FoodNerd!

Padma Lakshmi has a new line of jewelry, and all of it is pretty, but one item in particular stands out. She made a pair of earrings in the shape of clove buds, with square diamonds in the center. They’re pretty just as abstract organic shapes, but food nerds will almost certainly recognize them as cloves immediately, and that makes them so much more awesome. Why have plain diamond earrings when you can have FOOD-shaped diamond earrings?

I have now run 25 minutes straight 4 times in a row. That is mind-boggling.

Also, a fearsome necessity given the number of fully-loaded Chicago hot dogs and pieces of passionfruit layer cake I ate at our party this weekend. Heh heh.

I just ate a fresh lychee from the branch I bought for tallasiandude at the local Indian market, and maybe it is the heat but it took me straight back to Hawai’i and made me want a shave ice. With lychee and liliko’i and li hing syrups. Sigh.

actually quite insanely useful. video of a dude opening a bottle of wine with a shoe and a concrete wall

I ran for 20 minutes straight last night. And didn’t die.

Oh, what a wretched pun. Last night we made spaghetti all’ubriaco, the delicious pasta cooked in red wine that we ate in Florence, tipped off by E&O, our intrepid eating pals. And our other pal brought over a huge baggie of ramps that she foraged with her mom, and it seemed only logical to chop some ramps and add them to the pasta. Logical, and in actual fact, truly delicious. The ramps added a sharpness and savoriness to the buttery, nutty, fruity weirdness of that pasta, and made it even better. The other nice thing is that a bowl of chopped ramps makes your whole house smell terrific if you leave it out on the table for a couple of hours while you finish off some sliced salumi and bread and cheese and wine. Better than air freshener!

Today I did this:

ran 3 minutes
walked 90 seconds
ran 5 minutes
walked 2.5 minutes
ran 3 minutes
walked 90 seconds
ran 5 minutes

and didn’t die. Yay me!

I have been struggling to actually exercise lately, aside from dragging my butt to the weekly swing dances. There never seems to be time to ride the bike to the store, and words are insufficient to express how much I hate getting up early to work out before breakfast. So tallasiandude has been trying to gently nudge me in various ways, and to his endless credit none of those ways have made me want to smack him (no small task when it comes to the topic of exercising). And one of those nudges appears to have managed the impossible, and I am now undertaking to learn to run.

For now it is “running” rather than actually running, but it does seem to be working. It is Couch to 5K, which is deliberately constructed for people who think they hate running and never exercise. I don’t hate it, and it’s quite pleasant to go outside now that it’s warming up a little, and I am not *completely* couchbound. And the online program and accompanying podcasts are I think what tipped the balance, by making it absolutely braindead-easy to follow the program.

The idea is that you start out by walking for the most part, with very short bursts of jogging in between. This allows you to “run” without getting knee strain or side stitches or generally hating each and every step. 60 seconds of jogging is over before you know it. But even this would never have worked for me if I had to constantly check or set my watch to tell me when the various timeperiods were over, or had to memorize the plan for the week — not gonna happen. This is where the Podrunner podcasts come in.

These are electronica/dance music mixes with the correct BPM for the walking and the running portions, stitched together with little beepy tones that signal you to switch from walking to running and vice versa. No thinking necessary! Just zone out, listen to the innocuous oontsa-oontsa music, look at the flowers, and whenever it beeps, do the thing you’re not already doing. There’s not even any annoying person-voice giving the instructions, just impersonal tones so you can do your thing without any cheerleading.

This means that all I have to do in the morning is get dressed, put on sunscreen, find my iPod, and leave the house. No additional preparation or thinking is required, which is essential for the pre-food pre-caffeine hours. And it seems to be working, inasmuch as I am still doing it in week 2 and my legs ache a lot less when I get home.

No one hates (hated?) running more than I do, so I figure it can help all the rest of the haters find their way too.

How much of mood can be attributed plain and simple to vitamin deficiency? I just had a weird and sudden attack of the Oh My God Everything Is Pointless and Can’t I Just Go Watch TV blues.

Trying really hard not to eat my way out of it, I went and took a multivitamin and a fish oil capsule, and half an hour later I am feeling significantly better (though I still kind of want to curl up and watch a couple hours of Tony Bourdain). Last night I drank one of those energy/vitamin packets and had a similar rise in energy and willingness to deal with my fellow humans.

I always assume that because I eat a varied diet full of vegetables and proteins that I’m unlikely to be deficient in anything particular, but I am really starting to wonder now.

I never remember to take the damn vitamins though they are right out on the kitchen counter. Morning head is a problem for me. Maybe I should bring the bottles up and sit ‘em on my desk near the computer, so when I get all mopey and unfocused I can immediately squash the problem with NUTRIENTS.

OK, granted, I did actually exercise for 45 minutes or so this morning, but why am I on constant hunger alert today? I ate granola and yogurt and black tea for breakfast right after the workout, then brown rice and smoked salmon and broccoli for lunch, plus some dark chocolate when I was still hungry afterward, and then some leftover chicken hash with turnips and sweet potatoes because I was hungry AGAIN two hours later, and now again two hours later I am STILL HUNGRY. I am drinking water, even. Healthy food, reasonable portions, lots of fiber and protein. WTF?

Sigh. I am going to go drink some more water.