Ring Pistol

Because really, you could put an eye out.

Web Pirates

Thought for the Day

Tomorrow will be better.

Always is.

Quote of the Day

"I take life with a grain of salt, a wedge of lime, and a shot of tequila."
- unknown

Things Needing Fixing

Now that I've successfully grooved into a great new workout schedule and created a new internal communications plan at work at that I'm implementing, it's time to fix my REAL writing schedule, cause I can tell you right now that Black Desert ain't going to be done by March.

Fucking personal life, always getting in the way.

New goal: Fix writing schedule. While retaining the awesomeness that is my work and workout schedules.

When I grow up, I want to be able to juggle health, both types of writing, and a real, live personal life, for long periods of time. That would just be so fun.

A chick's gotta have goals.

An Open Reader Poll

Q: Should Kameron go on a date Friday night?

Yes/No

Please post your response in the comments section below (please show your work).

One For the Road

In Which the Protagonist Heads to Bed Early

Too much working. Too much working out.

Too much time tonight to sit around and think.

I'll get to bed early while I'm ahead. Rested muscles means more lifting at the gym tomorrow.

Reasons I Can't Wait Until Payday

Because the next payday is the 1st of February, which means I will once again have $100 in "fun money."

1/3 of which I have already decided to spend on pants.

This is the exciting writing life, yo.

My First Bench Press!

The two other women in my workday workout group didn't show up today, so I got a Kameron-friendly workout from one of our work personal trainers, K.

She hauled me back into the free weights area, and I bench pressed for the first time!

The bar itself is 45 lbs, so she started me with that just to verify that I could, you know, lift it with ease. She increased the weight by 5lbs on each bar until we got to 65. By then, I was probably too worn out to push weight increments of much more, but next time... I want to start at 70, yo!

As we moved on to free weights, one of the guys in the gym lumbered up and said, "You know, if you ladies are serious about lifting weights, you should use higher and higher increments. You know, 8 pounds, then 10pounds, maybe even a couple reps with 20, you know, til you tire out. Women don't have testoserone, so you don't bulk up. You'll just get these real lean muscles."

Imagine, when I grow up, I might even be able to lift a 20lb free weight!

I did understand the weight training routine he was referencing... though he got it wrong. It actually works in reverse of the way he said it. You start with the heaviest weight you can lift, do it to failure, then notch down your weights, doing each successively smaller weight to failure. It's called a Drop Set. This will build muscle faster, but could also result in overtraining. There are pros and cons. I suppose you could try this in reverse the way he believed you should (with his 20 years of personal training experience, I'm sure), but if you do 20 lbs to failure, you probably aren't going to be able to lift 25 and do them to failure immediately afterwards.

Anyway. Math is hard, and I'm just a girl.

K. was much nicer than I was going to be.

What I wanted to say was, first: "Women don't have any testoserone, huh? I wonder where my wicked sex drives comes from, then."

And:

"If I wanted your advice, I would ask. I, however, am no foreigner to free weights, thanks. Even though I'm just a girl."

K. has 15 years of personal training experience and a BA in Exercise Science or something. She merely said, "Thank you."

As we headed out of the weight area to work on the assisted pull-up machine she said, "Don't you just love it when random guys in the gym give you unsolicited advice?"

"We're just girls," I said. "It happens every time you walk over to the boys' half of the gym. And then they wonder why more women don't lift weights."

Honestly, do you think guys give other guys unsolicited advice in the weights room? Maybe they do, and I just never noticed because I don't spend enough time there. But I'd bet women get way more unsolicited advice than men do. Women have pride too, you know. And many of us even have an idea of what we're doing. If we're not doing it the way you want us to do it, it's probably for a reason. You don't know what our goals are. You don't know what our backgrounds are. Some of us have 15 years of personal training experience. Some of us can kick you in the head.

Thanks, tho, buddy.

Anyway:

My first bench press!

Awesome!

Be Advised

5 Scariest Insects in the World

No shit, man.

New PM Workout Routine

So, for some time now I've been trying to come up with a regular evening lower-body routine to match my morning upper-body free weights routine. My morning one works great. Years of habit make kicking off my day with a quick 15 minutes of weights as natural to me as breakfast and a shower.

But I needed something I can get into at night that's as quick, simple, and effective.

Well, it appears I may have found it. And if this doesn't kick your ass, then you're in far better shape than I. I can alter the number of sets to make this a quick 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the day. Again, if my morning/evening sets go much longer than that, I tend to avoid them. An hour workout during my weekday is fine, but get me at the beginning or end of the day, and it better be fast and require very little complex thought.

We'll see if I can work this one in each evening. So far, it's proved to be fun and functional, just like my 20 minutes of easy, post-pancakes cardio on the weekends.

Fun, easy, and functional makes it much more likely this will become a part of my daily routine.

Quote of the Day

"I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work." - Thomas Edison

12 Ways to Eat Diabetic-Friendly On a Budget

Most food budget tips will tell you to stock up on cheap fillers like rice, potatoes, pasta and canned beans and soups. The canned beans might not be so bad, but if you're a fickle diabetic like me, you want to stick to a low carb diet. This reduces the amount of insulin you take every day, improves your numbers, and ultimately, results in a consistent weight and clear head.

One of the biggest obstacles to figuring out a doable budget for me was creating a reasonable food budget without the help of the handy rice and pasta fillers that Steph and the Old Man are able to use. It's been a brutal learning period.

Here's some tips I've come up with for how to eat low-carb on a budget:

1) Buy cheap vegetables. Forget those pre-cut bags of broccoli and cauliflower. Cabbage is 50 cents a head (prob'ly cheaper in other places), and it's really filling. There are also a million ways to cook it. It's a poor person's food. People have been creative. Carrots and frozen peas are some other great low-cost filler vegetables (brussels sprouts aren't bad either, but they aren't the cheapest thing on the block).

2) Buy your meat in bulk. Go to Sam's Club or Costco, if you can, and buy those big packs of chicken breasts for stewing meat. Divide them up into individual bags when you get home and freeze them. Take them out the night before to defrost for your chicken stir fry the next night. No more pre-cooked meats. You'll thank yourself later when you're making an offer on that new house.

3) Breakfast doesn't have to be a full-out affair. I was used to the eggs and bacon routine from my Atkins days, so when I got diagnosed, I just ported that over. But it ended up taking up too much time, and bacon (even turkey bacon) isn't exactly cheap. Plus, I could only stomach it with cheese and mixed veggies, and that meant going through more cheese every week than my pocket was comfortable with. I buy frozen blueberries in bulk and defrost a cup of those, dust them in Splenda, and eat them in the morning while I'm catching up on blogs.

4) What about that Splenda? Buy it in bulk, too. It always feels like a major expense, though I don't go through a lot of it. When I buy it in bulk, I'm spending maybe $5.99 a month on it. Buying it at the store means I'm spending $7.99-8.99. This may not sound like a huge difference, but that's 2 or 3 iTunes songs you get to download every month now, or a pair of socks (I have learned how to mend my socks. I like iTunes more than I like buying new socks).

5) Low carb tortillas are a must. They're expensive: $2.99 for a pack of 8. But they do replace all of your bread products, and with that 90-per calorie count and 9-per carb count, you just can't beat them. I buy Tam-x-ico's Low Carb Tortillas. I buy two packages per week. That's a whopping $6 on bread products, but if you think about it, I'm not buying bread, pitas, bagels, chips, crackers or any other type of snack food of a similar variety. So $6 a week on bread products really isn't that bad.

6) Speaking of tortillas, since this is your only bread product, you're going to want to get creative with them. Use them for sandwich wraps for lunch, grilled wraps for dinner, fajitas, nachos or chips (cut them up and fry them or bake them in your toaster oven), quesadillas, and etc. Get your $6 worth.

7) Yogurt is great... just choose the right kind. There's a great low-carb yogurt called Fage that has like 9 carbs a serving, and a very reasonable calorie count. You can use this as an additional breakfast item, add it to your whole-wheat pancakes, or mix it with frozen berries and Splenda for a great sweet treat. Thing is, Fage is a tad on the expensive size. For just over a dollar less, you can buy Trader Joe's Greek Yogurt. Fewer carbs (6 per serving), and cheaper price. It's your best bet. Like the Fage, opt for the 0% fat version. They taste exactly the same as the full fat, but have something ridiculous like 1/3 to 1/4 of the calories.

8) And, what about berries? The highest cost item on my food bill every week was fresh berries. What can I say? I was addicted. Don't buy them fresh unless it's the time of year where they're in season, and it's cheaper to buy fresh than frozen. Otherwise, buy your low carb blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries frozen. Seriously. You'll save loads.

9) Watch the cheese. This is my biggest weakness. It's the best no-carb snack on the planet! Stick to low-fat string cheese (in my opinion, it tastes better than full fat) and some kind of extra sharp cheddar cheese for your sandwiches, fajiitas, and the like. If you must, you can buy feta or blue cheese for your salads, but at $3-$4 a week, it's not always a worthwhile expense for me. Some weeks, I'd rather buy socks.

10) Don't shop hungry. Yeah, yeah, you've heard this before as a great stupid "weight loss" tip, but let's think about where it's really hitting you: your budget. Nothing looks better than $4 packages of pecans and $5 cheese and spinach pre-made quesadillas when I'm shopping hungry, and the urge to add "just one more thing because I'm so cool!" to the basket quickly becomes $20 worth of "just one more thing"s.

11) Only buy thing's you'll eat. This might sound obvious, too, but if you're buying three packages of spinach a week for your lunch salads and only using 2 and throwing out the other one, that's $1.99 in the hole. You could have bought some SnapPea Crisps or a dark chocolate bar instead. If you only drink half a gallon of milk a week, don't buy a gallon. Unless it's something you're buying in bulk and freezing, only buy what you're going to use that week. Waste not.

12) No incidentals. No magazines, no books, no string, no plants, no random greeting cards. You can buy these things out of your fun budget when you're out on a different trip, to have fun. Make grocery shopping about grocery shopping. If the budgets are separate (for me, my fun budget and grocery budget are very much separate), then separate them in your head. Piling things on and figuring you'll sort out the costs later means no headache now, but a nasty realization later when you sit down with the recipes and realize you blew half your monthly fun budget on a Bob Greene book, an Oprah magazine, some notebook paper, and a handful of pens.

If I stick absolutely to my "rules" every week, I still probably spend $70-80 a week on groceries (this also includes toiletries - razors, face wash, soap and the like). This might still sound really high to people used to living on rice and pasta. The best I ever did on groceries was $50 a week... eight years ago. I did that by drastically reducing my food intake (two eggs and mixed veggies separated into two portions: one portion for breakfast, one for lunch, and mixed veggies, brown rice and sausage for dinner. String cheese to snack on. That's it. It was wicked tight, and not the funnest thing I've ever done).

$70-80 a week will be annoying, but comfortable. You'll still get snacks and a variety of sugar-friendly food, and you won't have to go without soap.

Finding Your Motivation

What drives you?

Not just to get up in the morning (I must work to pay for my roof, my food, to survive), but what drives you to do more than just survive? To push into the unknown, to take a risk?

I used to fear relationships and commitment in the same way people fear death. It's why I stayed single so long after high school, and one of the reasons (besides my crazy sickness) that caused much of the trouble in the two relationships I had after coming out of my post-highschool dating hiatus. I was terrified of getting close to people, of getting into anything serious, of not having an escape route, of showing weakness, of relying on somebody who was, by definition, unreliable. After all, anyone who wasn't me was unreliable.

That was all about to change.

I'd been in a relationship for three years in high school, lived with the guy for six months, turned him down - twice - when he asked me to marry him. And in that relationship, my first taste of what it was "relationships" were supposed to be, I became everything I hated.

I became a weak-willed, screaming, miserable wreck. I hated myself. I wanted to kill myself. I was a depressed, hysterical ball of self-hatred. I was terrified of everything. Terrified of my boyfriend, terrified of change, terrified of failing even more than I'd already failed. I took fistfuls of my waitressing tip money and watched "Titanic" in the theaters, over and over, wishing I could be that brave to just break away from everything - all of the promises, the expectations. I should have had everything I wanted. I should have been happy. But this wasn't the life I wanted. This wasn't who I wanted to be, and I didn't know how to change it. Change felt terrifying. Failure was terrifying.

But this, this life, was worse.

I made the connection somewhere in my head that it was my reliance on my boyfriend, it was this weak, sobbing, scary relationship that had caused me to become this way, and that if I avoided getting too close, avoided relying on somebody else, if I relied only on my own strength, then I'd never become that person again.

When I was asked to shed this idea in later relationships, it was like asking me to kill myself. It was like asking me to pull out the vital clockwork inside of myself that had built me into this strong, brave person who took risks and put a backpack on her back and just went. Oh, what a brave person I'd become! Moving on when things got too stale, too comfortable. Moving on because I believed with every taut fiber in my body that if I got too comfortable, if I got stale, I'd become that weak, groveling, sniveling piece of shit I had been.

I just had to keep moving. I had to cut people out of my life, and keep moving.

Jenn told me this was a shit-ass crazy way to live my life, but it's all I had. I had no driving force to replace it. Taking this belief away from me would be like cutting off my leg and telling me to walk. I wouldn't know how. I'd have to learn everything all over again.

One of the brutal experiences of my eighteen months of supreme craziness was realizing how easy it was to die. Was coming to the understanding of how much easier it was for me to die, on a daily basis, than everybody else. My death was just a little bit closer.

I should be dead already.

I made some crazy decisions based on that near-death experience. Some crazy decisions and then... some other crazier ones.

I was thinking about past relationships, past loves, and remembering an ex who really hated himself, drove himself to do stuff with this ragged internal monologue of self-hate, and I thought, God, how can you use self-hate as such a powerful motivator? How could I be with someone so full of self-hate?

And then I remembered that that's how I used to be. That's what drove me. Self-hate. Fear. Hate at the person I used to be. Fear of becoming that person again. Fear of giving it all up, of throwing up my hands and crying and saying, "That's all I could do." Not fear of never accomplishing anything, but fear of never even trying.

I don't mind failure.

What I mind is the not trying.

With the self-hate gone, with that terror-motivation gone, I realized... Yeah. With that gone, I was finally able to let go and love people, and start planning for futures; futures with other people in my life besides, well, me. For the first time, I allowed my heart to be broken. Really broken. Not hurt. Not bruised. I opened myself up that way. And it sucked, and it made me feel weak and stupid. I hated it.

But it wasn't the end of the world. Far from it.

So if I wasn't being driven by self-hate anymore, what was driving me? Something had to keep me going. There's something else that pushes me to make a better career for myself, to keep pounding out books, to develop a kick-ass workout plan to get the buffness I want, to budget, to build a life. Where does that motivation come from? Not just to imagine that life, but to build it? I could just sit around delivering the bare minimum at work, bumming off my roommates until they kicked me out, renting forever, blaming others for my problems, racking up more credit card debt, building one-sided relationships, going to be early, giving up on workouts, cause really, why bother? Who cares?

I care. And I care enough to use everything in my power to build the life I want.

Where does it come from?

From almost dying. From seeing how easily everything just... stops. You just go to sleep. And you don't wake up. That's it.

There's no great mystery, no second chances, no pie in the sky, no ghostly light, nobody's hand in the dark. You just go to sleep. You're done.

This is all you've got.

The realization of how precious this is, how close we all are to just stopping... It really pulled me up short this year. It make me realize how much I still want to do. I remind myself every day that I'm living on borrowed time. Time even more precious than before, because it's like getting a second chance. A second chance to live, to create, to love, to build, to do.

In death, everything stops.

If death is about stopping, then living is about going. Pushing. Moving forward.
It's not just other people who are unreliable anymore. My own body betrayed me. I'm unreliable, too. We're all taking a risk. We're all afraid. All of us have hearts that can be broken. That's the risk we take. Every day.

We're all afraid.

But my desire to live, to really LIVE, trumps all those fears. All those risks.

Living is all we've got.

The Sarah Conner Chronicles

"Pack the guns. I'll make pancakes."

I mean, really, it couldn't get much cooler than that.

It took me some time to warm up to this one. The woman who plays Sarah is that chick from The 300, so though she's not as kick-ass as I'd like her to be, I have faith that she'll warm up as things go along. She's got a strong face and a good presence. I think she'll find her groove soon enough (yes, a lot of that is that I'd like her to be physically more powerful looking than she is now. +20 lbs and some muscles, OK, people? This is Sarah Conner. I'll give you the teenager terminator, but give me my buff, scary, kick-ass heroine too, OK?).

Summer Glau was perfectly cast as the awkward terminator; she creates just the right dissonance in her performance between high-school chick and scary Other. It's a good performance. Like Heady's, I think it'll get better as it goes on.

The kid? Yeah, well, hopefully he'll get a backbone and some fucking sense as things go on. You need to have somebody strong enough to stand next to these women, and thus far, he's underwhelming.

You'd also think that with so many folks recognizing Sarah, she'd, like, get a fucking hair cut and dye job, tho, don't you think?

I'm just sayin'. I'm not gonna handwave that one much longer.

You also gotta love all the guns and violence and the wacky space travel and rebels-from-the-future thing. Throwing in a huge cast of rebels and terminators should also make things really interesting. I like the idea of creating a far-future army in the past to fight the creation of their own future.

Making this movie "fix" the crap that was movie 3 was brilliant also. I was hoping they'd do that. Who fucking kills Sarah Conner?

Puleeez.

We'll definately be watching the others.

Dubai

Where your $3.50 a gallon goes...

Quote of the Day

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
- D.H. Lawrence

Today's (Other) Song, Stuck On Repeat

I just bought both of these on iTunes. Since I was out of fun money for the month, I decided I would go without blue cheese on my salad this week in order to pay for it.

Want something, swap something.

I hate budgets.

The Wolfgang Press - "A Girl Like You"

You go to sleep
I want to sail in your head
And when you speak
You know you've got to make sense

You want to say
That it's me you know best
I say a girl like you
She was born to be blessed

My hands are yours
And you can take them from me
And take my mouth
I have nothing to say

You want to fly
To some other place
I say a girl like
She was born to be kissed
Born to be kissed

One thousand times
And your mother too
One thousand times

You're gonna say
You say you want to be free
But when you fall
You wanna fall back to me

You want to fly
And there's no disgrace
I say a girl like you
She was born to be blessed

My hands are yours
Cause I don't know how to pray
Take my mouth
I have nothing to say

I lift my heart
Up to a higher place
Up to a girl like you
Who was born to be kissed
Born to be kissed

One thousand times
And your sisters too
One thousand times
A girl like you

One thousand times
And your mother too
One thousand times
And your sisters too

One thousand times
And a girl like you
One thousand times
One thousand times

Because I saw you
Because I saw you