Nutrition

I was standing in Trader Joe's, frozen in indecision in front of the breakfast breads, when I realized that I have an ever-increasingly complicated approach to nutrition.

The debate at hand was whether to buy bagels.  I love bagels.  Bagels led me to relax my stringent distaste for white condiments and to actually try cream cheese.  I just requested (and received) a bagel-enabled toaster for my birthday.

But in my nutrition scale, bagels have no point.

Literally, no points.  To me, bagels have no nutritional value.  No whole grains, no protein, nothing but deliciousness.  So I ended up getting the Trader Joe's "Force Primeval Bars" which have whole grains, apples, raisins, and walnuts.  They achieved a similar goal as the bagels (I wanted to try out my new toaster), but without the attendant guilt of eating something "pointless."

Over time I'm realizing I have some useful and some very odd ideas underpinning my ideas of nutrition.  They include:

• Whole grains, super-fruits, and fish are very good for you
• Sugar, butter, spices, onions, tomatoes, and salt are flavorings, not food
• Chicken is better for you than red meat
• Cheese and cream are bad for you
• If I like it, I get less "points" for eating it.
• If I don't like it, I get more "points" for eating it

Based on that, some foods get lots of positive points for getting very good press, and because I hate them.

+ +
Whole wheat
Brown rice
Fish
Leafy greens like spinach and kale

And some foods get lots of points because they're legitimately healthy.

+ +
Cranberries, pomegranates, blueberries
Beans

Some I view as only kind of good for you because they might be legitimately healthy but I like them, which downgrades their "worth".

+
Whole grain oats
Green beans
Cabbage
Broccoli
Strawberries

And some I think are only kind of good for you because they're not known for being super-foods but they're not bad for you either.

+
Chicken breasts
Apples, grapes, oranges
Eggs (for protein, since I don't have a cholesterol problem)
Skim or 1% milk
All other vegetables

Then some stuff is bad for you, mostly for having high fat.

-
Butter as a main ingredient
Soft or melting cheeses, like Cheddar and Jack
Cream
Sour cream
Deep frying
Coffee creamer and CoolWhip (for being made of plastic)
Bacon


Things that don't fall in any of those categories don't have positive or negative points.  Some have no points because I'm not sure whether they're good for you or not.

0
Red meat (conflicting positive value on protein, negative values on fat and cholesterol)
White flour (empty calories)
White rice (empty calories)
Olive oil (conflicting good press and fat)
Coffee (conflicting caffeine and antioxidants)

And some don't have any points because, for reasons my conscious mind can't discern, I count them as flavorings, not food.

0
Butter for a saute
Parmesan, Romano, and Grano Padano cheeses
Onions (probably legitimately healthy, but it doesn't count)
Tomatoes (ditto)
Cream of mushroom soup
Sugar

With that basis, my mind, mostly unconsciously, computes the total value of a meal.  Tonight, I had two hard-boiled eggs, whole wheat spaghetti with pesto, and corn on the cob.  Lots of points.  All positive.  No negative.  Mental pat on the back.  But what about the Cincinnati chili I like?  That's a ground beef chili (0) over white spaghetti (0) with beans (+), onions (0), and Cheddar (-).  Not healthy.  But the pasta primavera I make?  That also uses white pasta (0), plus cream (-), but has mushrooms (+), green beans (+), zucchini (+), and peas (+).  Definitely healthy. 

 Dessert doesn't have a system.  Dessert is supposed to be delicious.

That is its only point.

Kitchen Colors

After seven weeks I finished the cabinets.

My friend Cindy came over for dinner and helped me hang the last of the doors - specifically the ones that were too heavy for me to hold in place and screw in at the same time.

After that I thought I would take a break before deciding on a color for the walls.

Yeah, that lasted two days.  I ended up getting samples from Lowe's and Home Depot, depending which I was nearest at the time.  One fun discovery was that both stores can look up and give you colors from other places.  I had brought in a paint chip from Sherwin Williams, after I found out Sherwin Williams paint runs $70 a gallon and yeah, that's not gonna happen.  I handed it to the girl at the Lowe's paint counter and asked her to color match it, assuming she would hold it up to the little color scanner like they do with stuffed toys in the commercials or with a chip of paint from the outside of my house when I had to do some touchups on the front.

After perusing doorknobs and shelf brackets because owning a home has made me a boring, stereotypical Saturday morning DIYer as cloyingly portrayed in sunlit HGTV clips, I went back to the paint counter.  The girl was examining the paint dot on the top of the sample.  "This looks like it," she said.  "I found it on the computer." At my puzzled look she said, "Oh, we can look up other company's colors." "Really?" I said.  "I thought I was cheating but apparently it's legit!" 

So I used that to my advantage and got two more expensive brand colors in big box brand paint.

Current frontrunner is Benjamin Moore's Everlasting (1038).  Funny, because it was the first one I picked before getting distracted by Sherwin Williams "Interactive Cream".  Interactive Cream was too dark, and orangey, so I also tested Sherwin Williams Biscuit.  That was too close to flesh tone, and once I realized it reminded me of the color of what's stuck under your fingernail when you scratch a lot it was never going to happen.  I also think the Behr sample was closer to paint chip than the Valspar samples, so maybe Home Depot's color matching works better or Valspar's new oval sample cans don't mix as well.  I could see streaks of white or green unmixed in the Valspar samples, so those colors might not be exactly true.

Now that this is my kitchen wall I'm kind of committed.  Maybe that's something I can do over Labor Day.  Compared to painting the kitchen cabinet it will be ludicrously easy!

Expectations

I remember library card catalogs.  I know that's one of the things the next generation will have no concept of, like payphones or the US having a thriving economy.  I'm definitely not one of those kids who always had the Internet at their fingertips, who never had to figure out the Dewey Decimal System to find the right section in the library to find the right book to find out what koalas eat for their fifth grade report.

And yet, I find myself still expecting to be able to find through Google every single thing possibly worth knowing.  And normally, Google has not let me down.  Though it took a few months, and extensive rephrasing, I did end up finding that painting my college roommate (Karen, actually) described as "dead people on a raft."  Google has obviously refined their algorithm since then because the Wikipedia article for "Raft of the Medusa" is now the first listing.

But what Google is now not able to serve up for my intellectual delectation is pictures of every paint color I might conceivably want to paint a room in my house.  Yesterday I thought I might be interested in Sherwin Williams' "Bagel 6114" for the kitchen walls, but the majority of the photos I found on Google were "a similar  color would be Sherwin Williams' Bagel 6114".  Well, yeah, sure.  Even harder to find where pictures of Benjamin Moore's Mohave Desert, since those photos were of the actual Mohave Desert.

So to perhaps keep others from hitting the same dead ends, I wanted to contribute my small part to the Internet's paint color collection.


The dining room is Tinsel Beam by Valspar, eggshell finish.

The living room is Bay Waves by Valspar, satin finish.  It is a very good honest gray, not too dark or too light.

Visitors often ask if the rooms are blue or gray and I have to explain that one is blue and one is gray.  Here are Tinsel Beam and Bay Waves side by side:

The kitchen cabinets are in Mascarpone by Benjamin Moore, satin finish in the Advance paint.  The pulls are Thomasville Grayson from Home Depot.

The Mascarpone is a creamy, slightly yellow white (like the cheese, I guess).  Here is the Mascarpone up against the whiter white of the trim.  I don't know the color of the trim because it is original to the house.

And against the white fridge:

This bedroom is Aqua Spray by Behr, adjusted to 75%, in satin.  The cabinet is Du Jour by Valspar, in high gloss.

Here is the 75% Aqua Spray in a different light.  I admit it is a bit more fluorescent than I wanted. 

This bedroom is Maple Cream from Valspar, in satin.  The trim here is Du Jour by Valspar as well. 

This bedroom is Desert Seedling by Valspar, in eggshell.

Kitchen Conundrum

After Catherine and Karen left, I impulsively decided to start re-painting my kitchen.  For a refresher as to why:

Yeah.  My kitchen really was those colors.

I thought I could cut my teeth on a few drawers.  But painting a few drawers required a lot of equipment.  A sander.  Sandpaper.  Fancy, high-VOC primer (Zinsser BIN Shellac-Based Primer-Sealer, to be exact).  Wood putty.  So it ended up being less of an introduction and more of a head-first dive.

A long, slow, dive.

All the instructions I've found online say that painting cabinets isn't quick.  "Not a weekend project", they say.  Well, yeah.  As I sit here over three weeks later and am only maybe starting to see the end in sight.

See, the process sounds straightforward.  Clean, sand, prime, sand, paint, sand, paint, done.  Even with a day between each coat that's still just three painting days.

But cabinet doors have two sides.  So expand that to six.  And even after borrowing a portable table from my parents I only have space to lay out four cabinet doors at once.  And I have 16 doors.  So that's four sets of doors, six days each...My mind boggles.

But the product is looking good.  The drawer hardware arrived on Friday and I ran to take pictures of it on the only finished portion of the kitchen - two of those original drawers on the one section of frames I had finished.

I'm pleased!

But there's a long way to go.

Catherine and Karen Visit California

This week, my friends Catherine and Karen came to visit.  It was great seeing them again.  I've come to realize there are in life a few people you can completely be yourself with, and Catherine and Karen are two of mine.

On their first full day I thought we should take advantage of the warm weather and visit Half Moon Bay.

Since it was Half Moon Bay it was in the 50s and Catherine and Karen froze but I think they had fun.






On the way back, we stopped at a glass art shop in the back of a winery and Karen did the demo to make a glass pumpkin.


























We tried to visit the tidepools at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve but it was too high a tide to see anything.  Since low tide was at 1 am that wasn't going to ever happen, so instead we climbed to the top of the bluff and took pictures of the interesting trees and scenery.

















The next day I took Catherine and Karen on a driving tour of SF.  It was mostly the 49 Mile Drive but we made detours to see the painted ladies at Alamo Square (aka "the Full House houses") and the Victorian on Broderick that was used for the Full House exteriors.


























We also walked up and down Lombard, which let us take lots of pictures and (the main point) meant I didn't have to drive down the curviest street in the world (or US, or city, or whatever Lombard is known for).







Near the end of the drive, we rounded the corner and I uttered a large understatement that  Catherine and Karen mocked for the rest of the trip: "Well, there's something."











Yes, turns out the Palace of Fine Arts really is something. With the palisades and the lake it was very beautiful.  I attribute my complete ignorance of its existence to locals' apathy.











Catherine and Karen tried to get a shot of Catherine holding one of the egg things.
















With moderate success.










The last thing we saw on the tour was the Sutros Bath ruins.  Here are Catherine and Karen looking out to the Pacific.












The next day we headed over the Golden Gate to see the Bay Model and Muir Woods.

We tried to take pictures at the northern side of the Golden Gate bridge but it was too windy.  My hair got remarkable mileage, though.








Muir Woods was calm and shady beneath the redwoods.  We walked on an easy trail and played "spot the hipster" and "guess the ethnicity of these children".

































On their last day we could have gone to Santa Cruz but instead decided to hang around home.  Mostly we lazed around, watched TV, and ate things, but we also went to Smart and Final because Catherine hadn't been to a restaurant supply store before, and went for a walk on the Bay Trail.  Because we're all engineers we detoured off the trail to see if a large structure across the street was the capture plant for the landfill's methane, but we couldn't tell.

What better way to end a trip than watching the sunset over the Bay?

Oil for Your Oil

In the most counter-intuitive move in my lifetime skincare regimen, I've been smearing cooking oil on my face for a week and have the least acne in recent memory.

It was my sister's doing.  She suggested I try the oil cleansing method, which I guess she had read about when deviating from nail polish research.  I found the relevant websites, but couldn't find the relevant castor oil for the life of me.  Or for the special ordering of me -- if I couldn't find it at CVS or Walgreens it wasn't going to happen.  So I just used olive oil.  Instead of washing my face at night I just smeared my face with olive oil, briefly steamed my face in a hot towel, and then rubbed the oil off with the towel.  Then I rinsed and dried my face for good measure (having forgotten the Internet instructions at that point).

And it works!  At the moment I don't have any active zits and the redness on my chin has calmed down some.  I also think I'm not as greasy at the end of the day.  So overall I'm a fan.

Maybe if this works I can decrease some of the rest of my regimen, since right now I used the oil to replace my night cleanser but I still am using Retin-A at night, benzoyl peroxide soap in the morning, and apricot scrub a few times a week.

My friends Catherine and Karen from Georgia Tech are coming to visit this week, which will be Catherine's first visit out.  I've planned lots of things for us to do and also anticipate plenty of sit around and watch TV time, which we always enjoy.  Like my friends Bonnie and Allison from high school, no matter how long it's been we always have plenty to talk about.  They're people I can just talk with.

Accurate Prejudice

I have a system for finding the quickest checkout line at Target. 

It bears a lot of resemblance to my method for finding the quickest security line at the airport.  At the airport, the ideal line to get it is the one with the most English-speaking businessmen traveling alone.  At Target, there are rarely many recognizable businessmen, so my preference is for men over women, English-speaking over non-, young over old, and for heavens' sake, avoid children.  It might not be politically correct, but that doesn't mean I'm not right.

Today, most of the lines broke the English and children guidelines, so I got behind a middle-aged woman who had a very full cart which can sometimes be a bad sign but it was full of several bulky things like a bedding set and large watering can.

However, she was placing on the conveyer belt six (SIX!) bottles of diet cranberry pomegranate juice drink.

"Wow," I thought to myself.  "She seems like a high-maintenance witch."

That sounded ungenerous even inside my own head, so I hastily revised my opinion.  "Well, maybe she has a UTI."  Though buying diet and therefore diluted cranberry juice drink for that would be silly.  Having to revise my opinion to infected and stupid isn't much better than high maintenance.

But that inner dialogue didn't last long.  Because that woman ended up being the most high maintenance witch I've ever had the misfortune to be behind in line. 

First she wanted a price check on a toy lantern, then she had to decide whether she wanted it.  Then she wanted a price check on an opened and manhandled sheer curtain.  Then she decided she didn't want it.  Then she let the cashier scan a few more items, then decided she wanted the opened sheer curtain but didn't want the sheer curtain the cashier had already scanned. But at least she knew how to swipe a credit card, so after that her transaction cleared quickly.

However, she didn't know how to load the bags into her cart, so the cashier handed every single one of my 20-odd items to me over the counter, which I put into my own bags and loaded into my own cart while the woman blocked the exit.  She was frustrated that the Target carts did not have a lower shelf beneath the basket, and querulously asked the clerk twice why the cart lacked it.  Then she asked the clerk what she was supposed to do, since all her purchases wouldn't fit back in the cart.  Since clearly all her items had fit in the cart before she got in line I have no idea what she was thinking. 

The clerk was calmer and much more polite than I would have been, and suggested the woman get a second cart, and also asked if she wanted help out.  After refusing each offer once, the woman finally acquiesced to have someone help her out, and as I left the clerk was trying to flag down another Target employee for assistance.

Turns out my instincts about what six bottles of diet cranberry pomegranate juice drink means were spot-on.