game_coder's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
game_coder's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 6:01 pm |
I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike.
I've been riding my bike work 2 or 3 or 4 days a week - just about every day I don't need a car. There's this cool site that lets you map your route with a google mapplet and it generates a graph of the elevation changes. The part of the ride between Lake Forest Park and work is always the same. 10.71 miles and mostly flat except a little hill that the office sits on overlooking a lawn farm. It's all Burke-Gilman and Sammamish River trail except about a mile on 124th between the trail and Willows Road. The machine powered vehicles fly through that stretch, but fortunately there's a nice wide, well paved shoulder. When I head in to work in the morning, I take the back roads from the North City Safeway to Lake Forest Park. There's not a lot of traffic. It's all 25 MPH and strictly enforced - probably the principal revenue source of the City of Lake Forest Park. And it's a really nice ride - downhill all the way. When I do encounter a car on my side of the road, I have to break to stay behind them otherwise I'm flying down the hill at 30 MPH or so. On the way home, I only tried those back roads once. That hill is brutally long going the other direction. The first alternate route I tried was 155th street from the trail to Lake City Way. I did that for a week or so, but the hill is absolutely brutal. Climbing 125 feet in a block (0.16 miles). So lately I've been braving the traffic and going up Bothell Way from Lake Forest Park to the cemetery. The bus lane is nice and wide and I'm off the road before dusk. So, if you're a crazy stalker, now you know where I live! And if you want to kill me, now you know where to run me over! | | Monday, December 15th, 2008 | | 3:43 pm |
The winners
The winners of the unicorn coloring contest... First  Second  Third  Weirdest  | | Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | | 9:13 pm |
Use it or lose it
The turkey's been in the fridge a week now, so it's got to be used or tossed. I had some leftover turkey noodle casserole for lunch and there's turkey soup in the freezer for another week. Tonight's dinner was Turkey Stir Fry! Never tried that before. It came out much better than one might suspect - the stir fry sauce overpowers the turkey flavor so it tastes more like stir fry than turkey and yet a bit of turkey comes through. The real test is that I didn't tell Anna that it's turkey. She's off in Gabe's room watching Digimon. Will she eat it???? Actually, I didn't watch her serve herself, so it's possible she just grabbed rice as she sometimes does. The biggest drawback of stir frying with leftover turkey is that the turkey is pretty dry and tends to stick in the bottom of the wok. Maybe lots of extra oil is the secret. In a bit I'll whip up some turkey pot pies with the last couple of cups of turkey. Those'll go in the freezer for use on some future night. If you freeze a pie for baking later, do you half bake it first? I bet google knows. Oh, speaking of google... have you seen "Google Alerts?" If not, google it! They're pretty cool. I set one up for "Gordon Ludlow" and so far none of the hits have been about me, but if anyone ever does mention me on the internet, I'll be the first to know! | | Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 | | 9:12 am |
Atlas Shrugged - My Car Failed
I've been listening to books on CD from the library on my commute. It's been a great way to catch up on the reading I never seem to find time to do. But I think Ayn Rand is cursed. At least when it comes to my car. Atlas Shrugged is about 50 disks, so it takes a while to get through. The first time I put it on my hold list, there were about 75 people in front of me, so it took a while to get. And once I got it, it took a while to listen to. When I was about half way through, my transmission failed on I-5 just north of Olympia. That was a few months ago. I couldn't renew the book, because other people had placed holds on it, so I had to return it half way through. Finally, I got it back again last month. Within a couple days, my car wouldn't start. Just a dead battery. No big deal. Yesterday, I started on the last disk of the book. And in the middle of the night a drunk driver plowed into my parked car. | | Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | | 11:43 am |
| | Thursday, October 9th, 2008 | | 6:22 pm |
| | Friday, September 12th, 2008 | | 6:11 am |
| | Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | | 12:26 pm |
| | Monday, August 4th, 2008 | | 12:38 pm |
| | Friday, June 20th, 2008 | | 2:48 pm |
Solstice picnic
Happy Solstice! I grabbed a sammich at QFC and headed off to St Edwards Park for an unplanned picnic lunch. It was about as much of a workout as you can get with less than an hour of walking. The route I took I descended 1200 feet on the 1.3 mile Water Tower / South Ridge trail and came back up on the 0.6 mile North Trail. It was gorgeous there today! Cool woods, sparkley lake, blue sky, warm and breezy. | | Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | | 10:48 am |
| | Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | | 10:42 am |
Could be worse
Eating and drinking to excess and not exercising at all for 3 or 4 days only cost me a few pounds in the march toward the weight loss goal.  | | Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 | | 10:06 pm |
| | 12:51 pm |
I was wrong
Spokane gets a fair amount of snow in the winter - enough that I avoid driving over there during the holidays. But I had the impression that all of eastern washington is blanketed in snow all winter. Cross the pass, you're snowed in. Turns out, tri-cities gets a lot less. It's about half way between Seattle and Spokane. Here's some data: Seattle gets 4.9 inches of snow a year. Richland gets 7.8. Spokane gets 10.7. And Goldbutte Montanna gets 64.5. Another half-way-in-between number is the average snow depth in January. 0 for Seattle, 1 inch for Richland and 2 inches for Spokane. Now.... why did I think it was feet? | | Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 | | 1:16 pm |
95% fat free
I'm shooting for a high protein diet. So instead of 60-20-20 where 60% of the calories are carbs and 20% each are fat and protein, I'd like to skew it more toward the protein (but still low fat). This brings me to a 95% fat free lunch meat that I picked up at the grocery store Monday. It's Oscar Meyer Smoked White Turkey. The nutrition label on the package is NOT the same as the one on their web site. On the web site, they claim a gram of fat per serving and on the package, it's a gram and a half. I'll believe the package. The front of the package is the same as depicted on the web. It boldly proclaims 95% fat free. Of the 30 calories, 15 are fat calories. Wouldn't that be 50% fat? 50% is a little different than 5%!!! OK... let's assume that they're claiming that it's 95% fat free by weight rather than by calories (I think that's the way it really works in the world of food packaging). There's 4 grams of protein, less than 1 gram of carbs and 1.5 grams of fat per serving. Wait a minute!!! 1.5 grams of fat in 6.5 grams is 23% fat. Oh... but the serving size is 28 grams. 21.5 grams is water and/or non-food turkey parts. 1.5 grams of 28 grams is 5.36% so the product really is 94.6% fat free which is 95% give or take a percent. (probably close enough in the world of food packaging) Hey... wait a minute! Fat has 9 calories per gram. So there should only be 13.5 calories from fat. If there's 15 calories from fat, that would be one and two thirds grams of fat. One and two thirds divided by 28... That's 5.95% fat. Is 94% fat free "close enough" to 95% fat free? In any case, it really isn't a high protein, low fat food. It's got the same number of calories from both. So, 95% fat free isn't all it's cracked up to be. | | Friday, January 4th, 2008 | | 1:35 pm |
Resolutions
My New Year's resolutions this year are:
- Get the debt under control
- Get in shape
I've been better about not spending money quite so far beyond my means for almost a year, but slipped over the holiday season. Last Spring, I started an Excel spreadsheet to track the balances of my dozen or so credit cards. The line graph of total debt is encouraging when it's dipping and motivating when it's not. Before that I mostly lacked the discipline to restrain myself from buying whatever I wanted at the moment. And when I was good, there wasn't any feedback. Tracking does wonders.
In 2006, I got serious about weight loss (again). When I went in for my physical, the doc pointed out that I was up to 200 lbs from 185 the previous year. So, I started working out 90 minutes day. 30 on the elliptical, 30 on weights, and another 30 on the elliptical. And I watched what I ate. I was crunching a lot at that time, so I was eating dinner at the office. Instead of the usual pasta and giant Claim Jumper entrees and such, I'd just have a salad or an appetizer for dinner. Between the diet and exercise, I was down to 175 for my physical in 2007.
Over the holidays, I got lazy about that as well. From a low of 165 lbs, I'm back up to 185. I can't really work out for more than an hour a day these days. There just isn't enough time. But I'm going to really start hitting the weights and switch my diet to high protein, low fat, low carbs. I'm going to build as much muscle as I can and lose as much fat as I can. My goal is to be back into 32 jeans, where I was in my skinny high school days. Last year I was down to 33, so that's a completely reasonable goal. (Now, the 34s are a bit tight so I'm back in the 36s.) In my high school days, I weighted 145 lbs, but I had no muscle mass at all - just skin and bones. So
I think my goal weight is going to be somewhere around 165.
So... no beer for me! It works against both goals - frugality and slenderness. Wish me luck! | | Monday, February 27th, 2006 | | 6:15 pm |
| | Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 | | 1:37 pm |
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day was *AMAZING*! I cooked gldngrrl dinner. We drank champagne and ate strawberries while dinner was cooking. Then we ate by candle light. Then we had a glass of lambic. And then she gave me the most amazing massage ever. She brought a bunch of candles to fill the room with candles. It was so romantic! | | Thursday, February 9th, 2006 | | 4:45 pm |
Well duh
If there is someone(s) on your friends list you would like to take, strip naked, tie them to a bed post, lick them until they scream, then fuck them until both of you are senseless and unable to fuck anymore, then wait about five minutes and do it all over again, then post this exact sentence in YOUR journal. | | Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 | | 11:36 am |
Awesome new horny girlfriend
I have an awesome new horny girlfriend. She's really fun and I really enjoy her company. And the sex is awesome! |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
game_coder's journal
happy