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Year: 2009

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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Moved, Yet Again

Seriously, next time I’m hiring movers. I bribed a friend with pizza and beer and still wound up sore from moving stuff! I hate moving, but I think this is the last time for a while

The new apartment is super cute, and in an awesome location. Pod says he doesn’t think we could have gotten a better place without paying out the nose, and I’m pretty inclined to agree. We’ve got the MAX walking distance on one side, and all kinds of stuff on the other side; Fred Meyer’s, Monteaux’s, IHOP, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Great Clips, and more! Freddy’s has pretty much everything we’d need.

Our couches are totally awesome.. they’re vibrant red without being tooooo bright. Ok, they’re pretty bright, but not Stop Sign Red bright. Our coffee/end table set has cool black bars and black tempered glass.. they’re sleek and shiny and I love them! My new desk sits in the corner and has a whiteboard, though I need a new chair.

We’ve still got some unpacking to do but it feels like home. I can’t wait for it to be all clean and unpacked though! There’s a few sneak peak pictures on my Flickr.

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Andy, You Killed Her!

Andy was a piercer on the East coast; I always forget if he was from Philadelphia or somewhere else. Anyway, he was legally licensed to do piercings somewhere that wasn’t Los Angeles. Considering that I got my first tattoo in my uncle’s back yard, the idea of getting a piercing in someones kitchen didn’t seem that bad to me.

I wanted to get my eyebrow done and Sonia wanted to get her lip pierced, and Andy kindly volunteered to do them for us for the low price of bringing him something to eat, which beats the hell out of $40/each.

After being rescheduled a few times, getting lost, and having Andy not be home when we showed up, we eventually got all 3 of us in the same place with the proper equipment and said meal. I got my eyebrow done first, as Sonia had never gotten a piercing and was kind of nervous. It was pretty straightforward and weird-feeling. It didn’t hurt that much but didn’t stop me from saying “OW Andy I hate you!” even though I didn’t mean it.

So then we sat Sonia down to get her lip pierced. She said it didn’t hurt that much and then got up and went to look at it in the bathroom, and all seemed well… until she got this glazed look in her eyes. Andy got up and got her some bread, which she nibbled, the wobbled…

Then fell forward, hit her head on the table and fell out of her chair.

I freaked out. Not even kidding. She was laying on the ground, kind of twitching. “OMFG ANDY YOU KILLED SONIA!” He casually sauntered over and commented that that had never happened before and he wasn’t quite sure what to do. That didn’t calm me down any. “OMG OMG OMG ANDY!!!!!!! What am I going to tell her parents?!”

A moment later, Sonia sat up and looked around, with a clear “why the hell am I on the floor?” look on her face and said “Oh, hi guys” like NOTHING HAPPENED. I was still freaking out. “OMG SONIA YOU WERE DEAD AND ANDY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO AND OMG OMG OMG!” I had never seen anybody go into shock; I’m surprised I didn’t pass out watching.

Afterward we went to her house, got in trouble and watched Butterfly Effect. Sonia actually still has that piercing. I had to take mine out at one point, but I got it redone because I missed it.

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Oh Twitter… Please #fixreplies

In what has been dubbed “the dumbest move Twitter has ever made”, Twitter made a “small settings update” that turns out to not be so small after all, and has the Twitter community up in arms.

Their blog post doesn’t even hint at the gravity of the change. They took away people’s ability to choose what they saw. So really, they made things worse for everybody.

One of their reasons was that only 2% of their users were opting to view @replies to people that they weren’t following. I admit- most of the time I had the feature turned off. But I’m still mad that they took it, and here’s a few reasons why.

1: I did occasionally go in and turn on @replies to people I didn’t follow, because it was a good way to find new, interesting people. This is why the 2% that had it on did so, I assume. It was nice to be able to pick and choose when I saw those replies.

2: So, when the ability to choose was turned off, people started mangling their replies by starting them with other symbols before the @reply, which forced it on my FL. Ok.. so, by taking away my ability to turn off @replies to people I didn’t follow, I’m actually now BEING FORCED to see them because everybody is dodging the filter. Thanks, Twitter.

3: I hate being given the ability to choose, then have it taken away because “big brother knows what’s best for you.” Yeah. Bite me.

So Twitter has now “reversed the settings change”, except for the part where they only show up if they’re not actually replies. O…k… question! How many of those @replies are not replies? Doesn’t that take away the whole “reply” part of it? Isn’t it then a “mention” which Twitter just recently added that confuses a lot of people? Oh wait. That’s the best part about this whole thing. Apparently Twitter took it off because “it was confusing”.

The whole thing is dumb. Every day I find myself wishing more and more that Google had bought Twitter instead of Jaiku. Twitter shot themselves in the foot with this one- could this be the beginning of the end?

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