365-Day Challenge--Restarting my Carnivore ADF transformation

I'm back at it, trying to fix my health. And I'm sorry I've been gone so long. I've realized that I need you. I need the community that you provide to be able to succeed. So, I'm back, pledging to stay, and bringing a new idea on how to make this work. I'm doing a 365-Day challenge, in which I post a video every day for the next year talking about my journey and how it's going.

I won't post the video for every day on the blog. I'll just do this first one. You can find the rest on my YouTube channel called Big Anklevich on Health.

An Early Thanksgiving

Another year, and I'm working on Thanksgiving Day again. I don't know how often that happens, but it seems way more often than it should. The worst thing about working this Thanksgiving is that I probably didn't have to. I asked for Christmas off this year, so I left Thanksgiving to the other editors...but none of them ever asked for Thanksgiving off, so we had all three editors at work this year for no reason. I guess the extra money might help pay for Christmas presents or something.

Anyway, you may wonder why I titled the post "An Early Thanksgiving." Well, it's not because we celebrated it the day before. Instead, my wife decided to have everything ready so that we could have Thanksgiving dinner by noon, since I had to leave for work at 1:00 PM.

Weirdly, we all wound up sleeping in later than usual despite our need for an early meal. My wife said she got out of bed at 9:30 AM. I remember her leaving, but I didn't know how late it was, so I went back to sleep, and then at 10:30 AM, I woke up still feeling sleepy. 

I checked my phone before going back to sleep though, and my eyes bugged out when I saw the time. There was only an hour and a half before we were supposed to eat. Surely my wife needed some help. I'd better get out there.

Turns out it wasn't that desperate, however. My wife had things pretty well under control. She let me help here and there, but mostly she beat that dinner like a boss.

I did get to do some important stuff though...like giving the cats some turkey cat food in honor of the day.

The kids helped me clear off and set the table.

Then my responsibilities mostly consisted of taking pictures of all of the amazing dishes that my wife made for us to stuff our faces with.

She used the air fryer that she got me for my birthday to cook the turkey this year.

It came out wonderfully, and she says it's the best turkey we've had in years. My daughter insisted that we have ham as well, so here's the meat platter for Thanksgiving:

We also had homemade mashed potatoes and gravy:

Which were super tasty. There were green beans fried with bacon, and, my wife's favorite, the homemade cranberry sauce:

She made a big dish of stuffing:

And a huge tray of sweet potato casserole.

We sat down to eat, and it was very apparent that there would be a lot of leftovers.

It's weird to have so few of us left. Ever since we moved to Houston, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas have been much smaller affairs, but this is getting ridiculous. Last year, my older son came to visit at Thanksgiving, so we had the whole family to eat that big meal. So, it's a much more noticeable drop from last year with both a daughter and son now gone. It's hard to handle this slide toward an empty nest.

So Playful

The kitten loves playing with our collapsible laundry baskets. She has so much more fun than I thought possible.

Is This The Right Plural?

Is it mice or mouses? Asking for a friend who doesn't already know.

Changing My Mind

You know, if my first cat, Juno: 

Had been anything like the new kitten we have, Jupiter:

I don't think I ever would have disliked cats at all.

She is so fun and crazy and playful and entertaining that it completely counteracts Juno's horrible personality. I guess it's an important lesson. Don't judge every member of a group based on one member of that group. Everyone is different. For every Juno, there's also a Jupiter.

Halestorm & Evanescence

My daughter is a huge music fan. Some people don't get too into music, others tend to almost base their lives around it. My daughter is one of the latter. It's probably her artistic nature, as well as the fact that she has a lot of time to listen to music while working on her art.

I did something right when raising her, though, because she likes mostly the same music as me. She's been jealous of me for a while as I've been telling her stories of the concerts I went to when I was younger. For example, She's a big fan of Rush. I saw them in January, 1992:

Now, Neil Peart, the drummer, is dead, and the band has called it quits. It's a band she can never see, and she's jealous about that.

I've told her I would take her to any concert she wanted to go see. All she had to do was find the show she wanted and let me know to buy tickets. She started looking...and then Covid hit. Concerts were canceled, heck every single public gathering was canceled from baseball games to Broadway plays.

It was a long morose couple of years, but things are finally getting back to normal...in some ways, anyway. Concerts are starting to come back. So, my daughter started looking for a show to see.

The band Evanescence, who burst onto the scene back in 2003 with their biggest hit, "Bring Me to Life," had a new album for 2021. I've always been a fan, so I checked the album out, and found it to be really good. I made a disc of it that I could listen to in the car, and after a while of riding with me, my daughter had become intrigued and started listening to it on her own as well.

She liked the album as much as I did, and when I told her that they were coming in concert, supported by another group that I really liked called Halestorm, she was all in. She decided that had to be her first concert.

I suppose here is where I need to make a quick aside. My daughter has actually been to a big concert before. In 2008, we got tickets to a Fourth of July fireworks show and concert that was featuring the vocal stylings of Miley Cyrus. These days, my daughter is a little embarrassed to admit that she ever went to a Miley Cyrus show, and since she doesn't even really remember it at all, having been only four years old at the time, she doesn't count it as her first concert.

Anyway, back to the present. We got tickets for the show, and the days steadily passed until it was time to go see some music. Luckily, my daughter was paying attention, because I had completely forgotten that the day had arrived. If it had been up to me, we would have sat at home that night, completely wasting the money we spent on those tickets.

Since it's a Covid-era show, we had to have our vaccine cards to prove we'd been jabbed just to get in the door. This of course made the line take a lot slower.

Our tickets claimed the show started at 7:30 PM, and we got inside at 7:39 PM, but the opening band, which sounded like they might be pretty good, wrapped up their set about one minute later. We didn't even know who they were, because the tickets didn't name an opener, but my daughter searched later and discovered that they were called Plush.

It would be kind of funny for them to turn out to be really great, and a band that we later grew to love, since we missed them by so small a margin. It would be like the time back in 1991 when I went to the Clash of the Titans concert.

The opening band that day was called Alice in Chains. At the time, they had one song on the radio called "Man in the Box." I saw them perform, but barely paid attention. I really wanted them to move on to the big headliners like Anthrax, which was one of my favorite bands at the time. Me and my friends sat around, making fun of Alice in Chains when we weren't completely ignoring them.

Later, Alice in Chains became one of the biggest bands in the world, and could have had Megadeth, Slayer, or Anthrax as their opening band. They became one of my all-time favorite bands. I love pretty much anything they ever did.

I never saw them in concert again, and the lead singer died years ago, so I never can see that version of Alice in Chains again. I could have said that I saw Alice in Chains before they were cool, but I didn't bother to pay attention to them as they played songs that are now some of my favorites right in front of me. I wish I could go back and watch that show again.

I looked up that band, Plush, and they seem to be right down my alley. I may really regret missing them later.

This show wasn't much like the Astroworld concert from a week ago that caused the deaths of nine people. Instead, it's a bunch of people who are similarly old like me, who couldn't be bothered to put in the effort to push to the front of the crowd. I sent my wife a selfie of us waiting for the next band to come out, and her comment was:

That's probably fine. When I told my daughter that the concert was being put on by Live Nation, the same promoter that put on the Astroworld event, she had second thoughts. I told it would be fine, and it was. Us oldsters just can't be asked to put in the kind of effort needed for a stampede. Somebody would have to burn the building down to get us running.

It wasn't long after we got there that Halestorm started playing. When the first blast of super loud Rock and Roll hit us like a wall of sound, vibrating our chests, a big smile spread across my daughter's face, and never left it until the show was done.

I got a couple of videos to share on the blog. My guess is that if you're younger than me you don't even need to bother clicking because you won't enjoy the music. It's pretty heavy, too, so you may not enjoy it even if you're younger than me. Maybe watch it on mute, the light show is pretty good, anyway.

About halfway through the show, the song that I came to see was played. In 2020, the singers from both Halestorm and Evanescence put out a duet of an older Halestorm song, and it is really beautiful. I knew, since both bands were touring together, that there was no way they would put on a concert and not perform that song, so I grabbed video of that song too.

Don't mind all those phones being held up in the shot. They're being held up for effect, instead of people endlessly recording and taking pictures. When I was younger, all the smokers in the audience would hold up their lighters at times like these. The flashlights on everyone's phones have taken the place of lighters now. It looks kind of like this:

Which is a pretty cool effect, and that's just the back end of the venue. If I'd taken the picture from right next to the stage, I bet it would look even cooler. My daughter was a fan, and held her phone up with the flashlight on for several songs, even when they didn't come out and ask for it.

Unfortunately, as I complained in yesterday's post, our view often looked like this:

That's a little annoying, I must say. Phones weren't even the worst thing, however. There were plenty of tall people in front of us that we often had to move from side to side whenever taller people managed to get in front of us.

Funny my hypocrisy, right? Complaining about phones up in the way after providing you with several videos I took doing the same thing myself. Then complaining about tall people being in front of us when I am 6' 1" and surely block the view of a lot of people behind me. I guess I'm a human. We're all pretty hypocritical when you think about it, and we all hate hypocrites at the same time too. It's pretty hypocritical for a hypocrite to hate hypocrites, isn't it?

The first band, Halestorm, finished their show after some intense songs filled with awesome dueling guitar solos. My daughter was so impressed that she decided that she wanted a Halestorm T-shirt instead of an Evanescence shirt. She knew Evanescence more, but now she was won over to Halestorm (also, I think their T-shirts had better designs on them, and that is probably the most important for an artist like my daughter).

I was really thirsty, so in between bands, we went in search of some water. There were no drinking fountains, of course, which wasn't a big surprise. If there were fountains, then how could they charge people exorbitant prices?

When I asked the bartender for water, he told me he only had canned water. I've never seen canned water in my life, but I bought one for each of us. We laughed a lot when we saw the brand name of the water.

Yes, their water came in a can that looked like an energy drink or a beer can, and the name was Liquid Death. LIQUID DEATH! That seems like a silly name for water, but fun, I guess. I was thirsty enough that it tasted like pure life instead of liquid death. Gotta do something to get that diabetes under control before it causes my death, huh?

Next thing you know, Evanescence hit the stage and started playing.

That video was one of their ballads, but they're more known for heavy rockers than ballads. One of their heavy songs, and their biggest song was "Bring Me to Life," and I got some good video of that one.

I don't know if it comes through in the videos, but Evanescence had so much more of a wall of sound pumping from their speakers than Halestorm did. When their drummer did a solo, the thumps of his drums vibrated our chest so much that I felt like it might cause a heart arrhythmia or something. Confusing our hearts so that they didn't know what was a drumbeat and what was a heartbeat. Luckily, our bodies aren't generally that stupid, so our hearts continued their normal function. Their guitars were much more distorted and chunky than the relatively clean and crisp sound of Halestorm.

Not to be outdone by Halestorm, Evanescence did a duet with Halestorm's singer just as Halestorm had done with Amy Lee, the Evanescence singer. Instead of doing one of their songs, they did a cover of a Linkin Park song called "Heavy." 

I got video of that moment, because it seemed significant, but truthfully, I didn't like the song as much. I don't know what my daughter thought, but I think she might have dug it more than me. She's a fairly big Linkin Park fan as well.

The show came to a big finale when they played my favorite song from the new album. The first time I listened to the album, many of the songs didn't grab me right away, but track twelve had an amazing melody to it, and I found it strange that they saved that one for the very last. It wasn't one of the singles that they released, and I was guessing that they may not play it at all, so I was pretty excited to see that it was actually their big finale.

Then the lights came on, and everybody cleared out. So, that was my daughter's first real concert. She had a great time, and was all for going to more shows...if only they weren't so expensive. I'll have to see if I can find some more affordable shows. Maybe some cool up and coming bands, because they tend to be much cheaper. Stay tuned for further blog posts.

Obstructed View

Took my daughter to her first concert last night. Concerts sure have changed since I was a teenager.

And yes, I understand the hypocrisy of using my camera to take this picture so that I can complain about other people using their cameras to take pictures. I don't care.

The Puzzle War

They opened a new store nearby called Tuesday Morning. Rish goes there looking for toys relatively often, but we weren't familiar with it here. In fact, my daughter thought we were actually joking about time travel when we said we were going to Tuesday Morning.

Most of us weren't particularly impressed...except for my daughter, who was amazed by the whole wall of puzzles they had for sale at the store. She is cuckoo for puzzles. She talked her mother into buying her not one, but two puzzles from this wall, one was a simple 300 piece puzzle and the other a daunting 1,000 piece puzzle.

She came home, and got to work, flying through the 300 piece puzzle first. She had it finished by the end of the night (a feat that none of the rest of us could have achieved, but to her was no big deal).

The next day, she started into the 1,000 piece puzzle, finding the majority of the edge pieces and putting the frame together...that's when the struggle began.

No, I'm not just referring to the struggle to finish a hard puzzle. She could have easily handled that. She had more to contend with...namely, Jupiter the kitten.

Jupiter loves to play with little toys like marbles, Legos, and balls. Sometimes, she can be entertained for hours by a simple scrap of paper that has fallen on the floor. So, when she got up on the table and saw all those little puzzle pieces, her mind was captured. She wanted to play with them.

My daughter didn't realize at first that she had an enemy to fight with. She left her puzzle partly finished on the table as she has every other time she's put together a difficult one.

The next morning, when I came out to get my nine-year-old ready for school, I found dozens of puzzle pieces on the ground. I didn't know the culprit, so I just gathered them all up and put them back on the table.

Later on, I caught Jupiter on the table (she's not allowed up there, but it takes an awful lot to teach a cat their boundaries). When I went to put her back on the ground, I noticed that she had a puzzle piece in her mouth. I snatched it out, put the kitten on the ground, and texted my daughter:

You better watch out. I caught Jupiter on the table with a puzzle piece in her mouth. And that happened after we picked about 50 pieces up off the floor. I don't know if she knocked them all off or if it was me with the laundry, but you might have a puzzle saboteur in your midst. Better finish it quicker than you did with the puzzle Grandma gave you.

To which she responded with a simple:

Ah!

She had been warned, but when she got home from school and saw the actual damage, she texted me back:

You didn't mention that she destroyed the whole thing...Like 5 hrs...And the entire frame of it is missing or disconnected

She almost gave up right then and there, defeated. I don't know if I talked her out of it or if she reached inside to a reserve that she saved for times of adversity, but she decided to redo the work she'd already done on the puzzle, and came up with a strategy to keep the kitten off of the puzzle.

Each day, as she finished working on the puzzle, she covered it (including all the loose pieces) with a light blanket that would keep Jupiter from seeing the pieces and going after them. Also, she spent more time on it than she might have otherwise, so she could get it done faster.

Even though she couldn't see the puzzle, Jupiter seemed to know it was under there. She kept getting up on the table and sitting on the blanket that was hiding the puzzle pieces.

My daughter pushed through, and within a week, she had to whole puzzle together....

...Except for the missing piece. We searched around on the floor and found all but one of the puzzle pieces to finish the puzzle off.

So, I guess she didn't quite win after all. We kept the puzzle on the table for another week, hoping that the last piece would show up, but it never did. Maybe Jupiter carried it off somewhere. She probably has a horde of things that caught her eye that she goes and rolls around in or something like a Tolkein dragon.

Will that instinct wear off as the kitten grows to become a cat? Or will my daughter have to fight with her every time she decides to put together a puzzle? I guess that remains to be seen.

Veteran's Day

 

The sailor in these pictures is my great uncle, Glenn. My dad was much too young to serve in WWII (he's the little guy in the overalls and glasses) and my Grandpa was too old (he's the guy in the suit and fedora), but his brother Glenn signed up, and crewed a submarine in the Pacific theater.

Not too long after these pictures, the submarine was hit, and Glenn sank to his final resting place at the bottom of the South China Sea.

I have to say on this day that I'm honored to know that a brave man like Glenn lies in my family tree. He was never able to have any children to carry on his line, so it's up to me and the others in my family to remember his sacrifice for our freedoms.

One Track Mind

My wife gets these yogurts at Aldi that have two pouches. One side is for the yogurt, the other side is filled with granola that you dump in when you're ready to eat.

But every time I see them in the fridge, I think of anything but yogurt and granola. Am I the only one that doesn't see the L in that word?

Finished Cover

 My daughter got me the finished, colored version of the picture for my book cover today.

Now, it's all up to me. Time to get to work and see what I can do to get this book out on the shelf, like the elf.

When Thorns Are The Tips Of Trees

Just posted this new episode over on The Dunesteef. Hope y'all enjoy!

 

It’s Jason Sanford month everybody! So put on your ugly Jason Sanford Month sweaters; make yourself a mug of The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain tea, and gather around the table for the roast Plague Birds. It’s time to enjoy some more Jason Sanford!

Today, we have a vintage Dunesteef production of Jason’s story, When Thorns Are The Tips Of Trees, originally produced for the StarShipSofa podcast back in 2009. Miles and his father care for the local memorial grove, but the job has become a more dangerous as gangs of deteriorating thorn die, almost zombie-like people driven mad by the phage that is rewriting their DNA, have begun attacking the groves all around the area. Can they survive, or will they become thorn die themselves?

Afterward, Rish and Big talk about how much of a formative moment this story was in the history of the podcast, and look back at the production process for putting it all together.

Head over to The Dunesteef site, subscribe to the podcast, or just push the play button down below to listen to the story.