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Greg vs HFCS

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past couple of years (or are merely very adept at avoiding the media), you know about the evil sweetener used in so many US food products that’s called “high fructose corn syrup” and which converts to fat much faster than sugar, doesn’t stimulate insulin production (which means you don’t feel “full” as fast), and also kills small kittens simply by being within a 5-foot radius.

Now, ever since I spent most of 2004 on Weight Watchers, I regularly look at the packaging of what I eat; calories, fat, ingredient listings, and so forth. So while I knew that I don’t eat many things that have HFCS as an ingredient, when Butch and Chris mentioned they were cutting it entirely out of their diet I found myself a little curious as to what I still ate that had it these days. (It does help that I’m not a big soda person.) So, I went through the fridge and pantry, because there’s a certain appeal in the idea of striking the last bits of HFCS out of my life. (After all, if it’s easy to go from “some” to “none” then why not?)

The end result? Only a few things, happily.

  • Box of individual Kellogg’s cereal servings
  • Pepperidge Farm 100% whole wheat bread
  • Kudos granola bars
  • 100-calorie snack packs
  • Gatorade

The nice thing is that all five of those are pretty easily replaced. The other cereals in my house (Kashi Strawberry Fields, and various varieties of Puffins) don’t have HFCS and I really eat them more often these days, anyway. Bread is easily switched back over to Nature’s Own 100% Whole Wheat, which I used to buy anyway but had only hopped brands because I could get the Pepperidge Farm bread at CostCo. The Kudos and 100-calorie snack packs are a little frustrating to go because they were also regular CostCo purchases, but similar alternatives from Trader Joe’s are a-ok. And with Gatorade, I switched over to buying the powder (which doesn’t have HFCS) and am going to just keep a pitcher in the fridge. Less plastic being used that way, really.

It does help that I shop a lot at Trader Joe’s, don’t really drink soda (happily my one occasional vice of Jones Soda Cream Soda uses sugar cane), and also enjoy doing some shopping at H-Mart/Han Ah Reum where the products just don’t seem to use it.

Do I think I’m going to magically drop weight from eliminating HFCS? Probably not. (Besides, I still have to eat what’s left of those snacks. That may take a month or so. But as they run out they aren’t getting replaced.) But it is nice to know that it’s pretty easy to cut that substance out of my home. It does make me wonder how easy it is for others to do it, too. And I do plan on writing letters to the makers of the products I will miss (Kudos in particular (*sniff*)) to let them know that I’m not buying their stuff anymore and why. Hey, it can’t hurt, right?

(And no, I’m also not going to go crazy about this. I know that sometimes you’re out and there’s nothing you can do to avoid it. I’m not worried about that.)

Just don’t tell the corn farmers about this. Between talk about switching ethanol from corn to things like sugar cane or switchgrass, and now this, they might get a little pissy at me. I promise that I’ll buy a lot of corn this summer, though. Mmmm, black beans and corn and avocado and tomato… Now I’m getting hungry.

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Photogregphy

Two quick items of note!

First off, I now have an official “these are some of my better photos” website put together. I think it’s a pretty nifty site, and I’ll be adding to it as I finally get my new camera up and running and it takes pictures worthy of going there. Consider it a “best of the best” selection, and it’s at http://photos.gregmce.com. Very exciting! (Well, for me.) It’s the closest I have to a portfolio online.

And second, for those in the DC area, Artomatic opens today! It’s running through June 15th, has free admission, and is one block from the New York Avenue metro station. (There’s also some street parking, and I think also some pay garaged parking available.) It’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but the rest of the week has some pretty reasonable viewing hours. (Wed/Thurs: 5-10pm; Fri/Sat: noon-2am; Sun: noon-10pm.)

So if you’re interested, try and head on up to the 9th floor and check my stuff out! And then check everything else out while you’re there; there’s a lot of really interested and neat art being exhibited this year, and I’ve only seen a small fraction. This year was a big learning experience for me and hopefully the next time the show comes around my stuff will be even better. But I had fun getting things ready.

End of self-promoting plugs! (Next time I’ll talk about something riveting like high fructose corn syrup. Mmmmmmm.)

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I feel the earth move under my feet

I’m sure there must be a “You can tell you’re an East Coaster when…” list out there that includes the item, “You get excited over a 1.8 magnitude earthquake.”

It certainly wasn’t as strong as the one a few years ago (that was around, what, a 3 or a 4?) which was piddly in its own right, so this one was even less so. With the previous one I at least got up out of my chair and stuck my head into the hallway to see if others felt it. With this one, the best I could muster was an instant message to Karon saying, “I swear I just felt our building shake.”

I’ve been feeling a little bleah for most of today, so it’s good to get excited about something. I skipped my run this morning (one of my legs was feeling stiff and tight this morning and even after several stretches today it’s still a bit that way) and I haven’t decided if I’ll attempt one this afternoon after work or not. (I am unfortunately leaning towards no.) I certainly didn’t sleep well last night, which didn’t help matters, too.

But on the bright side, my labels for Artomatic are printed and sitting on my desk, so I just need to pop by this evening and then I am completely done. People keep asking if I’m excited and the answer has been, “Not yet.” Maybe it’s because it was all so new and a learning process for me this year; I’ve already made a lot of decisions for potential future exhibiting on ways I would do it different. Hopefully once it’s all taken care of I will be a little more jazzed about it.

On the other hand, I have decided that if I sell some of the photos (which would be awfully cool) that I get to reward myself. So items I’m looking at include:

Mario Kart Wii just looks amazingly fun, plus there’s the online play aspect. I would sure like to experiment with a “prime” lens. And I haven’t had a printer for over a decade, since the infamous moment where Kate sent me a cursed manuscript and my printing it out literally destroyed the printer. (It started printing jibberish about 2/3rds of the way through—and no, it was not the manuscript’s actual text—and never recovered.) So for those, I am excited.

(Not that I’m actually expecting to sell any photos, of course. But the thought is pretty fun to think about.)

Overall, though, things are good. I have some friends moving into the neighborhood next month, some beautiful orchids blooming in my office, we had salsa lessons in the office yesterday for Cinco de Mayo (which was fun), and an older gentleman at the gym yesterday asked if that was indeed me at the opera last week—and that he and his wife also left before the end because they couldn’t stand it. Hee hee hee.

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Hopelessly busy, but making good time

Phew! April is finally over, and I think with it, the busy time is starting to wind back down. The past two weeks have felt like anything and everything was just crammed into it all at once, between returning to a full running/exercise schedule, book club, opera, an anniversary, Artomatic, reviews, and a billion other things that are temporarily escaping my mind.

That’s not to say it was bad things, of course. (Well, the opera was dreadful and we left after the first act.) Just everything happening at once. But it felt good after work yesterday to accomplish a lot of things off my list; stop by Michael’s and get some replacement frames, cook dinner with enough for leftovers, go running with Pacers in Arlington, eat dinner, feed Karon’s cats, head over to Artomatic and check on painting situation then clean everything up, and get home with enough time for Top Chef, Lost, and 30 Rock.

But anyway, after next weekend things are looking much calmer. Saturday has two birthday parties, Sunday is going to be hanging all of the photos at Artomatic. Then next week shouldn’t be too crazy, just finishing up my Artomatic set-up on Tuesday (labels for the photos, figuring out how to put a business card holder in my space, that sort of thing), dinner plans on Monday, spinning on Wednesday, running with the group on Thursday, possibly a 10k on Saturday and then a volunteer shift at Artomatic, and working at the store on Sunday.

And then… quiet time. It’s been surprising to me how much time Artomatic has taken up, especially as it gets closer, but it’s a good learning experience for me. If there’s another show in 2009 and I partiicpate, I will certainly be better prepared. And the next couple of weekends are much more open and free than mine have been as of late, too. So that will be nice. I want to just spend some time finally learning how to use my new camera (which is gathering dust on my desk because of everything else), that sort of thing. And as the days get longer, it somehow just feels like there’s more time to do things. That mental block that hits when the sun goes down can really slice into one’s day. Having my tv shows all come to a close again helps, too. (Although as of tonight I am now three weeks behind on BSG, plus two weeks behind on The Office and Ugly Betty.) I don’t watch that much these days but there’s only so many hours in the day.

Still, I feel like I’ve been accomplishing a lot. So it’s not a bad sort of busy. Just one with a lot of things getting checked off. I’m ok with that, for a while. I just need to keep the list from growing as fast as I remove things, that’s all.

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Wine-Book Wednesdays: David Hahn

My first exposure to David Hahn’s comics was Private Beach, a bizarre sort of merger between X-Files and Love and Rockets. Strange things mixed with relationship drama and a sharp wit is my best description of the book. When I met him at San Diego in 2002, he was one of those people that was so amazingly friendly and likable that you were almost relieved that he was such a good artist, because you wanted him to succeed at everything.

Since then, he’s drawn two Bite Club mini-series for Vertigo (think Miami mafia meets vampires), and is also drawing the all-ages Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane comic. The fact that he can switch from adults-only violence to fun and cute kids comics? Well, it’s nice to see that the industry knows how good he is.

His drawing below is also a take on one of his Private Beach covers. I must admit that whenever I see it, I always wonder what would happen if this sketch would suddenly collide with J.G. Jones’s wine sketch…

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Wine-Book Wednesdays: Kelley Seda

Ah, Kelley Seda, how I miss you doing things in comics. Seda’s debut work was a strange little mini-series called Rare Creature that… it’s kind of hard to describe, to be honest. But it’s about a girl named Amelia who is pregnant, and in love with the boy with huge hands next door. It’s an odd, almost fragile-feeling story that was like nothing else on the market.

She did some work designing books for other comic publishers for a while, but she seems to have left comics entirely for other art forms. It’s a shame, although I don’t think the comics industry ever really caught on to her brilliance. Very, very much our loss.

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Photo-Excitement

All sorts of exciting things are going on as of late in the world of Greg Photography!

Digital Rebel XTiThe first and foremost thing is that my brand-new camera arrived today. It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (known in other countries as the EOS 400D), and it’s my very first SLR camera. I am, needless to say, super-thrilled! I am also vowing to stop by the library today or tomorrow to get a book on SLRs because I’ve never actually used one. It’s a whole new world of lenses and f-stops and all sorts of other exciting terms that a decade ago made my eyes glaze over.

Almost all of my photos for Artomatic are now printed as well; I’m going to re-print one or two of them that need a slight tweak but generally speaking I’m really happy with them. When I picked them up, I opened up the package to make sure they were all there and the woman working the counter actually gasped out loud. Which was a nice ego boost, needless to say. She and another employee asked what camera I was using and were flabbergasted that it was a point-and-shoot. Frames are ordered and en route, as are my business cards. So now I just need to figure out exactly how I’m going to decorate my space. I worked a volunteer shift at Artomatic on Saturday night (it was gorgeous out, so the place was dead as a doornail—good thing I brought a book!) and it gave me some ideas to mull over. Artomatic doesn’t open until May 9th so I still have a little breathing room to get ready.

I’ve also put together a special sub-website spotlighting some of my favorite photography, and put about half of the photos into it. That’s the URL that I put on my business cards, and as soon as it’s done I’ll post a link here. But I’m happy with it, too; as great as Flickr is, I like the idea of having a very specific subset of photos to send people to instead of a photostream that also has, for instance, lots of pictures of my friends shoving french-fries into their nostrils. (Well, not quite that. But you get the idea.)

Between the new camera and seeing everyone else’s stuff at Artomatic, I’m thinking/hoping this will get me firmly back on the photography road again. It was nice having some time off after the 365pictures project, but at the same time I’m eager to start adding new photos to the collection.

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Side-Effects May Include…

One of the best things I’ve discovered about taking a Benadryl before bed every night, now, is a side-effect I didn’t expect. Namely, I’m having dreams that I remember on a much more regular basis.

Most nights, once I fall asleep it’s (by my reckoning) an instant transition from falling asleep to waking back up. Dreams more often than not are only in-between the two if I’m extremely tired or have had alcohol first. So maybe it’s the medication, maybe it’s just having a deeper and more restful sleep, but more often than not these days I’m finding myself with dreams that were strong enough that I can actually remember them.

It’s funny because I’m not entirely sure when I stopped having regularly occuring dreams. Maybe in college? It’s that sort of thing that you don’t notice until they’ve been gone for quite some time. Someone asks you what you dreamt about and you realize that you have no idea. It’s fun, though, to have them back. I can more often than not pinpoint where some of the images are coming from as of late, too.

For instance, last night my mother was talking a lot about Dexter and Michael C. Hall and The Tudors, and I’d mentioned Artomatic to her. The end result? I dreamt that I was Michael C. Hall, but was also somehow an amalgamation of myself and his characters from Dexter and Six Feet Under. I was in a large mansion (and Peter Krause was there at one point) and the rooms kept shifting back and forth between the past and present-day, but a large room full of picture frames was in both of them. I ended up meeting a very attractive noble and was flirting with him (I’d gotten as far as an arm around him and there was no objection at his end) when I woke up.

Very strange, and funny, and a wonderful jumble of things I’d just been talking and thinking about earlier. It’s really nice to have them back. Another thing once the springtime pollen dips a little bit to monitor closely when I try and see if shifting to Allegra and/or valerian root at night will make a difference. Now that dreaming is back, I’m not quite ready to give it up again.

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Good Morning

Ever had one of those mornings where everything seemed to just click?

This one unfolded perfectly. Got up and went to the gym early, snagging the last rowing machine. The woman next to me, Kathy, was chatty but in a good way. She said she didn’t recognize me and I’d mentioned that I was coming earlier these days, and a little more often while I took a week or so off of running. So we chatted about marathons (she agreed that Marine Corps is too crowded these days) and how she used to run them until her doctor made her stop, but how her husband runs ultra-marathons. She also laughed that I was “rowing too fast” her her to keep up and that she was competitive.

Now, I was thinking she was in her mid-to-late 50s. Turns out I was off by about, oh, 15 years. I want to be as in-shape and generally cool as Kathy in my 70s. And rowing next to her did wonders for my performance; a 30-minute set for me normally racks up the calorie counter in the 360-375 range, and around 6500 meters. Today’s set ended with it being at 404 calories and somewhere around 6750m. Clearly I will need to schedule my exercise around her schedule.

Bento Lunch -- 2008-04-11After a set on the elliptical and a nice chat over there with Roger (who had come in to hit the Friday morning spinning class, much to my surprise; turns out he had the morning off) it was back home, where after a shower (using a free sample from LUSH of their Buffy soap, which is great stuff) I took the brown rice out of the steamer, cooked some sausage and added it in, then seasoned the whole thing with coriander, chipotle pepper powder, cayenne pepper, and a few other spices and turned it into part of a bento lunch.

From there, it was off to work and the GW Parkway was just beautiful. I rolled the windows down, put the B-52s song “Hot Corner” on auto-repeat (and for those wondering how long the commute is, it was almost done with its fifth play when I got to work) and sang along while the warm breeze blew into the car and flowering trees gently dropped their petals. It’s just the right temperature out; no jacket needed, just a short-sleeve shirt and jeans and off we go.

There’s no big event in all of this. No “and then I found a million dollars” moment, no sudden turning point. Just a really good morning where you feel awake, and alert, and aware of everything around you, and alive. It was just about perfect, really. I wish all mornings were like this, but I’ll take them when they appear.

I hope everyone else is having their own version of a good morning.