Well I guess it was inevitable that the book that I have been writing has become a blog. That is right I am blogging the book. And I made an entry on a notepad with a few beers in me last week, that says: Stoneyfield yogurt vs. Krispy Kreme Donuts. And I cannot remember what significance this has. I am sure this will annoy me for some time until I remember what the heck this means. Suddenly I just remembered. I went into work last week and there were at least a half a dozen donuts left over from the previous shift. And yes I ate one, but that is all I had. Because I had a Luscious Lemon Stoneyfield yogurt for lunch and I had this with my grains, because I knew that I would feel much better in the long run, if I ate this instead of more donuts. I probably did not need the one donut but hey Krispy Kremes have historical significance for me. Because I had eaten them years ago in Gainsville Florida before any Yankees up here had ever heard of them. And they were and are good, and the name is even better. In fact my memory gets real good when it comes to food and I remember spending the last of my cash on a couple of donuts and a cup of coffee, and leaving the curly headed counter girl a pretty decent tip. But that was before I came up with my food philosophy. Now I know better. I will have one donut and the yogurt and grains and call it a day or at least a while before eating again. And today I forego the coffee for decaffenated tea or coffee and sleep much better and longer.
Today I went out to my father’s house to work on an electrical problem that he is having in his house. He has two plugs and a hall light with two three way switches that are all dead. So we replaced the switches thinking this might take care of the problem with the short in the circuit. After replacing the old swithches with new ones and no luck in solving the problem,we broke for lunch. During lunch I was trying to remember what I knew about residential wiring. I had a partner at work who was a certified electrician and I picked up a lot from him. And I also rewired my basement apartment in the duplex that I used to live in. And I rewired a good bit of the basement in the house that I am living in now. But I have not thought about wiring in a while and I had to try to relearn what I used to know. We had beef stew and broccoli raviolis for lunch. My dad is a pretty good cook having grown up in a bar restaurant. He and my mother team up on some pretty interesting meals, all tasting pretty good. I washed this meal down with a big cup of regular tea with the caffein. I needed the jolt since I was trying to remember how all those pigtailed wires work. My mother has been having her ups and downs lately. She is prone to depression sometimes and she would not eat with us at first. Then my dad coaxed her into the kitchen to eat something. So she came in and after she ate something I gave her a back rub at the kitchen table. I call this my treatment. And when me and my dad started gossiping about people and things she started to perk up with our mood. My father and I then had our conversation about haircuts. And twenty years ago after coming back from Africa he saw me cutting my own hair, a trick that I taught myself. And he started cutting his own hair and he has not been to a barber since then. We always go through the same kidding about who is more frugal. I now get my hair cut most of the time at Supercuts because I have the grain business in the house and I don’t want any hair around the food. I even gave my dad a gift certificate for a haircut last year but he had not used it yet. I figured that getting a freebie would get him to the barber but he has got pretty good using two mirrors to get the back of his hair. After lunch we headed up to the attic and tested the junction boxes in the attic for continuity on the wires. Next we headed down to the fuse box to test the circuits down there. Finally we realized we are going to have to run a new piece of wire to the dead circuit. My dad thought maybe a squirrel had gotten into the roof and chewed on the wire, but since the wire is bx-steel covered wire this was unlikely. So we decided to quit for the day and he was going to look for a shoot to run a new wire next week. Doing all the different aspects of house maintainance sometimes turns into experimentation ,because of the frailty of my memory. Just like the way I eat has been one big experiment. Lately I have been experimenting with having pizzas cut into 24 thin slivers rather than 8 or twelve large cuts and I have found that I do actually eat less this way. We started doing this a few years ago when we took a large pizza to one of those everybody brings food to the party. So we started having them cut it small for ourselves at home. I am not sure that its because we have to get up more to get more cuts or what. But we do eat less pizza when we cut it small. So I guess you could call this a dieting technique. Another technique is that we do not shove it in at a restaurant anymore to the point that we are stuffed. After bread, soup, salad and drink recently at our favorite italian restaurant I only ate a portion of the pasta entreé. I took the rest of it home and ate it for lunch the next day.