Lighten up

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Since September 2011, I have lost about 30 pounds, a little over a sixth of my starting weight. (The arithmetically inclined can now calculate my peak and current weights. Go ahead, I don’t care.) Occasionally friends and colleagues ask me What’s your secret? so I think it’s worth writing down my take on weight loss.

I don’t have a secret. No one does. The brutal truth that everyone knows, is that dieting is wretched and awful. Burning fat means eating fewer calories than you burn, and eating less is painful (mentally and physically) and so agonizingly slow to produce results!

My basic strategy is calorie counting, with MyFitnessPal to help me keep track. I don’t always remember to enter my calories every day, but I’ve done it enough over the last year that I pretty much know how much food is in 1200 calories. One cup of whole milk for breakfast and about 400 calories of frozen pre-pack for lunch, leaving about 600 calories for a moderate dinner. Some days it kinda feels like enough. Other days, the constant not-quite-hunger (or actual hunger) gets to me, and I wish I could feel really full again.

One nice thing about MyFitnessPal is its exercise incentive. For instance, biking to work allows me nearly 600 extra calories! If I want to eat more, all I have to do is get off my butt.

MyFitnessPal is great, but meeting fitness goals is still hard, especially because it requires changing ingrained habits. With Jeff I fell into the habit of eating my fair share of our meals (inevitably resulting in my eating too much), and once I got a full-time desk job, the picture of an expanding Inno-ass was complete. Ditching habits of over-eating and over-sitting has been difficult, and I’d be lying if I said I could stick to it 100%. Here the key for me is keeping expectations reasonable. I’ve learned to accept that I’m going to fall off the bandwagon for a couple of weeks (or months). I just have to get back on again (and not beat myself up about it, because that doesn’t help).

Another aspect of my reasonable expectations is a relaxed exercise standard: Do Something. If I set out to run around Lake Merritt and end up walking half of it, I still win because I got out there. Even little steps matter, and recognizing that helps me to stay motivated.

I started my weight-loss project because after several years in a desk job, I looked at my slowly expanding and sagging body, and it sunk in that I am not 18 any more. I’m not even 25 any more! Growing up, I was always super thin, so that’s how I thought about my physical self. I felt like a thin person, but my body was straying away from what I identified as being me.

Also, quite honestly I was out of shape. A few years ago on a company ski trip, a group of us went out snowshoeing, and I found it really hard to keep up. I eventually had to turn back, alone, and frankly it was a little humiliating. That is totally changed! I’m not a super athlete by any measure, but I can bike 5+ miles each way to work every day, even when I didn’t get quite enough sleep, and still make it up the long hill at the end on two wheels. I might drop to a nice low gear, but I’ll make it the whole way. That alone is an amazing reward for my hard work.

You see, I have no secret. But if I have any advice, it’s to love yourself, set high but achievable goals, and value your achievements even if they aren’t exactly what you intended.

Kings Canyon Reprise

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Three years ago I tried to hike the Rae Lakes Loop in Kings Canyon National Park. We had a good time and took a bunch of pretty pictures, but I got altitude sickness and had to turn back after two days. This year I’m in a bit better shape, so we thought we’d give it a go with a couple of acclimation days built in for good measure.

Trees, rocks, and blue blue sky

The plan seemed reasonable. Drive to Kings Canyon National Park on Wednesday and camp overnight. Get on the trail early Thursday, hike to Paradise Valley, and stay two nights there for acclimation. Hike to Woods Creek Crossing Camp and Rae Lakes on the third and fourth days, stay an extra day at the lakes for acclimation, and then over the peak and out.

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Eugene

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On Friday our friend Mike and his beloved Alli were married in Eugene, Oregon. Jeff was a groomsman. We drove up for the ceremony; it was a fairly mixed trip.

  • Two of the groomsmen had legal trouble with the car they were riding in and had to be picked up fifteen minutes before the wedding rehearsal; I volunteered and found them waiting on a street corner. In trying to follow the GPS directions on the way back to the hotel, I ran over a curb (hiding almost invisibly between two ramps!) and scraped the undercarriage of the car.
  • After the rehearsal dinner, I tagged along with the groomsmen when they bought beer and snacks for the bachelor party. The checker carded only me, even though I was just standing there and neither paying for nor going to drink any of the alcohol. Most ironic, I am actually older than any of the groomsmen. The checker said it was Oregon state law that she had to card everyone in the group; I asked if she was going to card the men, and she said I was the only one who didn’t look 21 to her. I was annoyed but handed her my card; in retrospect I should have insisted that she was being sexist and that I wouldn’t hand over my ID unless she carded the men too. (Like the groom, they are all sweethearts and would have backed me up.) I am still annoyed.
  • The dress I wore to the wedding is long and swirly, and to all reports I looked fantastic. I had some luck there; the wedding hotel was right next to a shopping mall, and I was able to get my nails, makeup, and hair done in salons there on short notice.
  • The ceremony was beautiful, the bride blushing and graceful, the groom proud and elegant. They had a whole dance prepared for their first dance, which was awesome.
  • In the afternoon before the wedding, the groom and his parents gave dancing lessons to bridal party and guests who didn’t already know how. We learned foxtrot and swing and were able to use our new skills (and my swirly dress) on the dance floor later that evening. We were passable I think, but too nervous to relax into the music. We’re planning to dance more and work on that.
  • On the way home we started hearing sounds like something dragging or hitting the road. We pulled off and looked under the car; the protective plate had come partially loose and buckled down a few inches on the driver’s side. We made it home, but I see a trip to the shop in our future.
  • My throat started getting a little dry yesterday evening, and this morning I have a full-blown sore throat.

The shoe problem

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As I wrote previously, I’ve been moving towards wearing hand-knitted socks. For the most part this has been fabulous, but it did uncover a lack in my wardrobe: black shoes.

It’s not that I don’t own any black shoes; I have at least about five pairs. It’s simply that they’re all at least moderately formal and therefore too tight to wear with anything but hose. Therefore a shoe-shopping trip to REI was in order.

Hedera in Ahnu Kick shoes

My requirements were simple: black, comfortable, open on top to show off socks, and a strap to hold my foot in (because I have a narrow heel and my foot will always fall out without a strap). And of course they have to look good to me and on me. Finding shoes to meet these criteria wasn’t a problem; I settled on Ahnu Kicks as the most comfortable.

Few shoe-shopping trips are without their casualties. Mine was a lovely green-and-brown pair of Teva Westwaters that the assistant brought out by mistake; I had asked for the black but didn’t complain because in fact the “pesto” colorway looks much better to me than black-and-gray. These are even more open than the Kicks and will be especially nice for summer wear.

Hedera in Teva Westwater shoes

The socks featured in the photos are from a Knitty pattern called Hedera. I finished them Tuesday evening; the yarn is Pagewood Farm Hand Dyed Sock Yarn and just lovely. (I fell in love with the color when I saw it in another Raveler’s stash and traded her for it.) I like the pattern, but if I were to knit it again, I would make a few changes:

  • The tubular cast-on looks slightly funny with the “twisted rib” (knit stitches are through the back loop to twist them). I would still use a tubular cast-on but would try modifying it to knit through the back loop like the ensuing rib.
  • The heels are a bit long (48 rows, 24 st picked up on each side). 32 or 36 rows would be more to my liking.
  • The given stitch counts are a little wrong after the gusset (the number of stitches remaining on the top of the sock is 29, not 27), so if you follow the instructions you end up with 58 or 62 stitches (for the small and large sizes, respectively) instead of 56 or 60 like you’re supposed to. One just needs an extra gusset decrease row to get back to the right total stitch count.

I am up in the middle of the night, blogging, because I went to sleep at about 8pm, woke up when Jeff came to bed at about 11:30, and wasn’t able to get back to sleep. Now I feel a bit like Christmas Eve, in that I want to wear my new shoes but have to wait until morning and can’t sleep for anticipation…

Fresh fettuccine

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Several years ago Jeff’s mother gave us a pasta maker. I think we used it once, though I don’t actually remember doing so. (I do remember trying to roll pasta dough by hand, which didn’t work terribly well.) The machine has sat in the closet for at least as long as we have been in California.

So why I suddenly decided to make fresh pasta on Sunday for my mother, who is visiting for the weekend, I don’t know, but it was an awesome idea.

Making fresh pasta is a little weird. You start out by making a pile of flour on your work surface (or if you’re a pansy, you can use a bowl). Make a well in the center of your flour and crack some eggs into it, then whisk the eggs and start mixing them with the flour. Knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic, then divide it in four and let it rest for a little while under plastic wrap or a bowl.

Now comes the rolling. A pasta machine makes this a lot easier; it has rollers that squeeze the dough thin and even. The rollers are adjustable, so you start out on the widest setting. Put the dough through, fold it, roll it through again, fold, and repeat about 6 times. Tick the rollers to the next setting and put the dough through a few times; repeat until the dough is smooth, satiny, and as thin as you want it.

Rolling pasta dough

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Return of the Flippy Gloves

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Four years ago, I knitted gloves for Jeff. These were not just any gloves; they were fingerless, with a mitten-top that could flip forward to cover the fingers. I even made the thumb flippy by means of a large buttonhole. (I have never seen either gloves or a glove pattern with a flippy thumb; I don’t know why no one else has done it since it’s so amazingly easy. I didn’t have a full pattern I liked, but I took a glove pattern for the right gauge and substituted a better thumb (and mitten-end) from another mitten pattern.

That first pair of gloves kept Jeff’s hands warm at Lena Lake and for almost four more years. He nearly wore them out; the holes were becoming pretty obvious.

Flippy gloves

And then he lost one of them on the way to visit my family for Christmas. He was pretty upset about it; those gloves were special to him both because I made them and because they were awesome. He had cold hands for a couple of months after that.

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Judith with the Head of Holofernes

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One of my colleagues went to the San Francisco Legion of Honor a while ago and told me she saw a painting that looked like me. That’s random, I thought, and I completely forgot about it until this week when she dug up a photo and showed it to me. She’s right, it does sort of look like me, though I suspect my face would have a rather different expression if I had just seduced a man in order to cut off his head while he is drunk.

Portrait of a Lady of the Saxon Court as Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Hans Cranach, circa 1537-1540

The painting is Portrait of a Lady of the Saxon Court as Judith with the Head of Holofernes, attributed to Hans Kranach, circa 1537-1540. You can also find it on the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco website.

I tried to do a little bit of research about the painter and the subject, but I wasn’t terribly successful. I found the basic story of Judith, but I didn’t find anything at all about Hans Cranach. On the other hand, I found a bunch of Judith paintings by Lucas Kranach the Elder, including my favorite, Judith mit dem Haupt des Holofernes. The paintings are so similar that I have to think the artists must be related, but I’m not sure what the connection is.

Judith mit dem Haupt des Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530

Check out these other versions:

I find the paintings’ variations rather interesting. Some show more of the severed neck, some less; some face right and some left; the sleeve decorations vary quite a lot. Still, it’s almost the same painting; the grayish head, the lady’s face, her floppy hat, the gloves cut to show her rings, and even the white-and-black-striped panel on her bodice are completely consistent. It makes me wonder why Lucas painted the same thing so many times; was he unsatisfied with his results? Or was it such a popular subject that every nobleman wanted one?

And if anyone finds out how she severed a man’s head without getting any blood on that gorgeous dress, let me know.

Stitches West 2009

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Today, I went to Stitches West 2009. For those who aren’t in the know, Stitches is a sort of knitting convention with a bunch of classes but also a large marketplace of knitting vendors. I didn’t sign up for any classes (I haven’t yet found a knitting technique I couldn’t learn on my own), but I did go down for the market.

It was a madhouse, even on Friday (apparently Saturday is supposed to be worse). I found a bunch of yarn I liked, but I was not generally overwhelmed by temptation. I did have to restrain myself at specific shops, but overall I emerged relatively unscathed.

My Stitches haul!

From left to right:

  • Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Lightweight (2 skeins)
  • Miss Babs Hand-Dyed Yarns and Fibers "Yummy" Hand-Painted Sock & Baby Yarn — 2 ply Superwash (3 skeins)
  • A Verb for Keeping Warm Superwash Merino (2 skeins)
  • A Verb for Keeping Warm tote bag (under AVFKW yarn)
  • Cascade Petite 100% undyed silk laceweight (2 skeins)
  • Wooden shawl pin
  • #0 47″ Addi Turbo Lace
  • beaded stitch marker (free from Miss Babs)

In total I bought seven skeins of sock yarn (enough for a full week of socks!). I can’t wait to start my March socks.

Ohio/Kentucky 2008

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Jeff’s father takes a trip to Ohio every December, and this year Jeff and I went with him. We spent a couple of days in Cincinnati with Jeff’s aunt, then drove down to rural Kentucky for a few days with his uncle’s family, then back to the city for the last couple of days.

Jeff’s aunt (not his father’s sister but the one married to his uncle) is involved in a documentary of a small hydroelectric station, called the Mother Ann Lee because it is located on old Shaker land. It’s an old station, very small and out-of-date, and to boot it can only be accessed by water or by a narrow trail. For all these reasons, the power company wanted to get rid of it; it just wasn’t worth it for them. Enter a small band of crazy engineers who are restoring and modernizing the station in order to get it back on line and providing power again.

It’s not a large station (I think I was told it could power 2,000 homes), but every little bit counts. Kentucky is a coal-heavy region; this plant is the only one in the area that can provide clean-energy credits. For these local-energy activists, the idea is to put small, distributed, green power stations all over, so that there is less dependence on huge monolithic plants.

(I put green in quotation marks because there are many arguments on all sides about what actually constitutes green energy and what is the most environmentally friendly … but I don’t want to get into that here.)

So Jeff’s aunt asked us if we would be interested in seeing the Mother Ann Lee, and of course we were. She led us along the base of a cliff, above a steep hill that led directly into the river. We had to step carefully on the damp leaves, but we didn’t fall.

Trail to the Mother Ann Lee Hydroelectric Station

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