Dear (Food) Diary - Day 1

I was in the library, or wherever it is that I sit and read, when I came across an interesting article in Time magazine. Basically, it said that those people who diet, exercise and keep a log of what they eat lose twice the weight of their counterparts that don't make a written account of what they eat.

This might be exactly what I need to keep me on track. I'm so close to my target weight that it hurts. I'm regularly riding my bike and participating in sports, but can't seem to quite keep my weight under the 200 lbs. mark that I've set. I'd actually like to keep track of both diet and exercise in my food diary, since the two work together to help regulate weight. Of course, anyone can write down what they eat--it's accountability that really motivates people (people like me) to change habits and improve their eating choices.

So, wanna see what I'm eating? (I'll try to stay away from the haggis and the like--I swear!) I'm starting today so that I don't have to admit sneaking a few spoonfuls of ice-cream right before bed last night. Oops.

Oh, and here's your invitation to show how gutsy you are by joining me by sharing your food diary: the gauntlet has officially been thrown down.

20080731

Breakfast:

• approx. 2 cups whole wheat couscous with soy milk, raisins, cinnamon, and sucralose
• 1 tbsp baked beans (wouldn't all fit in my tupperware for lunch)
• 8 oz. vegetable juice with dash hot sauce

Morning snack:

• a delicious peach--mmmm... fuzzilicious

Lunch:

• baked beans with fat-free hot dog
• oriental veggies with Can't Believe It's Not Butter spray and Mrs. Dash

Afternoon snack(s):

• apple
• fat-free granola bar
  

Dinner:

• 1.5 cups gazpacho
• 2 cups pasta salad
• 3 slices of low-fat ham lunch meat

Evening "snack":

• diet root beer

Exercise:

• 1 hour of volleyball in un-air conditioned gym

Parental Intervention Award

Trevor hatched a devious plan the other day to ride down the stairs in a laundry basket. I am hoping that he had not consulted with Anthony on the matter, as Anthony's similar attempt resulted in a rather forced acquaintance of Anthony's forehead with the far wall on the lower landing of our staircase. Yes, it's not like a stair sledder could open a door and shoot out into the yard--there are drywall, studs, a toolbox, and folding metal doors at the bottom of the stairs.

Tales of Anthony's attempt to become a stair master, which attempt was made some years ago now, have been passed on to the members of the Jones family by Mama Jones, Jr. (a.k.a. Tamara), who was fortunate enough to witness the lower half of Anthony's descent. Unfortunately, Tamara was also breastfeeding Natalie at that very moment, and was unable to intervene in the young buck's risky escapade. No doubt she quickly put Natalie down and soon was listening to two children cry.

Well, Tamara is not breastfeeding yet, though she is looking forward to recommencing soon, as she is more than seven months pregnant. Even so, as Trevor's laundry basket sled was teetering on the brink of a potential disastrous plunge, Tamara snatched him up and deposited him on safer ground.

Tamara, for successfully rescuing Trevor from his own misguided machinations, I nominate you for the Parental Intervention Award. Congratulations!

Hmmm... A catapult?

A stranger... from the outside!

Do NOT under any circumstances show this to your kids.

(They've got enough ideas of their own.)

If you don't get the reference in the post title, click here.

The lady of the lake

Wow! We have been experiencing some very uncomfortable weather lately. At seven or so months pregnant, can you imagine how Tamara feels? I don't even want to guess.

In order to ameliorate the effects of heat and humidity on Tamara and the kids, we decided to make a splash at our favorite waterfront: Rutland State Park. Although temperatures and conditions in the city were nigh unbearable, we found much needed relief at our watery oasis.

Here are some photos from our day at the "beach."












And a video, too:

30 second blog post #3 - Ph.D.

I've just been informed that I am already a Ph.D.! What a relief!



I wonder how this will look on my resumé?

They put the "pain" in...

Send a JibJab Sendables® eCard Today!

So my friends at JibJab put this together for me.

What made me laugh:

• McCain's heart attack
• Barack Obama singing about change astride a unicorn
• Bill Clinton getting hit on the head (that will always, always make me laugh)
• The very Soviet/Communist looking posters for Hilarity's 2012 campaign
• The clock/radio set at 3 AM
• The jets with the red, white, and blue streamers doing a fly-by past McCain in a tank
  

Really, though--are these two my only choices? If so, it's going to be another Black Tuesday in November...

You asked...

I've had a lot of people ask me about a possible graduation date and my plans for a career. I promised I'd post something...

Well, I still don't have an exact graduation date nailed down, but I have received and accepted a job offer. I am pretty sure things will work out with Athena Diagnostics, and have given them a start date of August... scratch that--this just in: I will be starting September second. I will be developing tests for neurological diseases as a scientist in their research and development department.

Consequently, I have found that I need to finish things here at Clark rather quickly. I just now finished a little pow-wow with my advisor, Dr. Thurlow, and we have gone over my formal proposal and what I need to get done in the lab to generate enough material for my dissertation. (Perhaps more importantly, we have come up with a variety of ways to progress beyond the current step that I have been working on for easily two months now.) I hope to have all my research and a great deal of writing done by the end of the summer break, and deliver a presentation subsequent to the beginning of the new term. Assuming that all my committee members pass off on my research, I should be able to defend my dissertation within the year and graduate next May.

Be Your Own Happy!!

Remember who makes your happiness. You have the power!

Props to Stephan Pastis for yet another great comic.

The existence of the government and the media

During a quick glance at my Google news page this morning, I found a story that piqued my interest. "Massachusetts brewing a 'recipe for chaos'" is featured on OneNewsNow.com--a division of the American Family News Network. Below is a quote that resonated with me.

LaBarbera [president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality] notes that much of the Massachusetts media is betraying its pro-homosexual bias by portraying the debate as an issue of "fairness" rather than one of special treatment for individuals who choose to engage in homosexual behavior.

This bias is not only present in the media, but in the government as well. Instead of debating the morality of the issues that face our nation, lawmakers are trying to claim that they are working to promoted "equality" and "fairness." They are steadily abandoning one moral principle after another in order not to seem out of touch with the progressive movement--a movement that is doing nothing more but progressively descending deeper into baseness and degeneracy. Here is a quote that didn't quite make it into the talk that I gave yesterday in front of the LDS congregation to which I belong. I feel it is very descriptive of our current state of affairs.

Our government is succumbing to pressure to distance itself from God and religion. Consequently, the government is discovering that it is incapable of contending with people who are increasingly “unbridled by morality and religion.” A simple constitutional prohibition of state-sponsored church has evolved into court-ordered bans against representations of the Ten Commandments on government buildings, Christmas manger scenes on public property, and prayer at public meetings. Instead of seeking the “national morality” based on “religious principle” that Washington spoke of, many are actively seeking a blind standard of legislative amorality, with a total exclusion of the mention of God in the public square.

Such a standard of religious exclusion is absolutely and unequivocally counter to the intention of those who designed our government. Do you think that mere chance placed the freedom to worship according to individual conscience among the first freedoms specified in the Bill of Rights—freedoms that are destined to flourish together or perish separately? The Founding Fathers understood this country’s spiritual heritage. They frequently declared that God’s hand was upon this nation, and that He was working through them to create what Chesterton once called “a nation with the soul of a church.” (Richard John Neuhaus, “A New Order for the Ages,” speech delivered at the Philadelphia Conference on Religious Freedom, 30 May 1991.) While they were influenced by history and their accumulated knowledge, the single most influential reference source for their work on the Constitution was the Holy Bible. (Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve, from a talk given 5 July 1992 at the Freedom Festival in Provo, Utah)

What are we doing to take back the media and the government that are here to serve us? To paraphrase a well-known verse, "The government and media were made for man, and not man for the government and media."

30 second blog post #2

Here's my nephew, Owen, eating some ramen and noodles. I laughed so hard when I watched this.

(Yes, this took me all of thirty seconds--I used my stopwatch.)

30 seconds

My friend, Bob, inspired me the other day.

Here's my 30 second post.

Had fun yesterday doing a treasure hunt with the kids.

Don't dig a pit!

And there shall also be many which shall say... dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this...






Oh, there's harm.

Photo Personality Meme

So, because I have nothing better to do, I decided to follow in the steps of my friend, Cami, who just recently completed what I thought was a pretty cool photo personality meme.

Here are the instructions (lifted from Cami's blog with some alterations by me):

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search. (This, I think ensures that the pictures will be less prosaic than those found through Google Image Search, which is my prefered image search.)

2. Use only the first page of results, and pick one image. If you want to avoid having to chose between pictures (and be boring), pick a number between one and twenty right now and always go with the resulting photo that falls at that number.

3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

The questions, of which I only answer a select few for clarity, leaving you to use that formidable intellect I know you possess:

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your favorite food?

3. What high school did you go to? "Las Lomas High School" returned only pictures of cheerleaders and basketball games, so I went with "Las Lomas."

4. What is your favorite color? Historically, I have always said "purple." I am finally admitting my previous naïveté concerning colors and answering this question ever more with "violet."

5. Who is your celebrity crush? I could have answered: "Jennifer Connelly."

6. What is your favorite drink?

7. What is your dream vacation?

8. What is your favorite dessert? Didn't see any with raisins. Sigh...

9. What did you want to be when you grow up? I actually read quite a bit about this career before chosing biology. The Manhattan Project was one of the more interesting subjects.

10. What do you love most in life? "Family" didn't really come up with anything, so I used "children."

11. What is one word that describes you? Ask my kids. I bet the most common word would be "funny." Hopefully they would mean it in a good way.

12. What is your flickr name? The mystery and riddle are in it. If you can guess that and the picture, you should be doing something more productive than sitting here reading this blog.

As did Cami, I invite anyone to give this meme a try. I certainly had fun with it.

Okay, for those of you who would otherwise be sore about it...
The Answers:
1. jeremiah - photo 6
2. tacquitos - photo 3
3. las lomas - photo 10
4. violet - photo 12
5. audrey hepburn - photo 8
6. guava nectar - photo 5 (this had to be what they were talking about in greek mythology when they mentioned ambrosia)
7. disney world - photo 2
8. snickerdoodles - photo 11 (they really are better with raisins)
9. nuclear physicist - photo 9
10. family - photo 1
11. funny - photo 4
12. - photo 7 (no idea what that is...)

Friends In The News!

For all you out there that subscribe to the Friend magazine, be sure to check out the Friends In The News section for July. Family members may see a few familiar faces and past Worcester Ward members may see several familiar faces!

In April 2007 our primary had an Easter activity and I submitted a photo of the primary children. After going through the effort of getting signatures of all the parents of the children in order to submit the photo it was nice to see it finally get in there.

Michaela and Natalie are easy to spot but Anthony is pretty well hidden. He is sitting in front of Michaela but you can only see the top of his head and part of his shirt. I knew it was him only because I knew where he had been sitting when we took the photo. Our children are excited and wanted to share it with you all!