You might laugh at me like Daniel did, but I’m so fickle.

I wrote here about how I love my paper to-do list, but I was giving it up for something a little more advanced.  I was going to try Remember The Milk again.  Remember the Milk is an online to-do list that syncs with my phone, and I can access my to-do lists anywhere I want.

Well I fell off the wagon.  To be honest, it’s just too tedious to log in and get all of my information off of the website.  So now I’m using my Outlook task bar:

Chances are that I’ll be ditching that in the next couple of days and just using my good-old-fashioned pencil and paper routine that has worked well for the past few years.  If it ain’t broke…right?

I just wish these tasks could easily sync with Google Tasks; anyone know how to do that?

After that last post, I received a few messages on Twitter and an email with mixed messages.  Some were supportive.  Some were hesitant.  And some were supportive, but hesitant that they could be healthy on fewer carbohydrates.

Even though the messages were varied, I think they all had a common thought: I crave carbohydrates too much to make a change like this.

To which I have one reply: craving is a symptom of addiction, and the surefire cure for addiction is abstinence.

I don’t know that I have any room to speak on the subject yet–I’m just four days into this new treatment plan–but I have noticed many of the withdraw symptoms starting to subside.  I don’t have feelings of hunger any longer (which I attribute to either cravings for carbohydrates, or REAL hunger because I was struggling to figure out exactly what to eat).  I’m in a good mood.  And my favorite side-effect so far is this intense feeling of optimism.  I’ve finally found a doctor that is speaking to my numbers and giving me specific tasks that have immediate effects on my blood glucose levels.

I started seeing a new doctor that I found on twitter. Kinda strange, right? But she just opened a practice that is pretty dedicated to diabetes-management, and she’s local. Her website is here: http://www.diabevita.com

This new doctor’s approach to diabetes-management is slightly controversial. My doctor follows the philosophy of Dr. Richard Bernstein who is known for suggesting ultra-low carb eating for diabetics…which means 6g carbs for breakfast and 12g for lunch and 12g for dinner (versus the American Diabetes Association’s 30g per meal).

Day one was excruciating.  I ate close to ZERO grams of carbohydrates.  I skipped my morning coffee (the whole milk I use is too high in carbs).  I had a huge headache.  I was cranky.  It was just miserable.

But day two was easier.  Today is day three, and it feels pretty good so far.

And now for the nerdy part.  I am going to start storing my blood glucose levels in a spreadsheet that is saved on Google Documents.  And I created a Form that looks like this:

And then I embedded it into an .html file on my webpage…so I can easily enter my glucose levels and have them save to a spreadsheet that I will print out and bring to the doctor’s office.

This is what the results look like:

If you own your own website and want help doing this, hit me up.  I’ll help you out.  If you don’t own your own website, but want me to set one up for you here, let me know.

After my previous post about new dog names, Paul commented with:

Um, what happened to Basil?

Which is a question I’ve avoided here and on Twitter.  So I guess it’s time to give you the straight answer.

Dan and I brought Bazil the dog home on the Sunday before Memorial Day of this year.  He was a spunky chihuahua/pug.  He was about the same age as Olive, and he wasn’t fixed.

We had a couple of problems with him trying to mount Olive…but for the most part, they got along.

On the Tuesday after Memorial Day Daniel took Bazil to the Maricopa County Animal Control Facility (the pound) and had Bazil neutered. Tuesday night Bazil came home and seemed to be recovering properly.  Wednesday was a tough day…you could tell that Bazil was in some pain.  The pound didn’t give us any pain meds for him.

Thursday I came home from work during my lunch break, like usual, to check on the doggies and to take Bazil outside.  Bazil wasn’t as crate trained as Olive was, and we wanted to avoid accidents in the house.

When I left the house to go back to work, everything was fine.

Thursday after work I had planned on going to my mom’s house, and when I left the club I got a text from Daniel asking me to call him as soon as I got the chance because he had “sad news.”

When Daniel got home Bazil was really lethargic and didn’t jump up to greet him like he normally did.  Daniel figured out that something was seriously wrong with Bazil, so he ended up taking him to the emergency vet.

At the vet they told Daniel that it would be best to euthanize Bazil.  And we wouldn’t officially know what caused this unless we paid for an expensive puppy autopsy.  If they had to guess, the vet people told us, it could have been a bad reaction to the anesthesia or a blood clot from the surgery.  We’ll never really know.

We love our dog named Olive, and we’ve been talking about getting another female dog really soon.  Olive turned 1-year-0ld on September 1st, and she could do some mothering/sistering soon.

If you didn’t know, Olive moved into our house in December 2007, and we kind of named her after Olive from “Olive The Other Reindeer.”  Which is a cute children’s book.  And I was thinking that it would be cute to name our new dog after a children’s book character.  Here are the names I came up with:

Hachiko is a cute name, but it’s a real dog’s name.

Ramona is one of my favorites…but Dan doesn’t love it.

I love the name “Beezus” too.  In the stories, Ramona’s sister was actually named Beatrice, but they called her “Beezus.”  Dan says that it sounds too much like “Jesus.”

I haven’t had the oppotunity to ask Dan if he likes this one.  But if he vetos Beezus and Ramona, my next number one is “Pippi.”  Isn’t it cute…”Let’s take Olive and Pippi to the dog park.”  Or how about “Pippi, drop that sock.”

So which is your favorite?  Any other children’s book characters that would make a good dog name?

I forgot that this site just had it’s second birthday.  I’ve been blogging since mid-August 2007.

Happy Birthday What Some Would Call Lies.

I like making new desktop backgrounds every couple of weeks.  I like original.  I like darker colors usually.  I like words.

So when I was trying to come up with a new background, I decided to write my mantra on one, and to use my own handwriting font.  And I’m pretty pleased with the results:

If you want to make this picture into your background right click here and click “set as desktop background.”

Once upon a time I worked as a hiring manager for a non-profit.  My job basically consisted of reading resumes, interviewing and putting people through the new hire orientation.

And I’ve kind of forgotten how silly some people can be when they are creating their resumes.  Take for example this absurd entry on a resume I just received:

If you think that I want to know your age and marital status, I’d just hunt you down on Myspace/Facebook.  Right?

In my past position that I mentioned, I received resumes with the stupidest mistakes.  My personal favorite is the un-edited OBJECTIVE sentence.  I loved when I would receive a resume that said the applicant’s objective was to “receive a full-time position at Bank Of America that utilizes…”   Sometimes I would reply with “Your objective says you are looking for a full-time job at a bank.  You must have misunderstood our job posting; this is a part-time job working with youth.”

Once I received a resume from a dude that wanted to work with kids and he mentioned that he was the president for this legalize-marijuana organization.  Which on the surface isn’t bad.  I mean, going out and getting petitions signed and talking about the positives of legalizing something doesn’t automatically make you a bad guy.  But when I clicked through to their webpage, I saw that this org was responsible for organizing these big smoke-ins…where people sat around in public places and smoked weed.  Kind of disqualifies you from being the “adult mentor” type?  No?

And one of my favorite responses as the hiring manager was when a young lady sent me her resume, and I was having a long/bad day already.  Her resume was riddled with typos (annoying), and when I called her she had some shake-your-booty ring-back music (super annoying).  Keep in mind she applied for this job. I wasn’t chasing down cold leads or anything.  After finishing my spiel about the job requirements, the lady said, “Umm, do you know if [Name of a different organization] is hiring?”

I was confused.  “You applied for a job at [Name of my organization].”

“That’s kind of far to drive.  Do you have the phone number of [Name of different organization]?”

“Google it.” I said before hanging up.