Right. So I’ve signed up at SparkPeople and it’s good and lovely and all that, at least for the moment. Some part of me is a little pessimistic about my own continued motivation, but we’ll see. For starters, though, it’s already got me thinking different ways about some things. Like, when I first went to the fitness section I thought, oh, I’ll never do any of those strength exercises because I just don’t have time for that kind of workout. But then after poking around a little more, I realized I was going at it wrong. I don’t have to do a whole big workout all at once. There are several exercises I could do at my desk while waiting for progress bars to fill, or while reading stuff onscreen, etc., etc. So I’ve started experimenting with that.

I would love, love, love to use their menu plans. To have a balanced day all laid out for me and not even have to think about it. Unfortunately, it just won’t work. Some of the stuff that pops up on the meal plans, Tim can’t eat or needs to limit, and I’m not going to start getting into this cooking one meal for me and one for him ridiculousness. We can do that a little by rearranging lunch plans, but that’s about it. (Also, I have to admit that their suggestions don’t really inspire me, but the truth is they might be easier to get motivated to make than the things that do inspire me. Moot point anyway.)

One thing they’ve suggested doing that seems both very silly and potentially very effective is to post visual reminders and make a “vision collage” to help keep you focused. So my new mini-fridge at work has a picture of the smaller-sized jeans I want to get back into on it, and I made a collage of pictures of healthy food, glasses of water (eight of ‘em!), the same picture that’s on the mini-fridge, my daily goals, etc., etc. I think I’ll put it over my dresser where I’ll see it each morning. Will it help? Dunno. Do I feel a little silly, me, a grown woman, making a collage? Yeah. Was it fun? …Yes. Yes, it was.

I did horribly at dieting yesterday, and expect to not do wonderfully again today because of the whole New Year’s Eve thing (happy early New Year!), but I actually don’t feel very guilty about it. OK, I slipped up with food. Well, I still accomplished other goals and I’m working on getting myself back into that healthy mindset that I seem to have such trouble finding back lately. So it’s not a great thing, but not a total loss either. Even the site’s “strategies” say not to focus on actually meeting calorie goals right now, but rather to observe and get a feel for how things affect the diet.

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I think I’ve once more fallen in love with Johnny Depp and Tim Burton. Le sigh.

(With the caveat that I’ve never seen the musical and thus can’t comment on the stage-to-screen translation. But damn, that was gorgeous.)

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I keep trying to restart my diet and failing. This does not feel very good. I seem to have lost all self-control when it comes to junk food and sweets. *sigh* And, you know, I tried looking at why that was and fixing it, and… that didn’t work either. Now I’m just frustrated because I feel like, why can’t I just NOT EAT IT? And I can whine all I want to about how hard it is to diet on the holidays, but in the end that’s just an excuse. Perfect example: Tuesday at Mom and Dad’s there was a veggie tray out, and fruit, and scads of peanuts in our stockings (it’s a family tradition), and I chose to keep shoving candy down my throat instead of eating the healthy snacks. That’s not the holidays’ fault.

So I guess… if you don’t succeed, try, try again? (And yes, Yoda, I hear you telling me how there is no try, but not all of us are Jedi masters with iron-clad will.) This is not, I should be clear, a New Year’s Resolution. I don’t do those anymore because I feel like I’m just setting myself up for failure. However, there are certain things that need reinforcing, and the turn of the year is a convenient starting point for those things.

Point one: I’m not going to throw out the stuff we got from Jungle Jim’s right away, and waste it and waste the trip over and waste the money. There really isn’t that much “junk” in it anyway. What’s there, though, must be consumed or discarded by the end of the year. Same deal with the remaining drinks from Sam’s mentioned in an earlier post. Whatever IBC and Arizona is still left at the end of the year goes down the drain.

Point two: Eyebrows has pointed me towards SparkPeople. It looks like perhaps a more motivational tool than FitDay has been for me, so I’m going to give it a try. I’ll try to use this to track and motivate.

Point three: In that vein, my three “FastBreak” goals to work on over the next couple of weeks are eating a high protein/high fiber breakfast (shredded wheat with nuts, cranberries and milk, and thank you to Eyebrows for the help on the protein part), stretching for ten minutes each day, and giving myself a five-minute mental pep talk each day.

Point four: The diet profile pointed out to me that I eat emotionally (true), so I’m going to go back to tracking my mood… but in a different way. I’m going to start tracking when I eat and why. The main point here is just to be more aware of when I don’t actually need to eat.

I think I’ll start the FastBreak stuff now, and maybe the tracking. The new year marks my really getting serious and cracking down, though. Right? Right.

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I know, I keep doing these randomness posts. I just keep building up little bits of stuff here and there…

I sort of accidentally stumbled upon a method of making my own salsa verde. A big can of tomatillos (drained), a smallish can of diced mild chiles, about a quarter of an onion, about half a dozen slices of canned jalapeno for a little bite, and probably half a bunch of cilantro. Throw into a food processor, season with salt and pepper, and puree the hell out of it. In the end, I think the onion could stand to be cooked and I might have used slightly too much cilantro (the finished product has a little bit of a leafy taste), but overall it’s really pretty damned good for just having made it up on the fly. If I do say so myself. And it made, like, probably three cups or so; lots of salsa.

We ran over to Jungle Jim’s again on Thursday. We’re not doing as many “hey, that crazy thing looks neat, let’s try it” buys as we have in the past, but we’re still doing some of that. This time it’s A&W root beer floats in a bottle. They’re not as good as they sound, though they could also be a lot worse.

One great thing that we often get at Jungle Jim’s, though they were out of stock this time, is Dr. Pepper made with cane syrup instead of high fructose corn syrup. Had a Jones soda on the way home, which is likewise made with cane syrup, and one of my “just to try” things was a Mexican pineapple soda (which is actually available local), also made with cane syrup. I think the jury’s actually out on whether the high fructose junk is actually any worse than any other sweetener (last I heard, anyway), so it may or may not be any better for you, but I think it tastes better. Soda made with cane syrup isn’t as overly sweet, so you can focus on the flavor instead of the sweetness. Ideally I’m trying to cut back on the soda altogether, what with the wanting to lose weight and all, but if I must have it I should at least try to aim for the cane syrup varieties…

I have a new iPod (the old one was crapping out, and though I thought it too expensive for a Christmas present, Tim rightly pointed out that I probably had a Christmas bonus coming that could pay for it now, but if I waited until the thing really died a few months down the road the money wouldn’t be there anymore), but it has the same strange sense of humor as my old one did. After dropping Nene off, we went to the hospital because Tim needed to get some blood drawn. When we got back in the car and I went to turn the Pod back on for a little driving music, I realized the song it had been in the middle of when we had gotten to the hospital was “Bleed” by Tapping the Vein.

I think the sun was out today
I can’t remember when I’ve felt it
I keep waking up to waste away
In this empty room
–Tapping the Vein, “Bleed”

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I got lots of good prezzies for Christmas this year, but the best ones (sappiness alert) came from Natalie. The week before Christmas she started to sleep through the night fairly regularly* and then the day after Christmas she rolled over for the first time**.

Can I get a great big awwwwwwww?

* The thing is, we’re still letting her sleep in her car seat, theoretically due to lingering chest congestion, but really mostly out of habit. She has previously not slept as well for us out of it as in it, so she might not stick to this sleeping through the night thing once we stop that. Which will be any day now. (It should’ve been tonight. She was so fussy right before bed, though, that I chickened out. *sigh*)

** Just once, and she hasn’t figured out how to do it again. She had some help from Tim, but just in that reaching for his fingers got her hands out of the way so she could roll over. She did all the physical work herself, though.

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The things I find to do when work gets slow… One of those things is going back and rereading certain recaps of favorite TV episodes. Today I was on a Buffy kick for a little, and then decided to jump through the Jossverse over to Firefly… well, not Firefly exactly, but Serenity. I’m not sure if I’ve pimped this recap here or not, but it’s worth mentioning again if I have. It’s probably my favorite piece of work on the entire TWoP site. It’s long, thirty-five pages, but more than worth the trouble even if you don’t have the time to do more than read it in segments.

And here’s why. Because you get typical TWoP hilarity like this:
“Inside, Captain Malcolm Reynolds freaks. I wonder if he was thinking all that majestic crap when it happened. ‘Ah, my beautiful ship, standing strong in her, getting all Captain-y, leading a crew of rag-tag freaks with good hearts and healthy sex drives, my spine straight as an arrow as I lead us once again into the fray, as once again I risk life in order to bring a better — what the fuck was that?’”

And then you get a level of analysis and deeper commentary that goes beyond all that and really gives you a better appreciation of how the work’s put together, like this:
“Things go silent and there’s a bluish glow on everything, River brightly lit in the darkness, consciousness fully altered. Images of her torture, of the Reavers, flash across the screen. She whispers: ‘Miranda.’ And yeah, ‘brave new world with such people on it,’ but also, ‘daughter of a wizard who controls the whole world, playing everyone like chess, because he’s trying to teach them how to think.‘ To elevate them from their sinful, base impulses, to a life of pure reason and control. It was on Ariel that River died away, locked in a cloven pine, and reawakened with her powers, as a tool of the Alliance, restored. Where Jayne revealed himself again as a creature without higher purpose, without self-forged belief beyond the acquisition of pleasure and riches, not honored with a human shape, a creature of the world, a savage without the nobility of his fellow savages, and was nearly judged with death by the Captain, and earlier, by his victim River herself. ”

And then, farther on down the road, you get stuff like this:
“But even then, there’s a higher point, which is that ‘sin,’ in the sense that the Operative means, and means to enforce here as he did in the beginning, is in itself the most sinful concept imaginable. Imposing their lack, through Pax, through legislation, through signing subjective moral concepts into law, circumvents God’s plan entirely, and means taking on God’s role and making of oneself an idol. It perverts religion and politics, and all of us love one more than the other. Without pride and the choices it presents, there can be no faith: no assertion that one’s relationship with God, against all reason, is imperative and real. Without envy, there is no hope, no comparison, no competition, no dissatisfaction, no reason to try, to succeed. Without gluttony, in a world where greed is eliminated, there is no way to choose charity. Without lust, we all die, and without acknowledgement of lust’s universality, there is no fortitude. Without anger, without the holy anger of the proletariat, of the people against the unlawful, there can be no justice. Without greed or sloth, there is no moderation, no temperance or prudence — we are unable to look at ourselves critically and see long-term v. short-term effects. We stop growing them when the state mandates these lacks, takes away these choices: we all go to sleep. And we don’t wake up. And Oceania keeps fighting, and the signal is silenced. ”

And it’s not that this hasn’t been said before, one way or another. It’s not that I haven’t worked this around before. But it’s too easy to get complacent and get on with the getting on with your day and not really give much thought to what’s going on around you, and even if you’ve thought about this and it’s sitting in the back of your mind influencing your decisions you just don’t really think about it. Every once in a while something comes along and kicks a train of thought loose and makes me go through it again, though, and reexamine it, and if nothing else reminds me of how I came to my conclusions and why I feel the way I do about certain things. And this recap has several of those spots, and for that I love it.

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(Discovered one flaw in Scribefire: I can’t access “notes”, or drafts, begun there from anywhere else. I was compiling this list yesterday in a “note”, but today that computer’s Net access is down, so I have to try to rebuild.)

From the recap of the America’s Next Top Model finale:
[Jenah] says she hates that just because she’s not running around smiling all the time, that makes others think that she’s mean or that she thinks she’s better than people. She says she doesn’t have to spew rainbows incessantly for girls to want to be like her. That statement made me love her a little, and I am certainly going to incorporate “I don’t have to spew rainbows incessantly…” into my self-referential lexicon at my earliest convenience.
Word, Potes. And Jenah, too.

Happy slightly-belated 90th birthday to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, whose work I have not read nearly enough of. Perhaps I should begin to remedy that in honor of the occasion. I think I have a secondhand copy of Rendezvous With Rama sitting around I could pick up…

New chocolate recommendation: Dagoba Mon Cherri. Dark, dark chocolate (the product listing I’ve linked to says 72% cocoa solids, though the bar I’ve got says 74%) with dried cherries and cranberries and just a hint of vanilla. Now that’s some serious chocolate, y’all. Sure, it’s expensive ($1.80 for a two-ounce bar on sale; I think regular price is closer to $3), but you need so much less of it at a time than you do of milk chocolate.

Interestingly, even if I’m not actively working on developing my “Alex” project anymore (boo), NaNoWriMo still seems to have kicked something loose (yay). I may only be doing the usual running through scenes in my head to entertain myself when I don’t have anything else to think about, but I’m actually managing to tentatively fill in some gaps and make some decisions rather than just get stuck on the same six or seven scenes (or sequences of scenes, in some cases) over and over again.

More baby pictures! Click here. My favorite from this bunch is this one.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
–Edgar Allan Poe

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Oh, for the love of little kittens, people.

Referendum may reset clocks on time debate

Can we just drop this? Please? I no longer care what time it is here or whether it makes any sense or not; I’m just sick and tired of having to hear about the whole issue dragging on and on and on and changes happening every time I’ve finally gotten used to the situation. Just… make a decision and stick with it. All right?

Also:
“‘When the average person sits down and thinks about this, you’re giving up the 4:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. daylight and trading it for 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. daylight (in the summer) and most people like that concept,’ [Representative Dave Crooks] said. ‘I understand some people don’t; but people with active lifestyles like the daylight at the end of their day.’”

Something about that last bit is really grating on my nerves. I’m not sure whether it’s the implication that people who don’t have active lifestyles don’t count, or the implication that only lazy slobs without “active lifestyles” could possibly not like having later daylight in the summer, or the implication that if you’re not out making use of the extended daylight you must not have an active lifestyle. (Because there’s no such thing as being active indoors.) Or maybe I’m just being oversensitive, I don’t know.

I mean… I don’t like it still being light at 8-9pm because I want Natalie to be going to sleep in that timeframe, you know? And because it screws with the lighting at the Civic Theater’s outdoor shows. And because frankly it screws with my sleep schedule too, which begins earlier than some people’s because I have to get up earlier rather than because I have an inherently inactive lifestyle. I will admit that I don’t have a hugely active lifestyle. But my reasons for disliking extended daylight wouldn’t be addressed by changing that.

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Speaking of movies that go with novels, Tim and I saw Stardust a while back when it was in theaters and are looking eagerly forward to the release of the HD-DVD. We both thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

Then, not long ago, I picked up the audiobook of Stardust (read by Gaiman himself, who by the way is one of those authors who has a lovely speaking voice and does a beautiful job of reading his own work aloud). I’ve just finished it, and although most things come out more or less the same in the end, there are some pretty big discrepancies between book and movie. There are things that are rearranged, things that didn’t happen quite like that, and things that are made up out of whole cloth just for the movie. The biggest change is probably the ending, which although it puts the characters in the same place at the very end, takes radically different paths to get there in the two media.

Here’s the thing. With Stardust, this doesn’t bother me. I find myself puzzled: Why does The Golden Compass bug me so much and this doesn’t at all? Is it because I saw the movie first, and am only getting to the novel later? Is it because Stardust the movie isn’t as fresh in my mind as The Golden Compass the novel? Heck, is it because it’s Neil Gaiman, whose work I’m predisposed to like in the first place?

…Or is it because, it seems to me, the adaptation of Stardust to script was done more skillfully? The basic structure remains the same even if there is some deviation here and there. Events happen in the order they should; exposition roughly does too. Where there is a major deviation, in the ending, I can at least look at the book’s ending and admit that I see it’s not a very cinematic ending and that the movie’s ending probably did work better onscreen and ultimately got us to the same place at any rate. (The movie does a big confrontation. In the book, it’s far quieter and more understated, a simple meeting and parting and that’s that.) It’s done in such a way that movie and book both have their merits and comparison does not, in my opinion, make either suffer.

Eh. Really, it’s probably a combination of all those factors, with a side of feeling more inclined to forgive or at least rationalize a fault here and there because everything else is handled well.

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*sigh*

Oh, boy.

Tim and I saw The Golden Compass Friday night while Mom and Dad were watching Nene. It was… not as good as I’d hoped. I’m not someone who’s read the books over and over and become very attached to them (or even finished the series, yet), but I have read The Golden Compass recently and based on that reading would not rate this a wonderful adaptation. I’ll try my best to do this without plot spoilers, although spoilers about how the book was adapted (while remaining vague on the details of the plot itself) will be unavoidable here.

The thing that really got to me was the exposition. In the book, there are mysteries. Things are hidden for a while. You don’t just get everything thrown in your face. Half the horror of the whole intercision bit is the slow dawning discovery of what, exactly, is being done at Bolvangar. Not so in the movie. Everything is told to the viewer at first opportunity. Usually, I might add, by Lyra, who seems to have developed a talent for divining anything that needs exposited simply by looking at other characters (with or without the alethiometer).

The other big thing was the ending. Or… the lack thereof. I am not speaking, here, of the book’s rather open-ended conclusion. That, I had expected and was prepared for and was not going to complain about in very much the same way I didn’t complain about the ending of Fellowship of the Ring. It’s the first book in a trilogy, of course it’s not a definite ending. What bugs me, though, is that the climax and ending of the book has been deleted entirely.

No, I know. Don’t let the previews fool you. It’s not there. I have since been told that it was filmed, but went over poorly with test audiences, so it was cut. Unfortunately, there seems to have been no effort made to compose the remaining footage so that there’s some kind of feeling of closure (however temporary) there, some feeling that for this book the plot arc has been completed. It just kind of cuts off nonsensically.

Of course, my utter confusion leading up to the ending probably didn’t help. Everything was all out of order. It felt like they’d thrown the final few Big Events into a hat and drawn them out at random to see what happened when. For a little while I thought they were going to skip Bolvangar entirely, which… I have to admit, they’d already pretty much given us all the information we gained in that sequence in the novel, and they didn’t need it to set up the ending even if the ending had been there (given that events between it and the ending had already happened), and the whole thing was so rushed as to practically be an afterthought, so I’m actually not entirely certain why they bothered.

I’m sorry to say I can’t recommend this movie. As an adaptation, it sucks utterly. As a movie, standalone, I’ve heard people who haven’t read the book say it was fairly decent, but when I mentioned this to Tim he said things were so rushed and out of order that he thought if he hadn’t read the novel first he would’ve been lost. We both spent half the time just staring at the screen whispering, “What the hell?” to each other. And there were a host of more minor complaints too, from people showing up where they shouldn’t be to some characters being “Hallmarkized”, but these were the big ones. *sigh*

I did take some amusement, though, from the prominent placement of the Prince Caspian trailer before the film, given Pullman’s “antidote to Narnia” comments about his work.

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