Arctangential

I stopped yesterday evening at a local diner for a hot turkey sandwich. I really shouldn’t eat them, but sometimes I just need one, and I’ve joined a honest to goodness gym, so I feel less guilty about the occasional extravagance.

Anyways, that’s not what my story is about. My story is about the crazy lady in the booth next to me at this diner. She wasn’t hurling obscenities or spitting uncontrollably; she was actually sitting quietly and drinking a cup of tea while she read the menu. At first, I thought nothing of her, apart that maybe she wasn’t really the type I’m used to seeing in this diner in the wee hours. She was a small woman, in her mid-forties, dressed conservatively (or at least unmemorably); I’m used to seeing construction workers, drunk and/or stoned teenagers, and a variety of scruffy miscreants (such as myself) in this place, at this time, but even so, she didn’t particularly stand out.

As I was seated, the waitress (there’s only one working at this time of night) took my drink order and then stopped by the woman’s table to ask if she’d decided. She said no, and asked some kind of question about the menu; I don’t remember exactly what it was, something about if a particular dish came with fries or if it was possible to get just fries. A stupid question. A few minutes later, the waitress returned with my drink, took my order and then went to ask the woman if she’s made any more progress deciding what she wanted. The woman asked some other asinine question about the menu and then said she needed more time to think about it.

This pattern repeated itself the whole time I was there. I got my soup (I ended up with gumbo despite having asked for wedding soup, but the gumbo was actually pretty good, so I didn’t say anything), and the woman asked something like, “what is country-fried steak” and then for more time to consider her options. I got my hot turkey sandwich (they sprinkle crispy onions on top of it, it’s so good.), and she did it again. Each time the waitress came to bring or ask me something, she would ask this woman again if she wanted to order, and she was never able to decide. Just as I was getting done with my dinner, the woman suddenly put down her menu and, having drunk only half of her mug of hot tea in this entire time, got up to pay her bill. After paying, she returned to her table to leave a tip: one cent. She put it down kind of angrily and then stalked out the front door. Maybe she was upset that the menu was too complicated.

She should have ordered a hot turkey sandwich. They’re really good.

Some history: apart from having the occasional crappy 35mm camera as a child, I was not really into photography for a long time. I’ve always had a good memory and never really saw the value in taking photos. A few years ago, when I first started getting back into Lego, I decided to take pictures of all my Lego sets, and for that I needed a camera. I picked up a total piece of shit camera at Best Buy, from the opened item cage, for, I think, $100 or less. At some level, it worked, so I can’t complain too much. Its autofocus was terrible though, and with no manual focus capability, pictures of my small Lego sets turned out a lot like this: (click for bigger)

I got kind of tired of this whole situation, and so started looking around for a new camera. I’d finally decided on the Sony F717 when my boss at the time, a man who was independently wealthy from a dotcom stock sale, sent email to our group asking if anybody wanted a free Sony F707. I, of course, jumped up out of my chair and ran to his office to claim the prize. That was a good camera; it served me well for many years and took quite good pictures. It even had some pretty fancy features, like a neat laser-grid autofocus system for getting quality autofocus in low-light conditions.

However, the camera got old, the battery stopped being quite as nice, and I felt the yearning for new technology. I was hoping to upgrade to the next revision in Sony’s L-shaped semi-SLR line, which had continued after the F717 to the F828, only to find that the line had been discontinued and essentially replaced by Sony’s new DSLR, the Alpha. At first I was a little annoyed, because I didn’t really want to get into the whole SLR thing, but then I decided that it would be worth the investment, and I took the plunge.

And now I’m entirely into the whole SLR thing. I’m constantly reading about which kind of lenses, filters, flashes, tripods and even carrying cases I should be using. I’ve already spent more on extra lenses for my camera than the kit cost me in the first place, and just the other day I bought some more books to help me learn how to really get the most out of the thing. I think it’d been worth it though, I’ve taken some pretty decent pictures lately and I’m having a lot more fun with it.

I’m a fat dude. Have been for a long time. It never really bothered me much, and while I made plans to start a “real diet” after my 30th birthday, that never really happened. About 8 months after that date, however, I started experiencing some fairly painful gastrointestinal issues (the details of which I won’t go into here.) My doctor told me that the best way to fix these things was to lose weight and said that all I needed to do to accomplish that was to eat 2000 calories a day, stay between 20% and 30% calories from fat, and get some exercise every day. This seemed simple enough, so I started doing it. Counting all those calories was a real pain, though, and so I wrote some software to help me keep track.

This first shot is the daily summary screen for a day back in August. I wanted to show a typical day of eating for me, and it turns out I have very few of those. On this day, I had a bowl of cereal in the morning, went to Subway for lunch, had a burger, french fries and broccoli for dinner, then had a waffle with peanut butter and figs for a snack later. Figs are really good. Even later, I seem to have eaten a curry bao.

Here are three screens, showing various edit features of the software. The first two show parts of the process to add a “food event”, essentially one of the line items in the first screenshot. The third shows the screen for adding a new food item. This process is not very interesting.

And here’s a graph of my weight progression. For a while the average was 0.33 lbs per day, but I seem to have slowed down somewhat. I hope I’m not decelerating. The hump in the middle of the graph is where I got a cold and couldn’t really work out for about 4 days, and also decided not to count calories those days. I was a little bit disappointed that I gained so much weight in such a short period of indolence, but I was able to take it back off fairly quickly.

Anyhow, that’s just a little peek in my insane anal-retentive nerdiness.