I Think He May Be On to Something
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Apr 122011
My In-Laws Know Everybody
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Apr 112011
I don’t know what it is, how they do it. Everywhere they go, they know people. We have a fairly recognizable last name, so often when I introduce myself I’ll get “Oh, you must be related to…”
And I don’t just mean around town. I hear it when I go to other cities. I got it once when I went down to Atlanta to visit a friend. It’s uncanny.
This weekend Alpha Geek was watching a show called Flying Wild Alaska. He likes watching shows about flying, even though he finds it frustrating that their editors clearly know nothing about airplanes. Watching a series of shots showing the same airplane, supposedly all from the same take-off: “See, there he’s got his flaps set at ten percent, which is correct for a short field take-off. There, flaps at ten percent. Flaps at ten percent. No flaps. Flaps at ten percent again.”
So his parents happened to drop by while we were watching it, and he watched with his dad while his mum showed me some stuff. The pilots were flying up to some little town in Alaska called Kotzebue. It’s a town near the arctic circle, there are like a hundred people living there.
Alpha Geek’s dad remarked, “Oh look, they’re flying into Kotzebue.”
His mum said, “Oh, see if you spot Linda.”
Seriously. True story.
I’ve Gone Paleo
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Apr 102011
Some of my friends and family have already noticed I don’t eat bread and pasta any more. I’m not trying to lose weight (although I can certainly stand to drop some pounds), I’m trying to get rid of the stupid IBS.
Toward the beginning of this year I came across some discussion of this thing called “paleo diet.” The general idea is, eat food that homo sapiens evolved to eat. I won’t bore you with the details; if you’re interested, I recommend The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf. The chapter on “Grains and Leaky Gut” sold me; it sounded exactly like what my doctor described when she was telling me about all the harmless foods to which I had somehow become allergic.
So I tried it starting the first of February, and whattaya know—the IBS went away. It didn’t just go quiescent, as it sometimes does, where I don’t have to go to the bathroom every ten minutes but my guts still hurt. The frequent bathroom trips went away, and the constant low pain in my abdomen went away, and the ache on my right side that had been slowly getting worse over the last year went away. Also fifteen pounds have gone away. Bonus!
So yeah, I eat hamburgers with no bun now, and I don’t drink soda any more (man, that one was tough). But the upside is, I can leave the house whenever I want.