Non-local trick-or-treaters

This post is a few days late, but here goes.  As I was driving home from work on Halloween, I hit awful traffic, so ditched the freeway and took side streets to get home.  I cut through the "nice" neighborhood that is only a few blocks away and it was JAM PACKED with kids, people, cars, everything.   Normally, it's a pretty low key, quiet, uncrowded neighborhood.

What is the deal with people leaving their own neighborhoods and going to the "nicer" neighborhoods for candy?  When we were young, we just went in our neighborhood.  We never would've had our parents take us to a more affluent neighborhood for better candy.  I guess the thought just never crossed our minds.  We wanted to run around in the streets we were already familiar with and with people we already knew, not roam around a strange neighborhood.

Is it Robin Hood trick-or-treating?  All I know is that if I lived in one of those homes, I'd be demanding addresses for kids when they came to the door.  Not a local resident, no candy for you!  Call me a grinch, but it just ain't right.  Actually, instead of not giving them anything, I'd give them the lame candy and save the chocolate for the locals.  A two-tiered system.

It'd be fine if you were there with people who live in the neighborhood.  But they aren't.  I was chatting with a woman at work who took her kids to a nicer neighborhood.  She said they give out the king size bars instead of the trick-or-treat sized ones.  Really?  Really lame.  Because I'm sure that's what kids need.  King-sized chocolate bars.  I'm not sure exactly what I hate about this, but it just seems so wrong. Like it's not in the spirit of trick-or-treating, but maybe it's just me.

SoCal Games Day #51

We held SoCal Games Day #51 at the Little White Chapel in Burbank today from 11 AM - 11 PM.  We had a pretty good turnout, about 50+ people there.

A remarkable number right at the opening bell, which is a little unusual, but I think it was because there were two tables of Struggle of Empires happening right at the beginning, so all those guys showed up right on time to learn the game and play.  All told, I think the teach took about an hour and then not sure how long each table took, but I think Jonathan's (the organizer) table took about 4-ish hours to play.  My favorite part?  The same group followed up Struggle of Empires with Hoity Toity, a very lightweight game.  I guess they needed a palatte cleanser after a heavier game.

I played: Ticket to Ride Team Asia, Shogun (for the first time in over a year), Escape (the new Queen game), Industrial Waste, Time's Up! and Tichu twice.

Overall, had a great time.  Tim and Heather came down from Paso Robles so Shane and Jon came down to have dinner with us.  We had *awesome* Lebanese food over at Hayat's Kitchen.  They were super-busy, so the service was slow, but that baklava is worth the wait!

One negative: a guy peed on the floor in the men's room and I had to clean it up.  Thank goodness Karl TOLD ME about it so it could get cleaned up.  He also helped me clean it up, which was very sweet of him. Not sure who did it, but a message will be going on out the games day list tomorrow.

Slow Carb Diet

I decided to accept Tim Ferriss' challenge to try his Slow-Carb Diet.

I started on Sunday, so it been almost six whole days. I think I've maybe lost of couple pounds. More than that, a pair of pants that I rejected on Sunday as being too tight fit better when I put them on Wednesday. They weren't loose, but they fit better because my love handles are noticeably smaller. So that is happy-making!

I've never tried a low-carb type diet before because I love, love, LOVE carbs. Pasta, rice, bread, corn, potatoes, chocolate, anything really!  But every time I've read Tim's blog post on it, I always wondered if it would actually work, so I decided to see if I could get through one day without carbs.

It was tough. I won't lie.  It didn't help that I decided to start on a Sunday to see if I could get through a single day without sugar.  Especially hard when I was going out that night for trivia at a bar with awesome garlic fries and poppers.  But I made it through.  Once I made it through that day, I decided to see if I could last a week.

And here we are, six days later.  So, even though it hasn't been an official "week" yet, Tim's Slow-Carb Diet advocates having a cheat day and he recommends Saturday, so tomorrow is my cheat day where I can eat anything I want.  I'm pretty sure I'll have a potato ball from Porto's and a Drumstick for dessert when I get home.  I'll likely throw some chocolate in there at some point too.

The weird thing is, the first two days were tough.  Sunday was the worst.  Monday was a little better, but still tough.  But since Tuesday, it's been fairly smooth sailing.  I haven't cheated once and honestly, I haven't even been that tempted.

My meals have been looking something like this:

• Breakfast - Scrambled eggs with sauteed onions and chives and a few strips of bacon
• Lunch - Spinach salad with chicken breast OR Mexican food (beans and meat, no tortillas)
• Dinner - Salad (Cobb), Shrimp Creole (without rice), smashed cauliflower, and more Mexican
• Snacks - Nuts, pickles, cheese, red wine in the evening

The nice thing is that I haven't been that hungry either.  I haven't been really monitoring my portion sizes as much as I should've.  I'll work on that next week.  And I'll work on exercising.

One of the ways you can "earn" the chance to eat carbs is if you do a 30 minute resistance training workout. I bought some resistance bands tonight at Target for $10.  I figure it's worth a shot.

I probably should've taken some "before" pictures, but I'm mainly just hoping my clothes fit better.  I doubt it will be a long-term thing, but I'll just see if I can get through another week and play it by ear.

My ideal goal is to keep it up until Thanksgiving.  With BGG.CON coming up, I'm not sure how that will work out, although we'll be in Texas where we eat our weight in meat each November, so it might not be too hard to stick with a low-carb diet.  Dallas is the perfect place for that actually.

More than "losing" weight, I just want to feel better about how my clothes are fitting and so far, we're off to a decent start.  If I throw in some exercise, I might be able to speed up the process a bit.

NaBloPoMo 2012

Every year I toy with the idea of doing NaBloPoMo, which is the challenge to blog every day for the month of November.  This year I should have absolutely no excuse because I can blog from my iPhone! So, let's just give it the old college try and see if I can even do it for a week.

Meanwhile, today I got a check-up.  I went to have an echocardiogram done, a treadmill stress test and right now, I have a Holter monitor attached to my chest (insert joke here).  The technicians who did the first couple tests said that, unofficially, everything looked normal.  I hope that trend continues!  I have to return tomorrow at 9 AM to have them remove and download all the information they're collecting for the next 16 hours.

Day one complete, but I reserve the right to add more whenever I want.

My Jeopardy Episode

My Jeopardy! episode was online for a short while.  Meanwhile, it was deleted from that site.

Here is a link to my episode.

Me and Alex Trebek

Ir's me!  With Alex Trebek!  Tomorrow is the air date! Set your DVRs!  Recap to be posted soon!

What is September 28, 2012?

Answer:  The date I'll be on Jeopardy!  I've been waiting for my promo photo of myself and Alex to show up so I can post it here, but so far, no dice.  Instead... Here's my Hometown Howdy!

I apologize for the autostart.  I tried to figure out how to just get it to show up and not auto play, but I failed to find it within five minutes so I gave up!

Licensed to Wed

Jason and I went down to the LA County Registrar's office to pick-up our wedding license.  It's official, we are licensed to wed!  The wedding is only five days away and I am finally starting to get excited about it.  It all seemed so far away and work has been so all-consuming, it's been tough to muster up energy to focus on just the wedding.

Now, all the big pieces are in place and most of the shopping is done, we're just trying to tie up the details and get the apartment ready to have three guests!  It's gonna get cozy!

My oldest friend in the world arrives tomorrow night.  I'm looking forward to hanging out with her before my sister and nephew arrive on Thursday night.  My mom and her hubby arrive on Friday as does my Main Man of Honor...

And then we get to set-up and prep for the wedding on Saturday!

*However, there will be one detour, which deserves its own post (to be published this week)... Just waiting for a picture to be emailed to me before posting the blog entry...

Rituals I miss: Reading the Lyrics Insert

Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but as Jason & I put together our list of songs that we could potentially use for the wedding before the ceremony, I realize I miss something that I did religiously as a teenager...

Any time I bought a new tape (or CD in high school), I would unwrap it, and then take out the insert/booklet and read all the lyrics from start to finish.  I'd then listen to the whole album.

I'm not sure why it is, but it's really hard for me to comprehend lyrics from just listening to a song.  I'll listen to a song a hundred times and sometimes have no clue what it's about.  The lyrics only make sense when I read them.

I miss reading lyrics!!

That said, I rarely buy CDs anymore.  In fact, I hardly buy any music really.  But if I did, where's my lyric sheet??  

Side note:  When I was in high school, my mom gave me my first CD player.  It was my big Christmas present that year.  Between that and my subscription to Rolling Stone, which I read from cover-to-cover each month (that's another ritual that I miss), I felt in touch with music.  I kinda miss that too.

Seating Chart or Not?

The wedding is quickly approaching and now that the big pieces have fallen into place, it's now time to start focusing on some details.  One of which, is whether or not to use a seating chart.  Since the wedding isn't very formal, I wasn't sure if we should or not, but I think it will help relieve anxiety for the out-of-towners or the in-towners who don't know many of the other people who will be at the wedding.

So... I went ahead and made one.  Since Jason and I are board game lovers, I think we're going to use pie pieces from Trivial Pursuit to indicate which table everyone belongs to.  Unless of course, I can think of something better in the next week or so, but that's doubtful.

It's still open to revision, but I'm glad to have yet another to-do list checked off!