Getting A Life

Good thing I wasn’t counting on the money…

A while back I noticed I had no copy of a tax return for the tax year 2004. Since I would have had to file in early 2005 and since that was a fairly drama-riddled time for me, I guessed I had forgotten to file because of all the stress. Accordingly, I sent in a paper return. I wasn’t sure I would get any money back because of issues with my defaulted student loan, but I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I got a notice back from the IRS today. As it turns out I had already filed for 2004. Oops! They were actually pretty gracious about it, if a bit absent-minded; they included tax return material for tax year 2007, in which I had not actually earned anything taxable. It’s probably something they throw in with all their written correspondence to taxpayers.

Ah well. There is no point getting hysterical about it, I suppose. The money would have been nice but I was already living without it, know what I mean? Still… It would have been nice to have had some way to catch up.

Weekly weigh-in

237 | 225.0 | 140

Two-pound gain from last week but some of it is bound to be hormones. I had a sashimi bowl last night for supper, but on the heels of not having had much to eat all day and I am still in ketosis this morning, so I don’t think I derailed anything. It was the third successive day of dealing with my daughter having moderate to severe behavioral issues and as I think I’ve mentioned here a time or two, I can be an emotional eater. Not that I sit around eating gallons of ice cream when I’m upset–it isn’t that bad–but I will tend to rationalize a lot more when I’m upset, and in the case of food it involves saying something to myself like, “I need a bowl of sticky rice. I’m stressed out.” It isn’t even properly a food craving. More like acting from a place of defiance.

And I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to be defying, but anyway, I’m fine today so there’s no point beating myself up about it. Said bowl of sticky rice also contained raw salmon and shredded lettuce, carrots, and daikon, so overall the dinner was rather good for me, and I skipped the sweet potato tempura I usually get from that place.

So, not too bad. I’m about due for Aunt Flo to visit anyway, which probably means it’ll happen in another week and a half *sigh* …but when it does I’ll probably drop about five pounds or so in a week. It’s happened before.

Fun with BzzAgent

I recently joined BzzAgent for some reason I don’t recall, and it looks like fun. Right now I am not rated very highly yet, but I have access to their FrogPond feature where they ask you to visit websites and give your opinion of them.

Well, I ran across this nutrition website. Seeing a link for new diabetics, I investigated. I was not very impressed. My summary of the site back at FrogPond:

Honestly, I would rather use the USDA nutritional database than this site; the only way they could improve it is if they would make it more user-friendly. This site buys into the same old stuff about fat being bad for you, weight loss being about calories in versus calories out (generally untrue–depending on my diet composition, as a 226-pound, 5′6″ tall woman, I can eat as much as 2900 calories a day and lose weight, without exercising), and calories being more important than carbohydrates for diabetes control. The latter is particularly egregious since there is scads of good research out there indicating that cutting grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars to the bare minimum in a diabetic diet and upping fat intake is key to good blood sugar control without drugs, particularly in early diabetes. These folks have access to even more research studies than I do, and there is no excuse.

It’s a pretty site, but I need substance as well–good, honest substance that doesn’t buy into hype. People’s lives literally depend on it, with this particular subject matter.

I mean, why do experts do that? When they have access to good information and they completely ignore it even though that means people will die badly, how do you justify that?

So this has been my evening…

First there was this…

I miss sushi rolls like crazy, even though I have found I can eat some rice through the day and not knock myself out of ketosis–why risk it? So sashimi is an acceptable substitute, and how! I got this while I was picking up shirataki noodles at the Japanese grocery, which is what my little girl and her dad and I all went there to get in the first place. When I read about these noodles Friday night on Sugar-Free Sheila’s website, I knew I had to try them. We haven’t opened them yet, as we’re all kind of moping around because my little girl has caught a cold or something, but we probably will later on today. Too bad; they probably would have gone well with the squishy fish. Oh, and my daughter loves sashimi now, which is hilarious, because she wouldn’t touch the fish in the center of my sushi rolls in the past.

Anyway, then I went on to this:

Disregard the toys in the background. I only just rearranged this section of my living room yesterday and already it is disappearing under a three-year-old’s clutter.

However, the computer screen in the background is of interest. That’s GnuCash running on my computer; you can see the lines in the “ledger” onscreen.

I just got done doing a massive catch-up of my financial tracking for the month of May; I’d seriously fallen behind on everything, and in particular my cash. Probably explains how I shot through most of $400 without actually paying any of my regular household bills. I am feeling really stupid right now. And this just points up the necessity of tracking your spending DAILY before you overshoot and wind up broke with people threatening to shut things off. Not that that is happening yet, but I need to get my butt moving on catching up.

At least the single biggest category was groceries and not, say, pig snout futures. I also have to give myself kudos about my cash balance because I knew I’d be off and it turned out I was only fifty-two cents short. However, I have no idea what the heck I did in inputting my checking account stuff into GnuCash because it’s seriously misbalanced, and I know I have the correct balance in my register (rather than drive myself nuts, I finally just adjusted up for that eight cents so it matches the balance on my credit union’s website now). But my brains are just about run out of my ears, so I’ll figure that one out later. It doesn’t help that GnuCash’s one major flaw seems to be the difficulty involved in entering split transactions. Grumble.

Oh, and one more thing: I got mentioned at Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb! AAAAGH! I feel like some famous person just came over to my apartment and it’s… well… it looks like it does now. Um… hi? *waves*

I love being proven right.

In the process of reading about low-carb dieting, I recalled some of what I learned in high school honors biology about glucose metabolism. It helped me put together what else I was reading in the same vein about prediabetes/Syndrome X, diabetes, and obesity. Along with this I remembered what I’d been told all my life, that bodyfat is just a way of storing excess energy in case of famine.

All these factors came together in my mind and the lightbulb came on. I thought, Why is obesity being blamed for disease? Fat is just energy storage. Why would it make us sick when it’s there to save our lives?

I decided that the reason obesity has been statistically correlated with things like heart disease and cancer must be that it is sometimes a symptom of health conditions that themselves lead to heart disease and cancer. I felt my position was bolstered, too, by the strong connection between diabetes and heart disease and also diabetes and obesity, and by the fact that cancer cells need more glucose than normal cells do. (This has been a long-understood fact, although researchers did not understand why–do a search for cancer cells and glucose on Google and all sorts of stuff pops up.) Well, it’s like having a severe allergic reaction. Itching in itself doesn’t kill you, but might be a sign of something else that will. Think along those lines.

So anyway, it turns out that two years ago, research emerged that proved me right: diabetes, not obesity, causes death. Score another one for allopathic Western medical practice and its longstanding tradition of treating symptoms instead of disease!

Now, before any Fat Acceptance folks come along and start crowing (if you haven’t seen this already), this doesn’t exactly let you off the hook, because you’ve been telling fat people for years that nobody ever needs to change their dietary habits if they’re fat. Fat people should be able to eat whatever they want no matter what, you proclaim. *bzzt* Wrong! Their obesity still isn’t the central problem, but someone who is overweight NEEDS to get a health workup to discover the cause(s) of their obesity. It’s not as simple as “get up off the couch and get some exercise”–something is going on. If their obesity is related to insulin resistance, which is what leads to type 2 diabetes, they need to change their eating habits permanently. That’s not saying fat people are bad, it’s saying diabetes is bad and should be prevented where necessary. You aren’t the one who’s going to need the dialysis, the seeing-eye dog and the foot amputations, so go preach to your bathroom mirror.

Now here’s one more area in which the medical community needs to get a clue: they’ve discovered that some cancer cells immediately die when deprived of glucose. Now they’re saying they need to develop drugs to take advantage of this, but that the drugs can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, because “the central nervous system… needs glucose to function properly.” Oh, really? This ranks right up there with the medical community’s efforts to come up with a satiety drug when all you have to do to feel full is eat enough fat and cut back your sugars and starches. Now they want to drug a cancer to starve it when low-carb eating is a possible alternative. Can we stop re-inventing the wheel now, please? Because it’s rolling over entirely too many people.

Low-carbing progress

I weighed in this morning and was at 226. It is not Wednesday so I’m not going to categorize this as an official weigh-in. I’ve been having some… interesting symptoms, so it may be hormones. If it is it’ll go away in another few days–I may show a net loss by the middle of next week. Also, I’m still in ketosis so I must be doing something right. I also have not been eating as much as I could or should have from day to day, so another possibility is my body’s going “OMG STARVATION!” and holding on to my stores… who knows. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, last night, I had pizza. And that’s not why I gained. *laugh* I tried this cauliflower pizza crust, and if you can get fat on cauliflower, shoot, I give up. And it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. My little girl’s dad said it made him think of quiche. It did hold together well enough to pick the pizza up but I think it would have done better still had I used my pizza pan with the holes in it. We’ll do that next time. I’m a little worried the crust will “leak” through the holes as I’m spreading it out on the pan but I don’t know that it will be much of a problem.

But… Pizza! I can have pizza! How cool is that? And I don’t have to make it out of a hamburger crust or use that weird wheat gluten stuff, either! (Which is just as well, because too much wheat seems to make my daughter nutso!)

I’ve begun contemplating scheduling out what kind of a dinner we have every night of the week and it is not unreasonable to anticipate a Pizza Night now.

On top of that, I found Sugar-Free Sheila via Cleochatra’s site yesterday (thanks, sweetie!). I had been wanting to do something yummy with canned pumpkin and heavy cream and Splenda but wasn’t looking forward to the experimentation because I’m already running around broke and don’t want to potentially waste food. Well, she’s already done it, only with cream cheese. Oh heck yeah. And a whole lot of other interesting things as well.

I will look nothing like her when I get done with my weight loss phase. My skin’s been stretched out like whoa by two pregnancies and a sudden, huge amount of weight gain after my second child’s birth. (They say exclusive nursing helps you lose weight–yeah, right! Only if you are not a hormonal mutant like me. Not that you shouldn’t do it anyway, I’m kind of strong-minded about the subject, but that’s another matter.) So I’ll probably wind up bearing a vague resemblance to a Shar Pei puppy. Not as hairy, though.

That bothers me. I don’t need to be the cute blonde in a bikini but I’d like to be the cute thirtysomething brunette in the altogether when the situation calls for it. So I’m going to see what I can do just with muscle toning and a little bodybuilding (not now, but hopefully soon) and whether getting into better shape that way will compensate. I’m sure it will help somewhat, I just don’t know right now how much difference it will make. I’ll have to lose the weight and see what’s left over.

And if being in shape isn’t enough, I have another option–I can get the stretched parts of my skin removed. That is going to be the absolute last option. MRSA is becoming a serious issue in hospitals, possibly killing more people annually than AIDS does. Surgery can be botched. I would probably wind up taking on debt to do it since it’s usually not covered by insurance. So I have to seriously think about whether it is really worth stoking my vanity with so much at risk.

And it’s possible my answer will be No. In that case looking like a melting mutant may make a fantastic screening device for the people in my life or coming into my life: if you think I’m gross because I started taking care of myself and lost a lot of weight, if I embarrass you or I’m a turnoff, then I don’t have time for your garbage because you wouldn’t have liked me fat either–and even if you would have, I was unhealthier then, so you don’t like me healthy either. That’s what I would have to think because, speaking from very recent experience, it’s kind of painful to hang around feeling rejected, and I don’t want to waste half my life going through that again. and again. and again. You know, I already have, almost. That’s a shame.

I’m still young, though. It could be that I’ll come through this all right, only looking slightly “off.” We’ll just have to see. The question isn’t holding me back from continuing with this, that’s for sure!

Weekly weigh-in

Still nice and strongly in ketosis, still going strong on this different way of eating.

237 | 223.5 | 140

By the way, that first number is approximately what I weighed on July 1 of last year when I first began Atkins in earnest. I have made a couple more attempts in the time since, and have kept jumping off the wagon. Now I’m to the point that I’m really fed up with being in this condition and I think about how I would be almost done with my weight loss had I kept up my efforts consistently to begin with and… I’m seeing it through this time. I have to.

My first Revol-oopsie Rolls!

…Or Oopsie Rolls for short.

I started low-carbing yesterday, am in ketosis today, and decided to try these just to see if I could do them, because having a bread substitute that does not require wheat gluten or soy is A Good Thing™. Here’s a closeup of one roll:

They smell eggy coming out of the oven, maybe what a quiche would smell like if it didn’t have all that other crap in it, but they taste nice and the texture is good. Mine are flatter than they’re supposed to turn out. I’m not sure if I didn’t mix the yolk and whites enough or if I just didn’t get the egg whites into stiff enough peaks when I was beating them to begin with. I’m guessing probably the latter.

My little girl thinks they’re OK but they may be a bit too weird for her, even with jelly on top. So that was my one teensy-weensy cheat already today, but also the last one. We have Ezekiel bread in the fridge–I buy it for her because it’s from sprouted seeds, which makes the proteins a little bit different and thus less irritating (so I hear)–so she can have that instead. Ezekiel bread’s slightly lower-carb than regular bread and I think it is also supposed to be lower on the glycemic index, but I still can’t spare the carbs right now.

Sob… I miss my macadamia nut butter. The only place in town I’ve found it where it was just straight macadamia was at Sunflower and they folded. *sob* There’s one other place I will look because I don’t believe I thought to look for it the last several times I was there, and then I will have to think of something else for non-meat sandwiches because I am NOT eating soynut butter. *shudder* I’m not real big on cashew butter, so the macadamia and cashew thing is Right Out. I mostly eat the mac nut butter for the extra fat it provides, anyway.

Oh yeah, did I mention I am in ketosis? Yay! That didn’t take long. Guess my body just needed the break.

Some progress, some setbacks, some tentative plans

Well, I survived my first day back low-carbing. I even got a handheld mixer so that I could make oopsie rolls (see The Lighter Side of Low-Carb in my blogroll for details), so that I don’t have the excuse that I miss bread. Hahaha. I always seem to have eggs and cream cheese around and we discovered a sale on cream of tartar at Kroger a while back (a big deal, as it’s usually pretty pricey), so I’m set. I am not in ketosis yet and I have no idea when it will happen; if I hit the three-day mark and the ketostix aren’t changing color, I’ll move more in the direction of a “fat fast” to see if I can kick things into gear. I have macadamia nuts, cream cheese, eggs, and mayo, and I can get avocados cheap. Bring it.

I will also be on the lookout for frozen cauliflower, and possibly stocking up on zucchini at the end of the summer because it can be frozen and both make good pizza crusts and all manner of other things. Veggie pizza crusts? Yes, and far healthier than the wheat variety.

My spending, though… is entirely too far out of control. It’s been so bad I am afraid to tabulate everything up into GnuCash. I already know I started out with $400 on Wednesday and now am down to below $200, actually closer to $100. Not a one of my regular bills has been paid yet. I didn’t even put any of it into my checking account yet. WTH? I know I am living close to the bone, I know I have a moving day coming up soon, and here we are. Some of it was buying fast food. Some of it was the sushi I got Saturday, knowing I would be low-carbing yesterday. And some of it was supplies to deal with the stupid cat’s peeing on my carpet. And it doesn’t help that my little girl’s dad has not taken us grocerying, nor that now he has to replace his passenger-side front car window because one of the downstairs neighbor’s idiot friends broke it. (That’s our guess based on events Saturday night, but I’d also guess we have a 99.9 percent chance of being correct.) But the whole situation is just making me nuts. I can do better than this, so what happened?

However, I got a piece of mail from Chase Friday or Saturday inviting me to start a checking account with them for a $100 bonus. And I may just take them up on it. I am also supposedly going to get a $200-plus refund from the IRS from 2004. (Now all of a sudden I’m incredibly paranoid that I actually did file that year but didn’t print out the return. I’d been doing them through H&R Block’s free online service for a few years there. Aaaaargh…) But the thing is that both of those would be extra money. I am not supposed to be looking forward to possibly getting them now to make up my stupid shortfall.

And it just goes to show that conventional wisdom does not always apply. Some of us find it far too easy to spend money whether it’s cash or plastic. Not to be totally flippant, I’m just trying not to spiral into beating myself up unproductively.

I’m still poking around, as I always do, trying to figure out increasing my income. eBay is still pretty much a wash. I need to find books through the library to figure out how to do it better if I’m going to try and make it a decent income stream. I found a great one at Barnes & Noble but couldn’t justify the price. Trying to get it used might be a mistake as well because eBay is constantly changing how they do things. We’ll see.

I might start making art trading cards out of some of my photos and selling them on eBay or Etsy. If they’re meant to be sold they are technically referred to as ACEOs or Art Cards, Editions and Originals–ATCs are supposed to be for trading only. Anyway, I found a photofinisher that does wallets in 2.5″x3.5″ instead of 2″x3″, and for dirt cheap. I can pick them up at Target, so I’m going to try that pretty soon. Worst case scenario, I’m out less than five bucks. Best case scenario, I can have a lot of fun and make some decent money while I’m at it.

Otherwise, there are several places around tha intarwebs that I’ve picked up a few cents here, a few cents there, and I need to buckle down over the next several weeks, get each account up to the minimum dispersal balance, get my money out of them, and shut them down. It is just too much time and energy sucked up for too little reward. Amazon’s MTurk program is one example; Helium is another. I simply do not have the time to sit around typing and clicking and hoping to be paid well, only to find I earned pocket change.

As for a certain person that I wasn’t sure I wanted to communicate with again, I’m thinking we’ll try a phone call, if he’s still amenable, and we’ll see what happens from there. I have misgivings about being anything but a long-distance old Army buddy to him, but if that is all there is and it goes well, I would rather have one more person in the world wishing me well than one fewer. And if I had lived by that philosophy all along I might be a much happier person today.

Leaks in spending from April

I can’t sleep right now anyway (and can you believe I’m craving more Diet Mountain Dew?), so while I’m thinking about it, and if I’m not interrupted by a restless 3.5-year-old, let me go over some places in my spending last month where I could have done better. This month is more than half over but the more I drill this stuff into my head, perhaps the smarter I will be about my spending.

Food categories (junk or otherwise)
I spent over seven dollars on vending machine snacks. In a way, that is part of our routine when I take my little girl to her weekly speech therapy appointments; she looks forward to her granola bar or animal crackers or whatever, and I enjoy treating her. On the other hand, it’s seven dollars that might have been better spent elsewhere. Still, I’m not sure how I could substitute for this and still make it into a special treat for her. Get her something from the grocery store that I then only give to her on Tuesdays? No idea. Will have to think about this some more. Compared to the other not-real-food categories this one’s pretty low on the spending totem pole, anyway.

I also spent over twelve bucks on soda. If I would just do what I posted about a while back, keep a cleaned-out 20oz soda bottle around the apartment for taking to the hospital with me and refill it from a two-liter bottle here at home, I’d slash the soda budget like crazy.

Now here’s a humdinger for you: I spent twice as much on fast food as I did on regular groceries! That’s not quite as bad as it sounds; my little girl’s dad buys most of them. But $55 in fast food versus $25 in groceries is just stupid. I could have covered at least a quarter of our grocery budget for the month by myself if I hadn’t spent it on edible crap. And that’s not getting into another almost thirty bucks on regular restaurant food (I think from our trip to China Buffet the weekend before a payday).

Transportation
If I am going to keep buying gasoline for my little girl’s dad’s car anyway when we go to her speech therapy appointments, I might as well keep a little money aside for bus fare; it’d be cheaper. Twenty-eight dollars for gas and four weeks’ worth of parking tokens ($2 each) versus twelve dollars for all four weeks going to and from on the bus? No contest. OK, we’d have to be quicker getting out the door, the trip would take longer, and I’d have to keep on top of my child to make sure she behaves, but I have to think about whether the added convenience is really worth sixteen dollars. It might be, and it might not.

Hobbies
A little over twenty dollars for my photography hobby, or at least that’s how I have it labeled. However, that’s intentional; I’m getting a whole bunch of old rolls of film developed right now. I aim for at least four rolls a month if not four every two weeks. When I get done dealing with that, my cost should go way down for a while. (I still want to develop a lot of photos but I’ll be doing my best to take advantage of discounts and that kind of thing, and they’ll be from digital so maybe not so expensive. And I’m using a cheap developer right now, is the sad part.)

I don’t remember what the “reading” and “computer” categories were. If they weren’t important enough to remember, I shouldn’t have spent on them.

Fees
The bank fees are stupid. I could avoid them by keeping some cash around at all times; getting cash back on a debit card transaction is free. The library fines are also stupid, but at least I’m not paying as much as I used to. Total so far: $8. I also have to pay PayPal transaction fees because I have a Premier account and I can no longer get it reverted back to Basic. I would like to get to the point that people pay me via RevolutionMoneyExchange but I’m not sure if eBay would put up with it. We’ll have to find out. Meanwhile, that’s four bucks gone because I sold things on eBay.

Online games
Just one, actually: I’ve gotten a bit addicted to Travian lately. The trouble is, I keep buying gold (game, not real). Grand total for April: $30.42. It would be cheaper to get a paid account at Second Life, and I would stand a chance in hell of getting that money back. Note to self: Delete your freaking accounts off the server if you are ever tempted to buy gold again. That five dollars here and five dollars there add up!

Toys
I spent a bit over eleven bucks for toys for Thea and another ten for supplies so I can work on a puzzle. Thea does not need me to keep buying her toys unless I purge what she already has. Happily a move is coming up soon and I have a feeling that at least half of her toys are not going to make the journey with us to the new place. It’s just as well because most of them are junk.

Conclusion:
I spent enough money in April that I could have paid off at least one debt on my liabilities list. This is stupid. It’s all well and good to want to have a good time every now and again but it’s not doing me any favors if I have no savings and can’t pay down debt as a result.

Now if somebody knows where I can purchase a good night’s sleep, some quality time to myself every day so I don’t feel I have to stay up until 5am, and some way to split myself into two people so I can simultaneously clean house and take my child to the playground, THAT might be worth me blowing money left and right. Alas, it is not to be.