I have a camera. Yes, yes I do. I have my first ever digital camera. Yeah, I’m behind the times, so sue me.

One of the things I want to do with it is include photos in the cookbook reviews to make them more interesting—this way you can see for yourself how the recipes came out.

(I expect this could be particularly interesting when things go… wrong.)

Anyway, while it’s true that I’ll end up taking way more images of the cats than any person should, here’s a taste of other things to come. And yes, this was tonight’s dinner:

Not familiar with the concept of honor killings? Familiar with them but don’t know much about them or how you of all people might do something about it? Read this post by Azteclady over at Karen Knows Best; read Joss Whedon’s original 2007 post; and then pick up a copy of the book, Nothing But Red to help raise awareness and money for the cause. Heck, buy one for a friend, or a local library.

And please, do read Whedon’s post. I have nothing to add because he already said it all, far better than I could have.

The one thing that all ‘experts’ on health and eating (whether they’re doctors, nutritionists, or just proponents of the latest fad) seem to agree on is this: colorful, non-starchy veggies are healthy. They go back and forth on everything else, but not that. Of course, most of that back-and-forth could be accounted for if people just used a little common sense—everything in moderation, and the farther removed it is from the kind of diet we were designed for and eating over the last few thousand years, the more you should exercise that moderation. Seems to make sense to me, anyway.

So, yeah: vegetables. Whole grains. Good water. Fruits, whole, not juiced, so they have fiber to slow the blood-sugar spike.

I can’t entirely give up meat and it’s one of those things the ‘experts’ go back and forth on. However, I do recognize that it is a lot harder on the environment than eating a similar amount of vegetables (it takes so much more in the way of resources to produce that meat), and vegetables are better to eat in bulk. So over time I’ve gradually slid into a semi-vegetarian diet. Usually we get a freezer pack of meats from our butcher, which we know are good quality, then once a week or so we take a package out of the freezer, thaw it, and make something with it. Occasionally we have a little deli meat as well, although we’re trying to avoid the ones with preservatives these days where possible. We got some natural turkey breast at the Whole Foods market last weekend, and I was really surprised to discover how much more flavor it had than the stuff from the grocery store. We used one slice at a time in whole wheat wraps with plenty of veggies, so it served as a satisfying bit of flavor.

Although I’m not a vegetarian, I do use vegetarian cookbooks, because they’re a wonderful source of delicious and nutritious vegetable recipes. I particularly enjoyed reviewing The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Vegetarian, Third Edition, which contained a whole lot of fascinating information on nutrition and the like.

I also got a kick out of Food 2.0, by Charlie Ayers, the chef who cooked for Google. It’s got some amazing natural foods recipes in it, including a smoothie recipe that knocked my socks clean off.

Lately I have a new morning routine. While the cats eat their breakfast (which takes a good 10-20 minutes since they eat a raw diet), I leave my meusli to soak. It’s a slight variation on a fantastic recipe from the CIG vegetarian book; I just use dried cranberries instead of raisins (I like the tartness) and plain kefir instead of yogurt (I like the consistency), and I add a squeeze of agave nectar. I do my stretching from Stretching Illustrated or some yoga. I have my meusli, which fills me up better than oatmeal, cereal, eggs, or anything else I’ve tried, and I have some V8. (Yeah, it’s got a lot of sodium, but it’s a start, and it’s better than hot chocolate or OJ.)

I should be better about having veggies for lunch, but I’m lame and often have kefir with agave, more meusli, or leftovers. Sometimes we make a bean salad or something similar ahead of time for our lunches (it’s easy for my husband to pack in a cooler), in which case I might have that. Then there’s dinner, which could be just about anything, but these days is likely to be heavy on whatever produce looks good.

I won’t claim I’m suddenly losing a ton of weight or anything. I still need to get more exercise than I do, as well as eat less (I’m a compulsive over-eater with a wicked sweet tooth). My medications also don’t help—when I got switched from one ADD medication to another a couple of years ago, I suddenly gained more weight than I care to think about, and I have to fight just to keep from gaining more. But at least I have more energy when I eat well, and I know by eating less processed foods and less sugar I’m reducing the chance I’ll develop type II diabetes (which does run in the family) or other, related problems.

Then there are articles like the one that discusses a possible link between chemicals in body products and breast cancer tumors. Chemicals are being found in people’s bodies that probably got there through things they apply to their skin, hair, etc., and those products don’t have to abide by the same strict safety guidelines that foods do. You can’t avoid exposure to potentially harmful chemicals, but you can at least reduce it. I use all natural products when possible (it’s a little tough for me because I’m allergic to aloe, which is in almost everything), buy organic when I can afford it, and don’t use most cosmetics.

I never thought of myself as a health nut, but as I hit my mid-30s I’m kind of becoming one. Maybe I’ve just been made more aware of my health by recent changes in it (like the pains that seemed to be gallbladder problems, but might be ulcers instead). Maybe I’ve just started noticing the quality of life that some of my older friends enjoy, and others don’t, and I’m making some decisions about what I want to be capable of in another ten, twenty, or even forty years.

At any rate, it’s the sort of thing you have to think about sometime, and act on eventually. Otherwise you run out of time.

Today’s book review is of Elizabeth Vaughan’s amazing fantasy-romance Dagger-Star.

You know you’ve been receiving too many review books when the FedEx guy thanks you for keeping him in a job.

You know you review too many books when a relative tells you they might be gluten sensitive and the first thing you say is, “I have a review copy of a book about that…”

You know too many of your review copies are of the ’spicy’ variety when you have to start a separate book to take with you to the gym most nights. (It’s a family-friendly gym.)

Speaking of review books, here are two more reviews: Janelle Denison’s Wild for Him and, from Sensorotika, Erotika: Bedtime Stories.

And now, for today’s re-worked T-shirt design, perfect for roleplayers and gamers:

I see dead people…

From 1990 to 1992, I went to MIT. From ‘90-91, I shared a dorm room and slept in the top bunk. The floor was linoleum over concrete. One morning I happened to fall from the top bunk and landed on my ass. From then on, I have always had mild problems with my tailbone and my neck. In ‘92, someone hit me on the side of my head—just in front of my right ear—during an argument, hard enough to knock me over. That sent the neck pain from mild (and almost negligible as long as I didn’t sleep with a pillow) to killer. There were times when it hurt so much that I’d lie on my back with my eyes closed, and the tiniest movement made me sick to my stomach.

I got physical therapy; the first physical therapist helped, but when she left the hospital and I got a different one, she wasn’t able to do much. I was told that the occipital nerve at the base of my skull was pinched and inflamed; that I held my head forward of where I should which was causing stress on the muscles in my shoulders, neck, and head. A doctor put me on oxycodone for a short while; it didn’t help a whole lot, so I took it once a week to at least give me a short break from the pain. Kind of, a little time to recharge and recoup my ability to handle the pain. The doctor tried injecting some stuff in the back of my head, but it burned like hell and didn’t help.

Then my mother sent me a video she bought at Kripalu. It was called yoga for pain relief, or release, or something like that. I tried it. And little by little, the pain got better. I came to understand from talking to a physical therapist that this made a lot of sense—the pinched nerve was being released as the yoga stretches lengthened and stretched out my vertebrae, so the inflammation reduced. I was learning to hold my head back where it should be again (yoga teaches proper posture), so the muscles in my shoulders, neck, and head weren’t being stressed. However, I made the mistake of telling the doctor I was seeing that yoga had made a huge improvement, and I got shunted into the category of hypochondriac and shown the door. He was an older guy, white, male, heavily steeped in traditional American medicine. Never mind that the yoga stretches were simply an ideal form of at-home physical therapy—it wasn’t within the tools of the American doctor, therefore it was bunk.

That’s okay though—it helped far more than the doctor had, so I didn’t mind that I wasn’t seeing him any more. Eventually I got to the point where, although I still have to be a bit careful with my head and neck, they don’t hurt from day to day. I have to make sure to buy living room furniture that has good support; no people-eating soft couches and cushions. I find that plain wooden chairs, particularly those found in restaurants, often give me headaches and hurt my sacrum.

Nowadays, my sacrum is the real problem—that point at the base of my spine that I landed on when I fell out of that bunk bed almost 20 years ago. It has all the earmarks of sciatica. My last doctor just said “get exercise” when I asked him about it, which wasn’t entirely useful, but this last week I was reading a review copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Stretching Illustrated. It has a stretching course to use if you suffer from sciatica, so I’m working with that now in addition to going to the gym most nights.

A lot of people who haven’t worked with yoga think that it’s something hard. This isn’t surprising—photographers love to show us the most complex and fascinating-looking poses that leave us saying, ‘I could never do that!’ Yoga instructors love to show those stretches too, because it shows how accomplished they are, and it’s an implicit promise: ‘I can show you how to do this too!’

Truthfully, however, yoga can be one of the gentlest, easiest exercises you’ll find. Sure, there are some tough, impressive yoga stretches out there, but those are something that you work up to, if you do them at all. Many yoga stretches are designed to nurture the body, and can be adapted easily to injuries, weight issues, etc. Yoga: the Iyengar Way is one of my favorite resources; it includes detailed photos and hints, as well as ratings of each pose’s difficulty so you can find the easy or hard ones. Yoga for Wellness is another good find, since it is designed entirely around the idea of using yoga to heal an injured body. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Yoga, Fourth Edition will also give you a good place to start; it includes many variations to help make the poses easier or more challenging as necessary.

Luckily many new doctors these days are open to such ‘alternative’ and natural treatments as yoga. They recognize it for what it is: a legitimate form of stretch therapy that can be practiced at home or with a teacher, that doesn’t require the expense of a physical therapist (many health insurance plans cover a very limited amount of physical therapy, and that’s assuming you’re insured). Look around, and find a yoga instructor who has experience with injured clients. If your instructor insists that there are no detrimental yoga poses, keep looking—a good instructor, like those books I list above, will know the limits of the poses and how to determine your body’s limits as well.

A doctor’s input is important, and you should absolutely see one first to find out the limits of what you can safely do. But then it’s time to take charge of your own health, and stop waiting for a pill, surgery, or injection to solve everything that ails you. I was lucky to have a great mother who thought of me when she saw that video and sent it along, probably saving me years of pain. Now that you know about this stuff, you can get what you need for yourself.

Okay, I didn’t get a review written yesterday. But I have two books read & ready to be reviewed for this coming week (one fiction, one non-), and a cookbook almost ready (cooked from, but I need to read more of it). Speaking of cookbooks, this week we’re cooking from Food 2.0, the cookbook from the chef who cooked at Google for years. Our first experiment from it—a smoothie—was awesome. In order to get everything we needed we made a rare pilgrimage to the Whole Foods Market. Usually the prices there are insane; however, the prices there don’t seem to be rising as fast as elsewhere in response to the higher gas prices, so it no longer seems quite so ridiculous to shop there now and then.

We went to see a movie today (Ruins? The Ruins? Whichever). It was definitely fun, if not overly new or different, and it had some nice touches to it. Mostly it made me curious to read the book, which at this rate will happen on the fifth of never. Sadly, the movie popcorn was so bad it made us mildly ill. I’m used to cruddy movie popcorn, but this went above and beyond. Blech.

I felt like doing something semi-productive this evening, so here are two more re-worked MMORPG T-shirt designs:

It’s our “Murlocs of War” and “Gnomes for Breakfast” designs (’Cry havoc! and let slip the murlocs of war’; ‘Gnomes they’re not just for breakfast any more, they’re also for between-meal snacks’).

Hopefully tomorrow I can get a little gardening done around chores, cooking, reading of review books, etc. Hope you’re all having a good weekend!

I’m buried in books. I had a friend visiting over the last week and took a semi-vacation at the same time. She saw how many review books I have at the moment, and when I emailed her this morning and told her my husband had discovered four more on the doorstep when he left for work, she replied:

“woman killed in her own home by book avalanche. film at 11.”

Don’t worry, I can catch up. (I sound so confident, don’t I?) Today’s review is of J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s Immortal in Death. I expect to have another ready to review tomorrow, and we’re cooking from two review cookbooks right now. Speaking of cookbooks, I’ve found that few book bloggers tackle them. But this morning I discovered one that does! Visit the Thin Red Line when you get a chance.

In the meantime, here are two more re-worked designs from Gamers’ Heaven:

Yesterday I got two fillings for the first time in 20 years. Plus side: dental work has improved a whole lot in the last 20 years. It took very little time, and the only pain was from the injection.

Minus side: there’s just no way to eliminate an entire childhood of accumulated terror regarding the dentist’s chair. Every time I feel the drill bite down I expect pain. A lot of pain. I think I shook during the entire time I was in that office. And really, I feel badly for the dentist on that score, because he’s a nice guy who does a good job, and it’s gotta be tough to know your clients are scared witless.

Many things have changed since we first started selling shirts & stuff through cafepress at Gamers’ Heaven and Caffeinated Chicanery. I have a better sense of what will translate well from my screen to a T-shirt, mug, or poster. Cafepress now allows us to use the same transparent-background image on dark and light items since they have better printing processes. I have a copy of Photoshop. I have some actual—*gasp*—experience!

Now that all of these things have happened, I noted that our earliest designs were kind of… embarrassing, frankly, next to the recent ones. So, bit by bit, I’m going back through and re-working them. I’m also cleaning house on the designs that never did well. Here I will present you with some of the new/old designs that I’ve done so far; I’m starting off with the gaming shop. First, “I’m not lazy I’m just out of mana,” also known as our first runaway bestseller, which won second place in a Cafepress holiday contest based on sales:

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