This is the photo I put on the background of my new Zune HD.  Am I loving the new Zune HD?  I am not.  I don’t like that I can’t put a background on the main page anymore and I don’t like that the screen is less wide even though it is longer and I don’t like that I’m having a really hard time putting mp4s onto it!!!  Raaaaaaawwwwwwr!!!!!!

Boo.  If only I created everything in the world things would work perfectly.

It is at least better than the Archos 5 Internet Tablet that I bought on the way up to Vancouver.  I bought it in Sacramento and then I returned it a week later in Tacoma.  Nothing worked on it.  Although the screen was bigger.  The fact that nothing worked like it should AND they had zero technical support was too much to bear.  I returned it to the Tacoma location of Best Buy as a punishment to it.  Harsh perhaps, but I want my technology to work as promised!

Vancouver was fun, especially Halloween at Clairessa’s place.  I brought a big cheese/deli meats/crackers platter and several bottles of Malbec, which is my wine of the moment.  I also brought my board games collection – we played ‘Apples to Apples’ and ‘Imaginiff’ -those are some of my favourite games.  Michael won ‘Apples to Apples’ and I don’t recall if we ever finished ‘Imaginiff’, we may have been pretty sauced.  In the photos it shows us with shots of Patron while the game is still laid out, so I’m guessing that things went astray…

I have to confess that I’m SICK of the food I’ve been eating lately.  SO SICK OF IT.  I tried to eat scrambled eggs yesterday and it was all I could do to keep from throwing up.  My body does not want them in it.  And I agree.  Eggs are for throwing at houses and making smiley faces in the frying pan with.

Where does this leave me…………………………………………………………………..?

After an existential breakdown I gathered myself together and re-evaluated.  I do still believe that low-carb, high protein and fats is the way to go, but something is not right because I DETEST eating this food!  Je deteste! Je refuse!

I’m sick of cheese, yogurt, bacon, various other meats, nuts, and chili.  The only low-carb approved food that I still enjoy is steak and milk.  Oh! and whipped cream.  But I have neither the time nor the inclination to char a Chicago-style steak everyday.  Plus, something tells me that would get old really quick too.

This doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make sense to hate food that is ideal for you.  It really doesn’t make sense that the more you ate the healthy food the more it would make you want to throw up.  That cannot be natural.

Here’s my guess: both Ryan and I are getting canker sores, ulcers, and heartburn.  Yes, he’s eating the exact same as me.  It’s pretty obvious that our acid levels are off the charts.  Maybe the millet grain in that cereal that I was eating was enough to reduce the pH to levels where my body could still handle eating all that protein from the eggs and almonds at lunch.  I thought milk was fairly alkaline, but it’s not.  Everything I’m eating now is pretty acidic.  I bought some bread at Whole foods that is just made with millet, amaranth, salt, and water.  It’s actually fairly tasty.  Millet is a very old grain that Europeans have been eating for millenia.  I mention this because I’m from European descent and I think it’s safe to assume that if your ancestors were eating it then your body will know better how to process it.  So, if you’re asian or arab etc… then you can probably healthfully eat different foods than I can.  So, Ryan and I researched what grains have been around for eons for Europeans and the answer is millet, barley, and oats.  Rye too, but I don’t like rye.

My plan now is to eat a small amount of millet, barley, or oats everyday along with my regular low-carb foods.  I did that starting today and it was refreshing to actually have some energy at the gym.  My other complaint about the 100% protein & fat diet was that I had noooooo energgggggggggy.  That actually made it super hard to lose weight since I had no energy to work out.

It’s important to point out that there is no yeast in that bread I bought.  It is my belief that yeast is not good for you.  There are many articles I’ve read on the detriment of yeast to your body and honestly it is just. really. gross.

In conclusion:  It was so nice to have buttered bread with my eggs and it did make them not only tolerable, but pleasant.  Also, I finally had the sensation of being satiated, which I just wasn’t getting from eating only meat and dairy.  This simple type of bread also filled me up and did not cause me to crave more carbs or mess with my blood sugar levels.  I stayed full for the rest of the day.  I’ll let you know if this works!

Hello! I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I ate most of the cheesecake already… sorrrrrrrrrry – and I say that with a Canadian accent with the hard ‘o’ – not the American way, which I can only say when I’m not sincere: “I’m so sar-rry.”  I do try not to say it unless I really am being genuine though, it’s one of those things you can say ’til it’s meaningless!

Let’s move on.

I did make the cheesecake and it was tasty in a Stevia-ish way.  Yes, it does taste good, but not ‘to-die-for’ good because you’ll only get that with sugar, since it’s really less about the taste and more the addictiveness of carbs that makes you feel that way.  Think about it, what IS taste, really? – ‘taste buds’ are actually chemosensors that detect certain chemical stimuli in the environment.  These chemosensors go wild over sugar, but it’s so counterproductive to what our bodies need, I have no idea as to why the sensors haven’t evolved more.  I know eggs are really good for me – why can’t eggs be something my taste buds tell me is fantastically exciting? Why!? I hate eating eggs! Though… my good news for you today is that this cheesecake recipe has 8 eggs in it.

Other than the obvious fact that it’s not quite as compelling without sugar, the cheesecake actually turned out super rad.  So much so that I thought that I would include the recipe and the publication I got it from.  It’s from a special edition of ‘Cook’s Illustrated‘, which I highly recommend for the scientifically precise info they supply you with and the perfectionism with which they research their recipes – awesome – you cannot go wrong if you follow their recipes to the ‘T’.  Which is what I did and the cheesecake was perfect! No crack on the top, perfect texture, everything just as they said it would be.  Thank you!!!  I’m actually not that much into cooking, but I miss eating dessert and you can forget about buying a sugar free cheesecake, not gonna happen.  So here I be, in the kitchen.

Here are the pages that I scanned from the issue for you: page 1 and page 2.  Also, if you click on the cheesecake pics I included you can see hugemongous examples of my results. If you’re interested in buying Cook’s Illustrated, it’s published in a magazine format and I bet you could get it at any good newsstand or bookstore, but I get mine as an impulse buy when I stand in line at Whole Foods.

Today I chose my UBC Med school clothing, which is a little ritual my sister and I have: every Fall when she receives the Med school clothing catalogue I pick out which ones I want and then I get it as one of my Christmas gifts from her.  Even though I’m very fashiony and not the sweatshirt/t-shirt type, a lot of the time I’m chillin at home or doing some rigorous physical activities that call for that sort of apparel, so I have usually completely worn them out within the year and require my Fall replenishment.  It makes me happy to wear them because it reminds me of Clairessa and how proud I am of her.    This year I picked out a women’s fitted navy hoodie with the UBC crest and a pair of matching sweatpants that have the elastic around the ankle – so 80′s I know, but those old school sweatpants look kinda cool I think and it’s more flattering on me since most sweatpants are too short for me anyway, they would just be hanging loosely like 5 inches above the ground – not attractive.   Still, I may not leave the house in them… Je deteste looking bummy.

If you’re wondering what happened to my guitar playing, I’ll tell you – I cut my thumb very deeply when I broke an hourglass the other day.  Rather cryptic don’t you think?  I knocked the hourglass, the top half came off and my thumb caught on a shard of the bottom half.   It bled a lot and was very terrible.  My texting, button pushing, and 6th string guitar playing skills are in shambles.  Fiddlesticks.

I wonder if you would feel better if you put the lime in the coconut and drank them both together….?  Some day I will experiment and let you know.

Today is one of those dark gloomy days mostly seen in Vancouver and not Newport Beach, but the last two day have been like that here.  Makes me want to get some fake logs for my gas fireplace.  I’ve been working on my personal webpage the last few days and have gotten the foundations finished.  You can check it out here.  It may seem like a waste of time to put so much effort into a page that I frankly don’t need, but by working on my own webpage I learn in a real way how to take an idea and design and turn it into a working website.  All the classes, videos, and textbooks I’m reading don’t give you much more than an idea of how to go about it.  So, many things go awry or affect your page in ways that you could’t have guessed that it’s pretty much the only way to really learn – the textbooks and videos are all worked out in advance to give you a specific result with specific steps.  Ha! Like that ever happens in reality!

I talked to my Grandma yesterday, she’s so cute.   She told me all about how the family was doing and she talked about Clairessa coming to stay with her in February for a month, so I know she’s already excited about that.  Clairessa got to Toronto yesterday where she’s going to be for a month because of one of her med school rotations.  I think she’s liking 4th year a bit better.  Thank goodness.  But I also think she’s happier now because she went back to eating some meat.  From empirical evidence I’ve witnessed that being a vegetarian makes a person puffy and wrinkly and GROUCHY!  If you want a more scientific and peer-reviewed case for eating meat then I highly recommend this book – ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’ by Gary Taubes.  (If you don’t have time to read the thick book here is a video of the author which covers a lot of what’s in the book ) I had so much trouble staying thin until I read this book.  A rice cake with 30 calories would make me gain weight, but eating cheese with 1000′s of calories wouldn’t – that is totally against what popular wisdom says these days – but popular wisdom is just that, it is inherently popular but it is not inherently true.

Lately I’ve had this song stuck in my head – “Just Go” by Lionel Richie – it’s really where I’m at this week, I just want to get away and relax.  The last two weeks have been just one trial and tribulation after another.  I feel like I am going to be surprised with a Survivor-type reality show trophy any minute now.  Soon it will be mine – I’m sure of it!

This weekend was an oasis of fun in the recent desert of living though, we did all sorts of Autumnal activities like go to Target and get little orange candycorn lights, which I put up around all my windows and my balcony, and I got a cute pumpkin candle holder centerpiece for my table, which I lit along with my other candles and played my guitar in the soft orange glow.  I also made soup!!!  Which was yummy, I put all sorts of veggies and just the right spices in it.  And we went for a hike in Trabuco canyon, which was interesting in many ways if not for beauteous reasons.  Much red rooibos tea was drunk and a good time had by all.

Trabuco canyon is very canyony, but I wouldn’t recommend it for hiking.  It took a very loooooooong drive down a very treacherous boulder filled ‘path’, for I would not call it a road, to even get to the trail head. Unless you are in an off-roading vehicle I wouldn’t advise it.  Several cars and us didn’t even make it to the trail head because parts of the path ahead of us were just a swatch of jagged foot high rocks – it would have just shredded the bottoms of our cars.   So, we parked and walked from there which meant we were pooped by the time we reached the trail – bah!  There was also a lot of Poison Oak and even at 5pm it was hot, so though our moods were jolly, I can’t say that it inspired my soul and regale you with tales of natural beauty that would impress you.  Foiled again!

I talked to my Mom Saturday morning, I was very relieved that she was safely back from the cabin and in good spirits.  She went up by herself last Monday, and it still has Dad’s stuff just as he left it, so Clairessa and I were worried she’d get into some weird mood and take her life.  It was a valid worry I think, but anyway she seems to have dealt with some of the issues regarding his death, so maybe she’s gonna be a bit happier from now on…..?  I really hope so.  I’ll go up near Halloween and give her a big hug.  Adelle will love that, she loves Mom and visiting Vancouver.  I’ll drive up so that I can easily take Adelle and the foliage is gorgeous through Oregon and Washington at that time of year.  It’s worth it to go just for the drive.

Looks like we might get government funding for Pacifica.  Keep your fingers crossed.  This would be the hugest relief and allow us to keep full control of the company without being under-capitalized into extinction.  Right now I know a lot of us are under-funded and under-funned, but I’ve got some ideas like the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride!  It will only solve the latter problem though, sorry.  I’m planning on doing that in a few weeks and of course Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights! So. Much. Fun.