Tuesday, 5 February 2013

By on February 5th, 2013 in Barbara, news, science kits

09:30 – Barbara’s mom and dad are doing about the same. Instead of heading directly over to her parents’ apartment after work today, Barbara’s going to go to the gym and then come home for dinner before heading over to dad-sit.

I filled a few hundred bottles yesterday, using the bottle-top dispenser. That’s basically a pump that sits on top of a reservoir bottle. The body of the pump has a slider that’s calibrated from 2.5 mL to 30 mL in 0.5 mL increments. To fill a bottle, you just place the mouth of the bottle over the dispenser tip, slide the pump body all the way up and then press it all the way down. It takes about five seconds to fill a 15 mL bottle and a bit longer for a 30 mL. The reservoir bottle is one liter (the largest they had), which is enough for 60+ 15 mL bottles or 30+ 30 mL bottles.

I’m doing batches of 60 or 90 bottles at a time, so I sometimes need to refill the reservoir with the same solution during a run. That takes 30 seconds or so. Cleanup during a changeover to a new chemical is faster than I feared it might be. I just rinse the reservoir bottle and dispenser under running tap water, put the supply tube into a beaker of tap water and pump 10 or 12 passes of tap water through the dispenser, and then repeat with a couple passes of distilled water.

The batch of bottles we’re currently working on is sufficient for 60 more chemistry kits and 30 more biology kits. After we finish this pass, I think I’m going to bump that up to batches of 120 chemistry kits and 60 biology kits. I’m also going to bump up the size of the chemical solutions we make up. Right now, I’m doing one liter at a time of the solutions that go into 15 mL bottles and two liters of the solutions that go into 30 mL bottles. That’s sufficient for 60+ sets of each. Other than solutions with relatively limited shelf lives, after this batch I’m going to start making up four liters at a time of the solutions for 15 mL bottles and eight liters of the solutions for 30 mL bottles, which is sufficient for 250 sets of each.


10:49 – I see that the Catholic hospital in Colorado that had made the unusual argument that a fetus is not a person has now backtracked and is admitting that a fetus is a person under Catholic doctrine. They were being sued for the wrongful death of a pregnant woman and her twin fetuses and had claimed that the two fetuses were not people under Colorado law. Now they’re saying that they were “morally wrong” to claim the fetuses were not people, which presumably means they plan to continue arguing that in the eyes of the law there is only one wrongful death at issue.

And some articles are now claiming that that image of Obama shooting skeet is a fake. Fake or not, it really doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone really believes that Obama is a shooter.

From the image, if he’s shooting skeet it would appear that he’s shooting a sitting clay. (The shotgun is in full recoil, which even with the ported barrel and light skeet loads means it must have been about level when he pulled the trigger.) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that this image is of Obama shooting at skeet, because I doubt he’s ever actually hit one. If indeed this isn’t the only round Obama has ever fired in his life.

So I have a challenge for Mr. Obama. As Barbara, Paul, and Mary can attest, I pretty much suck at shooting clays, at least with a shotgun, so if Obama is actually a skeet shooter my challenge should be trivially easy for him to win. The deal is, Obama gets his shotgun and 25 rounds of skeet shells. He shoots a round and we total how many he breaks. Then I get my Colt Combat Commander and 25 rounds of hardball. I shoot a round and we total how many I break. If Obama breaks more than I do, he gets to claim to be a shooter. What could be fairer than that?

I should say that I actually tried shooting clays with my .45 back 35 years ago or so. I used a box of 50 rounds and IIRC broke half a dozen clays, for a success rate of 12%. Some of the guys I was shooting with did better than that, but they were using higher-velocity rounds.


12:56 – I just got off the phone with PayPal support. I was starting to get concerned about a couple of things. First, the from: line of the payment-received emails that PayPay sends me had changed. Until the end of January or thereabouts, they were in the form:

“jdoe@johndoe.com” <jdoe@johndoe.com>

For the last several days, they’ve been in the form:

John Doe via PayPal <member@paypal.com>

My second concern was a change in withdrawals. I regularly sweep our PayPal balance into our corporate bank account, at least daily and sometimes two or three times a day. Until now, as soon as I did a transfer I’d get an email immediately from PayPal noting the details of the transfer. For the last few days, I haven’t been getting those confirmation emails, so I began to wonder if I’d been hacked.

As it turns out, there’s no problem. Mallory at PayPal support said they’d changed the way they format the from: line on payment-received emails to cut down on fraud attempts. And she said not to worry about the lack of confirmation emails for transfers from PayPal to our bank account. Apparently, they’ve been having some kind of issue getting those emails sent.

56 Comments and discussion on "Tuesday, 5 February 2013"

  1. bgrigg says:

    I have visions of Arnold Shwarzenegger. “I’ll pump you up!”

  2. OFD says:

    http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/01/green-mountain-dems-reject-military-style-gun-ban/

    Common sense continues to prevail up here, even from Dems and the usual suspects.

    Minus 8 this morning on the Lake. Snow flurries later, and again tomorrow night, with more icy cold, and then there is chatter from the weather liars about a bigger snowfall coming Friday or thereabouts. If so, great! We’ve only had one genuine snowstorm this winter so fah. OFD and Mrs. OFD wanna get out and do some x-c skiing here.

  3. OFD says:

    That O’Bummer image has of course gone viral on the net and been photo-shopped six ways from Sunday. It really looks like a green-screen setup but what do I know.

    He’s a regular shooter like I’m a soprano opera singer transvestite pygmy.

  4. Dave B. says:

    I’m surprised you aren’t selling more of the Forensic Science kits. With the popularity of all the CSI shows, I thought there would be more of a demand for the Forensic Science book and kit. I suppose this means your target audience is mostly home schooling parents looking to educate their kids.

    I thought there would be more people like me out there who are interested in finding out more about Forensic Science. Unfortunately I’m a little busy with other stuff right now to pick up a microscope and a Forensic Science Kit. I still need to replace the door knob on the basement door with a locking one, which is the first step in setting up a basement lab.

  5. ech says:

    I still need to replace the door knob on the basement door with a locking one, which is the first step in setting up a basement lab.

    Then you need to recruit a lab assistant, either a hunchback named Igor or a pretty young woman.

  6. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    The Forensic Science kits are selling reasonably well, especially since, as you point out, they’re not part of most homeschool curricula. Off the top of my head, I’d guess we sell chemistry:biology:forensics in the ratio of about 6:3:1. So far this year, we’ve sold seven forensic science kits.

  7. Lynn McGuire says:

    Good to hear that Barbara’s Dad is doing well (for a 90+ year old guy). Hopefully they are enjoying each others company (from previous joint expeditions it sounds like it).

    OK, this is a new definition of nerd. Using google maps to explore the world:
    http://xkcd.com/1169/

  8. Lynn McGuire says:

    I see that the Catholic hospital in Colorado that had made the unusual argument that a fetus is not a person has now backtracked and is admitting that a fetus is a person under Catholic doctrine.

    We are studying the early Christians in Sunday school right now. My Sunday school teacher, one of the elders in my church, brought up the Didache. This is the first time that I have ever heard of the Didache. The Didache is a very controversial document that was probably written around 50 AD. It is kind of a pamphlet on how to be a Christian and may have been written by the Apostles.
    http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/didache.html

    Anyway, the thing that surprised me was “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born”. Abortion is not mentioned in the Bible (OT or NT) as far as I know. I was very surprised to see abortion mentioned in a early church document as abortion used to be very difficult.

  9. paul jones says:

    I doubt you or many of your readers would consider Obama a shooter. But by those definitions, I’m not a shooter, either (well, come to it, that is probably pretty accurate). I’m not sure I’d beat you at your challenge. Also, as you’ll recall from our trips around the range, there are targets that mimic “rabbits” – clays that are thrown hugging the ground. He could be firing at one of those. (Actually, have we ever done the golf course bit at the range? I did that with some students a few years back but I can’t remember now if you and Barbara have joined us.

    But it’s all just theater; whether the man is a shooter or not is irrelevant as to what policies should be pursued.

  10. OFD says:

    There are Protestant interpretations of how abortion is or is not treated in Biblical texts; here is the Roman Catholic version:

    http://www.priestsforlife.org/brochures/thebible.html

    And here is the Roman Catholic reading of the Didache:

    http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04779a.htm

    As some here may know, the RC Church has not been real huge on reading and analyzing Scripture over the centuries and although the hierarchy pays it lip service these days, I have seen little change to that effect since I converted in 1996. My former church, Episcopalian/Anglican often referred to its ‘three-legged stool’ of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, which I appreciate/d. And when I say the Church has not been big on it, I mean for its regular parishioners; we have a tradition as old as the Church of Biblical scholarship, translation, analysis, etc., and this is still true, but it’s academics and intellectuals mostly.

    Then, of course, some Christian denominations really are huge on Scripture, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

  11. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Paul is being modest. He really is a natural shooter, both with a shotgun and a pistol. I was very surprised how well he did on the skeet range his first time out. By the percentage of clays he busted, any regular skeet shooter who was watching would probably have assumed that Paul was a regular skeet shooter who hadn’t been out in a while. No one would have guessed that he was a complete beginner.

    Same deal the first time we went to the pistol range. If I didn’t know that was the first time Paul had ever shot a pistol, I would have said that Paul was about average for a regular shooter. His wife, Mary, shot about how I’d expect for a novice pistol shooter. She had trouble keeping it on the paper out at 50 feet, and wasn’t putting many in the black even at 25 feet. I could just see her starting a slow burn. Mary absolutely hates to suck at anything. She eventually stomped out and retired to the sitting area. I followed her out and found her nearly in tears, not just because she was shooting poorly but because her novice husband was shooting so well. I told her that I’d coached a lot of beginning pistol shooters and that she was doing okay for her experience level, but that Paul was probably the best natural pistol shooter I’d ever seen.

    Yeah, Paul, if we went out on the skeet range, I might beat you with my pistol. I say might. And that’s only if you’re also shooting skeet with a pistol.

  12. OFD says:

    I love this board; science kit sales, skeet shooting with footballs and abortion inside of twenty minutes.

  13. Ray Thompson says:

    And now this:

    The largest prime number has been discovered — and it’s 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.

    The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper.

    Mallory at PayPal support said they’d changed the way they format the from: line on payment-received emails to cut down on fraud attempts

    We send large quantities of emails to members of the organization. I have had to jump through hoops to get some emails to go through. I have to modify the header to get past some spam filters. Including the persons name in the TO field became a necessity I guess under the theory that if you know the persons name then you do have some mailing relationship.

    I also battle with spammers on incoming email daily. It is a constant battle. I subscribe to a service within the firewall that will block known spammers. The mail server will also validate the emails and weight them on spam possibilities. Some just get marked and processed, others are just flat out dropped. I also maintain my own blacklist of sites to block. Then I have some rules defined in the mail processor that based on subject lines trash the email.

    National kill a spammer day, held once a week, would be an invite that I would gladly attend.

    With the popularity of all the CSI shows, I thought there would be more of a demand for the Forensic Science book and kit

    Ah, you mean the shows that take reflection on car of a license plate as seen through a crappy video camera, enhance the image and read the expiration date on the license plate. Or they can search an entire barbershop and find one hair of significance. Of course all the labs have the latest and greatest technology including the ability to immediately pull cell phone records for the last year of a cell phone that just got run over by a train.

    Yeh, send me one of those kits.

  14. OFD says:

    “National kill a spammer day, held once a week, would be an invite that I would gladly attend.”

    Ditto.

    And this reminds me of a remark by an IT security colleague a few years ago who worked for a large bank, and someone had been trying their damndest to hack into there and make his life miserable. He said if he ever caught this guy, he would beat him to death with a hammer and laugh while he screamed.

    My gmail has always pretty routinely weeded out the spam, I’d say about 98%, easy. But we get it on our cell phones and landline despite registering the numbers with the Do Not Call org.

  15. ech says:

    My favorite caption that was added to the picture of the President shooting. “Be vewy, vewy qwiet. I’m hunting Repubwicans.”

  16. Lynn McGuire says:

    I also battle with spammers on incoming email daily. It is a constant battle. I subscribe to a service within the firewall that will block known spammers. The mail server will also validate the emails and weight them on spam possibilities. Some just get marked and processed, others are just flat out dropped. I also maintain my own blacklist of sites to block. Then I have some rules defined in the mail processor that based on subject lines trash the email.

    I used to do this. Then I moved my winsim.com domain MX record to google apps. Best zero dollars that I ever spent. We were getting 10,000 joe job bounce backs some days, at least once per week. All that and our spam went to zero. Fricking amazing. Highly, highly, highly recommended. http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/

    If you cannot move your domain MX record to google apps then they use to work over your inbox using their Postini ( http://www.google.com/postini/ ) email service. Looks like they are transitioning that to google apps now.

    I got in on the free days for google apps and am still grandfathered in. For some reason they are less than bright about payment because I would PAY for this awesome service. The going rate is 50 $/email address/year. But the Irish in me wont let me pay until they force me too. All this and you get the award winning gmail interface for free (sounds like ginzu knife commercial!). The rest of google apps is OK, nothing to write home about.

    If I were running a web service, I would be quaking in my boots. The big boys (google, microsoft, apple, etc) are moving in for very fair amounts. I currently pay $300/month for my dedicated web server and would love to pay $20/month for a server that automatically scales itself with demand or DNS attacks (been there done that with the Iranians).

  17. Miles_Teg says:

    Ray wrote:

    “The largest prime number has been discovered — and it’s 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.”

    Sorry to be a pedant, but there is no largest prime number. This may well be the largest prime currently known, but there are an infinite number of primes, hence no highest prime number.

  18. OFD says:

    Oh my.

    I am so out of my depth on this one.

    I feel….inadequate.

    weak.

    a pipsqueak among giants…

    But knowing what I know, and boy is it vast, of things infinite, I tend to agree with Our Boy in Oz, or one of our our boyz in Oz anyway. Infinite number of primes….

    I will consult the Summa accordingly….

  19. OFD says:

    Here is more on the viral shot of O’Bummer allegedly shooting a shotgun…more pics even I hadn’t seen yet:

    http://www.guns.com/2013/02/04/the-white-house-warns-against-photoshopping-obama-but-the-internet-cant-help-itself-17-photos/

    Oh no, we sure won’t photoshop it, dude, no, no, nothing like that, not to worry…

  20. Miles_Teg says:

    Ah, the miscarriage in Colorado case.

    I think the guy who is suing the hospital just wants to make someone – anyone – pay for his wife’s death. The trial court knocked him back as did an appeal court in Colorado. His wife was over 400 pounds – geez, I’m sure that’s more than any two of us combined. When she felt sick she didn’t call 911 as far as I’m aware, but called her husband, who came home from work to take her there. Any attempt to save her “babies” may have jeopardized an attempt to save her life.

    Anyway, this is all just ambulance chasing. The Catholic church is being suckered here – and they know it. The woman involved was a heart attack/stroke waiting to happen. We all know that the RC church would like the law to say that life begins at conception, but the courts haven’t ruled that way so the RCs are perfectly entitled to use the law as it stands. Just proved how soft in the head they are.

    Dave, I assume you’re aware that most conceptuses don’t ever get born. The wastage is enormous, so if a one day old fertilized egg is human that means it goes to heaven (or hell, if you’re a consistent Calvinist/Augustinian). That means that there’ll be trillions of people in heaven (or hell) who were never born, and have no history.

  21. Miles_Teg says:

    OFD wrote:

    “I’m a soprano opera singer transvestite pygmy.”

    I don’t buy the pygmy part.

  22. Miles_Teg says:

    OFD wrote:

    “But knowing what I know, and boy is it vast, of things infinite, I tend to agree with Our Boy in Oz, or one of our our boyz in Oz anyway. Infinite number of primes….

    I will consult the Summa accordingly….”

    I’m sure Tom Aquinas knew this result, didn’t he put it in the Summa?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_theorem

  23. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    But knowing what I know, and boy is it vast, of things infinite, I tend to agree with Our Boy in Oz, or one of our our boyz in Oz anyway. Infinite number of primes….

    Or an aleph null number of primes anyway…

  24. OFD says:

    “…His wife was over 400 pounds – geez, I’m sure that’s more than any two of us combined.”

    Nope.

    “…if you’re a consistent Calvinist/Augustinian…”

    Nope.

    “I don’t buy the pygmy part.”

    I wouldn’t buy the soprano part, either, if I was you.

    “…didn’t he put it in the Summa?”

    I’ll let ya know when I’m done reading it. Could be a while.

  25. Miles_Teg says:

    Well, I’ll concede that any two of (Bob, you or I) may go over 400 pounds. But if we force the inclusion of Slim I’m sure that he and any of the rest of us would be under 400.

  26. Lynn McGuire says:

    Minus 8 this morning on the Lake. Snow flurries later, and again tomorrow night, with more icy cold, and then there is chatter from the weather liars about a bigger snowfall coming Friday or thereabouts. If so, great! We’ve only had one genuine snowstorm this winter so fah. OFD and Mrs. OFD wanna get out and do some x-c skiing here.

    Dude, do you live on or near the arctic circle? Seriously, I forgot where you live. We are sweating in the 80+ F today and have fired up the air conditioners. All of them! The day started at about 60 F. Muggy too since we got 30 minutes of rain yesterday. Cut the dust on the gravel road at the office (I hate the 1300 ft gravel road when it dries out). Here is my weather:
    http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=KSGR

    I am beginning to get worried about a 116 F summer here in the Land of Sugar. We have yet to freeze this year so all the bugs are up and walking / flying / crawling / dragging their butts about. In fact, I am giving up hope of freezing this year and starting to think about shaving the winter coat (6″ long) off my dog as she is getting warm while we walk every night.

  27. Lynn McGuire says:

    Sorry Miles, was 254 lbs on the scales this morning. Am in deathly fear of being called in by the cardiologist and demanded an accounting of my weight. Was 248 lbs the last time I saw him and he suggested, nay demanded that I drop 10 lbs the next time that I saw him. I am planning on blaming the rat poison that I take daily, it is making me think like a rat.

  28. Lynn McGuire says:

    BTW, since we are moving next week to another location in the ETJ of Sugar Land, I am thinking about dropping our land phone line. We are moving from a small phone company, Windstream, to Ma Bell so we will lose the phone number that we have had for 25 years. Only mobile phone numbers are portable, land line phone numbers are not. Sounds like discrimination to me.

  29. Miles_Teg says:

    I’m sure Dave’s gone to get some beauty sleep by now, so I’ll answer for him. He lives in St Albans VT, the northernmost point in the US attacked by the rebels during the war of Slave Power attempted escape from humanity.

    Saw my endocrinologist last week. I’d dropped 4 kg from the last visit in July last year, and had dropped another 6 kg between July and the visit before that. I was 79 kg (12 st 6 lb) when I was 18 (after 10 months on the Tab diet) and that’s roughly my aim. Not sure when it will happen though.

  30. Miles_Teg says:

    My phone number when I bought my current abode was (062) 41 xxxx, which later became (06) 241 xxxx which later became (02) 6241 xxxx. When I got cable a new landline was part of the deal, I kept both for a while, which ruled out the free transfer of the number. Telstra, the 800 pound gorilla of the Australian telecommunications market kept putting up the monthly connection fee so I pulled the plug on the original line, which I could no longer transfer for free to the cable associated phone. Not that it matters that much, most of my phone calls were wrong numbers or marketing.

    When I first moved in in 1985 I got a few phone calls for a local brothel, which had a very similar number. Not good at 2 AM.

  31. Miles_Teg says:

    Lynn, I’m sure you’ve had a million suggestions, but…

    Try eating some healthy stuff that you like first. Gorge yourself on it. Then have as much of the bad stuff as you normally have. I think that may lead to reducing the amount of whatever it is that you eat that is putting on the pounds.

  32. Miles_Teg says:

    “From the image, if he’s shooting skeet it would appear that he’s shooting a sitting clay. (The shotgun is in full recoil, which even with the ported barrel and light skeet loads means it must have been about level when he pulled the trigger.) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that this image is of Obama shooting at skeet, because I doubt he’s ever actually hit one. If indeed this isn’t the only round Obama has ever fired in his life.”

    I was wondering why the stock was a bit high up, so that it’s not making full contact with his shoulder. Wouldn’t you want it a bit lower so that the area of shoulder taking the recoil is maximized?

  33. OFD says:

    265 pounds all by my lonesome.

    So Lynn and I are easily a quarter of a ton right there.

    We are sixty miles south of Montreal if that pins it down bettuh for ya. Northern end of Lake Champlain. Which is frozen up this end but not so further south. (it’s 100 miles long.)

    13 now at 20:50 and dropping. Snow flurries on the way; I may be the northernmost in CONUS of people on this board. Dudes up in O Kanada are probably a bit further north but in the Banana Belt of Kanada.

  34. bgrigg says:

    There is actually a banana plantation 85 miles away from me in Osoyoos. S’truth!

  35. jim` says:

    Bob, check this BBC production if you haven’t already seen it:
    Victorian Pharmacy
    http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3ugg_e1-the-victorian-pharmacy_lifestyle

    I’ve only watched the first episode and it’s fun as pure pabulumatic (is that a neologism?) entertainment. They do an extraction of cinchona bark which doesn’t differ from today.

  36. Miles_Teg says:

    BG wrote:

    “There is actually a banana plantation 85 miles away from me in Osoyoos. S’truth!”

    They grow a fair bit of rope around there too, don’t they? And have bears guarding it.

  37. Lynn McGuire says:

    Oh, I know what my problem is. Sweets! My sweet tooth has been rocking since Thanksgiving. And the wife made a banana cake with cream cheese icing at a friends behest for his super bowl party (he loves her banana cake with 10 rotten bananas in it). I got my fair share and thrice that. I’ve just gotta break the sweet tooth again. Did it in 2004 and dropped from 272 to 232 in six months. No donuts, no bread, no cookies, no cake, no pancakes, no pie, no pie, no pie. Man, I love pie.

    Unfortunately with my heart, I’ve got to lose the weight. There is actual documented evidence of a dude living to 83 with my condition (he was worse – no right coronary artery at all, I’ve got two inches). I am the oldest person that my second cardiologist had seen and I would like to keep it going that way. Especially with my new 30 year mortgage.

    And I got my warfarin cranked again today since I eat too much green stuff. 8.5 mg/day. Enough to kill 3 or 4 rats. The good thing is that much warfarin has dropped my blood viscosity down so much that I have not had tachycardia in quite a while.

    St Albans. Yup, see your house on google maps. You are not in the arctic circle but I’ll bet you can just about see it from there. With all this warm weather down here we may be in the pool in a couple of weeks. Can’t enjoy the spa until I get the pool heater fixed (bought the house as is with a $3,000 price reduction). BTW, the pool heater is 400,000 btu/hr! I may be locking that bad boy down after the first month’s natural gas bill.

  38. Don Armstrong says:

    Miles_Teg says on 5 February 2013 at 21:37

    I was wondering why the stock was a bit high up, so that it’s not making full contact with his shoulder. Wouldn’t you want it a bit lower so that the area of shoulder taking the recoil is maximized?

    Very true, and it’s got a lot of notice. I sure wouldn’t want to have my shoulder feeling like his would, the next morning, having been beaten-up by the corner of the butt.
    Of course, he’s shooting a real high-dollar shotgun, and sometimes they come in sets of four – three different gauges of 12, 20 and 28; plus .410 calibre. There’s been some conjecture that they let him shoot a 28 gauge shotgun.

  39. Miles_Teg says:

    Too a large extent I’ve lost my taste for sweets, crisps and other stuff on the “really bad” list. I suppose that’s helping. Mainly I think I’m losing weight because I’m eating more protein and less carb and sugar.

  40. Marcelo Agosti says:

    “Well, I’ll concede that any two of (Bob, you or I) may go over 400 pounds. But if we force the inclusion of Slim I’m sure that he and any of the rest of us would be under 400.”

    I’m 54.5 kgs. (or 120.1519 pounds according to Google). That should give any other a big challenge in getting us both over the 400 pounds target. I have been that weight since my teens. Not too tall either but definitely not a pygmy.

    Always happy to give a hand.

    I also thought that the butt was too high…

  41. Rolf Grunsky says:

    Our Banana Belt would be southern Ontario. Point Pelee, the southernmost point in Canada is further south than the northern border of California. My wife is from Montreal, she would never move back. Too cold! (and bill 101.)

    From time to time, I hear people go on about the particular “quality” of the light on the French Riviera. They seem to think it is somehow “tropical”. I always take delight in pointing out that we (in Toronto) are further south. The Mediterranean climate is nicer.

    The temperature has been holding in the mid 20’s (F) for the last week. But after an exceptionally dry and mild November and December I’m content. Spring (sort of) in 6 weeks.

  42. Dave B. says:

    Too a large extent I’ve lost my taste for sweets, crisps and other stuff on the “really bad” list. I suppose that’s helping. Mainly I think I’m losing weight because I’m eating more protein and less carb and sugar.

    I’ve been doing the South Beach Diet which involves cutting back on high carb foods. I now weigh 25 pounds less than I did three years ago. I miss pizza and pasta more than I miss sweets.

  43. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I’ve been doing the eat-whatever-I-damned-well-please diet for almost 60 years now, and it seems to be working fine.

  44. Miles_Teg says:

    And by your own admission you don’t do any exercise to speak of.

    I also eat whatever I like. When it cools down again I intend to do more cycling. I’m losing weight, just not as fast as I’d like.

  45. Dave B. says:

    I’ve been doing the eat-whatever-I-damned-well-please diet for almost 60 years now, and it seems to be working fine.

    That would probably work for me if I actually walked our larger dog two or three times a day. Although I have to wonder if the reason Bob’s diet works for him is that he can’t cook and he drives so infrequently he probably has forgotten how to use a drive up window.

  46. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    And by your own admission you don’t do any exercise to speak of.

    Oh, I get a fair amount of exercise. Every hour or two during the day, I walk Colin up and down the street, maybe half a kilometer each time. Call it 1.5 miles/day of walking. Then there’s the back and forth between upstairs and the basement, which I do 10 or 20 times a day.

  47. OFD says:

    I have Bob’s diet plan up here and like him seem to be doing OK; yeah I weigh 265 but I’m also 6’5″ and look average. I could probably put on another thirty pounds before I might look heavy.

    This will probably later translate into sore knees and back all the time, but for now, other than usual aging aches and pains, I manage alright.

  48. Dave B. says:

    I’ve been doing the eat-whatever-I-damned-well-please diet for almost 60 years now, and it seems to be working fine.

    Bob, I think you’re doing the eat whatever Barbara serves you diet. Supplemented by the two recipes you know. If you visited the drive up windows of fast food joints like the typical American, your diet probably wouldn’t work any more.

  49. Lynn McGuire says:

    Oh, I get a fair amount of exercise. Every hour or two during the day, I walk Colin up and down the street, maybe half a kilometer each time. Call it 1.5 miles/day of walking. Then there’s the back and forth between upstairs and the basement, which I do 10 or 20 times a day.

    That is actually awesome for you. As soon as your metabolic rate slows down, you crank it right back up. Especially with trying to hang on to a 50 ? 60 ? lb BC.

    I think that genetics plays the most part in all of our health. I’ve got a 60 yr old friend of mine who went on South Beach diet for a month a couple of years ago. She dropped 17 lbs (to about 120 lbs and she is 5’8″) and decided not to do that again.

  50. Lynn McGuire says:

    I’m 6’1″ and have a 42″ waist at 250 lbs. Too much! I weighed 210 lbs in college and had a 36″ waist. And could bench press 330 lbs. Those days are long gone as I doubt that I could bench 150 lbs nowadays.

    I’m actually thinking about fasting one day per week. I don’t seem to be able to kill the sweet tooth this time and I have tried.

  51. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I’m 6’3″ or 6’4″ and I think I’m probably 220 pounds now. My jeans have a 40″ waist and they’re a bit loose on me nowadays, so I suspect my waist is now 38″ or thereabouts.

    In college, I typically weighed 185 during tennis season and 240 over the winter. I just went up and down automatically without thinking about it. Somewhere in my mid-20’s I didn’t drop the weight when it got warm, and I was about 240 ever after. I was 238 the day we got married in 1983. Over the last few years I’ve dropped gradually, simply because I don’t eat as much as I used to.

  52. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Oh, yeah. Colin is about 75 pounds, most of it muscle. Like Duncan and Malcolm, Colin is gigantic for a male BC. They’re typically 50 pounds. All three of ours have also been taller than average for male BCs, Malcolm two or three inches and Duncan and Colin four or five inches. Colin is actually about the size of an average female gray wolf or a smallish leopard.

  53. OFD says:

    36″ waist here. Eat yer hahts out!

    Oh, I’m sure I’ll pay for this someday; it’s clearly mostly genetic in my case; tall thin dad, tall grandparents, etc. Based on my family’s actuarial history, I will likely go by cancer, senility and/or gun shot.

  54. Chuck W says:

    I have been told by more than 1 health professional, that sugar is 24 hours to addiction kick: don’t eat any for 24 hours, and you won’t miss it. That seems to be the case for me; if I don’t have it for a day or two, I just don’t care if I have any more. I have to remember not to put sugar into my coffee or tea, though, or I am right back to addicted (I increase the milk instead).

    Before Jeri got sick, we both lost quite a bit of weight following the advice in an old book authored by Norman Walker—she read the German translation of the book. It advocates eating more raw fruits and veggies and less cooked foods. I lost about 15 kilos (33#) over 2 years. Walker built the first juicer; Jay Kordich has continued building Walker’s machine. Eating more cellulose-rich foods seemed to cut down on our appetites, as both of us were satisfied with less. I still ate a Döner Kebap each week, and we ate at our favorite Indian restaurant nearly weekly, so we were not strict adherents to the Walker regimen. I also had my copy of Starbucks Mocha Cream every Saturday morning, so there was a lot of cheating. But still a lot of weight loss over time. We did not use a juicer, but I have been contemplating using a blender (Ninja 1100) as it seems like that would reduce my time in the kitchen these days.

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