Source: Self Magazine, May 2007

• In a lifetime, according to the authors of The Animal Rights Handbook, the average meat-eating American will consume 1 calf, 3 lamb, 11 cattle, 23 hogs, 45 turkeys, 1,097chickens, and 15,665 chicken eggs.
• Of the 127 million overweight adults in the U.S., 60 million are obese and 9 million are severely obese.
• The number of calories from fat in a typical meal from the U.S. government’s school lunch program is a whopping 38%.
• Soybeans contain more protein than beef, more calcium than milk, more lecithin than eggs, and more iron than beef.
• There are approximately 2.1 million farms in the U.S. Of those, 0.2 % are organic.
• Corn is used in more than 800 different processed foods.
• About 80% of vegetarians are women.
• Vegetarian meals are the most commonly requested special meal on airplanes.
• If Americans abandoned their meat-centered diets, 200 million acres could be reforested.
• Vegetarians tend to have lower blood pressure than non-vegetarians.

Everyone in my house is on a diet.  Well, o.k. the cats are on weight loss maintenance since they achieved their weight loss goals last year.  However, Pugly was told by the vet that he has to lose 4 lbs — 1/6th of his body weight!  How do you explain to a Pug, who thinks he’s starving 24/7 on any given normal day, that he has to cut back on his in-between meal snacking and meal portions?

Meanwhile, I’m doing Weight Watchers@Work with 23 other hapless souls.  Since I managed to lose 55+ lbs on WW back in 2002/2003 rather successfully by applying strict OCD methods, I figured I can manage to lose the 45+ I regained living in Maine.  Actually, I’m trying to do it without the OCD part as that was a bit scary — no weighing myself 3 times a day for instance.  I’ve lost 6.2 lbs in 8 weeks so far, which is pretty healthy and I’m mostly feeling good about the choices I’m making about what I eat.  It’s much easier to follow the program during the work week however with all the cult members around.  That’s exactly what we’re like with our bags of baby carrots and our navel oranges and our discussions of Points and Lean Cuisine — which I don’t eat, by the way.  It’s very hard to find a variety of vegetarian frozen dinners that aren’t over -salted to cover the lack of flavor and under-sized.

So that’s body.

My house is going through a lot of changes too.  The roof suffered some damage from the Winter weather thanks to all of those back to back storms this past year.  Ice dams also did some inside damage.  So, I’ve just hired a contractor to do $5,000 worth of work.  It was really hard signing those papers.  However, the main house will be getting a new roof, there will be a steel door between the dining room and the garage, there will be drywall repair in the bathroom, kitchen and living room, and all three of those rooms are getting painted new colors and even the kitchen cabinets are getting repainted so no more awful green — and green is one of my favorite colors but that was just ugly.  I’m going for toffee orange in the kitchen and living room since they have an opening to each other and Cayman blue in the bathroom.

I’ve also finally bought a nice plain dining room table but no chairs.  I plan to strip the awful color on the front stoop and just stain it a natural weather-resistant wood color and I’ve been working in my garden, planting flowers and wildflower seeds.  It doesn’t look like much yet, but I have a botanical dream.

The biggest change is going to be the switch from oil heating.  I was getting physically ill at the thought of next year’s heating bills.  Last year’s bills of $600 a month were just horrible and that was before this latest daily increase in oil prices.  Then I got my letter telling me that I needed to lock in my discount rate for next year — the one I get as an employee for my work through my oil company — $4.59/gallon, a full 30¢/gallon cheaper than everyone else.  My brain might have actually melted.  For the year 2007, I used about 850 gallons of heating oil and my usage for the first 4 months of 2008 went up about 30-40% due to the harsh Winter.  Despite having been a math minor, the daughter of a CPA, and an IT professional, my brain simply couldn’t even begin to do the math; it simply couldn’t face it.

But I got to thinking about my options and I remembered hearing about Les Otten on NPR and the local news.  Otten is this crazy guy who was trying to get the state legislature to give tax credits to people who bought furnaces that burned wood pellets.  Well, I know a couple of people who recently bought wood pellet stoves but I’d never heard of a wood pellet furnace so I looked it up and it turns out that it’s a European thing.  Mr. Otten is bringing the first 100 wood pellet furnaces to Maine this summer and promising to have them installed by Winter.  He’s hoping to convert 10% of the Maine homes currently burning oil (that’s 44,000 residences) to wood pellets in 5 years.

Four out of five homes in Maine are heated with petroleum products, the highest share in the country.

By switching to wood pellets, Otten calculates, the average Maine home could be warmed for half the current cost of oil. If 44,000 homes made the switch, residents could save $78 million a year on heating bills, based on current costs. [Home Heating: Otten bets Mainers Will Warm to Wood Pellets]

So, I checked out his company’s website: Maine Energy Systems.

And let’s face it, the first thing I checked out was the cost and most particularly, the cost comparison between wood pellets and heating oil.  Let’s assume I use 900 gallons of oil and I’ve locked in my discount rate at $4.59/gal; that’s $4,131 for a year.  Apparently the equivalent amount of wood pellets would be 6.73 tons and MES’ rate is $250/ton, so that comes out to $1,684.  That’s a huge difference — $2,447 annual savings.  (O.K. I’ll be financing the new furnace but still.)

I love that the whole thing is automatic.  It just has to be cleaned once a year.  Plus, it’s environmentally friendly.  Most wood pellets are made from by-products of other wood manufacturing processes and the ash create makes excellent compost.  Plus, oil is not a replenishable resource and wood is, though it should be harvested wisely.

Anyway, I put my deposit down and now I’m waiting for that contractor to come out, have a look see at my current furnace with its big rusty hole and its current set up, and discuss the refitting so I can be one of Mr. Otten’s pioneers.

And now that my checking account is tied up for the rest of the year, I believe I’ll be sitting at home admiring the construction on my house and my wildflowers and my pitiful food portions and trying not to do anything else that’s going to cost anything.

And forget trying to get FedEx to change the delivery address after it has shipped.  Even if you have the shipping address, your birth certificate, and a letter signed by your Congress-person proving you are who you say you are and you are the person who actually should get the package, FedEx will not change where the package goes without an Act of God and some sort of discussion from the CEO of the company who shipped the package originally.  Admittedly, I’ve had better success with UPS on this matter.

You can actually go down to FedEx and pick up the package if you pre-arrange it but their office is purposely located somewhere not easy to find and you will probably be lost for several days trying to find your way back home.  I do remember when you used to be able to go down to a UPS location to pick up packages but now that they’ve taken over those Mailboxes, Inc. shops, they’ve hidden their actual warehouses, presumably with magic spells learned from Harry Potter books.

Now, if I’d known ahead of time that said package needed a signature, like if the website had indicated that when I was finishing my order, I would have had it shipped to my office where someone would be during FedEx’s delivery hours.  I don’t normally like to do that because I don’t like to bother the secretaries, but in an emergency or to avoid waiting two or three extra days for my Palm Treo 755p Smartphone, I’d let them suffer.

In this day and age, I think it only makes sense for companies to be upfront about their shipping/delivery requirements.  In fact, the issue is somewhat of an Environmental one.  FedEx has been griping about how the cost of gasoline is cutting into their profits and having to take a second 40+ mile trip from the city to the country to see if I signed the absentee door hanger so they can leave my new cel phone in the wood pile probably doesn’t help conserve gasoline or freshen the Spring air.   It also didn’t help my mood last night, though it did help fulfill yesterday’s horoscope that I’d be tired and cranky.

Only yesterday the plowed snow was higher than my crabapple trees and I thought it was going to be July before it all melted, but here it is the middle of May, my garden is overgrown with weeds, and my yard is dotted with dandelions and unidentified white and purple wildflowers amidst the overly tall grass blades. Bees are happily busying themselves in my rhododendrons while my neighbors’ cats stalk my bird feeders.

So much seems to have changed and yet nothing seems to have changed, just life moving on and evolving.

My job has finally evolved into the kind of work I always thought work should be but secretly suspected was a myth. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been swamped with time-filling, mind-challenging projects. I feel creative and useful and inspired. It’s not at all the sensation of day-to-day mind-numbing busy-work I’ve felt I was doing for pretty much 15 years. Until this week, there wasn’t a single day that I went into work that I actually did what I planned to do that day. There were a couple of weeks where I would work for 15 minutes on one project until someone from another project called or emailed me and then I’d work on that project for 15 minutes until someone from another project called or emailed me and then I’d work on that project for 15 minutes until someone from another project called or emailed me and then…and so on. And the last two weeks I didn’t even read half of my email on any given day. In fact, for 3 days, I only worked on Production Issues — 1 was a million dollar billing issue and the rest revolved around a really bad system go-live (what happens when you barely test a patient care system because you want to stay on budget).

And I really feel like I’m actually accomplishing something. It’s been a very exciting change.

I could have done without the drama of dealing with GE for two months though. He had some sort of meltdown back in February and decided that I was going to be the focus of dysfunctional malfunction. The whole thing only served to prove to me that when dysfunctional people around me go full throttle, it sends me into overdrive myself. I absolutely cannot stand it when someone refuses to “behave” appropriately. GE refused for two months to read my work emails. As a result, since he is the sys admin for one of our interface engines and we are the Integration Team and I was elbow deep in a high priority (read: sponsored by the VP) project on the fast track that required changes to the server, I was having extra special trouble getting my work done. On top of that if someone emailed the four of us and I answered and then GE answered, he ignored my reply and then the original person would be confused if I had answered with a decision-type answer that conflicted with GE’s. Repeated requests to the Director of our division were fruitless as he is a conflict-avoider and we have no manager, something we have been begging to be rectified. If I asked GE anything in person, he would literally stare blankly at me with these pale blue eyes and then without answering turn away and go back to staring at his computer. The whole situation was only resolved when our Director suddenly took a project GE was working on away from him and gave it to me; suddenly GE was as pleasant as punch.

What GE couldn’t grasp was that the project that was taken away is sponsored by the CIO and is a state-wide initiative. It was taken away because he had actually written a rather tactless (not uncommon for him) email to the CIO about why in his opinion the project should not be done using the method he had been instructed to use and in fact he didn’t think it was a good idea to do the project at all. (It would be a good idea to note that by the time this email had been written, the project had been on the news and in the newpaper — state-wide.) There was apparently a meeting with the bigwigs and our Director met with GE and told him to do the project such-n-such way. GE refused and phoned the CIO to explain why this was such a bad idea.

So, now I am working on this really interesting state-wide initiative that really isn’t such a good idea, in my opinion, but I wouldn’t say so. The only reason I think it’s kind of a poor idea is that I think the whole state-wide plan is really too much at one time; they really should try to take things a little more piecemeal rather than trying to attack the whole thing at once. And the whole reason I say that is because we’ve tried to do this same project in-house two or three times and have never pulled it off 100% successfully. But I’m not going to tell the CIO that or anything. That’s not my job. My job is to do what the big guys want me to do. That’s what I get paid for — take the data from here, beat it up, shove it over there. That’s it.

I just can’t understand how someone gets away with telling the CIO he won’t do his job and with refusing to read his team member’s email for 2 months and causing communication problems and he still has a job…and this has been going on for 6 years. Dysfunction.

My Parents’ Backyard:

Mogollon, NM:

From a Speeding Truck:

I was so happy when there was breaking news about Britney Spears and I can’t even stand her and I don’t understand why anyone thinks she’s news.  Yet, I was ecstatic that CNN was acknowledging that there was more to life than the election.  For God’s sake, it’s only January!  It’s going to be a long year if they intend to continue this ridiculousness.

And to make it worse, there’s really not much else on t.v. to watch, or rather, that’s increasingly becoming the case.  The writers’ strike has been going on and on forever.  They’ve revived American Gladiators.  Will someone please give the writers what they want?  No one wants American Gladiators or worse. And I’ve started watching shows I normally wouldn’t watch — Medium, HOUSE, NCIS, Biggest Loser.  I even have a design show from HGtv set to record on my DVR.  I watched Legally Blonde 2 twice this weekend!  It’s one thing to watch crappy t.v. because I want to but I shouldn’t have to be forced to — that’s why I pay the big bucks for all of those channels, including 2 CNNs!

Honest to God, I cannot think of any way more depressing or agonizing to spend my day than trapped in a small windowless room with a group of people I wouldn’t otherwise talk to on purpose with no laptop, no phone, no knitting, no comfortable seating discussing a project workplan for a project my Integration group has minimal involvement in. Oh, yes, the whole purpose of this meeting is to review every agonizing infinitesimal detail of work that has yet to be done, to analyze what day each minuscule task will be started and how many minutes it will take each person involved, to set preposterous deadlines guaranteeing there will be more high stress project workplan review meetings in the future for excuse-making and finger -pointing and, yes, more analysis of dates and minutes and tasks and even more bewildering deadlines.

I’ve never been shy about my opinion about meetings. I find the time involved extremely unproductive. I’m really a person who prefers to just “do the work” rather than “discuss doing the work”. I have often found that the more you discuss doing the work, the less gets done. My opinion of of the ratio of discussion to work is the same as my opinion of the length of an email signature to an actual email. The first should never be longer than the latter or you’ve missed the point.

I also get bored really easy if the discussion isn’t about me. I actually don’t attend very many meetings in person but rather phone in so I can work while the rest of the attendees can talk about all of their non-Integration issues — everything from where they are going to place the computers on the unit to the color of the font on the screen, but the minute they have a question about data crossing from our demographics system or our ordering system to their new application, I’m right there with my headset on perkier than ever. In fact, some units have never seen me in person but think I am like Bill Gates.

I tried to get out of attending this 9 hour meeting. I figured I had a good reason since Integration’s actual involvement is minimal; in fact, for the most part, the project is just a nuisance to us as we now have to find some software that will take some Groupwise emails and send them to our pagers rather than have actual people copy and paste them into a pager application and page us manually. I can’t imagine spending 9 hours discussing that.

But apparently while I was away in New Mexico, some office politics and toe-stepping went on and this now is a sensitive subject. No one in our division is going to look like she isn’t giving the project 100% of her attention. This is the result of the fact that the Manager of the division that this project actually affects the most couldn’t be bothered to show up at the first workplan review, which was only scheduled for 2 hours. So now I’m being punished.

There is no way I’m going to make it through two hours let alone 9 hours. No amount of caffeine will help. I’m going to be doing the head bob trying to keep my eyes open while my brain goes numb. I’m fairly sure they have laws against cruel and unusual punishment, don’t they? I keep hoping for a pardon.

One morning we were sitting in the living room and she asked me out of the blue, ” Do you think that woman is going to be President?” Her voice was just dripping with grapefruit juice or something really acidic.

Rather surprised because I thought she was napping through whatever sappy Lifetime Christmas movie my Dad had left on the electronic babysitter, I looked up from my pitiful knitting and replied after a hesitation, “I suppose it’s possible.” I tried to be as neutral as I could because I wasn’t planning on voting for “that woman” but I didn’t want to make it seem like voting for her was the wrong thing to do.

“If she does, do you think she’ll bring her husband?”

“Well, I assume so. Presidents generally bring their spouses to the White House.”

“But they’re divorced!” she exclaimed rather wide-eyed and scandalized.

I was rather taken aback by this. “Uh- No…they aren’t divorced.”

“They’re not?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Oh…” She put a hand to her cheek as if in dismay and just stared off into space as if she had to resort everything she knew now.

Thinking about it now just makes me chuckle. “That Woman.” Can’t have a divorced woman in the White House, especially if she brings her ex-husband with her. That would be way too scandalously modern.

Another day, my parents had invited their new neighbors over for some wine and crackers or something ridiculously snobby-sounding — whatever, it just meant I couldn’t eat the Gouda. They were in one of those ridiculous tizzies where they try to make the house look incredibly neat and not at all like it looks the rest of the time while people are breathing and sitting. Anyway, I even had to put away my knitting and they weren’t even my company and I’ll never see them again. However, they wanted my Grandma to go change clothes, at the very least her shirt. They were nagging her about it.

And finally, Grandma said, “Well, it was clean when I put it on yesterday.”

Grandma is in constant hope that Ugly Betty will get her braces off each week. She slips food to the dog under the table. She insists she’s not hungry for lunch or dinner but asks for a bowl of ice cream instead. She not only sleeps in her clothes but also in her glasses and then doesn’t understand why the frames are bent out of shape. She’s impossible. She’s frustrating. She drives my parents crazy. She cracks me up.

But then, I live in Maine and they live in New Mexico and I’m sure that has something to do with it.