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I count calories…well, sort of. I like to attempt to count calories. I try my best to eat right but I’m always cutting corners. Calorie counting helps keep me honest. With that said, I cheat a lot.

I like to try out various websites that help with calorie counting. It’s hard to find a single site that has everything I eat. My recent test-drive has been with Calorie Count Plus, a site provided by About.com. I like that it goes above and beyond just counting calories. It has a decent community side to it as well as a bountiful amount of information about food and general health.

I’m on day 2 of my attempt to count how healthy I eat. I’m not claiming any success, I’m just sayin’.

Last night I was recording what I had for dinner. I crunched the numbers and ran the food log report. 2 out of 7 items were healthy. The rest were given grades of a C+ or lower.

I pondered this for awhile, assessed the situation and proclaimed to Courtney, “Yep. I see my problem. It was the DQ Buster Bar and the mint ice cream that did me in.”

Courtney raised an eyebrow. “The Buster Bar and ice cream? You needed a website to tell you that.”

Apparently some of us know this information off-hand.

Last night when I arrived home Riles was in a stellar mood. Court had been watching him play on the floor by himself for some time. As the night progressed we noticed that he was being quite pleasant all night. During dinner he sat politely and ate. We happened to notice while he ate his eyes were half closed. Riles isn’t typically a tired child, he’s on the go all day long.

We started running the stats and something wasn’t adding up. He was focused and played alone, he ate without incident and appeared tired. Court gave him the ol’ Back-0f-the-hand thermometer test (much more pleasant than the official rear-end check). We debated for awhile whether he was warm or not. But by 7pm it was quite evident that he was running a temp. He was quite tired and ready for bed. There wasn’t much we could do except give him some ibuprofen and put him down for bed.

When we started this whole parenting thing I was quite afraid of knowing when was the right time to do something with Riles. How was I to know when he’s hungry? tired? sick? If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that I will never know when any of those things happen.

Over time I think we’ve learned that our best guess is probably good enough. There’s no point with struggling to get an exact temp when the forehead test will suffice.

I’m taking a sushi cooking class tonight. Cooking is probably the wrong word for it. More like “preparing” sushi, I gather. I cautiously starting eating sushi again after the incident earlier this year. As long as I stay away from the yellow tail I seem to be fine.

I remember the first time I ever watched someone eat sushi. It was my second tech job and I was sitting in the lunch room with my new boss. Steve came in with what I know now is a take-out platter of sushi from Lund’s. I remember thinking how swank and hip it was to be working at a dotcom eating sushi. I hoped one day to be that trendy.

Courtney and I got back on Sunday from a Carribean cruise which took us to San Juan, St. Kitts, St. Barts, St. Maartan, and St. Thomas. I won’t bore you with the drunken details. No one likes to hear stories of drunken debauchery. But I will tell you about the sushi incident.

Since I hadn’t yet figured out that sushi does not agree with me I decided to eat some yellow tail in San Juan the night before we boarded the cruise ship. An hour after I ingested the roll I was back in the hotel room dying. I wasn’t sure how the sushi was going to re-manifest itself. I did know that it felt like it was tearing apart my guts trying to get out. I ended up spending most of the evening in the bathroom on the floor. It took me to noon the next day to realize that I had the same reaction to yellow tail in Minneapolis a week before. Why must I be damned to only eat cheap lousy sushi from Lund’s?!

Incidently, I had to look up how to spell debauchery and found it’s dictionary definition interesting:

1.Extreme indulgence in sensual pleasures; dissipation.

If you are wondering about pictures, they’ll be up soon. I want to wait until I have my new web server up and running first.

Courtney and I celebrated our second anniversary last night by jaunting into Uptown. We started at Sushi Tango for some great sushi. I’m not quite sure what constitutes great sushi. But I figure it has to be good if you can’t tell it raw fish. After having some stiff cocktails with our raw fish we headed over to Zeno, or is it Xeno? I can’t remember. It was a really odd coffee/dessert/sandwich shop where we had to be served and seated to order a coffee. We joked, laughed and plain out enjoyed each other’s company for the entire evening. Rarely do we take the time to reflect on where we’ve been and also understand each other. It was a great night and it reminded me why I fell in love with her nine years ago.

Then later on I spent most of the night popping Pepto pills to combat the onslaught of stomach churning acid making it’s way through my lower intestines.

I have never claimed to be a great cook, but I must say that *I* think I’m the best cook around. Courtney may have a different opinion. I can make a pan full of Manwich like no one else. As long as I have my garlic powder, chili powder, and red onion, I can turn any dinner into a 4-course stink fest that will stay with you for days. The dogs seem to like my cooking as well.

UPDATE: Just like I suspected, Courtney came home and warmed up some of my infamous Manwich. As she cracked the lid to the meaty goodness she hooted, “Jeez! Did you use a little garlic?”

Saturday Courtney and I stopped in at Applebee’s for lunch. We walked in the door at 11:03 am and were patrons in the door. I order by typical chicken fingers basket and Courtney had the steak salad. As I was finishing my meal I noticed that one of my french fries had been overcooked. But as I looked at the burnt piece of potato I slowly realized that it had a head and legs on it. There was a catapillar in my food. I promptly stopped eating and informed our server that I wasn’t angry but very disgusted by the critter. Applebee’s paid for our insect-infested lunch and gave us a $10 gift certificate. I realized they were probably trying to usher us out as quickly as possible so we wouldn’t start hootin’ and hollerin’ about the situation.

I can’t get enough of Hey Ya by Outkast.

Last night I went out to the greatest place on earth, Murray’s in downtown Minneapolis. It’s an upscale dining establishment. Luckily I didn’t have to pay.
I pulled up my poor little Honda to the front door where I was kindly greeted by the valet. Once inside it was straight out of a movie with hundreds of people waiting to serve you. I sat with my group in the “lobby” a.k.a. bar for a minute or two before being seated. Once seated we all perused the menu which was 75% steak, 25% other. So for someone of my tastes I thought I was out of luck. I did manage to find the 1 chicken item on the menu, simply titled “Chicken Breast.” We all sat and talked for a couple of hours. It was a good time.

Have I mentioned before that I bought a Vaio? Yeah, one of those really tiny computers. I absolutely love it. I got the base model, 505ve, which is a Celeron 333, 64 megs of ram, 6.4 gig hard drive. It does the job and looks cool while doing it.