Sardines

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.

Icky Word

This is a section of the rundown from our show last night, and this is also today's affront to the English language.

Crappy made up words like  this make me cringe.

Reach For The Sky

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.

Almost There

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.

Toy Overload, Part 5

Okay, this is the last one.

While I was on the phone with Rish, telling him that my daughter was about to drive back to Texas from college, he happened to be in a store looking at the clearance figures they had.

"They have a Dune figure that you might like for your space station," he said, and sent me this picture.

It was a ReAction Figure, which, if you don't know, are new figures made to look as though they were made by Kenner at the same time that they were making those original Star Wars figures. Generally I hate those things. Why make a figure look crappier than it needs to? These days they can make amazingly detailed figures even in a scale as small as 3.75 inch.

However, the figure wasn't bad as it was, and also, I'd seen this photo only days before on Empire Toy Works Instagram.

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Adding some silly things like these into the mix on the space station would be fun, and you never know, with some work and a little love I might possible be able to make the figure look passable.

Besides, they were on deep clearance, so why not, right? Rish said they had Paul Atreides and Baron Harkonnen as well, and I told him to grab one of each.

They're pretty cheap looking figures, but then again, they were pretty cheap. 

I'll mess with them, adding washes and drybrushing to see if I can't make them look a little better. If nothing else, they can be back in the background, where you wouldn't see their details anyway. They're fun anyway.

There's other ReAction figures out there that I'd be willing to buy for the space station. Particularly, I want the Conky figure from Pee Wee's Playhouse.

He'd be a funny droid to add to the more standard R2-D2s and IG-88s on the station. Or similarly, the E.T. figure they did would be a good alien to add.

That's the best part about ReAction figures. They have every property imaginable, so you can get a figure of anything you want. Though, sadly, it's generally a substandard figure.

Toy Overload, Part 4

Okay, day four of this, and we're still going. Here's another figure that Rish sent out to me in trunk of my daughter's car. The Endor version of Han Solo.

I was talking with Rish about how I was tempted to get the figure at the store, where you can pretty easily find it right now. Rish said that I would probably find it on clearance later, but I knew that was unlikely here in Houston. 

Then he said something about having several left over in his inventory from the last time that they released this figure a year or two ago that he got on sale. There was no difference from that figure and this new one, and I figured I could buy it from Rish instead of from the store. 

He found a Han in his piles of inventory, and sent me this picture with the figures he was setting aside.

 That was cool. I wondered if I should just get all of the three main characters in Endor gear from him.

I didn't realize this, but apparently that was an offensive thing to suggest. I think Rish was a little irritated with me, because now I was asking for figures he could sell for much more. That wasn't my intention. I just figured that I could help Rish if there were figures that he couldn't get more than the original price for that I wanted, it would be better to buy them from him than from a store. I don't know which figures those are though. So, I let it go.

Instead, while I was at the store one day, I saw Princess Leia in Endor gear on the pegs, and I grabbed it. Figures aren't cheap anymore, but as I've said, Star Wars doesn't make it to clearance around here. So, I went ahead and bought the princess to stand on the shelf with my forthcoming Han. When he arrived, I put them both on the shelf and took this quick picture.

Is it just me, or do they look out of focus? They're not out of focus, but they kind of are too. I don't know. Doesn't matter, it's not a great picture. There's a bunch of garbage on the shelf behind them and they're not really posed. So, I posed them up, and put them together with the few ewoks that I have, and took a second picture for y'all to check out.

It looks pretty good. I'm hoping they'll re-release the Luke in Endor gear sometime this year. It's the 40th anniversary of the release of Return of the Jedi this year, and they're releasing these figures in honor of that. There is another ewok forthcoming, and I'll definitely get that. 

If I keep this up, I'll have a lot of Endor figures. I may have to create some kind of Endor diorama with trees and stuff. I could make them the same way I made the creepy trees for my Halloween diorama.

 

 

Hard to see, but they look like standard tree-shaped versions of this tree that my daughter made using the same techniques.

 

I could make some great big tree trunks like these (minus the scary face) to go all around them. Hell, maybe I could even make an ewok village to hang in the trees using coffee stirring sticks...that's what all the YouTube guys that make videos about scratch building use, it seems. That could be fun, but it's a long time off, I think.

Toy Overload, Part 3

I don't know if I should talk about this one...this may be like one of Rish's TMI episodes...but I like She-Ra. Not a ton or anything, but I have to say that when I was a kid, I thought She-Ra was hot...and I think that's probably objectively true.

Up until now, I've kept that my dirty little secret. MOTU Masterverse, however, made an action figure of She-Ra that I thought looked really great, and I was considering buying it. Then all the MOTU Masterverse toys suddenly went on clearance, so I gave in and decided to pick it up. 

Except, I didn't find She-Ra on clearance anywhere. I found every other character, just not her. As usual, my ace in the hole was Rish. He found it on clearance, and bought it for me and set it aside, and now my daughter has brought this figure my way.

I told Rish he didn't need to send me the boxes, because it was unnecessary size and weight to ship, but since we weren't shipping them anymore, I suppose he decided he didn't want to bother taking them out of their boxes. So, the figure came in her box.

Looking at the back side gave me a little pause. Maybe I shouldn't have this figure. This might not be for me...

A pink unicorn? Isn't that taking it a little too far? I thought She-Ra had a white unicorn. Oh, I guess that was in the cartoon. She had a white unicorn with rainbow colored wings, but the toy was a pink unicorn. That's some really nice artwork though. You could put that on the side of a van in 70s and be...well, maybe still not be very macho, I suppose.

Anyway, the figure itself is really nice. I pulled it out and put it with the Frosta figure that I bought back when Rish bought the She-Ra for me...oh, I guess I haven't mentioned that. I also have a thing for Frosta. Don't worry, it's the same deal. I think she's totally hot, which is, again, objectively true.

In fact, one of the first characters I made up when I was a kid was a cross between Frosta and Storm. Her name was Annika the Galactic Pirate Queen. She was basically Storm wearing Frosta's outfit. I really like that blue and white look. So, when I saw the toy, I had a few reasons to buy it, I guess.

I sent that picture to Rish, and he responded asking:

 He was right...I had to re-pose her to make her look better before putting her on the shelf.

Standing up straighter and true did make the figure look a lot better. I know there's a bunch of other characters in the Princesses of Power show, but my collection is complete.

See you tomorrow with a different princess...