook. WHen I get going, I pile in more ingredients. I pile the plates high. So I just reined that in. Whatever I cook has to fit on that plate. That really curbs any tendency to open another pack of anything. And we have 1/3 of the plate as a simple Caesar salad, with bacon; 1/3 as veggie of some sort. So far, since my magic plates arrived on Monday, I have peeled off five pounds—back to the lowest since May. I have my wine in the evening. Jane had a little bowl of chips. We had our supper. We walked. And we dropped another pound.
I am willing to recommend my magic plates. The Magic Plates They’re pretty, they seemed apt, and our other plates are getting scarred, chipped, and kind of tired, so I have just put them away for a while. These are light, chip-resistent, and actually feel like glass instead of plastic. And the cups are a meaningful 8 oz size. For a confirmed coffee drinker, this is good. 8 oz cups and 8″ lunch plates.
When I read in today’s Oregonian that Governor Gregoire had declared eastern Washington a disaster area I had no idea how bad it was! 😉
We are?
News to me. I know they’ve asked for federal help on the west coast because of the Japanese tsunami debris. Only thing else I can think of is the wheat situation…real weird weather and heavy rain close to harvest.
I think I heard on NPR that over half the country is in drought. We aren’t….yet….in southern N.E. but we are being careful, saving laundry water for the gardens, short showers and all that jazz.
I like your idea of small plates and anything you want to eat. I have periodically done the small plate thing, but never with the accompanying anything you want as long as it fits on the plate.
I know what you mean about cooking; both Proge and I enjoy it far too much for our own good. I made strawberry ice cream last week..yum! (I grew up thinking ice cream was a basic food group!)
Sympathies for all your computer glitches……I am so glad I don’t have to deal with that!
Indeed, it’s raining right now as I type just outside Boston, Mass. It has not been very rainy in general here in the New England seacoast but this is more or less common for July. It has been annoyingly hot and humid but nothing particularly outside of normal — although temperatures have remained somewhat high at times.
I hope this rain continues so I don’t have to water my garden for a few days! That takes a lot of time before work in the morning (I’m teaching two nights a week after my day job so watering in the evening doesn’t work as well as it should, and getting back late often on the other days too.)
I’ve been trying to switch us over to the luncheon sized Fiestaware plates for most eating. They’re colorful, semi-collectible, and only 9″ across; plenty big for most meals. We need to get more veggies into our diet, problematic when DH wants to cover them in cheese or butter 🙂 Powdered drink mixes as a replacement for lunch would give me the pip. You are far more dedicated than I.
Beware of orange, so I’m told. The old stuff used Uranium Oxide in the glaze for the color. It’s mildly radioactive.
Fiesta ware did use small amounts of uranium oxide to make that vibrant red-orange color, but you’d get about as much exposure to radiation by handling a chunk of granite. It’s barely above background radiation, certainly not glow-in-the-dark time.
Gran loved orange and red, blue and yellow. Back in the day, for at least 15 years, we ate off everything, nearly every week. The good news is she cooked more with cream sauce than tomatoes, which are good about dissolving metals…
I remember one summer visiting my friend whose husband was a physics professor; we went to all these antique stores looking for the old-style Fiestaware that would make the radiation detector go off which he liked to demonstrate to his freshman class; the other customers looked in askance as we held the dosimeter to the plates to see if one of them would make it go off. Good times 😉
The plate thing is one that’s often recommended as a “diet tip” but it’s one that makes sense. It fools you into thinking you’ve got more food because it fills up the plate with less.
The size of the average dinner plate has gotten much bigger in the last 30 years or so. Anyone who owns any of their grandma’s old wedding china can attest to this! Just compare her old dinner dishes to what you find in most stores now. I have some modern plates that are big enough to be used as chargers and they are intended to be ordinary dinner plates.
Sounds like you’ve heard Alex Bogusky’s “The 9-Inch Diet”. I’m a great believer of portion control – it works for me.
Well, this one is 8″. Haven’t heard Bugusky. But I do remember smaller plates in my youth. Plate sizes really have increased. Gran used Fiestaware. Which were, indeed, smaller.
HAHAHAHAH OK so I’ve been re-reading Foreigner and I’m up to Conspirator (#8 I think).
And I’m reading your post about how happy you are with your new 8″ plates and 8oz cup and I thought, “But isn’t that infelicitous?”
I’m such a geek. 😉
8 is a felicitous number among, ummm, Chinese, or does it include Buddhists?
Eight is indeed felicitous for Buddhists as well (think of the Eight-fold Path), and is a homonym for ‘luck’ in Chinese. It’s usually doubled, eight-eight, for extra good luck.
Are puns as infelicitous for the Atevi as they are for us humans? 😀
🙂
Well, possibly, but peeling off 5 pounds since Monday is really felicitous! (Granted 2 of the pounds were probably water-weight.)
Agreed, congrats!
I’ve been on vacation this week. Despite the heat (well – 25c+ is hot for us) I’ve managed three rounds of golf already and have another today. Unfortunately I’ve been unlucky with the start times. Today I start at 11am again so that’s another 18 holes during the hottest part of the day. At least I’ve managed to avoid getting sunburnt so it’s all good. I think that with today being the last day of the vacation I might spend a bit longer at the 19th hole though 🙂
I LOVE Corelle! We have had the simple Winter White (no pattern, just white) for years. They’re not plastic, they’re glass, but extremely thin and light. Almost unbreakable, even dropped on the floor – wood floor, at least. However if a piece is on the counter or in the sink, and you drop something heavy ONTO it, watch out! It may just split into two pieces, but it may shatter into countless curved dagger-blades.
Unrelated, but I just ditched the Yahoo Toolbar. Its search error handler has been increasingly telling me it couldn’t find sites/pages I know darn well exist. When it attempted to claim WWAS (and the Intruder book cover image) didn’t exist / couldn’t be found, I’d had enough. It took some digging, but I found where to delete it. Firefox: Tools -> Add-Ons -> Yahoo Toolbar (Remove). Dastardly thing. I’ve regained a good bit of browser window space too.
COngratulations!
One thing I noticed, which may bear on this — normally, URL’s are case insensitive e.g. “Yahoo.Com” = “yahoo.com”, but for Wave Without A Shore, “http://www.cherryh.com/wavewithoutashore” comes up NOT FOUND, while “https://www.cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore” gets you here. So, it *is* case sensitive. I’m guessing one you get past the index pages (cherryh.com, janefancher.com) everything is handled internally by the Closed Circle web server, and that IS case sensitive (probably not Windows-based, then. Apache or some such?), rather than by the internet’s DNS server. Which is good, what the web can’t see, it can’t spam.
The URL I used is the same bookmarked URL I’ve been using, from the URL provided. Yes, case sensitivity can be a culprit. Unix (and therefore Linux and likely Macs) are case sensitive for path/file names. Very good idea, Xheralt.
Hmm… something else came up with Yahoo’s error handler, even though I’ve supposedly deleted the toolbar and my default search engine’s supposed to be Google, not Yahoo. Aarrgh.
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I think I have one or two items left of my grandmother’s red-orange Fiestaware, and some of the others. But between her and her caregivers (and myself more than once) there aren’t many pieces left. I gave her a few new plates and bowls one Christmas, and still have those. Yes, they now offer more than one plate and cup size.
We’re lucky here not to have drought conditions like all of last year. That’s helped a little with temperatures too. My sympathies for the highs and drought conditions elsewhere. Summers are usually hot and humid here (Houston) so we’re used to it. But once you get past 100, no one is really “used to it.”
Regarding your lost pounds, they are not lost. I know exactly where they went. . .
Is Jane doing something to her site? All of a sudden NewsFox doesn’t like her site feed, sez its valid but wonky.
I like the new dinnerware. Lovely simple pattern in keeping with the yard theme.
Is it just me or did you, in fact, draw a number of elements from Japanese culture for the Atevi? Their culture has always had a decided “Japanese” feel to me.
In regard to your software/hardware issues, the Greek statue of Laocoön comes to mind, as does this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qtWzbDgIQE&feature=related
I’ll tell her. IT may be because her post involves some Utube stuff off Fox. 😉
Actually I borrowed from Japan, Jane Austen, and Ancient Rome for the atevi setup. 😉
I know Laocoon well…I think I need his teeshirt.
The opening scenes when humans and atevi first encounter each other reminded me *very* strongly of 18th century utopian / early science fiction and fantasy writings, even to the hints of Louis XIV / Revolutionary era clothing…between English and French Lit. from that period.
The Japanese influence shows up more strongly as the books continue.
The running gag of the atevi pop-culture fears of “death rays from space!” …sounds a great deal like how people from the ’50’s and up through now would likely react if we did have first contact with aliens.
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Hey, those cherry blossom / sakura dishes are really nice!
Funny, I remember seeing strong Japanese elements/influence when I first read Foreigner but then they faded away in my mind. I suspect that is because I started getting so immersed in the actual Atevi culture that I treated it as whole in and of itself and not comparative.
Next week will be… interesting. I’m biting the bullet and having our base kitchen cabinets ripped out and replaced, then installing my own tile countertops and backsplashes. The originals were 30 years old, and showed it; the one under the sink had rotted from a leak several years ago, and the others weren’t much better. Originally I wanted to move the kitchen out to our current porch after enclosing it, but the hoops involved in making the County happy enough to issue a building permit nixed that. New stove, and I’m finally! getting a dishwasher. I will even be replacing the same-vintage linoleum tiles (no they are NOT asbestos!) DH is worried because the “real” kitchen will out of commission for a while, but we have a microwave, a hot pot, a crockpot, and 2 hotplates, and scads of disposable dishes and cutlery. I can use the bathroom to wash up the occasional pan, for a week or two.
You will LOVE the result. I’m telling you, dishwashers are great. And you can survive on paper plates and a crockpot quite handily. SMall roast, some potatoes, Swanson’s beef stock, carrots, some tomatoes, and celery, with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme—not to mention a little chipotle pepper and salt—and you’ll be quite happy right down to the sandwiches end of it all.
chrondite, having been thru a kitchen remodel last year, washing up in the bathroom works, costco has a large box of plastic cutlery that makes life a bit easier and if you have a grill in addition to a crockpot you’re good. the end result will be highly worthwhile!
another twists on crockpot roasts – red wine with the seasonings works well 😉