If I was Winnie the Pooh I would call today a blustery day. The is dark, gloomy, windy and there is a little rain too. Oreo and I slept in nice and late today until 10:30. It is definitely a lazy Saturday 🙂
I decided that the South Beach diet was way too lenient for me and that it was causing me to eat far more often than I really should given the way that my body processes food so I decided to alter the diet significantly to me appropriate for me personally. So I am now working on maintaining a diet of less than 900 calories or so (not keeping really strict track) which basically results in me having a large salad for lunch and just some veggies with cheese for dinner. That is so much less food than I am used to having. But I weighed in this morning to see how my first day of extreme dieting was working and so far I am down six pounds since yesterday morning. I won’t be able to keep that up for more than a day or two but it is a nice start.
Dad discovered that the Abbey of the Genesee has a website.
The British government was discovered to be secretly storing DNA information on tens of thousands of minors who have no criminal history whatsoever. Finally it isn’t us for a change.
Brainbench is now offering a series of fun tests for people to answer trivia about thinks like Star Trek and Dilbert.
Andy arrived at the house at 12:15 just as the rain that was coming down turned to snow. He and I had decided to get lunch today and dad was coming over to Geneseo to do some shopping so he decided that he would meet us over at the Omega at 12:30. I got my simple lunch salad like I did yesterday and two cups of coffee. This extreme diet thing isn’t very much fun.
After lunch Andy and I came back to the house and worked for about an hour or so on some Waste Watcher 2 designs stuff that needed to be taken care of before Andy could continue on the work that he was doing. He is at his current contract for just one to two more weeks before he will be back working on this project full time again. This will be, I believe, his first full time work on the project to this degree since we were in Pittsburgh six years ago. Can you believe that it has been almost six years (we moved to Pittsburgh on March 20th, 2000.) Boy time does fly.
While Andy was over at the house he was looking at the N scale model trains that we have sitting around and it brought back memories that he had of having model trains when he was young. He said that he must have had N scale trains when he was little because the size even seemed to be the same.
I haven’t seen Dana and her baby in over a year. Actually, since her baby is only six months old that means that I haven’t seen her at all yet but I haven’t seen Dana since she was just barely pregnant so it has been almost exactly a year. So I tagged along with Andy when he went up to Avon to visit with his family since Dana was over with the baby.
The weather is so warm here today that it is half raining and half snowing while Russia is stuck in a deadly cold spell that is killing all kinds of people who are unable to get to warm locations there.
I did a little maintenance on my Flickr site today and for those of you getting the RSS feed from there you should notice that the titles are now working properly.
Both Dominica and I independantly told people that our fiber supplements were like not as sweet versions of sweet-tarts! How funny is that. They really are good tasty fiber supplements. They are kind of like Flintstone’s vitamins. How funny is it that kids today eat Flintstones vitamins when they are really unlikely to even know who those characters are anymore. Boy how time does fly.
Does nobody pay any attention to their own websites these days? I mean the days of your website mattering were like ten years ago. I went to the web site of Rowe Photo today and noticed that they had posted a picture of their website (the mockup given to them by their web designer to show them what the site would look like, most likely) instead of the actual web site. Take a look at that site. Looks just like a normal web site except it is just a picture and there aren’t actually any links there. Who does that? That site has been there forever. I was thinking about shopping with them since they are local instead of going to an online retailer for the new camera that I want to buy but I guess my business is a pretty low priority to them. They don’t even let me look up prices, stock or anything. Abe’s of Maine it is then.
Dominica came home and headed for the living room to watch the final three episodes of the second season of Angel. We wrapped up that show and then watched In Good Company with Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid and Scarlett Johanson. That was a really good movie that was totally not what I was expecting. Nice to see a movie try to do something different for a change and with a lot of really good people in it.
Because of the diet that I am on I tend to get a lot of energy and don’t really need to go to sleep as early as I normally do so I stayed up and watched two episodes of Red Dwarf before finally deciding to wrap up the daily and head off to bed. While we were in the living room watching DVDs Dominica knit and I worked on laying cork down on the model train layout that I have been working on. I am working on a 2′ x 4′ layout in two pieces (each 2’x 2′) that is just a simple single track in an oval that will be built with four “scenes” for the train to pass through. It is kind of a modeling experiment to see how some things work. The idea is that it is really simple but complex enough that it will give me an opportunity to really exercise my modeling muscles. I want something that isn’t too ambitious and yet is easy to build and store but is still interesting for people to look at. I am only working on one 2’x 2′ section currently but I have the track laid out for that section and I have the cork roadbed down and glued for that entire section. I am hoping to have the track actually cemented into place tomorrow if all goes well.
I have also been working on trying to get my older N scale engines running again. My two old locomotives, a Life Like Union Pacific that was a birthday present many, many years ago was not running at all but I took it apart and it appears to be showing signs of life. It now moves irregularly up and down a straight piece of track that I have in place and its light works which is something since my two other older locomotives have lost their lights. I also have a Bachman Burlington Northern engine that is starting to work again. Its light is no good but it moves with a little more assuredness and should work pretty well again in time.
It is 3:30 in the morning and I think that it would probably be a good idea if I got myself off to bed. Dad is coming over after church to get lunch. Oh boy, another salad. I did really well today without messing up anything on my diet. I may not be staying under my goal of 900 calories but I am definitely close.