All other content is property of its respective owner
Well it’s been almost two weeks since my last post, so I figure I had better check in. Things have been pretty busy here lately: we are going through the final steps of purchasing our first house. It’s a nice cottage in a clean neighborhood, and the price was very good. Building inspection is tomorrow, but I’m not expecting any surprises. Early reports are sketchy, but it seems like we may have actually survived the angst, stress and panic that are usually associated with this kind of thing.
One thing we are looking forward to (in regards to moving) is the dishwasher. See, the apartment we are in now does not have one, and we elected not to purchase one when we moved in to save water. This naturally means that all dish-washing is a manual process, tedious at times, but it had always been manageable. To be sure, there was the odd lapse here and there where we “just didn’t feel like it”, and the small pile of dishes would grow into a mountain that stuck out like a sore thumb until we mustered the courage to climb it. But as I said, it had never been a real problem.
That is until we bought the fruit-juicer. Now, let me say that the fruit-juicer is great. It makes juice. Real juice. Not the vitamin-injected cocktails you find at Super C. Don’t know what I am talking about? Take a look at the rows of juice cartons at your local grocery store. It doesn’t matter what kind of juice; orange, cranberry, banana-strawberry, mango-peach, whatever. You will have a hard time finding one that has less than 100% of your r.d.i of Vitamin C and more than 10% of Vitamin anything-else. Sometimes you can find an 80%, but most are between 100-150%.
Why is that a bad thing? Well, Vitamin C is good for you, but too much is not better. Possible side-effects of excess Vitamin C include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and high doses may suppress the production of progesterone* - which is bad news if you are preggers. I’m sure the chances of overdosing on your off-the-shelf orange juice are low, but why pump yourself full of ascorbic acid if you don’t need it? Also, freshly-pressed fruit juice tastes much better than store-bought, and probably has a much more balanced payload of nutrients. We’ve replaced our daily breakfast drink with freshly-pressed fruit juice. You should try it.
Anyways, I didn’t want to go too far off on the vitamin tangent, but here I am two paragraphs later. So my only problem with the fruit juicer is that it needs to be cleaned. By hand. Every day. The juicer dis-assembles into several large pieces that all need to be hand-scrubbed, and this gets added on to the regular daily load, which is just enough to upgrade the task from tedious to onerous. Maybe its just the changing weather, maybe its related to the house-hunt, or maybe I’m just starting to get lazy. Whatever the cause, I’m really looking forward to the dishwasher. We are holding out on buying our own since one is included in the purchase.
On lighter subjects, we’ve both been enjoying the heck out of Guitar Hero III - though lately we’ve had less time to play due to the house stuff. I’ve also dipped my toe into Super Mario Galaxy and found the water to be positively delightful. Once the purchase is finalized I plan on diving in to explore its depths at length.
I’m also approaching the end of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion which I found really interesting, and I recommend it to anyone and everyone, whatever their personal thoughts on belief. Once I finish that I have Midnight Tides waiting for me and I am eagerly looking forward to revisiting Steven Erikson’s epic world.
The bi-weekly D&D games continue, and you can follow along by reading the Campaign Synopses by clicking here. Right now I am one-and-a-half sessions behind, but the second installment is already in progress and should be posted soon.
Other than that, I am really looking forward to some vacation time so that I can catch up on my projects and visit my family.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading.
*post-edit: only during the first month of pregnancy
Posted by Aaron on November 20, 2007, 3:28 pm permalink top | general
Your comment about the vitamin C made me think about something somebody else told me about Vitamin D. As we know, we normally get Vitamin D from the sun. Now, what about vampires or the pale faced goths who avoid the sun? Surely, there must be another way! Well, lookie here! You can buy Minute Maid Orange Juice with Vitamn D! I wonder how they got the Vitamin D in the orange juice? Let’s ask Coca-Cola, who makes Minute Maid:
“However, some of our juice products contain Vitamin D3, which is derived from lanolin. Lanolin is a natural oil in the fiber of sheep’s wool. It is separated from the wool after the sheep’s hair is cut (sheered). Lanolin oil is obtainable without harming the sheep, but may be an issue for strict vegetarians.”
It won’t make me stop drinking juice, but I never would have thought that my enriched vitamins were actually sheep sweat. Hmm… sheep sweat.