reduction

So I had my quarterly doctor's visit to check my blood glucose levels yesterday ... and as predicted (see 'consumption' a few posts back) eatin' good in the neighborhood is taking its toll. I am slowly inching right up to the verge of being diabetic. Maybe it was that candy bar I was eating just as I walked in to get my blood drawn. Just kidding. The doctor advised me to work on losing some weight, and set a goal of losing 25 lbs by the time my next checkup comes up in October. About 20 weeks ... holy crap that means I gotta lose 1.25 lbs per week! That's like eating 5 fewer Quarter Pounders every week. Well not that I do that, but if I did, that's what I'd be giving up. It's like skipping a meal every day. I already skip breakfast most days, so now I'd be down to the equivalent of one meal a day. The doc said I should try to eat about 1200 calories a day. Ain't that some sorry shyte!

So V. runs out to the store and buys some healthy chicken breasts and cooked 'em up until I was starving at 9:30pm. Along with some kind of giant mutant ultragreen broccoli. Yum. I brought some more for lunch at work and got admiring comments from my coworkers. Fabulous. I ordered dinner at the office -- Chopped BBQ Chicken Salad. That ain't so bad. After work I hit the treadmill in the gym downstairs for a half hour. I step on the scale to see where I am at. No change. Oh well. Now I just have to resist the urge to stop at Carl's Jr. on the way home ...

procrastination

The latest American Le Mans Series (ALMS) race aired this morning on CBS, live from the Mid-Ohio Race Course in, you guessed it, Ohio. I have it recorded on my Comcastic DVR and plan to watch it when I have time, but I did catch the start of it this morning before going into work. (Yeah, I know it's Sunday. Duty calls.)

Anyways, still no sign of the new Lexus IS350s that Team Lexus is supposed to be campaigning for the 2006 ALMS season. But some news at least, sounds like they may be showing up at the next ALMS race which takes place in July at Lime Rock Park (in CT I think?). They want to make sure the car is ready before it enters competition. At any event it looks like they should be testing soon, and hopefully we'll see some cool photos of the new cars in finished form. Until then we just have these teaser photos.

http://tunertuesdays.autoblog.com/2006/05/14/lexus-is-350-readies-for-american-le-mans-series-debut/

Lexus buildup part 1: http://www.lexus.com/assets/magazine/current/magazine/vehicles/vehicles_0.html#
Lexus buildup part 2: http://www.lexus.com/assets/magazine/current/magazine/is_racing/is_racing_0.html

It's raining today, which is a bit of a downer but there's always an upside... now I don't have to wash my car again for a while. I was really starting to gather up some nasty bug guts all over the front end of the IS from my daily commute through the swamplands. But a brisk 80mph drive through the sheets of rain and backspray on the highways helped clear some of that off. once the weather clears up again though, I really need to start taking advantage of the free car washes at the dealership.

fertilization

I was watching TV today and marveled to myself what a strange world we live in. One doesn't need to be watching TV or even own a TV to think this, but at the moment the inspiration came in the form of a commercial for gardening soil. The commercial was touting how great the soil-in-a-bag was, and how you were guaranteed that flowers and plants would bloom 50% better or some such statistic, if such a thing could even be quantified. I could just picture some lady with a pair of measuring calipers in the garden, checking to see if her yellow roses had indeed increased in diameter by 50% since switching to said miracle-in-a-bag. In fact, that's something my wife V. would probably do. "This stuff is crap!" I could imagine her saying when the results didn't live up to the promise. "So true you wouldn't believe it", I would respond.

But my focus here is not the claims the product made, but how the product struck me as another example of our devotion to excess here in America. We have plenty of land, and plenty of dirt for sure. But in our desire to have the most lucious of lawns, the biggest blooms of flowers, the most ferocious ferns, it's not enough. We have to go out and buy the premium potting soil full of nitrates and vitamins or whatever it is that plants really like. It's like taking the soil around you and supercharging it. How long before we start seeing some mutant fruit that bites your hand off? Ok, that was a little extreme I admit. But where does tending and nurturing your garden end and Pimp My Horticulture begin? Does anyone need a "green thumb" anymore, or just a green bag? Or a bag of green? I dunno what I am saying.

I find it somewhat odd that there are plenty of areas in the world where people can't grow enough food to eat, and I can walk right into Home Depot, or Target, or maybe even Safeway, and buy myself a big bag-o-dirt to start a garden with. I could drop a bag of this wonder dirt on the sterile cement pad outside my front door, and start growing something almost instantly. Are we shipping bags of this stuff to all the poor countries that we are giving aid to? Better yet, show them how to make it on their own. Why should anyone have to starve if this dirt works like it's supposed to?

consumption

My employer's evening meal plan just changed ... and I think it's going to shorten my life dramatically.

Let me tell you about the old plan first. We work a lot of overtime in my profession, and one of the nice benefits of the job was the meal plan. Our regular work day consists of 7 hours, it's a regular 9-to-5 work day minus one hour for lunch. Well if you worked 2 hours or more past your normal shift (a 9+ hour day), you got a meal allowance of $10. Every evening the office orders dinner from a local restaurant, and you can apply your $10 allowance towards ordering food. The way that it worked was, you were automatically credited $10 on your paycheck whenever you worked 2 hours or more beyond your 7 hour shift. If you ordered dinner, that was deducted from your paycheck and it all balanced out. If you didn't order dinner, you got the $10 and you could pick up something on the way home, or go out and get dinner in the middle of the evening, or even just go home, eat something out of your fridge and pocket the $10. That was the old plan.

The plan had its own complications and downsides, but it was generally a decent plan. One downside was that you had to order dinner at 4:30pm in order for it to arrive at the office around 6pm. I don't know about you, but I am rarely thinking about what I want to eat for dinner at 4:30pm. That's like senior citizen dinner time right there, sometimes I'm not even thinking about food at 6pm. I'm used to eating late, more like 8 or 9pm. As a result, I often missed or skipped the 4:30pm order and kept on working. I'd often work until 7 or 8, and then pick up something on the way home, or eat at home. And often I'd be pocketing the $10, tax-free, or the change left over from buying something.

Now let me tell you about the new plan. You now have to work 3 hours past your normal shift (a 10+ hour day) to qualify for a meal allowance. To make it appear that you're not getting completely shafted, they upped the allowance to $15. Sounds great, but that means that you now have to work until 8:00pm or 8:30pm (if you take a half-hour to eat dinner) to qualify for that $15. If you order dinner at the office, you've committed to staying that late now or else you'll eat the bill. But if you don't order dinner, guess what, under the new policy the money doesn't credit automatically to your paycheck. You now have to submit a receipt after the fact, to get reimbursed up to the $15 max allowance. No receipt, no meal allowance.

The new plan is clearly intended to save the firm some money. The 3 hour requirement is just enough to make it unpleasant enough of a stay that most people won't benefit from this plan. I think most people are ok with working 1 or 2 hours overtime on a fairly regular basis. You make a little more money, and if you only work 1 hour or 1.5 hours no big deal, you're still getting home at a decent time and can have dinner. But 3 hours, that puts me into the 8:30 to 9pm timeframe by the time I get home. You can't expect your spouse to wait until 9pm to have dinner with you every night, can you? I don't. So I tell V. to go ahead and eat without me. I just pick something up on the way home, and eat it when I get home.

Oh yeah, and I get shafted by the receipt deal too. Sometimes I pick up food, and don't get a receipt. Nothing like ordering a $14 pizza, taking it home thinking it's covered, and then realizing that you didn't get a receipt. Cha-ching, the Firm just saved some more cash.

So how does all this affect my wellbeing and health? Think about what kinds of places are open past 9pm. Most decent restaurants are closed at that point. It's 9pm, you're tired from working your 10.1 hour day, you don't want to wait too long to pick up something on the way home, where do you end up? Fast food, amigo. Taco Bell is open 24 hours, McDonalds and Jack-in-the-Box are open until 2am, and there's always the local am/pm convenience store for a microwave burrito. Now that's good nutrition right there. And you know what, after working that 10+ hour workday, I am not going to let the firm just pay for a $7 combo and call it a night. No way man, I am going in for as close to $15 as I can get. I figure I earned it.

So there I am last night, pulling up in my Lexus to the Carl's Jr. like a high roller. Gimme 2 burgers, 2 milkshakes, some CrissCut fries, and some fried zucchini. Total comes to $14.51. If they had a $0.49 cent item I'd order that too.

That kind of eating can't be good for me. I hope the firm is reinvesting the money it's saving with this policy change into some medical plan benefits...