an awesome start!

to what I plan to be another healthy day!  I pedaled on my recumbant bike for 30 minutes and am about to go for a walk with KT!   I had cheese toast (with the great new HFCS free bread I found!) and soy milk for breakfast and just snacked on a clementine for some energy for our walk!

I will make you endure another checkin later!

oh yeah!

almost forgot!

According to my spiffy new pedometer, I walked 11,889 steps today!

losing myself

...and it's a good thing!

So, we are doing a semi-formal biggest loser program at work.  $5 buy in for each participant (the sum of which will be awarded to the winner at the end of the 12 week program) and $1 per weighin (awarded to each week's biggest loser by % of body weight), plus the prime parking spot by the dumpster.  I know, I know...

I haven't won anything yet except for some additional respect for myself and you know what?  I'll take it.  

I have exercised at least 30 minutes each day almost every day since March 18th.  That is not when we started the program but it is when I had a firm talk with the ol' self and said things had to change and change immediately.

I already rarely eat red meat.  I am not interested in following a vegetarian diet so I do eat alot of turkey, chicken and fish.  

I have recently become quite studious in avoiding high fructose corn syrup.  I watched a documentary called King Corn and that was all she wrote.  I haven't been able to avoid it altogether, but I'm always looking for a new product to replace the HFCS one!  I have moved away from artificial sweeteners to organic natural sugar and am looking to try some agave syrup if I can find it.  The only thing I ever sweeten is my one cup of coffee in the morning so I don't feel like I'm going overboard with cutting out the artificial stuff.  

Water, water everywhere..and I drink it.   Lots of it.  I eat 6-9 servings of fruits and veggies everyday, most of them raw or lightly steamed.  

I hope that the way I am living now will shortly be reflected in how I look.  I know there are people everyday who look at me and think there is nothing in my lunchbox but a coupon for McDonalds and a twinkie (as if!  LoAdEd with HFCS) but I'd like to stack my pantry against theirs and I bet I would win the Gold Star of Healthy Eating a good bit of the time.  

I've lost significant amounts of weight before (most recently, 180 lbs about 5 years ago) and failed to keep it off, but something feels different this time and I truly hope it is not just a phase.  I want to do different, feel different, and be different.  KT and E are participating in the program at work too and I believe we will all benefit from the experience whatever number pops up on the scale!  

I bought a pedometer yesterday so I will post a total when I get home for the day!

Lowcountry Hurricanes by Walter J. Fraser Jr.

The bookgroup that I lead at work is a genre group rather than the traditional type.  The traditional book group picks one book (usually per month) and everyone discusses that book.  In my group we pick a genre or topic for each month and everyone gets to pick their own book to read as long as it falls within that topic.  This month's topic was southern history nonfiction and I chose this little gem about how hurricanes have affected the history of coastal Georgia and South Carolina.

Man oh man, let me tell you that it is a wonder anyone ever stayed there OR made any money.  The discussion got a bit repetitive, but then that very repetitiveness got in my head and morphed into something more along the lines of obsession.  The first time anyone thought to jot down a few lines about a hurricane in this area came in September of 1686.  Around this time coastal Georgia and South Carolina was basically a sparsely populated, unexplored subtropical wilderness.  Anyone crazy enough to venture there faced all the similar sorts of critter-driven diseases and dangers you might imagine in the Amazon jungle.  Then along comes a hurricane to drown you, your family, your animals, your crops, your home and your boat.  Multiply this times 80 billion and you have what went on in this area for the next 300 years.  

Hurricanes, tropical cyclones, tornadoes, and floods frightened and bedeviled that Spanish while they where cruising around trying to get their foot in the door and later the same thing happened to the British during the Revolutionary War and then the Union boats during the Civil War.  Rice was the king crop, with this area producing 98% of the region's rice and over 30% of the nation's supply.  Unfortunately, about every 2 years a hurricane would blow ashore and drowned everything.  Half-sunken ships dotted the coast and, what I thought was creepiest, abandoned ships floated around until they beached, were scuttled, or were bashed to pieces on the breakers.  Basically, from August to November it was a constant stream of dead bodies and ship debris washing up on all the beaches.  

These people's livelihoods and homes were being completely wiped out every other year and they kept coming back.  They would stay in their homes until either the house was lifted off its foundation by the storm surge and carried out to sea or until the water was up to their necks and they would make their way out to the yard and lash themselves to a tree for the duration of the storm.  Can you imagine? 

This was 250 pages of mayhem (oh yeah, that's why I loved it so much) and we are all crazy for being southern and loving it.  I remember maybe 3 or 4 hurricanes that have made it to where I live (Opal, Katrina, Dennis..maybe one other I can't recall right now) and I thought it was bad ass when it got here.  I can not even begin to imagine what that crap is like when it first comes ashore.  People of old, you have my repect.  People of now, listen to the weatherman and get OUT!

As I said before, it does get a bit repetitive as you read about the storm coming ashore, people drowning, crops being decimated, tide receeding, town rebuilt but bigger this time.  Rinse, and repeat.  But they kept coming, kept advertising on behalf of their towns to attract new residents, kept planting, kept on, kept on, kept on.  A good lesson for us all.

Genesis by Bernard Beckett

So, most everyone who knows me (and also if you've been reading this blog for long *wishful thinking*) knows that I lurve distopian/postapocalyptic fiction and movies.  I don't know why and I'm kinda dicey on what that says about me as a person but there it is all the same.  

So, on to Genesis.  This is a novella really, short and not so sweet.  Look back, if you will, on how much I thought Moody's Hater rocked HaRd!  Now, this little book is much more philosophical in nature, helped along by the fact that is sort of actually about philosophers.

Anaximander is a candidate for The Academy, the driving force and underlying strength of the Republic which arose from devastating worldwide plagues, wars, runaway global warming and assorted other nasty bits late in the twenty-first century.  She must endure a harrowing entrance examination that reminded me of a doctoral candidate defending his/her thesis.  I've never actually seen or experienced that so again, this comparison is only in my mind's eye...which also has a slightly sinister connotation after reading this book :-)

Anix has chosen as her subject her long-dead hero, the controversial revolutionary icon Adam Forde.  She must show that her knowledge of his life and motivations is exemplary and she has five hours to do so.  Never has five hours made my brain work so hard.  I did listen to this book and I am dying to get a monograph copy so I can ponder more closely the things that made my brain itch to think about them.   ....maybe I too have been infected.

If you like to ponder the human condition, the very definition of humanity, what are its prerequisites, what constitutes it, whether anybody really has any of it, and more of that sort of internal soul searching, find yourself a copy of Beckett's Genesis and prepare to think really hard.  Maybe you'll be better at it than me,  many people are, but I'm pondering again and again some of the ideas I read.  For me, definitely worth a re-read.

the non-fountain of youth

(from the Craftzine.com blog)

prepare to be AmAzEd!

Behold!  The World Digital Library!  

From the Washington Post

A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind's accumulated knowledge in seven languages 

for students around the world.

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who launched the project four years

 ago, said the ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents and authoritative explanations from the planet's leading libraries.

It's official, James Billington is now my favorite librarian in the world...right behind Nancy Pearl of course.  Billington will only surpass her when he gets his own action figure.

happy birthday to the Bard!

I can hardly believe I let this almost get by me...there is just entirely too much show here at work today.  Computer class nearly did me in.

another too cute!

Blood and Ice by Robert Masello

I picked up this book because I was judging it by its cover (which I liked) AND by its description (which I REALLY liked).

The story begins in the 1850's with Lt. Sinclair Copley nursing his ailing lover, Eleanor, while aboard a ship in icy seas.  Unfortunately, there is something strange going on with the two that the crew finds disturbing and they are chained together before being tossed into the sea.   

In the present day, Michael Wilde is deep in the throes of personal tragedy when his editor at Ecotravel Magazine offers him an assignment at a remote research base in Antarctica.  While accompanying another scientist on a dive for exotic cold water fish, he finds something, something nearly impossible to believe, frozen in an iceberg at the bottom of the Antarctic sea.  Naturally, they bring it to the surface so it can be thawed for study.  

I didn't think that was such a hot idea but hey, they didn't ask me.  So this book was a little slow to get started.  It wasn't excrutiating in any way and I stayed interested but, boy howdie, when you hit midway through, the action rarely stops.  I was listening to it (and if you decide to also, that point is CD #7!) and I actually got home 2 nights in a row and was too scared to immediately get out of my car despite the fact that spring time in Alabama in no way resembles the South Pole. 

Just the image of being in that darkened room with seawater seeping under the door and a ragged voice saying, "Give. It. Baaaack.", was enough to have me getting my purse on my shoulder and my keys out.  I didn't really look far enough ahead to think that the dark house would be scarier than the lighted porch, but that was my problem.

I thought the ending was a bit abrupt BUT, I give Masello credit for not making it the dramatic spectacle I expected.  I like being surprised and don't really mind being left hanging since maybe that means he will continue the story in another book...hopefully?....maybe?  (here's hoping Robert Masello has a Google Alert on his name and book and cares to comment)

We have another book of his, Bestiary, here at the library so I'm going to check it out too!