Crowd-Pleasing Bullets

Well, *apparently* album reviews are not certain readers cups of tea. And while some may ignore their readers' beverages of choice and post about the 21st century max-banal*, I am nothing if not a slave to my single-digit** readership. The people want Ulty updates? The people get Ulty updates. Abbreviated, ill-informative bullet-form updates - mildly appropriate given emoticon-titled subject posts - but updates nonetheless. The last few weeks, in (insert Megadeth scream here) BULLETS!!!

* - I kid, I kid. But seriously, you didn't think you could rag on my album reviews on facebook sans repercussion, did ya? :) But really, cute stuff from the Mark. If I'm ever forced to cover him in an Ultimate game, I will just say, "I've got Iheartyou."

** - My DFW impulse to clarify that "single digit" is a description of the quantity of the readership and not their individual mutant and/or shop-class-related finger-and-toe-statuses*** is kicking in. Clarified?

*** - My sensitive-'90s-ponytail-guy-sans-the-ponytail (and probably the sensitivity) impulse to clarify that there is nothing wrong with missing nineteen fingers/toes is kicking in. Morally or essentially wrong, I mean; let's be honest, you're probably going to deal with some functional difficulties in life, not the least of which will be throwing a flick**** and/or typing "Eff you Nyet" into the comments below in a timely fashion.

**** - See? Ulty content. In the fourth paragraph!

• When we last left our Sprawling heroes, they had won the Open Division of the Colorado Cup, even whilst missing famed superathlete co-captain Dheintime. This apparently went directly to the entire team's collective heads, as the plan - ramp up practices in August in preparation for the start of the Open Series proper in September - fell flat on its collective face. We started having attendance problems almost immediately as the month clicked "8," struggling to get sixteen-to-eighteen people out to the fields. And sixteen-to-eighteen people - particularly when that sixteen-to-eighteen is partially comprised of four-to-five non-Sprawlers - does not make for effective practicing with your top lines. Boo-urns.
• I can hardly talk, as I continue to be a mysteriously malaised, topping out at 75% wreck. Seriously, it's been better, but I'm still fading out here and there, and it got bad enough that I missed a couple of practices in there. Think about it - Nyet, willingly skipping Ulty practices! Not even going! Egads! The good news is that I've pursued all kinds of standard-issue medical explanations, and nothing overtly serious is going on. So put your worries away - cardiologists, pathologists, even surgeons assure me that everything is fine and this is merely some post-viral badness. One of those tests involved an incision and sitting out of all athletic activity for a week-plus - that was awesome - so maybe now you're starting to get an idea of why I haven't been entirely enthused about writing about Ultimate lately.
• Again, just to emphasize, DO NOT WORRY, and DO NOT WRITE me with bizarro speculations. "Nothing is effed here, dude," as Lebowski would say, so other than sympathizing with my suffering suckitude of late, you don't need to expend another thought on the health of Nyet. I'm fine. And raring to go for this weekend, taboot.
• Random side note - my funniest self-joke of the past month? Well, I'm still tracking my diet, which has been extra challenging with the sporadic cessations of exercise. But I'm maintaining my weight and eating well. Huzzah. The joke, though, is that the first self-e-mail chain I used to track things back in January was entitled "Food Diary." After a couple of months, I got tired of scrolling so far down the screen and created "Food Diary II." Then the nutritionist wanted me to track carbs / protein, so I started "Food Diary III." Tracking carbs means keeping track of a bit more info, so it was convenient to keep on elong e-mail and copy-paste frequent foods rather than repeatedly look them up. So this time I let the scrolling go long. And it turns out that e-mail threads in gmail max out at 99 messages; after that, it changes to "Re: Food Diary III." Annoying! So I had to start a new thread. Its title? "Food Diary Zoso." I. Am. Hilarious. Even if you don't get that particular joke, appreciate the meta-joke of having read one of the more mundane paragraphs e'er featured on this blog. Outside, you know, those dreaded album reviews.
• NEhoo, our solution to the attendance problem was to back it down to an optional practice on Mondays and a mandatory one on Wednesdays. This helped somewhat, but the curse of Phoenix-summer continued to afflict, and we continued to have problems. J-Ro even berated the team in an e-mail with the subject, "WTF?" When the excessively chilly and ubercool J-Ro gets feathers a-rufflin', things are problematic.
• We did (at least) continue to SLUG it out on Saturdays, occasionally having some stellar games. So there's been a thread of competition throughout, even if the practice issues have caused a lot of consternation.
• Speaking of consternation, we (in case I haven't mentioned it here yet) are going to be playing the series without stalwart Garret, who has run into way too much work and a new PhD program this fall. We're also going to be missing BP for sectionals (ugh), but it's better that way than having him miss regionals. And Cole has been 100% AWOL - I am relatively certain that I haven't seen him since CO Cup. Now, again, I missed three practices in there, but by all accounts, dude has just been GONE. So, um, that's disconcerting. Hopefully he rolls in this weekend to grab his reserved seat on the Pepsi Max Where-Have-You-Been-Dude? Bench. I mean, I'm one to talk, but I know where I was. Hopefully it's just been scheduling conflicts and not a dedication issue. Either way, communication is preferred.
• Speaking of, sectionals this weekend. Exciting times. We're carrying a roster of 23 and facing off against Monsoon, Le Tigre, El Ponderosa, ASU and U of A. You'll note the conspicuous lack of a Sweet Roll there - they have split between a master's squad and a co-ed team that could give Barrio a run. Pretty sure I mentioned this in the CO Cup writeup, but we never got that last official crack at 'em. Oh, well. Sectionals, fwiw, is conveniently located at the Scottsdale Sports Complex in Sunny Azz, so if you're around, be around! We play pretty much all day both days.
• I am sure all of that sectionals talk has you wondering how things have been going lately. Well, we changed practice fields to Eastern M(es)A in September, and have been making the trek to the east coast on Wednesdays for two hours of intense scrimmaging fun. Last week we played vert stack to give our D a look at the alternative O set, and then had to the D give the O lines nasty poaching sets. With the latter, we let the D play with eight guys - eight on seven! - and we still managed to score a good amount of the time. So hopefully that'll have us ready for the junk defenses our man-O will likely inspire.
• I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that things are intense enough at practice that some people on our D line - lets call them "& the Argonauts" and, um, "Red-headed Electrolyte" - got in an argument over coverage responsibilities that escalated in approximately six seconds into a drag-out, pit-bull-death-grip fight/wrestling match. YOWSERS! Shades of Nyet v. Ariel, 2002! (No, not really; we just yelled a lot. I don't think I'd seen a *physical* fight at a frisbee practice EVER before - you'll very, very occasionally see skirmishes at tourneys, but this was two guys who know each other at each other's throats with intent to harm). The whole thing was uncomfortable - it was broken up quickly and everyone was fine, so no biggie in the end. And the intensity was good to see on some abstract level, I suppose. But still. Eesh.
• So of course after all that quality O and leading-to-fights defensive intensity, we came out Saturday to SLUG and played sloptastic frisbee. Just didn't look good at all, tons of turns, people tired, leading to a lot of "glad sectionals is next weekend" sidebars. Ugh.
• Then fast forward to last night, where things looked a little better, but I - clicking on maybe three of my eight cylinders - managed to have a terrible, terrible practice. Qualify it - I was fine, more or less, for the "O" part of practice (when we were playing 7 against 8 and not allowed to throw it upside-down to simulate, as best we can, windy conditions) , and just had a really bad stretch of throws in the middle of the D section of practice, where we were running a vertical stack O. I probably took it too hard - it was just an exceptionally bad stretch of about ten minutes or so - but wow, can't go through that this weekend. I am sure the 106 degree forecast will help with that tremendously. Ugh, again.
• But all else considered, it was a good, hard, well-attended practice. Hard to know how we'll look this weekend, but for the first time in six weeks or so, we get to play someone other than ourselves, and that's always nice.
• So how are we feeling re: the weekend? Well, on some level, it's immaterial; all the teams who want to can go to regionals. I.e., our finish doesn't *really* matter. But we (obviously) want to win the section for seeding purposes, so we're going to have to crack down and get over the spottiness of late. Hopefully we will manage to play well AND work on our game, as regionals is still sitting as the smack-us-upside-the-head sudden change in intensity. We just don't have the same opportunities as JB and SG to engage serious competition at tourneys yet, so I envision a wake-up call in our future that we may or may not respond too with enough juice. All of that said, we look as good as we ever have of late, the people who are rolling out to practice are flat out bringing it, and there's adequate excitement in the air. O is crispy even without our blond deep threat, and D bothers me at practice, which is pretty much my barometer for goodness. So the weekend should be fun and enlightening. Wish us luck.
• In non-Sprawl Ulty news, my league team "The Way to Wikki Wakka" is 1-1, having staked out big leads which were choked away in both of the first two games. If I didn't mention it, my spring co-captain Lindsey is out for a bit with bad back issues (no!), but the league director made the sweetest - literally, sweetest - okay, you caught me, that would be figurative - of lemonades out of the situation for me and allowed me to captain with Jenga. She's a PHXaion / Spitfire player who is solid AND notorious for shattering all happiness/coolness scales, so despite our precarious play in the first couple of weeks, we're having a great time. Our team is the usual mix of skill/experience/talent - I'll do a full scale writeup at some point - but suffice it for now to say that I'm doing my best to run that team while my energies are really focused on and, more importantly, accustomed-to-the-level-of-play-of, Sprawl. So if I don't seem my usual fired-up-self with ridiculous VOTS game posts and such, it's only as an act of maintaining balance and not getting frustrated with the inevitable Sprawl-to-VOTS drop-off. I'm sure things will return to the usual VOTS-detail-obsessed state once I hang up these club cleats for good.
• In news a further step removed from Ultimate, school is back on. I have a relatively light semester courseload-wise, though I am writing this post at breakneck speed during a half-hour break from reading one of many five hundred page books that are staring me down. I am (allegedly) defending my prospectus at some point this semester, and continue to feel woefully unprepared. At least I don't have to grade undergrad essays this semester and can actually spend some time getting down to the brass tacks of, among other things, post-Darwinian evolutionary ethics. I know you're intrigued.
• As a final removed step, congrats to good friend Reena and her new husband Rob - the Nyetfam, Beck and I headed down to Dallas a couple of weekends back to attend her traditional Hindi wedding and had a fantastic time. We used the opportunity to spend Labor Day weekend in Texas and a good time seeing Aaron & Kristen, Grandpa, Deb, Pat & Ron, and my parents in various contexts, most of which involving delicious food. We *may* have even gotten my family hooked on grilled pineapple! May.

Hope that scratches the itch. Sectionals writeup due next week, though hopefully it will be a relatively boring weekend. We shall, as always, see.

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 7: -Burger Streak Broken for Burritos Instead

It's way too late for this, but I gathered energy after practice and made myself a Beck/Nyet staple: turkey, bean and rice burrito filling* (now w/ corn, minus the tortilla). Good stuff, and I augmented my late night meal with a well-deserved homemade margarita light**:

* - store-bought "Spanish Rice," a combination of black and pinto beans, corn, browned ground turkey, "Mexican cheese," taco seasoning, garlic powder, smoked Spanish paprika, chili powder, chipotle seasoning, cumin, corriander, oregano. Turkey browned, rice prepared as directed, corn boiled and decobbed, beans and spice added. Sooooooo good.

** - salt rim of glass, add ice, 1 oz tequila, 0.5 oz. triple sec, 3 oz. diet sierra mist, three hefty squeezes of lime juice. Stir, enjoy.

So good culinary times after a good practice. It's too late to comment further - first day of classes tomorrow, so now it's time for bed.

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 6: Bacalao!

Perhaps revealing my utterly uncreative nature, I took the opportunity on this, my third night of captivity, to keep the streak alive. My affinity for the -burger suffix is unmatched; in Beck's absence, I am three for three* in that department and tonight made myself codburgers topped w/ mango chutney a la Salt Spring Island's Moby's. I salt-and-peppered the cod, threw in a touch of Penzey's Cajun seasoning, broiled the fish, toasted buns, shucked and boiled corn, cut and steamed broccoli to make a delicious if somewhat formulaic dinner (that, ftr, has SALSA AUTENTICA on the broccoli and some of the corn, not some plebeian catsup. So phbbbbbbbbt!).

* - Through no fault of my own - last night was *going* to be a burrito dinner, or maybe even a breakfast for dinner at a local diner, but as I straggled my way out of practice, Skunk came up and revealed that he had locked his keys in his car. In this age of remote keys, it's fairly puzzling to me how that could even happen, but I suppose it continues to be Skunk's world, and I just take up residence. So I gave Justin a ride home (as planned, and incidentally, homeslice just moved and now lives something like 200 yards from Tuck Shop, dios mio!) and then took Skunk up to his place several blocks north and west of mine, then ran low on gas and got some, then drove Skunk back down to Tempe several blocks south of my place to grab his car, then found myself getting home at 11:30 instead of the planned 10:30. So leftover chicken burgers it was, and they were quick and delicious and hit the spot after sweating out some 13 pounds last night**.

** - I'm not even joking. I weighed seven pounds less when I got home than when I left, despite having drunk half a gallon water and 32 ounces of gatorade during practice. E-freaking-gads, Sunny Azz! And e-freaking-gads Sprawlers, whose poor practice attendance requires me to play at near savage frequencies.

Super-filling meal, and pretty reasonably good for me, too - I went with two quarter pound burgers and low-cal whole wheat buns, so all told this ran a conservatively-high 730 calories with 8 grams of fat and 73 (!!!) grams of protein. Again, subbing fish for your beef is a great way to keep that -burger streak going while preventing, um, other streaks. Like ones in your arteries? Yes, that was terrible.

No real plans for the next couple of night's meals, but I'll keep you appraised. Practice tomorrow night, though, so it'll probably be back to the burrito plan, Pepe Le Kendall's plans notwithstanding. We'll see. Otherwise, things roll along quietly here; a fresh batch of 20,000 lightly-clad freshmen-to-bes have littered campus, making everything up at school a madhouse (I'm pretty sure all 20K registered at the gym today, sheesh). We're adding 9 people to our little department, too, so it'll be nice to have some fresh faces. And I continue to be in a constant state of should-be-reading/writing/doing-more. So it goes - more when it happens.

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 5: When the Beck's Away, Chicken Burgers

Beck's in Chautauqua this week, celebrating the iPJ's birthday and learning about alternative energy. She's left me to fend for myself, culinarily and otherwise, so here's my best an imitation.

I think the automatic assumption during the few other times that Beck has left me by my lonesome was that I would take the opportunity to hit up every pizza place in a five mile radius. And, given the pepperoni and bacon orders of years past, that was not at all a bad assumption. But *this* time, much to the shock of any Beck-to-the-Future who may have been asked such a question in, say, 2005, I not only made an attempt to eat semi-healthy but FIRED UP THE GRILL. I am the anti-Nyet.

Grilled fresh pineapple, corn on the cob (plus steamed broccoli) w/ salsa, and chicken burgers* with toasted whole grain half buns made the menu tonight. I am sure I will cave and get take out** at some point this week, but for now it's Nyet 1, Beckless Kitchen 0.

* - I even called Beck to get a spicing consult for the raw chicken patties - I went with salt, pepper, medium hot chili powder, garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce, pizza seasoning, a touch of chipotle, and a scant bit of 2% milk cheddar cheese. Solid! In completely unrelated news, I scorched the pineapple and had some of the juiciest grilled fruit I've had - yum. I think the fast cook time charred it quickly but didn't dry it out. Good to note.

** - I suppose I should confess that my lunch today was some ridiculously good leftovers from Padre's Modern Mexican Cuisine from our farewell dinner last night. Holy new favorite Mexican place, Batman - I had carne adovada with refried beans and rice, and it was awesome yesterday and possibly better today. Beck had duck (!!) tacos; we shared delicious nachos to start. Anyways, I guess I've technically taken out once. Oh, well.

Full Meal!

Close up of maize autentica and visual proof that las samonellas son muertos.

Fairly gargantuan meal to cap the weekend, but I did more than enough running and chasing plastic in 100+ degree weather to make up for it. Here's to a week of good eatings and a happy nth birthday to the iPJ; hope he and the rest of the iPFam have a great week. I'll do my best to get by...

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 4: Cappuccino, Casserole and Fried Plantains

Nothing even approaching the fanciness of CFE here - just a note that last night included a hellaciously energy-expending Ultimate practice, so recovery today has included some yummy food stuffs. In pictures!

After enjoying many scrumptious coffees over the last week in Denver, Seattle, Vancouver, Salt Spring, and Denver again, I decided it was high time we bust out our seldom-used espresso machine. After a quick date with a Krups instruction manual, I am now the primary barista at Lola's del Fleur. That's a traditional cappuccino w/ cinnamon I made yesterday; the lattes I made today were a messier affair but allegedly are "just as good as the real thing." So yay for our team.

Trader Joe's has an excellent pulled smoky barbecue chicken dish that is pre-cooked, relatively light and full of protein (though admittedly a bit hefty on the sodium). I've taken to combining it with sweet corn, black beans and salsa for a good, quick casserole. (And I have no idea exactly how autentica TJ's Salsa Autentica is, but that is the condiment of choice lately. I think I like it mainly because I like saying, "autentica").

I bought plantains at Sprouts the other day as they were on my Fruits: Jury still out list, and they passed big time. I had them raw on cereal the other day and they were okay, but most importantly didn't render me unable to breathe like evil bananas sometimes do. Today, though, they were fried in a *tiny* amount of olive oil and sprinkled with medium hot chili powder and salt, and good times were had. Add another one to the approved fruits list.

Like I said, not a fancy CLE post - and btw, Beck, time to get back on the horse with that - but a good break in the day from writing all Ultimate, all the time.

Glad My Car Has a Cupholder (Part 1)

'Cause I gots to put this Colorado Cup somewhere... :)

Okay, technically speaking, I suppose my car needs a shortsholder:

With all apologies to fans of pre-modern linear narrative, popular demand* dictates that I cover the last part of our excellent vacation first. But I have to start with our second trip to Colorado, so that means starting the tale west of Vancouver on Salt Spring Island at 5 AM PDT.

* - Then again, perhaps this is a bad idea, as popular demand - read, a request from Sprawl-baller Aaron H. - also dictated that I include another sexy "half-naked pic" of your balladeer. This order is by-letter filled by the shorts pic above - I am indeed shirtless up there, it being a cool 102 degrees at the time of photo-shooting - but I am sure that is not what he had in mind, so here's a zoom-out to fulfill Harczynskian desires. FYI, this is what a one-fifth naked Harczynskian looks like when chugging a 32 ounce girly beverage:

The bed and breakfast where we stayed, Blackberry Glen, was easily a five star experience, but one question stood between the establishment and the coveted fifth and a half star - how would they handle breakfast on Friday morning? For flight-out-of-Seattle-at-3:45 and ill-timed-ferry-schedule reasons, we had to leave at about 5:30 that A.M. This meant not only an ugly 5 A.M wake up, but also that that we would not be getting our last breakfast, rendering the last night a mere bed-and. Jason and John, our excellent hosts, came through in the clutch with a quasi-picnic breakfast of sandwiches and fruit, pushing the stay into exalted territory. Seriously, I cannot recommend Salt Spring or Blackberry Glen enough, though I suppose we'll get into that in another post.

So Beck and I lumbered downstairs in the dawn-dark with our week's worth of luggage to begin a Friday-ful of travel, being careful not to make noise so as not to disturb our hosts nor the friendly neighborhood deer. We managed to successfully not take a detour into America en route to the Canadian ferry this time,* as thankfully it was just about a one mile - sorry, 1.6 km - ride to the ferry port from the B&B. We waited about twenty minutes before pulling up onto the ferry, parking the car and heading to the passenger deck. We used the boat cafeteria's microwave to heat up our breakfasts-to-go. And they were SO GOOD, on all kinds of aesthetic levels:

* - We were in a huge rush on Tuesday, leaving from Vancouver to get to the ferry in Tsawwassen - our boat left at 7:10, we were supposed to be there half an hour early, and our ETA after hitting traffic in Vancouver was approximately 6:38. Our directions said "take 17 South to the ferry," but as we're heading down that road, Beck sees a sign that says "next left: Tsawwassen." So, reasonably enough, she turns left. And after speeding through downtown Tsawwassen in approximately two minutes, we see signs welcoming us to America. I'll spare you the goofy details of Port Roberts, other than to note that yes, U.S.A. has perhaps the most pointless patch of territory in the world up there on a little peninsular offshoot of Canada, and the border guards on that patch are not really huge fans of the border U-turn. We technically left Canada for a microsecond, so we had to re-present passports, re-answer all of the questions about cargo and weapons, and restate our purpose in Canada. The guard waved us through with all the passion of someone who has heard "which way back to the ferry?" a thousand times, and we made it at 6:50, the last people in line to be let on the boats. Phew.

You'll notice, in addition to the sandwiches and fruit and breakfast chocolates, the chocolate-chip-oatmeal-and-raisin cookies that made it into the mix there. Those were definitely a highlight of the Blackberry Glen experience, and no, how dare you accuse us, we did not eat all two dozen of the ones baked for us. That's preposterous!

The ferry ride was relatively uneventful, other than fog and boat-rocking that made us a little queasy, but nothing crazy. I spent the boat trip (inbetween five minute naps, anyways) reading Tango et al.'s The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, at which Beck gave a cursory glance and asked, "Is that a book for nerds?" Yes. Really, really cool nerds. I did, though, just to stay remotely on topic, give quite a bit of thought to leveraging situations with playing time and how it applied to Ultimate. So that sort of reset my bar for assigning PT for the weekend, and I think resulted in a more even, more successful distribution. So the nerdiness occasionally pays off.

We couldn't take the subtle indoor boat-rocking after a bit, so we got up and walked laps around the boat-deck for the last fifteen minutes of the ride. This is more challenging than perhaps it sounds - being exhausted and walking across a rocking boat effectively makes you look very drunk, so that was good exercise for the day. We pulled in to Tsawwassen at 9:30-ish with way more than enough time to make the 2 hour drive to Seattle and catch our plane. We started making plans to hit a good eatery somewhere en route accordingly. Which would have been great...

...except that we did not anticipate that it was the Friday before "BC Day." Apparently Canada has a "civic holiday," which seems to mean that someone along the line decided screw it, the whole country's going to take a day off the first weekend in August. How very uncapitalist of them. The result was that we were not the only ones making the trip from Vancouver to Seattle that afternoon, and our leisurely stroll to Seattle turned into a tight-scheduled pain in the arse. We spent an hour and fifteen minutes in a traffic stall at the U.S.-Canada border, and the most challenging aspect of crossing the border this time was when the guard asked "What's new from Canada?" and Beck thought he was asking about Vancouver news and not, say, the bottle of port we bought on Salt Spring Island. "Nothing much... what's new with you?" didn't really suffice as an answer. But we didn't mention the Sky Tower or going to a Phish concert*, so they let us through just fine.

* - This has been a Zil shoutout. Liz: the only person who's U.S. - Canadian border crossings are more eventful than Beck's.

Another idiotic feature of your narrator is that he completely neglected to comprehend that Canada is, indeed, a foreign country, and as such data and texting and phone calls in such a place are, however technically, international. Meaning 15 bucks per megabyte and such. So we made it a solid three days without using our iPhones, and thank goodness we got them back when we did. The primary effect was that we could use the Yelp! app to find a non-McDonalds eatery for the ride back - despite the newfound tightness of our schedule, we thought it'd be a great idea to stop just off the highway in Everett for another nice vacation lunch*. We tried to stop at a place called The Majestic Cafe only to find it closed, but that sent us across the street to The Prohibition Grille... and next time someone asks you, "Do they have good soul food in Everett, WA?," you can answer, "Yes, yes they do." If I recall correctly, Beck got a bisque and a salad, and I got a big-as-my-head order of cornbread followed by a plate of Andouille sausage and cajun shrimp over jalapeno cheese grits and spinach. Dios mio - probably didn't exactly qualify as pre-Ultimate carbo-loading, but it certainly fulfilled my pre-tourney "dripping with oily flavor goodness" quota. The food came out fast and got us back on the road in a split; if you're ever north of Seattle, that place will not disappoint.

* - We ate quite well this vacation, I tell you what. I am pretty sure Beck broke a mussels-meal record - special thanks to Meghan and Greg for sneaky funding part of our trip! The Salt Spring Island bucks were great.

So we slugged it down through Seattle Friday afternoon traffic and our flight hour got closer and closer. Much to Beck's chagrin, the signs for rental car return at the airport left out one significant fact - that Thrifty's rental car location was five miles south of all the others. ARGH! All told, it all worked out, but it injected the end of an already too long 10 hour day with an added drama that we didn't need. A ten hour day, and we hadn't even taken the trip back to Denver yet. Ugh. So a tired Nyet* and Beck boarded the plane to Colorado, pretty much wanting a bed to crash into at that moment but needing another four or five hours to realize it. Beck fortunately had rented Sherlock Holmes for her iPad - her ire for Steve Jobs being worth a discussion on its own - and I had my nerd book to tide me over, so we made it through the flight okay.

* - I should note - the fatigue thing certainly did not get any better over the vacation. I was up and down all week - e.g., danced like a maniac at Elliot's wedding, did elliptical workouts twice in Denver the previous weekend and went running twice at the island, but at other times couldn't walk around downtown Vancouver without feeling faint, had to eat every five seconds to feel remotely okay, etc. I continue to not be able to get it. I was at my nadir around Wednesday or so and had absolutely no designs on playing at Colorado Cup ... but as we'll see, the best laid plans of Nyet and men are, you know, not life. Or something.

Oh, somewhere in there, EBay and Cole each texted me that Cole had broken his leg. And Ian wrote to tell me that his knee felt terrible. And I already knew that Dheintime wasn't going to be making the weekend. And with myself being questionable, it certainly seemed like we were in for a rough time. I was sub-enthused.

We had to circle Denver a few times in the plane thanks to thunderstorms - so at that point, I was having a "fatigue attack," for lack of a better term, and envisioning a weekend in the rain watching a depleted Sprawl squad play in nasty conditions. Not exactly the height of my optimism. We landed and it seemed every plane in the place had been delayed - tons of people were already in line at Hertz; thankfully we had reserved the car (priceline HEYO - 50 bucks total for the weekend!) and could just use the kiosk. We eschewed dinner in favor of a stop at a Safeway and ended up grabbing turkey and some fruit; we drove to the hotel (located partway between Denver and Boulder) and got ready to crash. I talked to Ian for approximately five seconds to get the keycard to our room and otherwise saw no Sprawlers that night. I got my stuff ready for the morning, briefly watched part of a Cubs-Rockies game which the local-to-Denver teaming won 17-2, and headed to bed.

So Friday night was a low - tired after daylong travel, wondering how in hell I was going to rally to play for the weekend, and generally not feeling great about the cap to our vacation. I would be pleasantly surprised in the ensuing 48 hours.

Caution (Keep Clear of Moving Parts)

Tuesday marked the first workout* in probably two months in which I felt normal - alert, strong, full of energy, like my cogs were finally teeth-aligned again. I blasted through no problem, felt like I could easily have kept going when I finished. Awesome! And crazy, because I had just played Ultimate the night before, rather hard Ultimate with about 18-20 guys total at practice, some of whom were injured - I mean, even more than I - so I didn't get to take it as easy there as I would have liked. Whatever, we'll take it! Combine all of that with yet another "well, all of your tests are normal" call from the doc, and I had the crazy notion that a corner was being turned...

* - Here's a typical workout - remember that I tried to move everything into one day so I can just go the gym a couple of times per week. I do a lighter weights workout on the weekend and fill in other days with running / Ulty / what have you, but this way I don't feel compelled to get up and run to the gym before work at 6 AM every single stupid morning.

10 minute elliptical warm-up

25+15+12+10 = 62 bicep curls

25+15+12+10 = 62 wrist curls
40+35+30+30 = 135 tricep pushups
25+15+12+10 = 62 reverse wrist curls
120+80+60 = 260 bicycle abs
15+10+10 = 35 reverse sit-up w/ extensions
25+25+20 = 70 reverse sit-ups
15+12+10+8+4 = 49 bench presses
12+10+8 = 30 upright rows
50+50+50 = 150 leg presses
20+20+20 = 60 c-chair straight leg raises
20+20+20 = 60 c-chair bent raises
20+20+20 = 60 calf raises
15+15+12+12+10+10 = 74 ab twists
15+15+12 = 42 seated resistance ab curls
30+30+30 = 90 triple threats
35+35+35+35+35+35 = 210 single leg presses
25+24+22 = 71 calf raises
20+20+20 = 60 ab-ball sit-ups
12+10+8 = 30 bicep curls
12+10+8 = 30 tricep extensions

30 to 60 minutes elliptical, depending how I'm feeling / time I have.

Stretch

Por supuesto no - I got to the gym early Thursday morning before work - after having taken it relatively easy Wednesday with no real exercising to speak of, just a sushi* date with my lovely wife and some dog-walking - and stepped on the treadmill for my warm-up, only to recognize within two seconds that it was no-go day. Actually, not a "no-go day," just a back to slightly off day, with enough energy in the tank to get the workout done, but not enough to do it with a joie de vivre.

* - Yes, the rumors are true - I let Beck take me sushiing. We had miso soup, gyoza/pot stickers (that inspired the aforelinked meal Thursday night), edamame, and tuna/yellowfish/salmon nigiri. I enjoyed the gyoza and edamame quite a bit, and I'd say I *liked* the sushi, and by far *liked* the salmon the best. I emphasize "like" because it was fine, even good when dipped in either soy sauce or the teriyaki-ish sauce they provided for the gyoza - but I just can't get over the price for such a slight amount of food. I know I wouldn't like anything roll-ish, either. Anyways... I suppose I now have another thing I can enjoy with the Beck, which is great, but I can't say I'd ever actively pursue it of my own accord, unlike many of the other things I have also tried** and enjoyed lately.

** - It occurs to me that I've basically had a wacky "try new foods" personality change that has accompanied vague malaise symptoms. Hmmm, adding that to the symptom stack should make for some interesting WebMD-ing. But wait, cuckoo bananas wasn't even originally in the differential!

I was pretty dejected by the return to lack-of-form, though, and really tempted just to go back to the locker room and head back to the office. But if twenty seven years of athletic endeavors have given me one (questionably stupid) habit, it's the powering through. Beck has (smartly) recommended that I ease back into things, so rather than jump in headstrong, I modified my workout and decided to at least get my cardio in (lest my Ultimate legs fall off in the month before Sprawl's first big tourney). Normally I do a seriously high resistance workout on the elliptical involving intervals - on a one to twenty scale on the machine, a sixty minute session looks like this in two minute spurts:

10,14,11,15,12,16,13,17,14,18,15,19,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20

followed by a two to three minute cooldown. The last bit of alternating between 16 and 20 requires all kinds of little tricks to push through - I take my pulse, I count strides, I calculate my calorie-burning pace in my head, etc., basically anything to keep myself from sitting there and solely counting seconds. The ellipticals have TVs attached, which sometimes helps a little (I can watch Sportscenter, or at least have it running in the background) and lately has been great with the morning World Cup matches. And MUSIC - I need some particular albums* to get me through a tough run, and it's not obvious what the shared trend is other than that they're familiar and I've run to them in the past. Whatever's going on, they get the job done, and if I need extra oomph with, say twenty minutes to go, I throw one of these on:

Outkast - Speakerboxxx

Green Day - American Idiot

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album)

* - The best weight-lifting album, it turns out, is Tuftsmen buddy Mike Bright's band Crisis Bureau's original demo plus Watchword. I've had it pop up on shuffle in the middle of a hard set and suddenly it's guaranteed super-strength. Unbelievable. I hear "IF ... YOU ..." and go all Hulk. Nay, I go all Sparkle - even scarier.

Those are just the ones in the rotation lately. I have to be careful with those, though, as overlistening to an album can easily strip it of its power-through power, and the last thing I want is to need a push and suddenly get nothing from my iPod. So on Thursday, knowing I wasn't going to be doing as hard of a cardiofest - in fact, here's what I did in three minute intervals instead:

8,10,12,14,16,14,16,18,16,18,20,18,16,18,16,14,16,18,16,14*

* - The earlier has 498 points of resistance x 2 minute intervals = 996 "resistance-minutes;" this has 308 x 3 minutes = 924 resistance minutes. Okay, that doesn't seem like much, but mainly this one just didn't involve grinding away at max resistance alternating with the still high 16 resistance for the last half an hour, so it felt a lot easier. Math seems to have failed me here, which maybe tells me that "resistance-minute" is a useless unit.

I put on a familiar but not go-to album, the Grateful Dead's Europe '72. But for whatever reason, I could stop counting the minutes - the music wasn't working. Nothing was working, actually, none of my go-to tricks could keep my eyes off the timer - I just wanted to call it a day, so aggravated at my renewed lack of energy. So I said screw the album and just put my Dead collection on shuffle. After adjusting the iPod without breaking stride - a neat trick - I stared down at my feet, away from the screen, determined to come up with something that would get me through. And I saw a small label:

Caution! Keep Clear of Moving Parts

complete with small man being dismembered in a disastrous elliptical accident. This sticker was on the base of the machine in a spot nearly impossible to see unless you were doing exactly what I was doing - ellipticking and starting at your feet to make the time pass. The situation depicted was ludicrous; someone would have to crawl in between your legs to look at the machine while you were ellipticking, not to mention he/she would not be able to see that sticker until it was too late. So I was contemplating what would inspire someone to make this sticker and place it right there when I realized what was playing on the iPod ... and if you're a Dead fan, you see this coming:

"Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)"

And so, that day's power-through power came via the absurdity of Dead/safety-sticker synergy. I started laughing, which gave me the boost I needed - not only got through the cardio, but did a weight workout afterwards, too. Inspiration, strange places, etc. Yet another small victory for the Nyet over... I don't know over what, exactly.

Removing Clogs / Removing Clogging

Interesting Monday in the Nyetverse ... after a pleasant valley Sunday spent watching a brutal World Cup Finals and skipping out on the now-dead Sunday pickup* (to rest weary knees), I enjoyed a scrumptious Breakfast-for-Dinner of Beck's off-the-hook waffles and my delectable scrambled egg whites, an episode of The Wire, and an off-cooling cup of MoJo. Good times. Unfortunately, somewhere in the mix of excess waffle batter, eggs and fruit that went down the disposal was something that elicited screams on Monday morning. Beck's screams, not mine. Our sink was clogged, and clogged in the "when you use the garbage disposal, water and food stuffs erupt from the opposite drain"-style clogged. Not good.

* - When I first got to Phoenix in '07, pickup continued unabated through the hottest months of the summer with 20-30 strong every week. We've been lucky to have twelve to fourteen lately, and more often it's been in the ten, eight, six range. Not good. I tried food promotions (chicken wings for layouts!), moving the fields, moving it later... nothing. I finally gave up, as driving twenty miles for three on three is not worth it at ALL, especially if you have to change fields because of irrigation or what have you. This past Sunday, I didn't go, as mentioned, but heard reports that only three showed up. Screw that. It's off until September, and I'm left wondering what happened - pickup is really a cornerstone of an Ultimate community, and without it, we're hardly going to improve the mediocre level of play in Phoenix. So it goes, I suppose.

Beck had to jet for work, but fortunately my day's plans included getting some reading done at a local coffee-shop, so they were amenable to the alternate plan of amateur plumbing. And amateur it was. I threw together the best of my deductive skills - we have a double sink, and BOTH were clogged, so it probably was not limited to one of the drains. The erupting from one sink to the other (and v.v.) indicated that the clog was not between them, either, but below the shared main drain. Picture!

Pay no attention to the utter chaos of home design behind the pipes; that's the um, "lo-fi" work of the previous homeowner. I was guessing that the clog was at the bottom of the U-pipe, and I did the obvious easy thing, which was run to the store, buy some Liquid Plumber and pour it down the left sink, hoping this would be a relatively tame problem. No dice, natch; after fifteen-to-twenty minutes of LP-soaking, the drains cleared, but as soon as I poured water down, we were back to sink flood. So it was a "most stubborn clog," and hey, right there on the bottle: "For the most stubborn clogs, use half the bottle." In retrospect, I probably should have been suspicious of a corporate instruction of "in case our product doesn't work, use more of it," but I wasn't entirely in the mood to disassemble pipes, so I followed directions. Another twenty minutes, and more nothing; sink still clogged. Ruh-roh.

I've never disassembled pipes before, and it's one of those things that strikes fear for all the usual visions-of-flooded-kitchen reasons. But plumber calls are ridiculously expensive, I had some time ... what the hey. I busted out the industrial sized wrench and went to town, which more of an endeavor than it might seem - parts of our sink are brand new-ish, parts are seemingly the original house pipes, so figuring out which joints to take apart and how was a trial. Details spared, but this was some high effort in tight spaces and invloved after-the-fact debriding of the pipe's screw-threads of years and years of deposits. It was, as you can guess, disgusting. But I got the whole u-pipe segment off, and cleaned/scrubbed it out, only to discover that it really was patent - the clog was lower than that.

My first clue probably should have been that when I took the u-pipe off, there was still water pouring out* from the section of pipe distal to the u-pipe. This is one-oh-one stuff, but remember, I'm a theoretical academician who doesn't deal in the realm of the real. So I thought that maybe I didn't have a most-stubborn-clog, maybe I just had one that was distal to the U and so none of the LP had actually gotten to it (gravity and density of LP only doing so much work).

* - Yeah, nor any drop to drink of black food-clouded disgustingness throughout this entire process. I had a bucket to catch it, of course, but this was not, shall we say, a sterile environment. BLEK.

So I tried the LP again, this time pouring it directly into the distal pipe which you can see up there running away from the camera toward the back wall. Twenty minutes. Again, no dice. I shined a flashlight into the pipe and could more or less tell that the pipe was clear (except for the black nastiness). So the clog was back by that joint at the wall and down into the main, big pipe running underneath the house (that pipe is obscured by the bleach bottle in the shot above). Hmmm...

Trip to Home Depot, auger bought, and I came home and spent the next two hours in Herculean task. At first I mainly just managed to pull LP back up with the auger, which was, yep, even more disgusting. I started to get worried, because at this point there was no more disassembling to be done; the joint at the wall, as far as I could tell, was completely inaccessible by human* means. So it was now or plumber. I worked and worked the auger, struggling mightily because there just wasn't a ton space and guiding the stiff wire around a Z pipe joint was tres difficult. Hopelessness started to set in...

* - Monkey means**, maybe. We're talking a very small crawl space with pipes abutting one another; I can't envision how they installed this, let alone how one would take it apart. It's like the pipes were there and they built the house around them.

** - Speaking of monkey means, is there any fruit that you can eat that will make you feel more like a monkey than a mango? The words "eager monkey" traipse through my head every time I've cut one open these past two weeks. And yes, that means no fewer than eight times. I'm gonna be a genius anyway.

And voila - the last twirl dislodged... I don't know what. "Gelatinous mass," let's call it. Dinosaur artery plaque. I suppose it could have been eggs or congealed fat or who knows what, but it broke up and came out in a thousand vomitous blobs. Problem solved! Huzzah for us!

Problem one, it turned out. Because now the pipes were disassembled. And again, I am well qualified to ponder, say, pipe functionality as a categorical heuristic or whatever, but these practical matters are typically beyond me. Still, I pressed on, reassembled the now clean joints, tightened every washer and bolt and clamp and, in short, put the now hopefully eggless Humpty Dumpty back together again. And I put the bucket back in place, and I ran the sink, slowly at first, then with more volume/sec...

And everything drained, and no liquid leaked. Huzzah.

And though it took a ridiculous amount of time - six hours, with trips to the stores and cleaning included - I avoided a plumber call with time to fix myself a Linner and get ready for practice that night. The agenda was to clean our O up - a definite most stubborn clogging - with a split squad practice* of handlers on one side of the field and cutters on the other. We started off together with the typical warm-up and a drill that involved cutting at the back of the mark and having the handler throw the disc out to space .. turns out this is a skill we lack entirely. Some really ugly, ugly throws by pretty much everybody involved served as a nice reminder that there is plenty-o-work to do.

* - This reminded me quite thoroughly of high school football and our splits of offense and defense that generated non only rivalries but a lot of bickering back and forth. One, it would be an interesting athleticism v. hands matchup if we completely separated the two kinds of players on Sprawl, though I would have to bet that the cutters would win. And two, it seems that Ultimate is similar to HS football in that relatively way more running than the other. In football, the D typically claimed to have way tougher practices than the O; I'll let you guess which group was which on Monday night...

Anyhoo, nothing terribly exciting to report other than that we did the split, and our handlers had a solid forty-five to work on communicating and generally getting on the same page. I think it helped. Afterwards we ran a modified scrimmage in which I set up additional cones that created eight yard lanes on the lateral edges of the field. In these lanes, the stall count was 5, whereas it was 10 everywhere else as normal (the idea being to train the offense by rule to keep it away from the sideline / have the offense get it away from the sideline quickly should it end up there / have the defense push it toward the sidelines). it worked pretty well, and made for some good competition. I didn't play particularly well in moments - I shanked a not-warmed-up-enough-huck, threw a perfect IO forehand to Dixon right as he cut the opposite way, and dropped a disc to end the game that I lost in the lights - but I made up for it with some others, and things did seem a little crisper than typical. So a good night for the Ballers. We've got a weekend retreat in Flag coming up, and Co Cup is a scant two weeks away now. So things are progressing nicely, if a bit haltingly - I just found out that another player will be unavailable for regionals, so it seems we'll have to adjust the roster yet again. And Ian sprained his MCL at Potlatch last weekend, so there's yet another hiccup.

No one said it would be easy. But between the two "plumbing repairs" of Monday, it was a fairly decent day...

Ugly Blog: Errata

Beck and I went through a few iterations to get the layout / design of her new blog, Cooking For Elaine, just right. Somewhere in there it became clear that The Ballad is "ugly." Comment then withdrawn, modified to "it's not what I would do." Eventually translated to "there's too much block text," then further translated to "your paragraphs are too long." Ah, I see where this is going.

In the interest of placating Beck, here's a little experiment. I have several blog posts in the works, all of which are undeveloped ideas that deserve big treatments that, really, it just seems I don't actually have the time to write. So in the interest of appealing to Beck's low-text, short paragraph aesthetic sensibilities*, here are several full posts that will never be, condensed to max-of-five-sentence paragraph form.

* - And this from a person who doesn't tweet!

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The Authenticity of The BS Report

I listen to Bill Simmons's podcasts regularly. In them, he interviews sports personalities, talks shop with various other ESPN personalities, phones his buddies to discuss the latest games, etc., all with a casual tone that gives off the impression that, aside from the occasionally bleeped swear word - this is an ESPN-ABC-Disney production, after all - the listener is experiencing what it would be like to just hang out with Bill. Given the usual gloss / subterfuge / simulacra that pervades most modern media*, the podcast feels like a last refuge, or maybe really a tech-enabled return, to authenticity: the real personality, the unfettered dialogue between these honest to earth, real people, who just happen to live high-profile lives. But then you realize they're recordings, undoubtedly edited and censored, and Simmons himself is giving near-constant indications that he is watching what he is saying due to the powers that be. So even the ostensible casual conversation requires the holding of tongues with quiet reservation, and even while e.g. listening to Seth Myers detail the behind the scenes of SNL skit-writing, the crushing clench of the postmodern spin forces me to wonder, per usual: what's crafted, and what's just crafted by casual tone so as to appear uncrafted?

* - Lame, vague term, I know. Hey, five sentences. It wasn't my idea.

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Jazz, Not Classical

Sprawl players, Hashem help them, cannot remember or successfully run plays to save their lives, yet they want and want plays with specific instructions for precisely what to do in this or that situation. It's borderline absurd, given that there's been no real indication that the plays would be followed even if people knew them, but the bigger problem is that the assumption that there is an exact thing-to-do in every given situation is fundamentally flawed. The expression we've come up for when players keep asking "what do I do when X" type questions is "Jazz Not Classical" - we've got a framework, and yes, sometimes there are definite cuts to make / notes to play, but a lot of it is creative improvisation from within the framework, following certain principles but having the freedom to adjust on the fly, in the moment. Cool metaphor, but it also uncovers a larger problem: we've got some players who don't, um, know their scales just yet. This is time number 42,376 in a teaching context where I've re-realized that my experience set does not match others, and we've got to make sure that a whole ton of fundamentals and background are in place before we can jam.

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Phish and the World Cup

When you listen to Phish jams, Trey is almost always way out front, wailing* o'er the top with incendiary melody lines on his Languedoc guitar, and it's very, very easy to fixate so much on that sound that the remainder of the band sounds like vamping. In soccer... someone has the ball. A way to experience both in a different, perhaps more enlightening light, is to do everything it takes to fixate on the whole instead - in the jam, you can aid yourself by making a concerted** effort to listen to bass and piano and the experience of the whole will just click; on the pitch, try paying attention to the shapes the defenses and offenses make rather than watching the players as individual entities. In short, feel the ball and the guitar more than observing them directly, and both art forms will breathe in a new way. I am becoming increasingly convinced that mainstream popular American sports and music taste are fixated on the former approach, locking in on the lead, and as this vantage gets its kicks from searing notes and goals, it doesn't seem very likely that low-scoring soccer or jam/jazz will overtake football or Taylor Swift anytime soon.

* - "Wailing," not "whaling," for you Mr. Miner readers out there.

** - "Concerted." I kill me.

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The Existential Bench-Press

My favorite memory of high school football, or rather my memory of the best feeling I had during my four years playing high school football, is one that occurred repeatedly - the five minute walk to my car away from the locker room at 6:30 after practice each day. That little five minute window put the maximum amount of time between me and the next time I would have to be back at the locker room, hunkering down, putting on pads and inexplicably putting myself through the nastiness of another day of physically and psychologically torturous CHS football. I bring it up because sometimes at the gym, after that last rep on the bench, or after the forty-fifth (or sixtieth or thirtieth, depending on the day) minute on the elliptical, I catch a brief whiff of that same feeling - I've put maximum time between myself and the next grueling workout. This is a weird thought to have, in particular, leading up to those last few bench presses; hard to keep moving that maximum weight for the day when your orientation is completely towards not doing it any more. All of this points to the necessity of constant renewed goal-setting lest your routine become Sisyphean, but it also points to the following section - if every action is oriented towards other goals, be they Ultimate or pleasure or health or whatever, wherein lies the "real" value?

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Zeal & Anosmia

Whence the drive to do things? Zeal for particular pursuits, like the locus of love or the origin of creative ideas, seems to be one of those mysterious rooted-in-nothing things that nonetheless explains everything. I have been kicking around the idea of a very, very loose framework of a novel entitled Anosmia in which a character goes into surgery to get his sense of smell repaired with the intention of enhancing his worldly experience only to inadvertently destroy whatever the fount of zeal is. This is clearly Smelltardian kinds of autobiographical, as I both can't smell and sometimes (like more people than will admit, I suspect) my zeal drops out - I look at the expanse and just don't have an inkling, an inherent "calling" or whathaveyou, of what to pursue. I kinda feel like the Anosmic lead has limited options in the achieve enlightenment, give up entirely or press-through-in-a-constant-state-of-frustration trichotomy, and I'm definitely leaning toward the latter. In the meantime, fear not, I dig Ultimate, music, and school and philosophy and all kinds of things - I suppose *I* can still smell a bit*, though that probably doesn't make for very interesting reading.

* - Beck would agree - ZING ME!

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The Wire Has a Fat Detective, You May Have Noticed

The Wire is, by all reports, the height of television quality, and it is for many reasons excellent - tight story lines ("too tight?" asks Beck), stellar performances, and an avoidance of expository dialog that evokes an attitude of respect for the brainspace of the viewing audience. Still, it's rife with preposterous elements - the constant eating / porn-mag reading of the fat detective, the overt greying of the stressed-out mayoral candidate's hair, the exaggerated "Omar lives by a CODE!" emphasis, the McNultian "I've cleaned up my act!" smirks - that force me to ask WHY DO THAT? I recognize my tendency to nitpick, I suppose the things that sore-thumb here are more indicative of the relative health of the rest of this excellent show, and we admittedly are only partway through season 4, so maybe the best is yet to come. But for all The Wire's composition and refined, near-Shakespearean air, there are still these cringe-worthy moments that jar the experience. So much is smartly left unsaid, why say these obvious things?

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Frustration, Aggravation Is Getting to You

I fight on a daily basis not to have my selfhood defined by frustration; I lose often. Beck called me on one of my WHY DO THAT? rants the other day regarding the healthcare provided on campus - the details are unimportant, but I was irked that they were basing so much of their thinking on a test with obviously confounding variables - and she's right, I get aggravated at these little mistakes and it dictates the remainder of the experience for me. So I can watch that and try to acc-entuate the positive. But what do you do about e.g. the intractable problem of trying to teach undergrads that are missing their second grade skills? I am meta-frustrated at how I am supposed to deal with pursuing a career that seems to involve a lot of farce on its educational side; that is all.

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The Data-Driven Life / The Reframing Capacity of Obsession

In the midst of all my calorie-counting, food diary-keeping adventures, Jenny pointed me in the direction of this article about, as it's called, "The Data-Driven Life." This little sub-post is really just a link, as it's an interesting little article. But I'm struck by the article's blase dismissal of the shift in framing that occurs when one alters one lifestyle so as to accommodate all that number-crunching. True, the effectiveness of all that data tracking is remarkable, but that tracking alters the way you experience the world, and it's unclear to me how you even begin to weigh that as a benefit v. cost - seems like you would need to, not to use the idea twice in two paragraphs, develop tracking for the tracking. I just know that I spend some non-zero amount of time each day looking at nutrition labels, and more important than the time lost is the way it has reframed my everyday experience - I don't know how to begin to evaluate whether the "health" I've gained is worth the unquantifiable alteration in my subjective experience of food and meals.

* - You could raise a similar point about blogging a life vis a vis living it. You *could.*

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Flags of Our Fathers

Requires a pic:

We have an Arizona flag hanging off the newly mounted flagpole on the front of our house. Now, some of you know what this is about: CBS Southwest is just carrying on the vexillological traditions of one iPJ, no further meaning intended, other than perhaps a generalized appreciation for our now home-state. But if you're not one of those in the know - more specifically, if you're a Phoenician passerby - you may be tempted to see this as some kind of ardent support of Arizona. And, you know, its laws. Outside of onomatopoeia, acontextual words are pretty meaningless; what about flags?

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Phew. There you go. Hope you found that interesting and/or more aesthetically pleasing. Now it's time to reorient myself to another value backing a goal worth pursuing. Until next time...

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 3: Spinach

Alright, this is getting silly, as at this point I'm just aping Beck's blog. But Beck's been throwing spinach recipes at me, trying to get something to stick, and last night* it stuck so well that I felt compelled to bake the recipe myself. It's a baked spinach cake recipe involving garlic, ricotta, and parmesan, and it is the serious good life. Seems to have turned out decently today, too, and now we have our veggie side ready for tonight. So in review, we've now got Nyet baking and baking spinach at that. Apocalypse This Afternoon. I also threw the leftover spinach from the bag in my lunchtime egg casserole thing, so fear that, too. Wowsers. Strange days are stranger.

* - Our July 4th festivities were off the hook, despite involving zero hot dogs, fajitas or fireworks (well, that we shot off; Sparkle still got scared). We started the day off with a trip to do the NYT XWord at Lola's over dreamy coffees and blueberry muffins. Came home to bake / cook / watch the Cubs get their collective face rearranged (they lost 14-3 to the Reds, giving up seven homeruns, including three to the Reds #8 hitter, in the process. Not the year). After a brief emergency run to the grocery store (Beck had purchased a bottle of Kahlua and taken it out of the store without having its security device removed; I took it back to get said device removed as Beck could not crack it at home. Given that Beck set off an alarm and walked out without a problem, and I set off an alarm and got a seventeen year old cashier to remove it for me without a receipt, Fry's is not exactly batting 1.000 with its security), Beck finished up cooking and we had, again as noted, as fantastic dinner of a variety of sliders, corn, broccolini, said spinach cakes, and ridiculous mini-pie / parfait desserts. Membership has its privileges. We capped the evening off with a couple of Wire episodes. Good day off...

Anyhoo... just wrapped up the mini summer session of grading papers, and now I'm officially onto my RA-ship. More about that later - I really just wanted to post some pics of my afternoon labor's product. Enjoy!

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 2: The F & V List

"Spinach (I could be convinced to try)." Wait... what? I wrote that?

Beck picked up on this big time the other day, and here we are knee-deep in Spinach Weekend 2010. This is a big step for us; the last time Beck put spinach in my food, it was the centerpiece of a bold-faced lie. She had cooked lasagna, and I had requested "just cheese" or somesuch, only what I got was laced with leafy green-ness. When I asked, "what's that?," I got "basil" as an answer from Ye Olde Ferrous Fiste. Only it turned out I was not a complete moron (or "tastetard," as Ali would undoubtedly have put it), and I could tell that wasn't basil. Such a breech of trust, such a sly move! Beck vowed never to do such a thing to me again, but to this day I wonder - why does this cheese taste funny? And why does my jello not jiggle properly? Is there spinach in there? I fear the devil's leaf!

Until now, of course, when I'm trying to be open-minded and eat new things. I've always prided myself, despite my narrow culinary upbringing, on being willing to try anything at least once, and it seems now that I'm willing to try, try again. The [blank] nutritionist who helped me not at all the other day criticized my diet for not having enough fruits and vegetables, and while this strictly speaking is not true (I eat broccoli and other veggies regularly, and I eat e.g. strawberries, pineapples and apples with the best of them) AND it strictly speaking does not really serve as its own justification as a recommendation (i.e., if I get my vitamins / minerals / fibers elsewhere, then why is it so important to eat fruits? There may be an answer, but "because fruits are good for you" is not it), I thought, sure, I could try a wider variety of fruits and veggies, and besides, maybe there's something out there that I'm just plain missing. So to set out on learning more about fruits and veggies I might like, I compiled a list of F & V that I know I like, know I hate, and am unsure about. The latter category has since been subdivided into "unsure" and "meh" about, but the general idea is the same. Anyways, I e-mailed it to my personal dietician Beck, and she nearly exploded at the chance to forcefeed me spinach of several varieties. And I have to admit, prepared properly, it seems to have jumped from the DO-NOT-WANT taxon to the meh taxon. Which I think is all Beck was hoping for. Actually, you can read all about her delight at her blog, though you'll note her fiendish past is duly censored.

So yeah, good eating times - regarding spinach in particular, we had garlic-drenched spinach the other night and are trying creamed spinach tonight. But I'm getting into all kinds of different things, and it's good to keep track. This should, ftr, shock you. Here's the list, and for your purposes, let me know if there's something I've neglected, something I just have to try in a certain style, or if you feel the need to rush to the defense of onions or something, go right ahead. In the meantime, I'll continue to eat all kinds of craziness and repeatedly stun myself. Check back for updates. Too exciting. Who is this Nyet guy?

Nyet's Official Fruit & Veggie List, 7.3.2010

Approved Fruits:

Apples, Apricots, Cherries, Dates, Figs, Grapes, Kiwi, Lemons, Limes, Mangoes, Nectarines, Pineapple, Plantains, Plums, Strawberries

Meh Fruits:

Blackberries, Blueberries, Cantaloupe, Honeydew, Peaches

Jury Still Out Fruits:

Acai, Avocado (dubious), Berries (Assorted - Currant, Gooseberry, Honeysuckle, Huckleberry, Loganberry, Mulberry, Salmonberry, Wolfberry), Clementines, Coconut, Cranberry, Grapefruit, Guava, Kumquat, Mandarins, Papaya, Passion Fruit, Pomegranate, Raspberries, Rhubarb, Tangerines

Disapproved Fruits:

Bananas (allergy), Oranges (allergy), Pears, Watermelon (allergy)

Approved Veggies:

Asparagus, Broccoli, Broccolini, Carrots, Cauliflower, Corn, Garlic, Green Beans, Jicama, Peas, Potato, Squash, Sweet Potato

Meh Veggies:

Spinach

Jury Still Out Veggies:

Beets, Black-Eyed Peas (dubious), Bok Choy, Chick Pea, Chicory, Parsnip, Radish, Rutabaga, Soybean

Disapproved Veggies:

Broccoli Rabe, Brussels Sprout, Cabbage, Celery, Collard Greens, Kale, Leek, Lettuce, Lima Bean (I almost need a separate list of hatred for this one), Okra, Onion, Peppers (Bell & Otherwise), Tomato, Zucchini

This is Not a Fun Blog, Vol. 1: Breakfast Bars

When I was younger, there existed what can only be described as the best mass-produced, highly processed, highly caloric and in no way a nutritious part of your daily breakfast commodity: the Carnation Instant Breakfast Bar. In theory, you ate this widget with a glass of milk, and it replaced your normal breakfast; in practice, this was the closest I could get to an honest-to-goodness candy bar*, and it served as lunch add-on, afternoon snack, secret Nyet when-the-parents-weren't-counting double** dip indulgence, and general staple of my growth spurts. I remember them beyond fondly; they were, in short, friggin' delicious and one of my all-time favorite foods. And maybe they had some vitamins or were generally Niacin enriched, but man, they were fatty, salty and drenched in chocolate; there's no way they were just a Rice Krispies substitute. Here's a picture of a retro mid-seventies version of the box (I don't remember that particular packaging) that gives you the general idea: granola, chocolate chips, peanut butter - the illusion of healthiness - dipped in milk chocolate.

* - This has come up a fair bit lately, partly in response to my recent changes in eating habits - once upon a time, my parents were semi-militant about "good foods." Candy bars, and sugary items in general, were verboten. We weren't allowed to have sweet cereals (like Frosted Flakes, Trix, etc.), we could only drink half a can of diet soda per day, breakfast bars were limited to one per day, we generally had peas or another veggie with meals, and bedtime snacks were, famously, small portions of green jello. All of these restrictions, though, didn't exactly form part of a coherent system of hippie nutrition. For example, I couldn't have sweet cereal, but I could eat three heaping bowls of Cheerios every morning with corresponding heaping spoonfuls of sugar. When we went out to Luby's after church, I got more food than I can now envision, including two portions of "breaded beef cutlet" (which is a bizarre euphemism for chicken-fried steak). When my dad was in charge of meals - Monday nights, when my mom was at Jazzercise - we strictly ate pizza***, and strictly pepperoni pizza at that. There are numerous other examples, but perhaps more telling is that the strictest rules were only in place until I was about seven or eight (and Aaron was about four or five), and they then they died off... and how. We drank sodas left and right, ate party pizzas with reckless abandon, and had lunches that featured the infamous "Something Sandwich" - peanut butter, butter, and sugar - two to three times per week. We were slowly allowed to eat sugar cereals on the weekend which at some point morphed into every day - my brother's consumption of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is legendary - and three to four scoop nightly ice cream snacks became the rule. All of this speaks to two things - one, we were apparently psychotically active kids, and this had to be twelve thousand daily calories. Two, my parents were very, very busy and definitely lived the double professional career life. They tried hard to feed us right and all of that, but the "it's hard to come home and cook" rumors were certainly true; they just didn't have time, and the rules got lax accordingly. You can imagine what happened in high school when my crazy athletic schedule was added to the dual-professional mix, and *then* I was actively instructed to eat so as to gain weight - we were hitting up Wendy's on the way to baseball games, choking down real sodas and gigantor gatorades every day, Reece's Peanut Butter Cup four packs as a post-workout pick-me-up... yikes. It's kinda insane looking back on it, and very telling that I more or less instantly gained twenty pounds - the same twenty pounds coaches had long wanted me to gain - the second I stopped playing high school sports; those eating habits and that appetite were eighteen years-ingrained by that point. Anyhoo, all of this is not to question parenting techniques or anything, just to show that even with smart, informed parents with the best of intentions starting off, it's tough to raise American kids with good eating habits. Though my dad's aversion to fish and the general Midwestern lack of culinary imagination were probably culpable components in my boring preference development, too.

** - Or triple, or quadruple, sextuple, octuple... seriously, my parents had to be aware that I eating Breakfast Bars by the handful. I definitely ate entire boxes in a sitting; they were my binge food for sure. Again, I was a crazy-active kid, so the calories were probably needed, but no one ever said "hey, Nyet, I just bought six boxes of Breakfast Bars yesterday and we're down to one left; what gives?" So, um, thanks? I can't pretend that y'all didn't know.

*** - This Monday night pizza tradition is still going strong in the Nyetfam; who knew that Jane Fonda would continue to have such influence into the 2010s? This also sparked two other trends - one, my dad famously game my brother and me one piece of pizza per year of our ages. The math equations involved figuring out exactly how much skinnier each pizza slice got as we aged are astounding, but if you press him, you can get my dad to admit that he was essentially giving us the exact same amount of food as he made sure that he got his usual share. Two, aside from grilling and such, pizza was pretty much my dad's go to meal. On one occasion, when he and my mom were going out for dinner and time was limited - the babysitter was en route or something - my dad didn't have time for pizza and so cooked us hot dogs and lima beans smothered in Cheese Whiz. And yes, that would be my very last choice for pre-execution meal. I am gagging just thinking about it. For shame.

As you can probably deduce from the use of the past tense, Carnation Breakfast Bars were discontinued at some point in the late '80s / early '90s. And a sad gasp crossed the land. There were similar products here and there - Quaker had chocolate-coated granola bars, and a close, too-sweet facsimile called a Kudos bar (really, the savory aspect of the BB was the key) made some appearances in our house - but nothing could replace that preposterously tasty concoction. I have no idea why it was discontinued, and I wasn't paying close enough attention at the time to notice - they were just gone. We all moved on, I suppose - actually, probably to the aforementioned Reece's Peanut Butter Cups - but recently, again probably on reflection of my changing eating habits and pondering what caused me to develop the restricted tastes I until very recently have always had, I caught myself looking through the Carnation instant Breakfast Shakes and remembrancing things past.

And lo: that big introduction is just to point out that at some point this week I developed a hankering. A looming SLUG-free Saturday gave me an opportunity to do some cooking - WHAT??!?!?, I know - so I hit up the interwebs, found a loose-copy recipe, and set out to make some homemade Breakfast Bars. Just think of this as "Cooking for James." Here's my best Beck-post imitation:

Menu:

Faux-nation Instant Breakfast Bars

Nyet's Turkey-Eggwhite-Corn-and-Broccoli Casserole

Faux-nation Instant Breakfast Bars

Serves 8-16 (or one nine-year old Nyet)

1 Cup Spanish Peanuts (Peeled and Crushed to a near powder)

1 Cup Rolled Toasted Oats

1 Cup Rice Krispies

½ Cup Miniature chocolate chips

1/3 Cup Light Karo Syrup

8 oz. Milk Chocolate

1.
Combine all dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Mix in Karo Syrup until mixture clumps together.

2. Line a small pan with wax paper and PACK the mixture FIRMLY into pan.

3. Melt the milk chocolate and spread over top of mixture and refrigerate until firm (at least one hour).

Notes:

1. Spanish peanuts, as far as I can tell, means standard issue bagged peanuts. Easy enough. I went to town with a pestle and mortar, and it didn't even cost me a spell point:

2. No need to find rolled oats. But you can certainly toast your whole grain Quaker Oats easily enough - 10 minutes at 350 in the oven or toaster oven gets 'er done nicely.

3. Beck suggested honey in place of the corn syrup - they're calorically equivalent, so it really depends if you want a touch of honey or a touch of vanilla (which the corm syrup has). They're both sufficiently sticky.

4. The original recipe called for 36 (!!!) ounces of milk chocolate which is absolutely preposterous. Eight ounces was perfect, though you'll note that this recipe merely tops the filling whereas in the real deal the bars are completely coated. I suppose advanced cooking would have you dip the filling in chocolate, but that seems hella messy, and this gets the job done. And now, gloriously melt-y chocolate chips:

As long as I'm at it, more proof that I actually threw these together from scratch:

And now, the full on artistic-photography treatment of the finished product, courtesy of the Beck:

Review: Unsurprisingly, the home version falls short of the original - the taste isn't really all that close, and this has a much more trail-mix granola that just happens to have a chocolate coating feel. (The topping actually reminds me of Grandma's three layered cookies, fwiw). But it's very easy to make, and it does generally have that savory / chocolatey combo. I will employ my better half to se if we can spice it up to better mimic my memories, but this is a grade B recipe that gets it done for the time being.

It, as I suspect is the case for the original, is not good for you. The whole dish is 2,840 calories with 137 grams of fat, 367 g of carbohydrates, 58 grams of protein and a scant 16 grams of fiber. The bulk of those carbs and fat are coming from the chocolate, which makes it further hilarious that the original called for 4.5 times at much milk chocolate. Dios mio! Anyways, I split the dish into 16ths, making each square 180 calories. It would make a fantastic dense caloric Ultimate snack if not for the chocolate - particularly here in Sunny Azz, chocolate Ulty snacks get gooey fast. Anyways, a good little dish to be eaten in moderation, says a much older, much wider Nyet to his childhood self.

As an added bonus, this is what I had for lunch today:

Nyet's Turkey-Eggwhite-Corn-and-Broccoli Casserole

1/4th pound of lean ground turkey

7 egg whites

1 oz. soft goat cheese

1 cup raw broccoli crowns

1/4 cup skim milk

1 large ear sweet corn

Minimal Olive oil

Salt, Pepper

Crushed Red Pepper

Penzey's Adobo and Pizza Spices

1. Travel back in time and brown the turkey. No, really, keep a tub of ground, browned turkey in your fridge for a fast protein additive to any meal. It's a solid move.

2. Lightly baste the corn in olive oil and fry on med high heat, 3 minutes per "side.". Do not spray the pan with cooking spray and then put the heat on high, lest you spend an hour of your life later scrubbing burnt synthetic olive oil off of said pan with steel wool and industrial strength cleaner. Cut the corn off the cob in sheets into a bowl (if you do this on a plate, you will find corn kernels all over your counter).

3. Steam the broccoli crowns by sprinkling them with water, putting them in a Gladware dish and cooking them in the microwave for two minutes. I am so high class.

4. Mix the turkey, egg whites, cheese, milk, corn and broccoli in a bowl. Add the spices to taste.

5. Pour mixture into the frying pan and pretend you are scrambling eggs. Be sure to take off the heat before the egg part is "done," as you don't want to overcook it.

6. Pour cooked food into a big bowl and enjoy thy gruel.

Review: This is a very protein-rich, ~500 calorie meal. It's pretty voluminous, and you could certainly cut down on the corn or eggs if it's too filling. Spicing it well is key, and if you wanted to add hot sauce or ketchup or something, that would be a good call, too. But as is, it's a very workmanlike, easy-to-prepare meal.

Alright, that's my best Beck imitation. Back to the whining...

Response for Joanne Re: Carbs

Joanne recently commented on my nutritionist rant:

joanneaspinall said...

I have a stupid question out of ignorance: are all carbs equal? You said you toss on cereal and sorbet to add carbs at the end of the day. Is there a difference between sugary carbs (sorbet) and other carbs (pasta)? I've always heard to eat pasta the night before a tourney, but no one has ever said sorbet would also work. I partly ask because we (Keith and I both grew up with Italian mothers) probably eat way too much pasta.

Here's a long-winded response sans citation that broke the 4096 comment character limit. Fwiw:

I wouldn't call that a stupid question at all, and it's actually somewhat enlightening that the nutritionist herself failed to differentiate. The short answer is no, not all carbs are equal - among other things, soluble and insoluble fibers are carbs (and get counted as such in nutrition info), but you get no calories from fiber by definition. So any notion that increasing fiber alone would help you with energy is nutty on face. The distinction that you're making is the classic "simple vs. complex" (mono- or disaccharides vs. polysaccharides), and true enough, these carbs aren't the same. But the nutritionist recommended "fruit juices" as a carb supplement, and those are mainly fructose, a simple sugar. So it's a solid question regarding carbo-loading and pasta - allow me to provide a long-winded explanation.

This is one of those instances where "it depends what you mean by healthy." You can read all of this stuff in reputable online sources, but here's a quick Nyet-guide:

The story you usually get is that whole grains with complex carbohydrates are just "better for you." This is because whole grains tend to:

1. Have more fiber

2. Have more nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.)

3. Get absorbed by the body more slowly

4. Result in lower and less "dramatic" spikes in insulin.

For 1 and 2, if you need more fiber / nutrients, then yes, eating the complex will be better. This is largely an efficiency concern - if I'm going to eat, say, 2000 calories of carbs, and my choices are to eat them with or without the nutrients/fiber, all things being equal, I should eat them with the nutrients/fiber. You can also eat your 2000 calories in simple sugars and take supplements, but this is less efficient - you just have to do more eating/consuming - and the bioavailability of the nutrients when eaten this way can be limited (e.g., you'll just pee out a good portion of super-multivitamins).

For 3 and 4, it's really an issue of satiety. Sodas (or even fruit juice, really) will give you a rush and then make you crash, needing more sugar, and this is pretty tightly coupled to your insulin reaction. So you're hungrier again sooner. For non-athletic health purposes, you want low insulin reactions largely just so that you won't want to eat too soon - frequent hunger = frequent eating = more overall calories. And if you take in more calories than you consume of any form, you'll store a limited amount of that energy as glycogen (in the liver and muscles) , but then the rest will be converted to fat.

This last point, the inter-convertibility of all of these energy sources by your body's metabolism, is the point that gets lost. When the concern in energy, it's important to remember that these biochemicals are all being changed into one another, so the initial source is not necessarily as dramatically important. Polysaccharides take longer to digest because they have to be broken down to glucose or other mono- / di-saccharides to be absorbed into the bloodstream and generally used as a fuel. So when you eat complex carbohydrates, you have to break them into simple ones before you can use them. The classic way to teach yourself this is to chew on a saltine for a long time - it's starchy, but there are enzymes at work in your mouth that will break those starches down to monosaccharides, so eventually (if you chew long enough), it will start to taste sweet. It'll also dry out your mouth; have fun!

Anyways, simple sugars, for the general non-athletic population, are "bad" because they don't have as many nutrients (hence "empty" calories) , they tend to make you eat more calories (because you're hungrier more often), and when you eat too many of them they'll be converted to fat. So dieticians recommend complex carbs accordingly. Another issue that I'll leave out here is the processing of complex carbs - remember, the "healthiness" isn't strictly from the carbs themselves but from the associated fiber/nutrients, so if you have starchy foods that have been overly-processed, you're possibly not really getting benefits even though you are strictly speaking eating complex carbs. I'm thinking McDonald's french fries here, which are starches no doubt, but have been stripped of anything good and holy that was originally in the potatoes.

But as a carbo-loading athlete, you're generally not worried about nutrients / fiber in your "extra" carb calories as you'll be getting those in your regular diet. And eating things that fill you up too quickly or make you tend to not want to eat a lot can actually interfere with you getting enough calories - and really, eating a ton of extra fiber with your extra carb calories can mess with your digestive system; less than ideal for an endurance athletic event. So "health" in this case isn't focused on the same issue - here, it's about what will maximize my glycogen stores in my liver and my muscles to help fuel me throughout the following day. And anything you eat will eventually be converted to glucose and replenish those glycogen stores, but 1, carbs will do it more efficiently, and 2, complex or simple carbs will do the trick roughly the same.

Now, that's not to say you should just drink coke the night before a tournament - that will give you bad insulin spikes and goof you up with acute sugar rushes. You still want to eat stuff with relatively low glycemic indices like pasta. But fruits - even mango tangerine sorbet - and starchy cereals - e.g., cheerios instead of fruity pebbles - won't give you those insulin spikes because they actually consist of a fair mix of complex and simple sugars. So, for the purposes of replenishing glycogen stores, which is what health means here, the difference between simple and complex carbs is not as important. And oftentimes, it's just faster to eat a lot of cereal than to eat pasta.

That's probably enough. There's lots of stuff out there about the best ways to carbo-load. Its benefits are probably exaggerated for non-pure endurance sports like Ultimate - you can manage your glycogen stores throughout a tourney just by eating throughout the day (which you can't do as easily during a marathon). Sure, it's better to start at max capacity, so eating the night before and morning of are good ideas, but eating a lot of pasta the night before and munching on smart start throughout the day at a tourney are not going to be all that different.

Again, there are a lot more scientific-y things to read out there. And I would give myself an F on this paper for not citing any of my evidence. But this is the way I think about it, which again, makes the nutritionist's recommendation to "increase my carbs" just seem wacky - I'm eating a ton of them already, certainly more than I need to replenish my glycogen stores in both muscle and liver on a daily basis. UGH!

Hope that helps!