Progress and AntiProgress

Sir Terry Pratchett argued convincingly that everything must have it’s opposite. Not just the light-dark opposite, but the opposite that goes through the conventional, traditional opposite and out the other side.

We have progress. What I’m having is a kind of anti-progress that has gone through retention and out the other side.

I am getting fit enough to take the dog around two blocks -yay- BUT, on the anti-progress side, I’ve been struck from asthma as a direct result of Mayhem’s Carpet From Hell [coming to a cinema near you!] and literally can’t walk more than a block without wheezing and coming over all blue.

Progress: we got all the filth out of Mayhem’s room. Something of a Herculean task, I can tell you. The Augean Stables were easier.
Antiprogress: Since the Carpet From Hell™ needed to be got rid of, Hubby and Brother-in-Law [aka Normally Shiftless] thought this was a brilliant excuse to renovate. Now I have furniture blocking further progress in getting the house clean and thanks to Mayhem’s hazmat situation I now have two cubic metres of laundry to tackle.

Progress: I’m getting more than five steps in a row before having to stop and re-introduce the hound to the concept of “heel”.
Antiprogress: He gets the idea that when I stop, he should be next to/behind me, but hasn’t connected the command with the action. Thus my entire walk is me saying “heel” practically nonstop for fifteen or so minutes. The word is losing all meaning.

Progress: Chaos is starting to help with small household cleaning tasks.
Antiprogress: it mostly consists of grabbing the nearest sponge or towel and wiping five square centimetres of countertop. Adorable, but useless.

Progress: I think I’m getting the household to start picking up after themselves
Antiprogress: There’s still vast swathes of “That’s not mine” when I’m after whoever left a mess. One day, I shall get them to clean the mess they see.

Of course, one day, the sun will grow cold and die… but I hope I can achieve that goal before then.

It’s a constant, uphill slog. I’m tired of it.

I can hold out the hope that I’ll get there, and achieve a lovely house and keep it that way… But I was nearly there… and now my house is once more crammed with stuff I have to get out of the way.

Some times, it makes me want to cry.

Crying never got anything done. Guess I have to get up and just do it.

Because no-one else will.

Quick diets and why they fail

I’m more aware of them, now that I’m trying to lose weight. The advertisements. The shill proclaiming their new product and ONLY their product will help you reach your target weight and stay there.

It’s all bullshit.

Especially the ones where they claim you -yes, you!- can drop an extravagant number of pounds/kilos in an amazingly short time.

What they never tell you is that you -yes, you!- inevitably yo-yo back up again when it’s over. Hell, that’s how they make their money.

Many “fast” diets are simple fasting. Or losing ‘water weight’ aka 'dehydration’ in the medical circles. And what happens is simple to predict - your body makes you, the dieter, obsess about all the many, varied no-no’s until you snap and break down in a frenzy of chocolate and fizzy drinks.

And, of course, you pack on more weight because your body has entered 'famine mode’ and wants to store fat for another such crisis.

A wise writer [Kaz Cooke] once said, “Your body is the ultimate smarty-pants”.

Then there are the “one food” diets. The rice diet. The leek diet. The grapefruit diet. The shittons of chocolate diet. Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the idea. After a few days of the prescribed 'one food’, you start to go completely bonkers. Obsessed with everything else not on your personal menu. Eventually, the dieter binges on everything else but the 'one food’ and rises further above their goal weight.

Then there are what I like to refer to as “math diets”. You can eat the stuff you like, but it’s worth score points. Calories, carb-equivalents… you name it. The dieter in this becomes compelled to evaluate food as a number. Now I admit, some of these math diets work. Or seem to. I keep getting the mental image of someone in a grocer’s with a calculator, not working out what their total is going to be, but working out whether or not they should buy a foodstuff based on its point value.

Lots of math diets are bad - simply because the math is off. If the body fails to get a certain amount of fat intake, it once again goes into starvation mode and prepares to balloon when it encounters what it considers to be the good stuff.

One great scam in the weight loss industry is the pre-prepared-meal diet. The dieter pays a great fee for meals made the way the industry mogul decrees. And they have to keep paying or the meals will stop. This teaches nothing - especially in the cases where they make the dieter’s favourite foods for them.

When the diet goal is accomplished and the dieter steps away from the protective embrace of portioned, balanced meals that look and taste exactly like the real thing… the dieter gains weight with the same bad habits the programme did not curb.

There’s a reason why just about every diet book contains a food pyramid diagram. What follows after that is generally attempting to lead the dieter away from sticking with just the pyramid.

But following the pyramid is not enough. You need to eat less. And in order to feel satisfied with less, you need to eat slowly.

The slower you eat, the fuller you feel. Simple.

And the better you eat, the healthier you get. Also simple.

Getting in to good habits, like regular exercise, are also a great help.

But there is a point in a diet where the weight loss just slows down for no apparent reason. Most will convince you this is some kind of unnatural and sell you more products.

All slower weight loss means is that the body has noticed you losing weight.

Keep the three meals a day. Choose healthier snacks when the need arises to snack. Keep the faith.

If you are still losing weight, then that’s the good thing [I am, of course, assuming anyone reading this is above a healthy weight]. Not the speed.

Permanent weight loss takes time.

Three meals a day - eaten slowly, of course - can help fuel the body through the exercise regime of your choice. They also help prevent the body from entering panic mode and wanting to keep or whack on the weight.

A little fat is not a bad thing.

A lot of fat is.

It’s that simple.

Which is why they never tell you that.

My tag list

The tracked tags on my tumblr are currently as follows:

brony
bujold
doctor who
ds9
leverage
lois mcmaster bujold
miles vorkosigan
my little pony
ows

This has to mean something. But what?

YouTube’s Ban-Bot and Why it Has to Die

YouTube has a little automated gizmo that scans a submitted work and flags it according to whether or not it contains previously copyrighted material.

It does not evaluate whether the work is Fair Use.

Thus, every time I submit a video these days, I get a nice, automated email saying my submission has been flagged as containing someone else’s stuff and I have to go file a protest to get it unbanzored.

Theoretically, the ban-bot should be flagging outright copyright breaches - like someone posting straight audio of a song with the album cover as a picture. That’s flagrant and obvious copyright infringement. I don’t mind them doing that.

It’s when the ban-bot goes and flags a Fair Use work without one human looking at the dang thing that I get tetchy.

Whatever happened to “better to let ten criminals go free than one innocent man go to jail”?

Oh, wait. The spirit of freedom died shortly after her life partner, democracy, was murdered by the corpratocracy. Nobody is investigating either death.

If you’ve posted a fan video at any time - use the automatic process claim thing they send you via email to file objections as fast as they can ban you.

If they have more paperwork to process because of the ban-bot, then they might just kill it for us.

Just remember - a work is fair use if (a) It is transformative - it gives another meaning to the material used (b) It is non-competitive - you posted it with no intention of competing with the owner of the original material, OR © It is non-commercial - you are not making one red cent from distributing your work. Having more than one of these qualifications is great. Having all three is gold.

This is why I didn’t even look at the “earn money from YouTube” thing they sent me a while back. I want to make fan vids and give them away for free.

I want to share the love.

Why can’t YouTube or the corpratocracy understand that?

Clever Dog, Not Smart Dog.

The hound, by daylight known as Max, loves rounding up our neighbour’s cows. I’m pretty certain that the neighbours feel less than charitable about that.

Another neighbour dislikes Max barking at the cows, the birds, etc. while he’s on his leash and has complained. Twice. I’m sure he has a few names for the dog that aren’t printable.

So in order to keep both neighbours happy, we have been attempting to fix the fence to so the dog can’t get through. Our first test resulted in us having to go fetch him away from the cows.

I insisted on having him on a leash for subsequent tests. Dog found all the places he could slip through. Easily inside of ten minutes.

When it comes to finding possible holes in fences, that dog is a frikkin genius.

When it comes to obeying orders… not so much.

It is not smart for a dog to be seen annoying cattle. That sort of dog can get shot.

On the bright side, we should have the fence permanently fixed, soon. And, I hope, fixed enough that he won’t be a pest to anyone.

I hope.

I pray.

He’s a loveable dog, but damn, he’s clever in all the wrong ways.

F*king Cashmas Carols

I usually refer to the Great Christmas Shopping Push from October to December as “Cashmas”. It isn’t the slightest bit about celebrating the holiday season, it’s about getting your money.

Buy a tree. Buy decorations. Spend a fortune on rellos you hardly ever see because it’s that time of year and you have to show them you care and why not use that credit card until it smokes?

Yeah. How about fuck off?

I have rellos who are hard to shop for at the best of times. Thanks to obstreperous neighbours, this is not one of those times. I almost have zero money [MeMum bailed me out and I insist on only spending that cash on needs, not wants] and difficult rellos.

My usual yuletide fallback of gingerbreads for everyone, or Molasses cake-bikkies, has fallen over because sugar’s on a whole bunch of folks’ verboten food lists. Sigh.

So the one high point of my current fix is that I haven’t been going to the shops a lot. Why is this a high point?

Cashmas Carols.

From October until January, all you hear is twenty-seven squillion versions of every last Christmas song there is. Some of them are nice enough, but most of them just make my blood boil.

One year, I was trapped in the zombie shopping herd and subjected to hours of every last rendition of The Little Drummer Boy. To this day, even one phrase of it will make me twitch.

Another year, they insisted on every last Christmas Song For Charity. In a row. Feed the World was right next to a song for the kiddies whose Christmas got wrecked by a cyclone in Darwin. When I was FIVE.

In yet another year, I was tortured by every last rendition of Winter Wonderland. This in a country where the summer heat sucks the soul out of you in less than a second, should one dare to step outside of the AC.

This year, in so far as I can tell, it’s Reggae Christmas Hits mixed with the world’s most annoying and whiny singers warbling atonally up and down the scales at every last opportunity and a few that didn’t exist before.

All I Want For Christmas is You is not a dirge, people!

Cashmas shits me off.

I do my utmost not to support it.

And every year, they make it so easy to do so.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Someone, somewhere, theorised that we spend half our lives waiting for something to happen.

Be that in a queue or in waiting rooms, or sitting around and waiting for someone in power to get the thumb out of their divot and get things done.

I, currently, have wasted half my day waiting for the men of the house to get their hairy arses into gear so we can finally finish fixing that fucking fence. They apparently spent all night programming - at work and at home - so  that they could have time to get things done today.

And the neighbour angry at our dog for barking came by again whilst I was sleeping and Hubby didn’t drop one golden word about the measures we’d taken already. Sigh.

I asked a few days ago as to whether or not I would be able to do the fence on my only. Hubby said one word, “no.” He wouldn’t even let me try.

So I have wasted half the week waiting for him to come home in daylight hours [he didn’t] so we could work on the fence. Now I’m feeling my weekend bleeding away because I’m waiting for him to wake up.

AND it’s my Mum’s birthday today [Nov 27th] and I can’t go shopping for her present because nobody’s awake to look after the kids.

Normally, I don’t mind waiting. It’s when I get some of my best writing done. But it’s hard to write when you’re sick with worry and stressing out about the things that need to get done but can’t because other people are fast asleep like the innocent.

It isn’t fair.

I spent every last cent I had on this. I work just as hard and just as long on it, and I’d do more if I just knew where Hubby put the damn essential tools… and nothing gets done today because the men decided they’d rather program all night and sleep all day.

The more time gets wasted, the angrier the neighbour gets and the sicker I feel from stressing out about the whole issue.

So whoever came up with that statistic must have me as a dot outside the curve, because most of my waking time is wasted waiting for other people to shift the thumb.

Is it so wrong just to want to get things DONE?

Nostalgia For Never Was

Remember all those sitcoms where people helped people out? The dream worlds like The Waltons or Leave It To Beaver? If a Neighbour was experiencing trouble, the whole neighbourhood pitched in to help.

I’m more convinced than every that it was just a dream. An impossible utopia that everyone pretends was real so they can say, “things were better when…”

In the real world, some busybody Neighbour would have reported the Cleavers to CPS because their kid was out of control.

Yeah, I’m still a bit bitter about the fence thing.

I watch some shows for fun. I watch one to escape my worries. That one, I wish was even a little bit real.

That show is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

It’s the same kind of dream world, where mean people - narrow minded people - are rare, if not nonexistent. A place where anyone can find employment based on skill and aptitude, rather than academic qualifications. A place where any personal quirk is accepted and tolerated.

If everyone on the planet actually worked towards some kind of mutual acceptance, mutual help, etc. then the world might just be a nicer place in which to live.

I guess that’s why they had to destroy the OWS camp. OWS were showing the world that they didn’t need the infrastructure we’ve been told we depend upon. They were living outside of The Holy System. Thumbing their noses at Authority and not backing down, giving up, shutting up, or going away.

If we lived our lives like the never-was Cleavers, Waltons(disregard the anti feminist stereotypes, please), or even ponies, there wouldn’t be a need for OWS in the first place, because people who got too greedy would be condemned instead of praised.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. I’m saying it’s something to strive for. Act better towards each other. Act with compassion, empathy and tolerance. Think a little about what other people might want before you take for yourself.

OWS made a functioning city within a city. We can make a functioning society out of the tattered remains that selfishness and mean minds have left us. It all comes down to three words:

“Need some help?”

Practice using them for a better tomorrow.

Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control…

I had to spend my “me money” on groceries.

You might not think this is such a big freakin’ deal. You’re entitled to your opinions. Hell, you’re entitled to tl;dr everything I write. Just like I’m entitled to write what I want, when I want.

And, right now, I want to vent some spleen.

I don’t spend a lot on myself for several reasons: 1) I’m hella fussy. Anyone who’s read my blog entries on finding the right shoes would know that. 2) Everything - and I mean every last thing - I want or desire is not available in my area, not for sale, non-existent, or freakishly, fist-bitingly expensive. 3) Most of the time I feel like I don’t deserve the luxury of spending money on just me.

Seriously, the most money I usually spend on myself is about $20 on chocolate. That lasts me the better part of a month. A month and a half - or more - if I actually stick to my rationing regime.

Everything else goes to the household. Kids, mostly. Little bits and bobs to keep the spawn happy and the odd I-hope-you-like-it thing I find for Hubby.

So, if I want something big, I save for it. I scratch together loose change from cleaning, from pockets in the laundry, from shopping overflow and -yes- even from the footpaths. I collect it all in an old simmer sauce jar. When it’s full, I go cash it in and spend however much I’ve saved solely on myself.

It takes me a year to fill that jar with change.

A year’s worth of slow effort is worth a little self-indulgence, don’t you think?

Not this year.

This year, some neighbour decided they didn’t have enough to do and complained about our dog’s relative freedom. As a direct result, we have no money for food.

Let me unpack. The hound was a surprise gift from a relative. We had no time to prepare for his arrival and have been desperately scrambling between stopgaps ever since he arrived. Alongside the usual stuff like buying his food and necessities…

The dog is a border-collie cross. He loves rounding up animals but hasn’t any idea what to do with them after that. On the times he spends holidaying with the kids at Grandma’s little farm, he rounds the sheep up all day long.

The neighbours uphill from us have two cows. Our fence is one the dog can very easily slip through.

I’m certain you can connect the dots. If we let the dog roam loose in our yard, he’s soon in their yard and pestering the cows.

So we’ve had to tie him up.

I got a five meter length of chain [those plastic-coated wire long leashes are a sack of suck] and one of those can’t-tangle-it tether-posts and did my best. He has access to food, water, shelter and shade. And I have to make sure he doesn’t tangle himself anyway because he’s that kind of dog.

RSPCA rolls round because of the aforementioned complaint, and proceeds to tell me the hound needs exercise.

I say we have plans to fix the back fence this weekend past. It’s been four weeks in the planning already, and a belligerently unbelievable chain of errors has stood between us and fixing that effing fence.

RSPCA plans to be back sometime this week.

I go off my nut panicking about the fence, and volunteer my savings to pay for the materials.

As I write this, the fence is halfway done [we ran out of light, strength, agility and motivation] with the hope of getting it fixed all the way real soon now.

I have $14 in my bank account.

My regular budget for food and necessities is $200.

I had $84 in change in my jar.

I had $35 squirrelled away over the passage of six months.

I need to keep $50 for petrol.

So yeah, thanks a real bunch, concerned neighbour. If you’d just come over and talked to me, I’d have told you we were trying to deal with things at our own speed. Which, I admit, is rather glacial. We could have worked something out.

But, because you apparently would love to see us get into legal trouble for something, you had to go blather to the authorities. And now we’re completely broke, with no safety net, and barely enough money to get by until whenever Hubby’s indie business actually makes some.

Thanks a lot.

As if I didn’t have enough concerns on my plate, bleeding my soul dry, now I have to worry about whether or not we get to eat, next week.

Fuck you. Fuck you very much.

Excuse me?

This guy had an interesting rant. What it boils down to is: Do what you like, just don’t ruin Christmas.

What.

The.

Fuck.

You have corporate assholes quietly and insidiously ruining your kids’ future, and that’s fine, just so long as no-one yells about it during a fucking Santa Claus parade?

We’re not allowed to speak because someone made your kid cry? What?

I’d image macro this with Professor Farnsworth saying “I don’t want to live on this planet any more”… but I have better things to do.

Like, making a better tomorrow for myself and my kids and everyone else on the planet.

/rant.