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Month: July 2009

Blogathon 2009

So, I didn’t find out about Blogathon this year until it was too late for me to properly plan for it, which makes me sad. But never fear! I shall be guest blogging over at Colin‘s blog, Therapy in the Making. My time slot is from 11:00-12:30 (PM, Pacific Time). Be sure to stop by and check it out!

We’re blogging for Doctors Without Borders; if you’d like to donate, you can sponsor us

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Update: July 26, 12:41am

Here’s my posts!
Shiney and Spaghetti alla Carbonara
Chicken Marsala
Piña Colada Bread and Mango Bread
Bacorn, Heart Attack Sauce, and Pepperoni Frittata

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Curse You, Metabolism!

My whole life, I was pretty skinny.

As a child, my doctors would (mostly jokingly) ask my mother if she ever fed me; she replied with a stoic “Doctor, she eats more than me and her brother combined. Yes, I feed her”. I suppose the amount of running and jumping and falling and climbing I did factored into that, but the truth was I could eat all i wanted, and did. People would be amazed at how much I could eat, and ask me where all that food goes. My typical answer was “to my toes!” My nickname was Katie No-Butt Wagner. It was true. There was no meat on me, anywhere.

When I hit Jr. High and the joys of puberty, I became “curvy”. Still skinny, but with hips that could move a mountain. I’m Hispanic; I expected that. I wore a size 7 juniors jean which was too big for me because a 5 wouldn’t get past my hips. I wore the same pants until college.

In college, my metabolism was still a good friend of mine, but without marching band to keep me moving all the time, I gained a few pounds. No really, only a few. I was not a victim of the Freshman Fifteen; it was more like 5 pounds, max.

After I dropped out of the art school (that’s a whole other story for a different blog post), I got into kickboxing and other strenuous activities. I dropped those last few pounds and was wandering around in that elusive size 5 for a while. I was stoked; I looked good and was in my prime! Wheee. If only I had known those days were so short!

In the 2 years that I’ve been in Portland, I’ve gained a lot of weight. Granted, I probably needed to gain 5-10 pounds, and I did, and felt pretty good… but it didn’t stop there. I am the heaviest and biggest I’ve ever been, and I am not happy about it. I’m not “fat” persay, but having always been so thin, this is kind of a downer for me.

So, now I’m ready to do something. I chatted with the people at Jenny Craig but really, my problem isn’t portion control, so I don’t think that’s quite the right thing for me. My problem is that I eat bad foods and drink too much beer. Ah, beer. Portland has more microbreweries per capita than most places do.. anyway. I know that if I just start eating better foods, and working out more, I can lose the weight. I wanted something to help jumpstart me though.

I’d heard people raving about The Master Cleanse a long time ago, but it just stricks me as way too extreme and probably extremely unhealthy. I can’t imagine not eating for 10 days. And the salt water chug? No thanks.

Recently, on my plane ride back to Portland from a vacation to LA (where I ate horribly, because I was on vacation, sigh), I was reading a Glamour magazine and saw and advertisement for SLIMQUICK Cleanse; a 7 day cleanse option made specifically for women that helps with issues specific to women’s weigh loss. It’s a supplement that you take while still eating actual food, so it seems less drastic than other programs.

I did some research on my good old trusty friend Google, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound like a sales pitch or fake reviews. But, I did find the Cleanse package and the followup SLIMQUICK Caplets for a damn good price, so I figured.. what the hell? I’d try to kill two birds with one stone.

So I bought them, and will be starting the SLIMQUICK regimen (including their recommended diet [as closely as possible, as I’m allergic to most fish] and excercise plan) on Thursday next week to see if I can drop some weight (I’d start tomorrow, but it’s my birthday tomorrow and damn it, what good is a birthday when you’re on a diet?!) (when I get paid, so I can actually afford to buy healthy foods) for Bird One, and I’m going to document my experience for Bird Two; that way, when the next girl that wants to drop some pounds Googles the product, they’ll hopefully find my saga that will be full of useful information. Yay!

Wish me luck!

SLIMQUICK Cleanse series: Intro · Day 1 · Day 2 · Day 3 · Final Review

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Verizon FiOS Outages FTL

Yesterday, I rolled out of bed all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (read: exhausted and just wanting to go back to sleep) and plopped down in front of my Mac to start working, just like every other business day. Except, I couldn’t connect to AIM, my work email address, or my work support tool. Everything else seemed to be working though, which was kind of odd. Called my coworker; he said he wasn’t having any trouble, so it had to be on my end.

So I power-cycled my router.. and then couldn’t get to anything on the interwebs. Ok… pick up the phone and call Verizon. Half an hour later, somebody finally picks up the phone and informs me that they’re having outages and that it’ll be working again by the end of the day, get off my phone. Swell. So I packed up and went to a coffee show to hijack some wifi so I can, you know, do my job.

Over 24 hours later, my internet is still not working. I am not a happy camper, at all. I tried calling again this morning and got a busy signal. a;sldkfjgh.

So I’m at the coffee shop again. You know, being here just isn’t fun when I *have* to be. I want to go home!

The most annoying parts are: 1, there is NO INFORMATION ANYWHERE about what the hell is going on and why they haven’t fixed it yet, and 2, this is the second time in less than a month that my internet has been down for an extended period of time. Last time, they had a maintenance guy working on the hubs out on the street, and he unplugged my connection and plugged it back into the wrong slot. I called within 10 minutes of my internet dropping (and we know about the hub maintenance because my boyfriend saw the guy outside and asked what was going on) and it took them 7 hours to send somebody to fix it. It took him 2 minutes. You know, I’m pretty sure the guy that broke it in the first place was still there when I called, and yet I had no internet for my entire work day.

Verizon.. seriously? I kind of hate you. I expect to be prorated for these internet-less days.

Don’t even get me started on what I think of the cell phone they sold me and the issues I’ve had with my mobile services; then I’ll never stop.
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Update: 3:30pm 07/09/09

After spending an hour on the phone troubleshooting stuff, my ticket got escalated and all they figured out was that there was some weird DNS issue going on (which is what Vista’s network diagnostic has been saying all along) and they have no idea why. Somebody will call me “eventually”.

So I cheated and manually set my DNS configurations to “somewhere else” after I got off the phone, and now I have internet. No thanks to Verizon.

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