the everyday adventures of sabrina

i'm happy, hope you're happy too

Argh. Sorry.

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i’m really sorry for flooding the friends pages of those people reading this via niquiblog on livejournal, with all the old postings. i was starting to convert the old entries and found a bug in it, so it wasn’t marking things with the proper date in my blosxom entries cache, and i swear i thought i disabled all the postings before i left the house this afternoon, but obviously i didn’t, because they all came back en masse.

bah. sorry!

I WANT A COOKIE.

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maybe it was that crack yesterday about not sitting around eating entire bags of potato chips and staring at the walls, but my *god* do i want some sort of crunchy snack product. RIGHT NOW.

Roast Beef with Nutmeg

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found (a variant on) this while googling for cook times for a beef roast.

Preheat oven to 500°F.
Pat beef roast down with garlic powder, thyme, basil, oregano, black pepper, and liberal amounts of nutmeg. Set roast in pan such that fat is on top, to baste meat while cooking. (Okay, I’ll grant you that it’s nice that, on Atkins, I don’t have to spaz about fat on meat…)

Bake for twenty minutes at 500°F, then reduce heat to 350°F and continue baking. Bake roast for thirty-five minutes per pound (including the initial twenty minutes).

Not bad. Not great, but okay. Would have been better had I cooked it more rare, but I haven’t made a roast in ages and I got the internal temp wrong. Alas.

blah

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the scale actually went up half a pound from yesterday, this morning. *shakes fist at it* yes, yes, i know you’re not supposed to weigh yourself daily, but you see, i’m a terrible creature of habit and if i don’t do it daily, i forget for weeks at a time. it’s because i want to weigh myself before i have any food or drink in the morning, and if i get up and have a glass of water before i remember, then i’m screwed. so. daily. yeah. but only weekly counts towards progress, so technically i’m not up anything, see. ;)

calculating my bmi: 36.6. this is dolefully told me as “clinically obese with high health risk.” yes, once more i find reason to disagree with blanket weight statements. is my weight putting extra work on my heart, lungs, etc.? yes, of course. am i an utter couch potato who can’t walk two blocks without gasping for air? uh, no. i’ll grant you i’ve been slacking for the past couple of months, haven’t ridden my bike to work in at least that long, but i am /not/ completely sedentary. my blood pressure is utterly normal. my doctor does not lecture me, presumably because he doesn’t find much reason to do so. i often walk places, which is a really nice thing about living downtown — if i want to go shopping, i can just walk to wherever i want to go. (well, unless i have to go to target. and even that will be resolved in october!) i don’t sit around eating entire bags of potato chips and staring at the wall. so why do you jerks continually insist that i must be?

i wish that weight-loss people would quit dictating with such an obnoxious air of superiority that fat == unhealthy, sedentary slob. some of us are just blessed with slow metabolisms, okay? now shut up already.

The Post Office

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so here’s a mystery: how come there’s apparently no information on the web about the Chicago main U.S. Post Office?

i was talking with blair on irc about construction and happened to mention that my favorite ikea-in-chicago plan i’d heard bandied about only to be dropped was the idea of installing them in the old post office. to which blair responded with “old post office?”

baffled by this and unable to think that blair (who had just trumped my own knowledge of the road construction at roosevelt and clark, which is in the neighborhood where i live and which he lives far from) didn’t know about the old post office/new post office, i started googling. first i tried ‘chicago post office,’ then ‘chicago new post office,’ then all kinds of other things. eventually i was searching on specific years and things, and really, nothing more helpful turned up than a report from the GAO on why the post office construction project overran its budget badly (hint: it’s hard to build buildings over the top of active railroad lines. and you really ought to know how large of a building your project requires before you start.).

so now i’m on a mission to find some sort of information on it, just to prove that there must be some, somewhere.

honestly, it’s the post office! and it was a big mess! and the old one looks way cooler than the old one! these are all fine reasons for there to be lots of sites about it on the web. so where are they all hiding?