Retiring my blog

Greetings folks,

As you can see, nothing much happens in Laurie Coleman world. I started this blog when Dave and I were newly married, I was working, and we were building a house and a life together. But, things have slowed way down for me, and there's just not enough to feed this blog. Therefore I am retiring it. Don't worry, I'll still be in touch!!!

Marmalade

Our Meyer lemon tree had a nice crop of lemons on it, just begging to be made into marmalade. Couple that with our wonderful Navel orange tree. So, this weekend I somehow talked David into helping me prep lemons and oranges for marmalade.

I decided to make Meyer lemon marmalade and also a marmalade made of a mixture of the Meyer lemons and Navel oranges. Half of the jars of Meyer lemon marmalade were infused with a vanilla bean pod.

Here's the proof of all of our efforts:


I think we may have a few to share. :-)

Calorie Deficit Update

In the last post I told you about my plan to operate on a calorie deficit to lose a few pounds. I'd like to share with you my successes so far. Here is what my Diet Power "dashboard" looks like today:


If you click on the image above it should bring it up bigger so that you can see it better.

What you can see is the trend that my day-to-day weights have been. Every yellow line represents a "new" diet start... what that means is that I may have changed or played around with my goal weight or goal date. I think I modified it from time to time. The original goal may have been about 138, then I changed it to 135. When I was overshooting that goal (projecting a lower weight) the program would allow me to eat more calories each day. I would then change the goal weight lower to keep me on the lower trend. Heck, if I reach my goal sooner, or reach a better goal, then why settle for more calories and a higher goal? So, I've adjusted the goal from time to time to keep the calories at about 1500 per day, give or take some.

My diet actually started on 1/16, at the first yellow line. I have used this program in the past but stopped when something happened, like a surgery or the holidays. It's just so difficult to count calories accurately during the holidays because so much of the food comes from outside of the home. So, the line before the first yellow line is Diet Power's assumption of my weight trend before 1/16.

What I like about this screen today is that my goal weight and my projected weight are exactly the same. What that says is that if I continue to follow the calorie allowance faithfully each day then I'll make my goal weight as planned.

I would also like to point out that I've done this with absolutely no exercise. It's not that I haven't wanted to exercise. OK, maybe I've been a bit lazy. But this does go to prove that what or how much you eat is probably more important for weight control than exercise. Exercise is important for more than just weight control (calorie burning) such as cardio-vascular health or muscle strengthening which is why I plan to start up with it as soon as my foot doctor gives me the green light for high-impact exercise. If I did exercise, my calorie allowance for that day would be increased by the amount of calories that I burned. But if exercise isn't an option, weight control can be accomplished by diet alone. All it takes is some discipline (which I do lack sometimes) and some willpower (ditto). Overall, it all comes down to operating on a calorie deficit, no matter if that's created by eating less food and making better food choices or if it comes from exercising to burn off excess calories.

Counting Calories

Off and on for just over a year I've been using a program called Diet Power. It's calorie counting software. The premise is that you tell it your goal weight and goal date for that weight. It will tell you if it thinks that goal is reasonable or not by telling you how difficult your daily calorie restrictions will be. Once you settle on a goal that you think you can accomplish then you start entering in every calorie that you eat. If you exercise then you also log calories burned and this, naturally, earns you more calories to eat for the day. The software will dynamically calculate for you every day the calories that you can eat for that day so the number will change from day to day.

If you are faithful about logging your calorie ins-and-outs then you will reach your goal weight on your goal date. Determining calories isn't too hard, unless you eat out a lot. Then you have to try to estimate as best you can. A lot of the restaurants here in California now have the nutritional data available for you (it's state law for the chains) but the mom-and -pop places don't have to. Most items you buy in the store have calorie counts listed on them. I love it when they are listed by weight. I weigh out just about everything. I have a nice kitchen scale on my counter and weigh my cereal every morning. I weigh bread (if slicing it myself). I weigh out my mayonnaise for my sandwich. I find weighing food so much easier than using volumetric measurements. When the food is weighed fewer dishes are dirtied, too. I don't have to dirty a measuring cup or measuring spoon.

Anyway, like I said, I've been using it for a bit over a year now, off and on. I stopped last summer during my abdominal surgery (it's my experience that I lose weight anyway during and after surgeries, yet I gain it all back then afterward.) I also skipped this past November and December. It's just too hard during the holiday season - too much food that I didn't prepare and had no idea how to count.

So, here I am. I started it again on January 20th and have lost 7 pounds so far to date. To reach my goal I will have to lose 10 more, and Diet Power is projecting that I'll actually be 2 pounds under my goal at my current rate. Therefore it is increasing how many calories I can eat each day because it wants me to stay on track. Of course, if I reach my goal sooner then that will be great but it doesn't seem like I can tell Diet Power that.

Oh, and might I add that I've been doing this without any exercise? Sure, having 300 more calories each day to eat would be nice, and last Friday I did spend an hour on my exercise bike to earn a couple of glasses of wine for the evening. But the point is that weight loss (or control) is more about controlling your calorie intake. Or at least balancing it all out. I don't know how many times I've exercised very hard and my weight wouldn't budge. It's because I would eat a lot afterward, canceling out the calories burned. Now I know that to lose weight I have to take in less than I'm expending, whether I'm exercising or not. I'll step up the exercise soon because it's good for things other than just weight management (cardiovascular health, muscle strength and toning) but the key thing that I am learning (and demonstrating) is that you don't have to work your butt off at the gym to lose weight. All you have to do is watch the calorie intake.

Burpee Figured It Out

Here's the final response from Shelia:

"The diameter from one side of the circle to the other side is 28". We are working on getting this information on our website.

I apologize for the inconvenience."

I wonder if the other two women learned anything from this.

Burpee Pole Bean and Pea Tower

I'm having a bit of frustrating fun with the Burpee gardening supply company. Here is a product that I am interested in: Pole Bean and Pea Tower. As you can see on the website, the height is 6' and it takes up 5 square feet. But they are missing a useful piece of information: the diameter. I know that the base is a circle and I know that this can be calculated, but I sent a note to the company asking for the diameter because, heck, they should know their own products! Here's a transcript of the responses that I've received from 2 folks (Sharon and Pam) in Customer Service:

My initial query: "Greetings! Could you please tell me the diameter of this product: Pole Bean And Pea Tower (Product number 91439). Thank you, Laurie"

Response from Sharon: "The Pea and pole bean tower pole is 6 foot high. The nylon string comes down to use only 5 square feet."

My response: "Thanks for the reply, but I didn't ask for the height. I asked for the diameter. Do you have this information? I want to determine if it will fit into my raised beds."

Response from Pam: "The pea tower is 5 square feet in diameter."

My latest reply: "I'm disappointed that you are not understanding my question, or basic geometry. "Square feet" is an area. "Diameter" is the length of a straight line that would be from one side of the circle to the other side. You guys should know your products better than this. Can't you have someone measure it if you don't have the product information handy? Which, I might add, should be on the product description page of your website."

In the meantime, I've already used an online calculator to determine the diameter using the known area of the circle, and I've determined that the diameter is about 2 1/2 feet. This will fit into my raised beds, barely. However, I'm going to see if I can get them to eventually understand what a diameter is and correctly answer my question. After all, they are Customer Service and they should be able to answer such a simple question.

I'll post their next response, which will probably be in a day or two. Or maybe their heads will blow up and I won't hear from them.

Back to Being a Normal Brunette

The red extensions were fun, but they are temporary by nature. I enjoyed the sassiness of them and also the little bit of extra fullness that they provided. However, they started to tangle easily at the ends, requiring frequent brushing, and I got tired of having to comb ever so carefully near my scalp after my showers. So, I decided to go ahead and remove them. I could have made an appointment with the stylist, gone to the salon later this week, spend 1/2 an hour or so there, and paid her about $25 - $40 to take them out. But I didn't. I just took a pair of needle-nose pliers and removed them myself. They are simply held in with crimped metal cylinders (called "beads"). So all I had to do is pinch them the other way to unflatten them and they came right out. It really wasn't very hard. The best thing is that I didn't have to spend my time and money letting someone else remove them.

It is nice running my fingers through my scalp knowing that I'm not going to catch on one of the metal beads.

Planting Onions

The 2011 garden season has officially started here at the Coleman household. Before I get into the garden itself, I'd like to say a little bit about one of my favorite resources. It's this book:

Following the guidelines in this book, I've learned to steer clear of the traditional method of gardening, the one that my grandparents used: row, path, row, path, row, path. The traditional method dedicated 50% of the space to walking, and that walking in between the rows of vegetables compacts the soil around the roots. A better way is to plant the vegetables in wide rows (beds) that you can reach into from at least one side so that you never have to step into it, compacting the soil. Even better: last year David worked very hard helping me to build raised beds throughout the garden. This provides better drainage and also saves stress and strain on my back.

Now on to what I did this week:
These are onion starts that I purchased from Dixondale Farms. I purchased a sample set of "intermediate day" onions. (According to their website I could grow either intermediate day or short day onions, but it looks like we are more in the intermediate day area.) The sample set consists of a white onion ("Super Star"), a yellow onion ("Candy") , and a red onion ("Red Candy Apple"). I planted 20 of each variety and passed on the extras to my neighbor for her garden. I followed the planting instructions provided by Dixondale. One thing that I didn't notice while I was preparing the soil 2 days ago but certainly did notice while I was planting the seedlings is that the ones near the edge of the bed went into damp, cool soil. That first 3-4 inches of soil doesn't get any sun yet and was noticeably cooler than the rest of the soil in the bed. The seedlings that were planted on the other side of the trench went into soil that was much warmer and drier. The tops of all of the onions are in the sun but it'll be interesting to see if there are any growing differences since the roots of half of them are in much cooler soil.

I set the onions off to one side because I plan to plant some carrots along beside them. They will develop a very nice relationship side-by-side.

This is what my garlic bed looks like today.

These are cabbage plants getting along nicely with cilantro. Sorry about the lighting. The fence casts a mean shadow.



These peas I planted last fall, in September. I've been harvesting peas from them all winter. Come spring, these will still be popping out peas left and right. What a nice head start!



This is a little artichoke starting to form on one of our artichoke plants. Peek-a-boo!

Beautiful Words

My PET scan report came to me in the mail this weekend. These are always fun to read. With that in mind, I thought I'd post the report here. These are posted as two images. If you click on each one it should bring it up to full screen so that you can read it more easily.

There are some very beautiful words in this report.

PET Scan Report from 1/19/2011

I just got a call from the (new) oncologist's office to let me know that my PET scan from 2 days ago came back all clear. Whew! I can't help but worry after one of these scans is done. And it's hard not knowing the result for days, knowing that the result is known by someone. So I am grateful that I got a call ahead of my appointment next week. So far, so good with this new oncologist.

I actually meet with him next week and will have some blood work done. The next scan should be in three months, so I can rest easy until then. Let's hope that I can have an unblemished spring and summer this year. The next couple of scans will be key. It's been 6 months since my surgery... getting through a year will be crucial and I am halfway through it. Everyone keep your fingers crossed for the next 6 months for me, please!

My Red Streaks

A couple of weeks ago while I was at the hair stylist getting my...ahem... distinguishing roots covered up I was flipping through one of those magazines in the rack. I saw a photo of Katy Perry's hair similar to this one:


I showed the photo to the stylist and commented that I thought the colors were very pretty. He told me that those were simply extensions. He said it's better to go with extensions if you want to do something like that because they are completely removable and they don't damage your hair the way a chemical process would. I kept thinking about the streaks and he said we can talk about doing something with my hair that's similar. After learning that I would have to buy a packet of hair for each color if I wanted multiple colors (and exactly how rock-star do I want to look anyway?) I decided to keep it simple and choose one color that would look good with my hair color. We narrowed it down to pink or red. When his wife held up the colors to my hair I immediately went for the red.

Here I am two weeks later:


And here:



And here:

In this photo you can see the streaks and the contrast much more when I lift up the top layers of my hair:


I will have to get used to these, and right now my scalp hurts a bit from the "beads" that are used to attach them to my own hair. But I think they really brighten my look! They will also give my hair a bit more fullness and also help absorb some of the copious oil that my head produces. If I get tired of them or decide I don't like them the extension pieces can actually be dyed my hair color and can be used just to give my hair more volume, if I choose.

My Chariot

This past week we went to Asilomar for a couple of days with some family and their friends. Asilomar is a bit spread out and you basically park and then walk everywhere. I remembered this from a previous stay there. Plus, there is a nice boardwalk along the beach as well. So, we decided to rent me a little scooter for the week. It comes apart in pieces for easier loading/unloading from the car. The heaviest piece probably weighs about 40 pounds. David developed a system and had it put together for me in no time.



It was a great decision to get it. Our room was very far from the dining hall, and uphill from it too. The walks back & forth from our room to the dining hall would have been very slow & uncomfortable without it. David took advantage of the motorized wheels too - he hopped on for a ride when he could! The scooter was very useful when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was a bit tight and crowded there but if I was patient and assertive then I was able to eventually see the displays that interested me. One thing that I learned is that people really don't see you when you are riding a scooter. Many folks walked right in front of me when I was moving forward, and the scooter stops pretty fast but it takes a few inches. Sometimes I didn't even have that much to spare. One woman actually ran right into the back of the scooter once when I was sitting still.



The scooter gets picked up tomorrow, but it's been fun to ride.