(no subject)

[miko2]

Friday: Gene had posted much earlier in the week that he wasn't mailing out the new issue of the Tai-Pan to local members because he expected to see them on the weekend. Without really thinking it through, I took a flying leap to the island of conclusions (never leap to conclusions -- you have to swim back) and decided that we were having a meeting on Saturday.

Of course, by the time Saturday rolled around I had thought it through and realized it wasn't the third Saturday of the month, and then checked and didn't find any announcement about an Editorial Board meeting. I realized that there was probably the Board of Director's meeting, and a Steampunk game going on Sunday, neither of which involve me. Which didn't mean that I couldn't drop by to either, only that I wasn't expected to.

Which meant I could goof off. Which I did.

But before that I spent Friday night working on the Tai-Pan APA, and got everything printed up except my own submission (which I still haven't completed) and the cover page/editorial page -- although I did write up my commmentary page and my editorial page.

Having decided that I really would like to layout my pages like several other contributors do -- in an Acrobat format -- I dug up a disc with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 on it and installed it. This, as far as I can tell, does not actually allow me to create a new Acrobat document (I guess those are created from Illustrator or some other layout program), so, deciding that all I really had was the Acrobat Reader, and an old version at that, I went online and downloaded the newest version. Except that that is called "Adobe Reader" and is apparently a different program from "Adobe Acrobat", so I'm kind of confused about what Acrobat does for me that Reader doesn't do.

I picked one of Chuck's very nice illustrations for the cover and put that together, but afterwards I decided to open the package from S. C. Emmons that Kristin had told me contained an illustration for her Haiku project. I did this on the suspicion that Mr. Emmons had included an APA submission, otherwise why send it to me? (He had told Kristin that he was sending me some pictures too, but I'd already forgotten that part of our exchange). Anyway, inside were 10 full-page illustrations, with a letter that indicated that all of them were being sent in for the APA, but also noting that one of them was for the Haiku illustration project.

I'm not sure if I was supposed to pick and choose from all of them or what. I decided that the Haiku illustration should not appear in the APA, but I printed everything else. And since they're all full-page illustrations, I now wonder if I shouldn't have maybe used one of them for the cover. Which I still could do, I guess. I'm sure it would make Stephen happy.

Three things that cause me problems -- Mr. Emmons likes to send oversiezed copies of his work. 6 of the 10 illustrations were on 11x17 paper. My scanner is one of those built-into-the-top-of-the-printer types so I don't really have the ability to scan something that large. For each one, I had to scan one half at a time and try to match the two halves up in Photoshop.

The second one was that James L. Brandt sent me his submission formatted with embedded illustrations into rich text documents. He had to reduce his art to bitmap image files to accomplish this. Despite all of this, the files looked fine when I pulled them up. However, when I printed them, the text would not print as formatted, and would run down onto a second page. At first I started to rebuild each of his pages in Photoshop with .jpg files he'd included and adding in his commentary text, but when I came to the last page -- a flyer he'd designed -- I was faced with redesigning the flyer itself, which didn't feel right at all. And then it occured to me that I was being stupid -- James had, along with a cd cointaining his RTF and JPG files, included printed copies of his submission. All I needed to do was scan those and print directly from that.

Andrew's submission was the scariest, because it consisted of 72dpi PNG files (and very very dark ones too) and a commentary page that was presented as a completely unformatted TXT file. But conversely, that was easier for me to deal with because I felt more free to add formatting and lighten up the image files in order to get things to print nicely.

I had decided that the cover needed a nice cool blue, but a visit to the local Office Depot revealed that I'd have to buy a full ream of paper if I wanted something nice to do my cover with. I'm only prnting 15 copies this time around, so that made no sense whatsoever. And actually, as it happens, I still have nearly a full ream of blue cardstock similar to the grey cardstock that I used for issue 0 (which I've owned for years -- which is an example of why I don't need to buy another ream of colored paper).

Anyway, I need to draw something, finish my submission, and get the rest of everything printed for this coming weekend.

Saturday

I goofed off on Saturday.

Sunday

Sunday was so nice that I decided I should get out and do some shopping and enjoy the nice weather. I visited Marlene's Market, then Trader Joe's, then Costco, then Fred Meyers, then Office Depot, and by then I'd spent more than enough money and time running around and came home. Also on the geneeral principal that all that running around had been an actual workout, I didn't do my workout for Sunday. Which was a bad decision, and I knew that even as I made it. Ah well. I wanted to get my character Shinobu Valentine to 50 finally -- which I did.

Monday

I've developed another cold -- this time mostly sinus congestion, so it's different than the previous one. But it was so bad that I was having trouble breathing and had to blow my nose every couple of minutes, so after work I stopped at Fred Meyers again to get some medication and stuff. What I forgot to pick up was a new box of kleenex -- my one at work was dangerously low. Also I was nearly out of hot cereal at work, but Fred Meyers didn't have what I wanted. I tried Albertsons, but they didn't have what I wanted either.

Since over a year ago I've been in the habit of eating cereal for breakfast -- trying to eat healthy, you know. But since early last Summer I fell out of the habit of getting up early enough to eat a bowl of cold cereal with milk, so instead I've been buying instant oatmeal type cereal and eating that after I get to work. I'm aware that instant oatmeal is probably not as healthy as regular oatmeal, and I prefer the flavored styles, but still, I figured it was better than no breakfast at all, and pretty much any cereal breakfast, even a very healthy one, is high in grains and carbs, but that didn't seem like such a bad thing for my first meal of the day. Just so long as it was a nice whole-grain cereal without a lot of added sugar, I felt I was in good shape.

I had pretty much stayed away from all of the name brand instant hot cereals for the same reasons that I went to the health food section for things like trail mix bars -- the ones sold by name brand companies are often glorified candy bars. I was buying Heart to Heart Instant Oatmeal Apple & Cinnamon flavor and Kashi Optimum Zen not cereal (similar to their cold cereal by the same name that I like). The Kashi stuff tasted good but it tended to remain watery rather than thicken like the oatmeal does, and it contained even more carbs than the oatmeal, which was fairly high. Also I had to shop at different stores to buy this stuff -- Marlene's Market had the Kashi hot cereal, but not Fred Meyers or Top Foods or Albertsons; Fred Meyers had the Apple and Cinnamon flavor Heart to Heart oatmeal that I liked, but Top Foods and other places didn't carry that flavor.

So I was at Top Foods one day needing to buy some new hot cereal, and they didn't have the two things I wanted, and I decided to try a flavor sampler box of Cream of Wheat.

I was never a big fan of cream of wheat, but almost immediately I realized that, at about 28 grams of carbs per packet, these were fewer carbs than either the Heart to Heart oatmeal or the Kashi Optimum Zen. I liked some of the flavors -- Strawberries and Cream and Cinnamon in particular. Unfortunately, no store I could find carried a box of just Strawberries and Cream or Cinnamon. In fact, most stores carried just "regular" flavor and "maple and brown sugar" flavor, if they carried any of it at all. Top Foods was the only one that also carried the sampler box.

I went back to Top Foods once or twice to get another sample box. I liked the cream of wheat instant cereal, although "regular" flavor didn't excite me that much. I tried to find a place online that would sell me Strawberries and Cream or Cinnamon, but you can't even order this stuff from Amazon.com or very many other places online. You can get it from MyBrands.com, which is (as far as I can tell) means you're buying it directly from Nabisco/B&G Foods. The only way I found the MyBrands page was a link from the Nabisco site. I can't get the specialty flavors I want any other way, except for buying the sampler packs.

However, while searching online for this stuff I came across a page that compared various hot cereals in terms of sugars, carbs, and overeall heath value, and one thing they pointed out that I hadn't even considered was that Cream of Wheat is not a whole grain cereal. Hmmm. So, it might be less carbs than what I was eating before, but not necessarily better. I decided maybe it was better just to go back to the instant oatmeal.

So... today I ran out of kleenex at work, and I also ran out of hot cereal. Also last night my glasses broke (again) which meant that I had to stop by Fred Meyers to get them fixed anyway. While they were fixing the glasses, I wandred through grocery and picked up some kleenex and then went to check out the various instant hot cereals.

One thing I discovered right away that surprised me -- Quaker instant oatmeal is generally about the same carbs as the Cream of Wheat (about 27-28 gram of carbs). Which mean that it was less carbs than the theoretically healthier Heart to Heart instant oatmeal (34 grams).

There was a Strawberries and Cream version of the Quaker instant oatmeal. Also, there was a "reduced sugar" sampler pack that came in at around 21-24 grams of carbs.

Pretty much all of the instant oatmeal flavors has 9-12 grams of sugar added. The Heart to Heart has 12 grams. I'm not sure why I was ever convinced it was "better" or "helathier".

I do know there are some brands of instant oatmeal (and possibly other instant hot cereals) that have no sugar added -- I read about them in that article last night. I need to look that up again and find out which brands those are. But in the meantime, clearly the Quaker instant oatmeal was not only not more dangerous or less healthy than I'd assumed, it was actually better than the stuff I've been buying for the last six months.

And it was on sale for $1.87 per box. Gee.

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In other news... I need to catch up on my song of the day thing again. I'm getting very bad at that. I still want to make it to April so I can say I did it for a full year, but I think after that I may want to take a break. It's getting old, and harder to keep up with.