Dinhternet

So I was read­ing ran­dom arti­cles on the inter­net today when I came across this post. Funny stuff, reminds me of the old “Look at these fuck­ing pep­pers!” pic­tures.

Then I noticed that one of the links is to a pic­ture of a savory Jell-O salad. That’s right. I can’t tell what exactly is in it, but looks like at least olives, cel­ery, and yel­low bell peppers/cheese slices. Eddie C thinks that the cel­ery is shrimp. This mon­stros­ity could likely be one or more of the lay­ers of the Eric­son Fam­ily salad. Who knows?

Any­way, appar­ently fine Amer­i­can cui­sine went through a phase where every­thing was jel­li­fied. Gelatin sal­ads and aspic meats. They used to have cel­ery, mixed veg­etable, tomato, and Ital­ian fla­vored Jell-O.

I was ini­tially put off, but I have to admit a cer­tain (mor­bid?) curios­ity about the whole idea. Eddie C says he’s down to try it. I guess I’m going to try to re-create this for his birth­day trip down in Pismo. (Fair warn­ing to every­one else going… you may want to make back-up din­ner plans.) I looked around a found a cou­ple of inter­est­ing recipes. Maybe I’ll try to pair with a good meat Jell-O recipe, too.

The last time I made any­thing Jello while on vaca­tion was TAK Retreat, when we tried to make Jello shots with Ever­clear and it wouldn’t set, so we a thin Jello cap over a Dixie cup full of rub­bing alco­hol. This has got to be bet­ter than that, right?

Oh, and accord­ing to this web­site, (not Wikipedia, though) Jell-O used to make an offi­cial whisky fla­vor! How did I miss out on the best era ever?!

Went on my sec­ond white-water raft­ing trip on Sat­ur­day. This time, I went with Eddie C, Michow, James S, Joe M, Alice H, and Rachel Loh.

We were pre­pared for more near-death and lost shoe sto­ries like from our first trip, but it actu­ally went really well. No one was knocked out of the raft this time, no one lost any equip­ment or cloth­ing, we did not get embar­rass­ingly stuck at the photo spot for sev­eral min­utes, and we did not have to hitch­hike to get home.

After a rough start at the early Class IIIs where we got knocked around a bit, we all set­tled down and got a sys­tem going, thanks to a “guardian angel” kayaker who gave us some pro trips as he passed us. Here’s a video of us shortly after that on some smaller rapids:

(There was a bet­ter video later on the river when we hit another Class III, but I’m again hav­ing some prob­lems with my cam­era. I think the bat­tery may not be charg­ing properly.)

Over­all, we did so much bet­ter this time, I think every­one who went on both trips was a lit­tle shocked. I’m a lit­tle sad, since our first raft­ing trip will always have bet­ter sto­ries, but you can’t com­plain about a smooth trip. We were say­ing that it’s prob­a­bly a bit of expe­ri­ence on our part, but prob­a­bly has a lot to do with the river’s flow being a lot greater this time. More water means less rocks to give us trouble!

Oh, and the kayaker told us to think about send­ing some­one to guide school so that we can hit higher class rapids, and I’m giv­ing it some thought now. Maybe some­thing to do next summer.

Time for another Hacker’s Diet update.

Keep going! 7.8 lbs to go!

Weekly loss: 2.9 lbs. — Daily deficit: 1429 calo­ries.
You will reach your goal of 155 lbs on 2009-04-29. (247 days early!)

So far, I’ve lost 37.6 lbs of mea­sured weight (3.1 lbs in the last week) and 32.3 lbs of “real weight” (3.1 lbs in the last week). When I was doing the fam­ily chal­lenge, I had lost 19 pounds.

The 100 Push-ups and 200 Sit-ups Pro­grams are get­ting tougher. I can still squeeze out the sit-ups, but I’ve been fail­ing on the push-ups, and have had to fin­ish sets on my knees. Appar­ently I’m get­ting more peo­ple into the pro­grams, though, so that’s cool.

I also men­tioned the Col­orado Exper­i­ment and Cross­Fit to Joe M and Eddie C, and Joe M in par­tic­u­lar seemed very inter­ested. Michow, of course, was inter­est­ing in see­ing us fail at these pro­grams. I don’t have the equip­ment to do these pro­grams, though, and I don’t feel like spend­ing money on a gym mem­ber­ship until I get bet­ter pay­ing job and more free time.

As you can see, I’m within a week or so of get­ting my mea­sured weight to my goal. Start­ing maybe a week or two ago, I could finally see a dif­fer­ence when I looked in the mir­ror. Feels like the real me is get­ting revealed under all the crap I’ve piled on. In fact, since things are going so well, I’m think­ing over low­er­ing my goal. But I’ll wait to hit my cur­rent goal first before mak­ing any final decisions.

As usual, thanks to every­one for your compliments!