It Started with a Journal

I was a cooking fiend yesterday. I made a big pot of fish soup in the morning (using fish as a base for soup is a lot less time consuming than using land-protein, as it takes minutes rather than hours to get all the flavor out -- BUT you do have to deal with all the fish bones). Then I felt like having dessert and made some pancakes. I made aloo gobi for dinner, and found this thing online where you can make 1 serving of ice cream without an ice cream maker and had to try it out (it worked). I've also got a sourdough starter in the proofing box so that I can hopefully make a loaf today. And I also cut up the pineapple I had (I'm now 3 for 3 in terms of selecting pineapples that are sweet and wonderful -- I think I finally have the hang of it!). Today I'm going to make crispy puris.

I've always been into Indian food, but I think I'm going to be cooking it more often. I have nearly all the myriad of spices that the cuisine uses by now, and I found these videos that this Indian housewife has made of all these different dishes, that are really helpful and fun. It's also cool because she's a vegetarian, so everything she makes is vegetarian, which is good because it'll force me to eat better. I've always thought that being a vegetarian is really hard except for Indian cuisine, because everything is so tasty and there are so many different ways to prepare it that it doesn't get old (as opposed to having salad constantly or veggie sandwiches, etc.). Still, if I'm serious about cooking more Indian food I'll need to invest in a pressure cooker, because cooking lentils/daal will take way too long without one. Aaaand I just ordered one on Amazon. Do any of you have or use pressure cookers? What else do you make in them besides daal? :P

So that's good when it comes to the Aspirational Jeans Diet. What's not so good for the AJD is that for the first time in months and months, I tried to use my treadmill yesterday. Unfortunately, sometime in the long winter months, something happened where now the buttons don't work. It turns on, it recognizes the iFit card when I put it in, but when I hit Start (and every other button), it doesn't work. Sigh. So now I have like a 500-lb paperweight (or however much it weighs). I guess I have to call the NordicTrack people, though a friend is like, don't call them yet, let me take a look first. And I'm like, you don't know anything about treadmills! And he's like, well I'll at least poke around for more than just 20 minutes! And I'm like, fine, I'll let you poke around until you get frustrated with it and then I'll just end up calling them anyway! And he's like, fine!

What a bummer. I can't recall, when I lost all that weight before, how much exercising I did. I think it was mostly portion control and eating better, but was it also walking a lot? I can't remember. If it was the latter it would have been when I was living in my condo, and walking around there is a lot easier than where I live now, which doesn't have nice paved sidewalks on the thoroughfare that my street connects to. Sigh.

I'm not the greenest person ever, but I do try and be conscientious of my carbon footprint, particularly when it comes to REALLY EASY things that take almost no effort to do. And it drives me crazy when people -- supposedly intelligent, informed people -- can't do the same. Two of my biggest pet peeves:

- Writing only on ONE SIDE of pages in a notebook. Write on the other side, which is completely blank, for pete's sake! Related: printing a number of documents, or something with many pages, on one side of a sheet of paper.

- Using a recyclables trash can as a normal trash can, which is right next to it. Is it really that hard to comprehend what is recyclable and what isn't, or to make the effort to notice what fucking trash can you're putting something into? It's not like they're asking us to sort between the various kind of recyclables -- everything from paper to plastic to aluminum can go into one bin. Food, tea bags, the like? The other bin. IT'S NOT THAT HARD PEOPLE.

I see this behavior constantly at work. It makes me insane. What galls me is how EASY it is. It's not like anyone has to go out of their way to be responsible, or that I'm some extremely serious environmentalist who's just being freakish and hard on them. God!

Last week I received an email to see a screening of Mamma Mia. It was from The Screening Exchange, which is an LA program. I am not in LA. Therefore I could not go to the screening. Cry. And this is why I hate Trix, who did get to see it.

I've bit(ten?) the bullet and hired someone to put together the treadmill. It's going to cost around $175, which is a lot, but considering the time and stress I'll save from having to do it myself (and getting it done by someone who knows what they're doing), it'll be worth every penny. Plus they're coming on Monday -- and who knows when I'd get around to it? The only thing is that I had originally wanted to put it in my bedroom ... but apparently getting the thing moved would require hiring other people to do, because it's so damn heavy. >< So I've cleared a space in the downstairs "fun room," which is probably just as well, because now I can watch TV while on the treadmill. Well, it has a built-in TV, so I could have done that before, but it doesn't have a DVD player!

( I've watched more DVDs/shows -- kind of cont. from my other entry about this. )

Okay, I've purchased a treadmill -- link to it here in case anyone else goes through the same hemming and hawing. Basically what I did was use the basics from this article to determine the basic stats of a machine that would work best for me (given my weight/predicted usage) and went to NordicTrack to find one in my price range with those stats. I tried a couple of other brands the article mentions, but their Web sites/offerings didn't seem very impressive and at least I've heard of NordicTrack (reputable company important when parting with a significant chunk of change). Probably a true exercise guru would know the actual best brands, but as a noob this worked for me.

This helped me determine that their lowest end model would work for me, but before just buying it off the NT site I decided to look for it on eBay (the article makes a sensible point that you can get good exercise equipment used, as people often buy on impulse and don't end up using them). Well, eBay didn't have the model I wanted, but I did find a higher-end model, that has a TV (O.o), iPod dock, and other niceties on top of being better functionally (in terms of motor type, weight capacity, etc.), at less than half what it retails for on the NT site -- and not much more than what I would have paid for the lower-end model. It's also brand new, from a seller who has over 270 feedback and a 99.3% positive rating, so I feel pretty good about it. The only thing I'm a bit leery about is the manufacturer's warranty -- I called NT, and according to them it's still good regardless of who I purchase the equipment from, but I can't purchase extra warranty as I've seen some suggest. Plus, it's still a bit of a risk because I'm going through eBay and all, so NT may not consider it legitimate or whatever. And of course, it's being shipped so I haven't actually seen or used it yet, so hopefully everything will be OK when I get it.

Now I just have to find a place to put it, and contemplate how difficult it's going to be to put it together!