Category: general

I haven’t really felt like blogging anything in particular lately. Not sure why. Then again, “lately” hasn’t really been all that long.

At any rate, my blood pressure was 115/90 this morning. The top number, the systolic, seems to have been steadily decreasing. I’m wondering if I just suck at taking my own blood pressure. Meanwhile, the diastolic is hovering around 90.

Just took it again, and the systolic is now 125, while the diastolic is 85. :>

Mari and I walked for an hour around her neighborhood. It was a pretty good workout. My new Payless sneakers work much better for walking than my Wal-Mart sneakers. (While I was at Payless I also snagged a cute pair of black clogs. They were on sale for like, $7!! I love Payless :D)

DietPower has been working okay, I think. My main problem today has been remembering all the water I’ve been drinking. It’s nice to have a record of that, though.

I have 1389 calories left for the day, and I’m not sure I’m going to use them. Then again, tonight’s Asian orange salmon might be costly. Plus I’m going to make white rice, which can really do you in.

Blah, I feel utterly boring today, so I’m going to stop writing :)

I want to see these Barbies.

More Japanese men prefer sitting whizzes

This article is fascinating.

Toilet researcher Junichi Hirata blames the spread of Western-style toilets on the increasing prevalence for Japanese men to sit on the toilet even while only urinating.

I guess people will research anything…

Sitters have also influenced changes in men’s underwear. Where it was once normal to have men’s briefs with an opening in the front to provide easy access at times of urination, now less than half the 20 types of men’s undies available from catalog clothing seller Cecile Co. offer such access.

Well, that makes it harder to get a blowjob from your secretary under the desk.

I mean…what? Did you say something?

“Men are structurally designed to piss standing up,” Chiba Institute of Technology Prof. Yoshiyuki Ueno, who has studied toilets for more than three decades, said.

Does Japan have enough people studying toilets? I propose a study!

I’m taking Mari‘s advice and using DietPower to track what I eat and how I exercise. Also, since the doctor told me to, I’m tracking my blood pressure this week. So:

This morning’s blood pressure: 125/90

Let me tell you right now that taking your own blood pressure is a pain. Kelly said that it would be nigh impossible due to hearing your own heartbeat in your ears, while trying to listen for your own pulse. This is not really my problem. My problem is putting the damn cuff on! :>

I’m not going to bother listing what I eat here, because I am doing that in DietPower. However, I will say that right now I am sticking to a calorie limit of 1500 a day. This will change, presumably. (I was expecting it to be less…but the program is taking into account my metabolism, or something.)

After stretching (a combination of kung fu and bellydance stretches), I walked for 22 minutes, plus a 5 minute warmup and a 5 minute cool-down. My new Wal-Mart pedometer says I took 3833 steps. It started getting pretty hot, and my feet are unused to my new sneakers, so I called it quits at 22 instead of trying to go for 30 like originally planned. I may actually need to buy more new shoes, because these seem a little loose. I don’t think I can take them back to Wal-Mart after having walked in them :(

I’m thinking about going for a swim, and then doing some laundry, and then going to find new shoes. Mari is going to call me later so we can get together and walk more, or bike. Should be fun :) Last night we went out to Longhorn, which tasted great but gave me horrible nausea. I’m seriously considering just throwing my leftovers away. (They probably wouldn’t fit too well into my diet anyway…)

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good, although my feet hurt. I’m thinking maybe I should start checking my pulse before and after workouts, to track my cardiovascular health…

I dreamed about having a son last night. I spent most of the dream gazing fondly down at his face, kissing his skin, rocking him.

He was a tiny thing, barely the size of my hand, with dark, straight hair and pinched eyes. I don’t know what color his eyes were.

I had just given birth to him. It was a total surprise. Sean and I weren’t ready; we had nothing at home with which to take care of a baby. The hospital room we were in felt more like a hotel room. Sean wrapped his arms around me from behind as I held the baby and said, “You do amazing things, woman.”

Time seemed to work oddly in the dream, so that I actually saw the baby as a toddler before I spent so much time holding him as a newborn. Sean was playing with him and calling him alternately “Robert” and “Junior”. Dream-logic informed me that Sean’s middle name was Robert, even though it isn’t. I kind of liked the idea that he’d come around to the whole “Junior” philosophy, but for some reason “Robert” felt wrong; I didn’t like it. I remembered the name I’d thought of recently (real life), Evan.

So, later, in the hospital room with the baby cradled in my hands, when the nurse asked what the baby’s name was, I said to Sean, “You wanted to name him Junior?”

“Yeah,” Sean said. “Were you thinking about something else?”

“I like Evan,” I responded.

Sean didn’t think too long about it, he just smiled and said, “Okay.” He started to spell it “Evin” in his PDA (he doesn’t have a PDA), so I corrected the spelling.

Things really went my way for far too long in the dream…you’d think I would have noticed ;P

But I didn’t notice until we started to get to the point of taking Evan home, and thinking about how we didn’t have any supplies. It just kept going along the same way, without us moving at all, or making any progress, until suddenly I realized I was sleeping and it was all a dream, and I wasn’t holding a baby.

“Evan,” I thought, “Evan Evan Evan,” but thinking his name couldn’t make him real, the tiny little baby with the pink skin and pinched up eyes and glossy brown hair. So I opened my eyes and got out of bed.

About.com’s RSS feed sent me an article about the Chinese character for “face” in Japanese. I clicked on it, expecting to see something nice and simple (like maybe a smiley face ;P).

But no. Look at that thing!

I wonder if the complexity of the character means something about the nature of a person’s looks.

I mean, look at Luke’s review. How could The Saddest Music in the World be anything but fantastic?

Unfortunately, it’s not playing anywhere :P (I did discover, however, that both Fandango and MovieTickets.com have evil pop-up windows for Surviving Christmas. Gee. Like I really need to see another farce on the holiday season…)

Thankfully, it seems to be on DVD!

Central Anime seems to have paused in their subbing of Touch in order to put out Macross 7.

Their version of 7 uses their old scripts, as far as I can tell. I have their original sub, in horrible quality, on CD. In fact, this new version might simply be a rip of their old one. I have no idea. In any case, it’s not DVD quality…I saw some of that old VHS flicker at the bottom of the frame.

There’s no real point in getting it, especially if Central Anime suddenly finds another series to start on and drops 7 in the middle. I’d rather wait seven years for AiA to finish their sub.

But I’ve already seen 7, anyway. I want Touch!!! Asshats.

It hides everything I want to find, and forces me to use Wizards to do everything. I have no idea what the Wizards are doing to my settings, and I can’t just, you know, access the settings.

*runs off to microsoft.com to see if there’s any recourse*

Dawn and Sam are gone, Dawn to Atlanta to spend the night with her family and then fly to Colorado to see Jered, and Sam back home to Huntsville. It was a great visit, kind of a whirlwind, but absolutely fun. I wish they lived closer. At any rate, I’m looking forward to the next time :)

Pictures are up (look here and here). I have captioned a few, but I’m not done yet. However, since I have work and a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, I need to hit the sack. So the captions will be done later. When I feel like it.

She’s one of us now. Ahahahahaha!

More pictures will surely follow. For now, enjoy this evidence of Stage One in the Corruption of Dawn: Krystal’s.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3666898.stm

“Of course, we don’t think it’s a very good thing to have junior high school children running around having sex. Tokyo wants to make sure it gives them every chance to have a wholesome upbringing, but in the end, sex is a very private matter and, despite our responsibilities, it’s not really an area we should be encroaching on.”

–Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro

He has a point. I would be more interested in how, exactly, you would prosecute.

Teenagers at junior high and high school in Tokyo have been responsible for rapidly escalating rates of abortion and sexually transmitted diseases in recent years.

Well, this is bad. But I’m not sure that writing “teen sex is prohibited” on a piece of paper would really help. If the government wants to do something, maybe they could, for example, put pressure on the makers of television shows not to depict junior high school students in love relationships that go beyond simple “like”.

Of course, fundamentally, I’m against even that. It’s not the TV’s job to raise kids, just like it’s not the police’s, or the government’s. What people should really be looking at is how to enable parents to better do their jobs, rather than taking the responsibility away from the parents. Maybe this would be by enforcing a shorter work week, to allow parents to be home more. Or by working to provide housing closer to the businesses where people work–those two and three hour train commutes are no good for families. While a law prohibiting teen sex would probably shame Japanese parents into keeping an eye out, ultimately they can’t really do anything if they don’t have the time to do so.

Essentially, I think laws like this are far too simplistic. There are reasons for why problems crop up, and those reasons should be looked into. This goes for any problem, anywhere in the world. You can’t outlaw the effect, ignore the cause and expect to see results.

[Note: I don’t know if the first paragraph of the article is in error, or if Governor Ishihara misread the law.]

So I beat level 12-7 finally! But level 13-1 TOTALLY KICKED MY ASS!!!

Worse yet, I can’t just try again. I have to start back from level 12-1 >_<

I will defeat you, Zuma!!!!!!! THIS I VOW!!!!!!!!!