Fupdate

Week 5 of the food updates. The theme this week will be chili, because when I make chili I make a bunch, and it tends to be too spicy for anyone but me to eat.

• Granola Bars for a certain pregnant somebody to take to work for a snack
• Macaroni and Cheese and Broccoli Casserole
• Chili--with read beans, pinto beans, black beans my wife brought me back from Hungary, and a 13 Bean Mix Darius passed on to me from the States
• Chili Sandwiches
• Chili Cheese Dip for corn chips
• Egg Salad
• Egg Salad Sandwiches
• Chili mixed with Egg Salad and Cheese
  
• Cream of Broccoli Soup for my ladies same day as the chili, in case it was too spicy for them
• Kugelis
  

Note on the Chili: midway through cooking it (I simmered it for about six hours) a couple students walked by my kitchen and I heard one say "Awe, you smell how good that smells?! I wanna eat so bad now!"

Note on the Kugelis: there are a couple Kugelis recipes on allrecipes, and neither are perfect. I thought I would post mine, but my wife said, as great as mine was (is, and will be fore three more days at least) she's had better. Therefore, I'm instead going to try working out how to perfect it first. My first attemt will be to increase the fat content. One of the recipes I found said to add butter to the batter. But maybe lard would be even better? Or olive oil. Or all three!

Another more on the Kugelis: recipes for kugelis are a little out of the ordinary. When I asked my aunt Silvija for a kugelis recipe years ago she just laughed at me and told me I don't need a recipe, I just need to put in whatever I have. That is the authentic way, I guess.

Gymbo

I'm very pleased to say that I'm back on track with my weight loss program. Maybe last week's shortfall guilted me into eating less subconsiously. And certainly today's light breakfast contributed; the half liter of tea I usually drink would have added a half kilo. At this point I'm 3.9 kg lighter than I was four weeks ago, that's about eight and half pounds.

On the volume side of the progress chart, I'm pleased to say that I've lost a total of 4 cm of circumference between the four points I'm keeping track of (see diagram below).

The Obama Deception HQ Full length version

What do YOU think?

Fupdate

Week 3 in the food updates. Some trends are broccoli, for my pregnant wife, eggs, because I have to do the grocery shopping now, and making eggs is a way to skip the store for one more day. Finally, I'm baking my own breads and buns more often: I'm getting fed up with additives in our food, so I'm trying more and more to merely buy raw goods and make things instead of buying prepared food, like bread.

Crustless Broccoli Quiche
Roast Meatloaf with Mashed Potatoes
Mashed Potato Pancakes
Meatloaf Sandwiches on Onion Mustard Buns (I think Darius would like them. Hint: quadruple the onions.)
Scrambled Eggs with Broccoli
Baked Salmon
Country Seed Bread
And for my buddy Evaldo birthday I baked a perfect chocolate cake:

Article of the Year

Klaipėdą sukrėtė šiurpūs nusikaltimai, in Lietuvos Rytas.

About 700 meters from where I live "bandits" beat a man and poked his eyes out Friday afternoon. Saturday a retired couple was found down the street in their apartment brutally murdered, together with the bloody hatchet and knife.

Over MY Head?

Although I've watched eighteen episodes of Lost, I never realized it; it came to me in a dream during a little snooze I was just having: Charlie Pace is actually Meriadoc Brandybuck from The Lord of the Rings. What! How did I not realize that?

I'll buy a big-ass beer for the first person to guess which character from Lost I immediately recognized from which movie. Hint: it's one of my favorite movies.

Homer, did you shine your head in the Shino Ballo?

For the first time in several years, I shined my shoes today. One of the twins, if I had to guess I'd say Liepa (usually they buy people gifts as a team, so separating them was a new challenge this year), gave me a shoe shine kit for Christmas. I would have used it sooner, but I couldn't find my good brown boots: my other brown boots are the rugged type that don't need shining, and my black ones are like pleather or something, I don't know, but they never change. And then I had to remember to ask my wife if I'm supposed to impregnate them before or after shining them, and then when I remembered I had to go ahead and find the impregnater, and after she found it I had to negotiate her into doing it for me. After two and half month I finally shined my shoes. Here's a photo half was through the process.

Good times shining my shoes

Thanks Liepa and/or Lokys!

Stupid Scale at the Gime

I may have been getting ahead of myself last week when I said "In your face diets! All I need to do is sweat my balls off for an hour five times a week." After another week I am not thrilled to report that I've lost no significant weight.

My wife insists that my gut is decreasing and that I'm gaining muscle weight. Weight is not a good criterion, she tells me. This may be true: though I didn't think it'd have such a significant effect, I did double the amount of wight lifting that goes into my regiment this week. I should reduce it until I reach my pre-pregnancy weight. Either way, I'll have to start measuring my progress at the waist line instead of on the gime scale.

Fupdate

Week 3 in the food updates. No recurrent theme, thought I did make guacamole twice. I found avocados on sale twice, and I do love guacamole, but lately avocados have been too expensive...so I didn't pass up the chance...chances. The week included:

Nachos with Guacamole
Potato Pancakes with Home Made Applesauce
Eggs Benedict for breakfast on Independence Day
Cheesy Broccoli Pasta Alfredo
Tuna Salad Wrap with Pepperoni
Garlic-Lemon Double Stuffed Chicken
Guacamole
Cajan Fried Potatos

Note: Trust your instinct. I had a hunch the Hollandaise sauce would be really sour from too much lemon juice, so I checked another recipe. It said about the same thing, so I did it. Bad move. The wife ended up scraping most of it off. It was a fantastic breakfast anyway.

Another note: I read that if you don't grind your flax seeds, you don't get most of its nutrients: they're packed in there so tight your digestive system isn't corrosive enough to get all the way through.

Update: I forgot to mention two loaves of banana bread. I also froze three more loaves worth of banana mush because bananas were on sale for 80% off! I've never done that before, but I read you can do it. I'll let you know when I try out the frozen mush.

Big Ass Task

The biggest task of my life begins! Irregardless of when I end up living in my family's home in Riešė, I have to begin its upkeep now, lest it face dilapidation. My wife and I are the only two contestants in the Olympics of spring cleaning this year; here are some of the events:

• Fixing Both Driveways
  Driving into the yard is impossible: one gate must stay closed because the concrete gate posts are cracked and in danger of collapse; the other gate is locked because someone did a terrible job of paving the driveway, and apparently you can no longer drive off of the pre-fence part onto the inner-yard part without damaging it.
• Taking Care of Septic
  There is an option for us to get connected to the local sewage system which has just been installed in our neighborhood. However, the cost is steep, and while I'm sure it's necessary, at this time there is some ambiguity as to whether we can get connected and still maintain our well, which we need; city water is too expensive, and of course shitty. Unfortunately, Silvija doesn't know much about it, and she's the only person there who doesn't give me a headache. Intriguingly, we had to emty the septic tank twice in two months with nobody living in the house: seems like somebody's sabatoged the tanks so that we'll be forced to sign on to the sewers.
  
• Reorganizing Basic Storage
  Too many books and movies! Wait, let me rephrase that: not enough space for the books and movies. And that's as it is. When I move in someday I'll triple the movie collection and increase the library by 30%. That makes it sound like I'm an illiterate, but I'm an above average reader: almost everyone's an illiterate compared to my voracious reader of a mother, though (Probably noone ever timed her, but I'm sure she read 100 pages an hour: if she had a few hours free she was done with your average novel). The question is what to do about it. The answer we've come up with is this: move all the books out of the office (office = tv room), since they're not in bookcases anyway, but simply in cabinets that used to be unnecessary. Now they are necessary for the movies. But we'll have to buy a few more bookcases--we would have had to buy another one or two anyway for the overflow from the current bookcases, plus we got a half dozen boxes worth of books from her office. And for anybody who know what a pregnant wife is like, if we're going to do this goddam it we're going to do it in an orderly fashion: we have to sort the books by topic and arrange them by height (I still say arrange them by author--my grandmother was a professor of librarianism). We emptied, dusted, and refilled one bookcase that way this weekend...it took two hours and we ended up with several piles of books on the floor that have no place in the bookcase: nonfiction, poetry, literature, children's books, and books on education. If you're wondering what did make it back into the bookcase, the answer is cookbooks (at least fifty), horticulture magazines, history books, and reference books, including a surprising number of books on mushrooms. One of the reasons it took so long is we came across so many books we wanted to read and had to take a look at immediately.When we move there we could read for an hour a day for ten years, I bet.
  
• Improving Liqueur Storage
  The liqueur cabinet: she needs reorganizing and a backup storage area. I went ahead and combined my liquor cabinet with my mother's, they were just two compartments of one chiffonier. I removed the wine to a little standing wine rack I got for Christmas, and removed duplicate bottles. I have one question to everyone who ever had a drink at our home: wtf were three open bottles of Metaxa doing there?! They each had about one centimeter of booze left, incidentally. My mother was wont neither to drink nor to waste space. Did these belong to my siblings, or their booze bag friends? Wine is now kept in an adjacent rack and duplicate bottles are kept...wait, I'm not telling you...who knows who the Riešė thieves are? They've been in the news lately. It might be one of you!
• Repairing Household Heating
  Several of the radiators are broken and the heating system is catastrophically wasteful. As it is, I couldn't possibly afford to live there paying for the utilities. This spring we'll hire a specialist to tell us how to heat the house more efficiently. There are several options, some more expensive than others, but all paying off in the end. One really interesting one my wife told me about is an furnace that runs on logs and the natural heat of the earth: it's buried deep enough to harness natural heat; as a supplement it has a log burning system that you add a few logs to no more than once every 48 hours, that's how long they burn for in the very low oxygen furnace. It costs about $12,000, but as it is now, the anual oil bill is about $2,000, so the furnace would pay for itself and be almost free afterwards in six years. We'll see what the pro says.
• Paying the Bills
  We got a notice that our telecommunications bill was overdue. The phone/internet bill was automatically paid from my mother's bank account, which has since been blocked. I went to their office in Klaipeda to rewrite the agreement we have with them. Guess what? That'll cost me fifty lits, plus they'll raise the internet rates because they don't have such low rates anymore. What! Well then, I'll just cancel the service and order it anew, how about that? That'll cost me 200 lits. What! Alright, then I'll just keep paying my mother's bill until I move there and want to increase the internet speed. Okay. Now, I heard anyone with land line internet can get public wireless access for 11 lits a month. No, they can't issue that access to a deceased person. I said, "wtf do you care, I'm paying for the internet service, and I'm willing to pay you more, and you don't want it? You won't let me pay you more?! It must be pretty hard for you guys to make a profit with all the hurdles you place before you customers!" Wanna know what her reply was? "Hey, you just be glad we allow you to keep paying the bills without rewriting the service agreement." This is the Lithuanian customer service mentality after a decade of every dumbass I know and his brother getting a bachelor's degree in business management: just pay us and be glad we don't fine you for doing it.
• Removing the Unnecessary
  To end on a less caustic note, my wife went through all my mother's clothing to separate what fits her from what doesn't. She looks very nice in a bunch of the outfits, though she looks older; I'm not sure if it's the style of the clothing or the memory of my mother wearing them. Most of the clothes don't fit, though. She thinks they'd be too small even for Liepa. We're not sure what to do with them. We have maybe one relative who can fit in them, Jūratė, but what do we do with the rest? Almost none of the shoes fit either my sister or my wife. I'm a pack rat, so the idea of discarding perfectly good clothes is anathema.
  

Oh, a Gime!

Last week I measured off at having lost 700 grams after my first week at the gym. After my second week I'm down another 850. However, I think last time I went and weighed myself after lunch, and this time it was before lunch; I'm gonna round down and say I just reached my goal of keeping my weight loss steady. Actually, I'm still ahead since it's only been 6 days, but I don't know if I'll go tomorrow since it's Independence Day. In your face diets! All I need to do is sweat my balls off for an hour five times a week.

Fupdate

Week 2 in the food updates: the recurrent theme is pork. The past week included:

• Roast Herb Pork Loin
• Pork Fried Rice
• Pepperoni &Wild Mushroom Pizza
• Pork Sausage & Bell Pepper Pizza
• Nachos with Guacamole
• Several different kinds of sandwiches on the Seed Bread that I made last Sunday, mostly peanut butter, but the tour de force sandwich was leftover Pork Roast, Cheese, and Fried Onions you see below:

One note: make sure you don't use too much pizza sauce. If you make too much sauce serve it in a bowl or save it for spaghetti. Extra sauce on the side for dipping is great, but extra sauce on the pie will make the crust soggy and you may end up having to use a fork and knife like uncivilized people.

Duh, is this building on fire, or something?

My gym is a three story building, plus a cellar with showers and a sauna. Two, really, since men and women are segregated in this barbaric country. The first floor is reception, locker rooms, and a bar. Third floor holds all the abdominal machines, a couple other ones, and the massage room. The second floor is separated into two halves by the load-bearing wall, with about twelve cardio and weight machines on each side. You can barely see any of one side from the other; there are several openings but they're narrow. Today I was going to town on the stair master, which is practically in one of the corners of the second floor. I was listening to my mp3 player; finally I found a use for it since Christmas. For two months I was thinking, why did I buy myself that? Anywho, I couldn't hear anything besides the music and my own heartbeat. At one point I looked around and there was nobody else there. Where there had been four other exercise enthusiasts and one trainer a moment ago, there was now just some tumble weed, which was eery in itself.

I sniffed a bit, no sign of smoke. I decided that if there were a fire, I could bust open the door to the balcony with a barbell and climb down, even though at that point everybody would be watching me. Although, in that case everybody would be watching me, and the metal railing would be really cold so it would reduce my bulge. Maybe I should make sure there is no fire. I unplugged one of my earphone and holy shit! Sirens! I couldn't believe it! For about three seconds, and then the siren blended back into the song of which it was a part. I'm telling you, music these days: you don't know what's the music and what's a sound bite and what's a fire alarm.

Gime? What's a Gime?

After a two month reprieve and a net gain of five kilos (11 pounds, since I knocked up my wife and both our hormones went berserk), I went back to the gym last Wednesday. Mind you, until the pregnancy I had not gained any weight for two years, so I was pretty concerned about it: returning to the gym was important. I've only missed one weekday so far. I'm very happy to say that after one week I've already lost 700 grams ( 1.54 pounds). If I can keep going at this rate, it'll only take me seven weeks to get back to my accepted left of fatness. I bet I could do it twice as fast if I cut out all the cake and beer. But then, what would the point of living be?

Fupdate

This is the first of a new series of posts listing things I've cooked lately. Maybe it'll be a weekly thing, so I'll try to remember everything I made this week. If it was from an online recipe I'll link to it. Note that I do read the comments on them and often take their advise; if you want to know exactly how I made something I can let you know. Unless it's a secret.

• Mozzarella Sticks with Marinara Sauce
• Pancakes for Fat Tuesday
• Spaghetti and Sausages
• Nachos with Guacamole
• Tuna Salad
• Mouse's Macaroni and Cheese with broccoli mixed in
• Cheeseburgers
• Chocolate Poundcake with Cream Cheese Frosting
• Country Seed Bread
• Homemade Peanut Butter
• Yogurt Shake with oranges and bananas