It is a continuation of the event that Rish started over on his Patreon...but if you're not on his Patreon, then you don't know about that either. We are presenting the stories from our very first ever Broken Mirror Story Event, from back in 2001-02. He posted his entry, which is called "Monitored Conversation."
Now it's my turn. Today, I posted part one of my story "The Ghost in the Monitor." It's a pretty long story, so I've broken it up into two parts to make it possible to finish the podcast within the month. It's a pretty fun premise. Joe, a young father of a newborn, is watching his child when he hears a
voice threatening voice from the baby monitor. He rushes into the baby's
room to find that...no one is there.
If you're interested, you could head over to the Patreon and pledge as little as $1 a month, and you could get it right now. If less than the price of a candy bar is too much, then I guess you can wait a week or two, and I'll post it on the regular feed, and you can enjoy it then. It's up to you.
How could I let this happen? It's been, like, a whole week since I last posted an update on my zinnias by the mailbox! Let's do a little timelapse or before and after or whatever we want to call it.
Here's May 19, the flowers starting to show up, but only 9 blossoms so far.
Now May 22, more blossoms. 13 now, but several buds are opening as well.
And this one was yesterday...I think I count 23, but it's still not the end, there's several buds opening still.
I sure am happy with how this turned out. Definitely worth the minimal effort of setting an alarm on my phone and actually going out to water the plants whenever it rang.
I was at the Walmart parking lot the other day, when I saw this:
Apparently, asking someone to finish parking their car is just too much. These folks pulled about 2/3rds the way in, then just quit, turned the car off, hopped out, and went in to shop. I wonder if they walked around the store, picked a bunch of things, put them in their cart, walked up to the check out counter, and then just left, because it was just too much to ask to finish the process...
Since the Ukraine war began, gas prices shot through the roof, and ever since then, the government has been trying to coax them back down. They've tried shaming the oil companies. They've released our strategic reserves to the public. They've...well, that's all I can think of, actually. But they must have done something else, because gas prices have finally come down to a level that I can afford:
I was at Walmart the other day, and as I was walking out, this car pulled in...I was shocked by what I saw.
I have no idea how somebody can drive in a car like that. You can see how much junk is piled up where the windows aren't shaded, but when I walked past the car, I could see through the shaded windows well enough to know that the garbage went to the ceiling everywhere. Only the driver seat wasn't covered in stuff. The rear view mirror would be completely useless in this car.
I've seen people with messy cars in my life, but I've never seen anything like this. Some kind of intervention needs to be done.
Movies and TV are not real life. Even reality shows are not real life. One of the main things they do in movies and TV is skip the boring parts of life and the drudgery. Nobody wants to watch that on TV, they already get enough of that in their own life.
I mean, take The Mandalorian. You don't see that guy sitting on the toilet (while still wearing his helmet) and pinching off a loaf. You also don't see him cooking up Mynock Eggs and Bacon for breakfast, or changing baby Yoda's diaper.
That doesn't mean that Disney doesn't see the value in those things though, behold:
Baby Yoda Wipes! Do you think he is as cute after he's had a major blowout and you're going through wipe after wipe trying to clean all of that runny stuff up?
I am so excited and proud of these flowers that I planted in the mailbox planter. They are turning out so cool. Over the weekend, tons of blossoms have opened up, so I've got another set of update pictures.
If you look close, you'll see that there are a bunch more buds about to open. The flowers are just going to keep getting better...at least for a while. It's amazing what you can manage with a simple alarm on your phone for a reminder. It's pretty great, and I'm sure I'll annoy you with many more updates.
My wife got me a drone for Christmas, and for some reason I never got around to getting it out and playing around with it until today. It was fun.
These pictures came through the WiFi connection to my phone. It also does pictures to its own MicroSD card. However, I don't have any picture of me from that, because it took me a while to figure out how to format it to make it compatible with the drone. It was kind of dark when I finally got it working, so I didn't get any picture in hi res. I'm sure I'll be back with more pictures soon. Stand by!
The saga of the mailbox planer zinnias continues. Just like Remo William's adventure.
As a quick recap, we have this planter built into our mailbox, and every year, all we've every grown there is weeds that we had to pull out so the HOA didn't put a lien on our house. I've tried a few times to grow something else there, but my disorganized nature always left those plants without the water they needed to flourish. So, this year, with renewed determination, and one slight step toward organization, I embarked on a plan to change this.
I dumped a bunch of potting soil in there to make sure it had the nutrients it needed. I planted zinnia seeds, because they did so well in our backyard last year when my wife grew them. I set an alarm on my phone that repeats every day to remind me to water the flowers. Then I watched them grow.
They went from tiny sprouts peaking out of the ground:
To a mass of leaves filling the planter box:
It already looked much better, but I didn't have any flowers. I posted the other day when I finally started seeing buds on my plants.
Now, as Barry Manilow always said, it looks like we made it!
These flowers are still pretty small. Zinnias can get pretty big, and make lots of blossoms before they're done, so it's just the beginning, and it already looks amazing. As Barry Manilow always said, I love it when a plan comes together.
I've heard this quote that goes, "If you don't measure it, you can't improve it." It was said by...oh wait, apparently the quote is, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." I guess that basically means the same thing. Internet says it was said by Peter Drucker.
Then again, it also says that it was said by William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin.
I don't care who said it now. It's already become one of those memes that people make to freak out obsessive sci-fi fans attributing quotes to the character from the wrong property. I might as well just make this:
Anyway, you gotta measure stuff if you want to be able to improve it. When it comes to getting healthy and losing weight, people usually measure that by stepping on the scale and seeing if the number went down from the last time that they did that.
That's not always the best way to measure, however. In fact, it's usually not the best way to measure health. There's any number of reasons why your scale would go down, and there's any number of reasons why it wouldn't. You could be losing a bunch of fat and replacing it with muscle, but because the scale doesn't show you any weight loss, you might get depressed because of lack of progress. That would be a travesty if you quit because you were using the wrong measurement to judge your progress.
Well, there's somebody I sometimes listen to called Dr. Boz. I mentioned her in yesterday's post about the sardine fast, that is her thing. Another thing she does is quote Dumbledore's expression, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."
She wants people to know if they're actually in ketosis or not, because if you're not, then any weight loss you have will come at the expense of muscle tissue, but more likely, you just won't be having weight loss.
She has something called the Dr. Boz Ratio, or DBR. That is when you take the measure of your ketones and divide it by your glucose. I believe she says that if it is under 100 then you are in ketosis at least a little bit. Ideally, you want to get your ratio under 40. If you're not there yet, then you might need to give your system a jolt or two to get it there, such as a sardine fast or even just a regular fast.
I've been having issues with eating according to the carnivore diet for a while, yet not getting much in the way of results. So, after hearing the good doctor talk about this several times, I finally broke down and got me a ketone monitor.
I got it off Amazon, and they offered me same day delivery. I ordered it at noon, and they said it could be there between 5:00 PM and 10:00 PM. I didn't believe it, but it actually arrived at that time. Did they deliver it by drone? Has that crap come to pass? I was sure that it had died off and been given up on.
Anyway, since I already had it this morning, I busted it out and measured my ketones and my blood sugar. I should have a pretty good number, because we just finished that sardine fast, which is supposed to really spike your ketones by the third day.
My ketones measured at 1.8, fairly good. I wonder what they were on the third day of that sardine fast. I didn't have the monitor yet, so I can't know. My blood sugar, which is usually sky high...like somewhere around 250...measured in at 116. It's much improved, but still has a lot of room for further progress. It should be somewhere closer to 80.
Doing the math, that means that my DBR is:
That's pretty darn good. It's not where it needs to be in the end, but it's headed in the right direction.
I haven't stepped on the scale in at least a month, but during that sardine fast I decided that I would, and for the first time in a long time, I saw that number budge downward. With both my blood sugar and weight headed downward, I'm not surprised that my DBR is in a decent place. I feel like I'm actually getting somewhere here.
I suppose I have that sardine fast to thank, no matter how unpleasant eating all those sardines was for me. I'm planning on including a can of sardines with my food at least once a week, but I'll probably have to do sardine fasts again in the future. It really was a good way to get my cravings under control. It might work even better than a regular fast, because you don't have to be hungry while conquering your craving if you do a sardine fast versus a standard fast.
So, that's where I'm at these day. I did a regular fast back on May 2nd and it helped me turn a corner and stop eating candy when I got cravings. Then I did the sardine fast and it helped me stop eating tons of cheese, which is technically carnivore, but tends to keep you from losing weight. For the forseeable future, I will be doing beef, butter, bacon, and eggs, or BBBE, with fasts thrown in on regular intervals,
And I will be checking my DBR to make sure it gets to and stays where it should be. I mean to have as much weight loss as I had in 2019 and then some before I make it to 50 years old.
For the last three days, Marshal and I have been doing a sardine fast. It's not really a fast, because that means that you don't eat any food, but it's a sort of fast in that you don't eat any food other than sardines for three days.
I have no idea why I agreed to do this...in fact, it was basically my idea. Sardines are really healthy, but I hate the taste, I hate the smell, and I hate the very idea of eating them. So why would I think that doing a fast that forces me to eat sardines and only sardines?
Well, I've been watching a fair amount of Dr. Boz lately on YouTube, and this sardine thing is her recommendation. She's talked about it several times in her livestreams recently, and even gave it its own standalone video.
So, that's what we decided to do, and let me tell you, it was a huge struggle for me. The first day, when I cracked open that first can and looked at those little fish...
It was a real struggle to get myself to put the fork in and take the first bite. Funny thing is that I don't really hate the taste that much. I don't like it, but I don't hate it either. It's just kind of blah. Chewing my way through all of those little fishies was kind of drudgery.
I ate two cans of sardines for my first meal. I did it out on the back patio instead of inside, because I didn't want to submit anyone else to that gross fishy smell. When I was done, I made sure to throw the cans away in the outside garbage as well for the same reason.
I ate two more cans later in the day when I was at work. I was really hungry when I finally ate them, not because I didn't have time to eat or anything, I just didn't really want to eat them. After a while, it started to feel like maybe I was doing a regular fast after all, since I didn't want to eat even though I was hungry.
Dr. Boz says that one of the good things about sardines is that it's hard to overeat with them, and that is super true in my case.
At work, I took the cans out to my car and ate them there to avoid submitting my coworkers to that smell. I'd hate to be the reason people were complaining that the break room stank of fish. I always hate it when I go in the break room right after somebody else has just finished microwaving fish, so I didn't want to make others deal with the same thing.
That was kind of an issue, because a car isn't really a good place to eat. Sardines come packed in water, and it's really easy to wind up spilling that water on yourself. Then you smell like fish for the rest of the day. On the second day, I realized that I just needed to dump the water before trying to eat. I just drained it into the bushes before sitting in my car and shoveling in those little fishes.
Over the next 72 hours, I followed that same pattern: two cans for breakfast and two cans for dinner. I ate twelve cans of sardines in all.
Halfway through day two, I got curious as to whether it was doing me any measurable good. I jumped on the scale, and found that I was no longer at the weight that I've been stuck at for months. Instead, I'd come back down a few pounds. I checked my blood sugar and found similar improvement. It was down by a lot, after being stuck in a high position for months.
With that good news under my belt, the last bit of the fast wasn't so bad. I was kind of excited, to be honest, in a good mood at least. It was still drudgery to eat the sardines, but I felt like I was turning a corner and heading in the right direction, so I wasn't so bummed about my food option.
On the last day, I was feeling good enough to change my habits a bit. I went out for a walk on the greenbelt trails. The wildflowers were still there, and I got these pictures of a new bunch by the bridge over the canal.
I also soaked in a bath full of epsom salt. That's supposed to be a really good way to get magnesium, a mineral that we tend to be lacking in our diet these days, but important to many of our body's functions.
And now, I'm about to go and eat a final can of sardines. Dr. Boz says that your fast starts when you eat your first can and ends after 72 hours when you eat your last can. After that, I'm going to make me a big batch of bacon and some eggs.
What did I accomplish with this whole thing? Exactly what I set out to accomplish. I have been eating the Carnivore Diet with Marshal for almost two full months already, but up until the last two weeks, I never made it more than a few days without failing in one way or another. My failures weren't too bad, because I managed to get back on again the next day or at least within a few days, but I wasn't making any progress that way. It was the classic two steps forward and one step back.
I still have that problem of thinking of food as entertainment instead of simply using it as fuel. It should taste good, sure, but when I get bored, going to the fridge should not be my idea of how to liven things up a bit. That's the kind of habit that I need to break. A snack is always an emotional event, and I need to eliminate them. I've been going to the fridge and grabbing a piece of cheese to eat way too often recently, and I need to end that.
From here on out, I'm going back the the BBBE thing that Marshal and I did for 90 days last year. That's beef, butter, bacon, and eggs. I'm going to stick with that for a long while (though I may throw in a can of sardines once a week or so to get some extra nutrients and not consider that to be cheating). Most of all, I'm going to avoid cheese. Those dairy products are the easiest way to get way too many calories in a small package. BBBE doesn't include cheese. I don't think my body deals with dairy products well anyway, so it will only make things better to cut them out.
I love sunflowers. We used to grow them like crazy before we moved to Texas.
But since coming to Texas, we have been completely unable to make these things grow. There are a lot more trees here than where I used to live, which makes a lot more shade, so it might be the difficulty in finding enough sun for the sunflowers. I don't know.
I had mostly given up on them. However, my wife insisted that we plant some this year again. We put in the seeds, and the shoots started coming up.
Then the other day, I was walking past a school in my neighborhood and I saw this:
Local school kids planted sunflowers in their garden boxes, and they've grown amazingly. Check out this one:
Look at that one in the middle of all of that. It's got to be at least ten feet tall! It hasn't even grown its flower up there yet.
Here's what our flowers look like right now:
Next year, I'm going to change things. Obviously, we are planting things way too late. I suspect those school kids planted their sunflowers in February, March at the latest. We planted ours on the last week of April, almost May.
Sadly, I have to wait till next year. I'm hoping that the flowers we planted this year will manage to survive. We'll see how it goes.
You may remember...but probably don't, because why would you? I did a post about a month ago about planting flowers in the planter box beside my mailbox. I swore that we would actually have something in that box. This is our sixth year here, and never once has there been anything but dirt in that stupid planter box. I set an alarm on my phone to remind me to water the plants every day, and that post was exulting in the fact that the shoots were starting to come up.
Well, after a month, things have only gotten better. I've watered the flowers every day (except the many days that it rained in the last month), and the flowers are doing great.
The plants have grown really tall, but so far, I had yet to see any flowers on them. Today, however, I saw this:
Flower buds! Finally! I can't wait until they open up and this mass of green leaves explodes in color.
It'll look nice. I'm so excited about how well it's going that I'm thinking of planting more flowers in a second empty area of dirt in our front yard.
