I'm a salty sweater!...and other helpful nutritional advice for runners

So I incurred an injury yesterday-more out of the blue, if anything- from running a mere 4 miles or so around Fremont Central Park. My left knee has always been my weakest, but lately, I started off with some foot achiness (in my arch) and now my kneecap is acting up. I thought everything was okay though...I felt fine too. Oh well, the best surprises *sarcasm* are the ones that sneak up on you and blind-side you, I suppose.

I get an e-newsletter from an avid marathoner and he sent me a plethora of interesting running articles. If you don't run, but you enjoy working out, these should provide you with some grains of salt, if any.

Two ways to recover more quickly
Note: co-sponsored by Jeff's running store Phidippides

1) During my long runs and marathons, I wear the Zensah calf sleeve. The research says that the compression improves blood flow to reduce damage, improves recovery and can result in faster times. I have noticed that my legs don't feel as tired at the end when I wear this sleeve.

For the next 24 hours (even when sleeping) I like to wear the sleeve. My legs just feel better—with less fatigue. Research shows that compression sleeves and sox tend to reduce blood clots. Since there is a slight increased risk of clotting (for everyone, not just runners) when sitting on an airplane for several hours, this is another good time to wear the Zensah sleeves.

2) Take a cool tub bath. After the race (or any run longer than 12 miles), I recommend soaking your legs in a tub of cool water for 12-15 minutes or more. The water temperature needs to be 20 degrees cooler than body temperature. I don't believe that ice is needed if the water is 78F or cooler.

***I will definitely take heed to this advice after running my long runs! Plus, I tend to have achy legs in general (well, I do sweat A LOT-like I'm the girl you DO NOT want to sit next to in a hot car with vinyl and probably leather- you'll be a hot, sticky mess next to me! lol) and have experienced Charlie horses in the past.

Strategies to Eat Better
Copyright: Nancy Clark, MS RD, The Athlete’s Kitchen, March 2009

2009 Sports Nutrition Guidelines

Hot off the press from three prominent nutrition and exercise associations—the American Dietetic Association, American College of Sports Medicine, and Dietitians of Canada—is the 2009 Joint Position Stand on Nutrition for Athletic Performance. While there is little earth-shattering news in this comprehensive document (available on www.eatright.org; on the left side of the screen, click on Position stands), the authors comprehensively reviewed the research to determine which sports nutrition practices effectively enhance performance. Here are a few key points, and the reminder that what and when you eat powerfully impacts how well you can perform. I hope this information entices you to “think again” if nutrition is your missing link.

• Don't weigh yourself daily! What you weigh and how much body fat you have should not be the sole criterion for judging how well you are able to perform in sports. That is, don't think that if you get to XX% body fat, you will run faster. For one, all techniques to measure body fat have inherent errors. (Even BodPod can underestimate percent fat by 2 to 3%.) Two, optimal body fat levels depend on genetics and what is optimal for your unique body. Pay more attention to how you feel and perform than to a number on the scale.

• Protein recommendations for both endurance runners and strength-trained athletes range from 0.5 to 0.8 grams per pound (1.2-1.7 g/kg) body weight. For a 150 lb. runner, this comes to about 75 to 120 g protein per day, an amount most runners easily consume through their standard diet without the use of protein supplements or amino acid supplements. Vegetarian runners should target 10% more, because some plant proteins (not soy but legumes) are less well digested than animal proteins. If you are just starting a weight-lifting program, you’ll want to target the higher protein amount. Once you have built-up your muscles, the lower end of the range is fine.

• If you are trying to build muscle, you need to pay attention to carbohydrates, and not just protein. That's because strength training depletes muscle glycogen stores. You can deplete about 25% to 35% of total muscle glycogen stores during a single 30-second bout of resistance exercise.

• Runners who eat enough calories to support their athletic performance are unlikely to need vitamin supplements. But runners who severely limit their food intake to lose weight, or who eliminate a food group (such as dairy, if they are lactose intolerant), or train indoors and get very little sunlight (needed to make Vitamin D) may require supplements.

• If you are vegetarian, a blood donor, and or a woman with heavy menstrual periods, you should pay special attention to your iron intake. If you consume too little iron, you can easily become deficient and be unable to exercise energetically due to anemia. Because reversing iron deficiency can take 3 to 6 months, your best bet is to prevent anemia by regularly eating iron-rich foods (lean beef, chicken thighs, enriched breakfast cereals such as Wheaties and Total) and including in each meal a source of vitamin C (fruits, vegetables).

• Eating before hard exercise, as opposed to exercising in a fasted state, has been shown to improve performance. If you choose to not eat before a hard workout, at least consume a sports drink (or some source of energy) during exercise.

• When you exercise hard for more than one hour, target 30 to 60 grams (120 to 240 calories) of carbohydrate per hour to maintain normal blood glucose levels and enhance your stamina and enjoyment of exercise. Fueling during a long run is especially important if you have not eaten a pre-exercise snack. Popular choices include gummi candy, jelly beans, dried fruits, as well as gels and sports drinks. More research is needed to determine if choosing a sports drink with protein will enhance endurance.

• For optimal recovery, an runner who weighs about 150 pounds should target 300 to 400 calories of carbs within a half-hour after finishing an exhausting workout. More precisely, target 0.5-0.7 g carb/lb (1.0-1.5 g carb/kg). You then want to repeat that dose every 2 hours for the next four to six hours. For example, if you have done a rigorous morning workout and need to do another session that afternoon, you could enjoy a banana, vanilla yogurt and granola as soon as tolerable post-exercise; then, two hours later, a pasta-based lunch; and then, another two hours later, another snack, such as pretzels and orange juice.

• Whether or not you urgently need to refuel depends on when you will next be exercising. While a triathlete who runs for 90 minutes in the morning needs to rapidly refuel for a 3-hour cycling workout in the afternoon, the fitness jogger who works out every other day has little need to obsess about refueling.

•Including a little protein in the recovery meals and snacks enhances muscle repair and growth. Popular carb+protein combinations include chocolate milk, yogurt, cereal+milk, pita+hummus, beans+rice, pasta+meat sauce.

•Muscle cramps are associated with dehydration, electrolyte deficits, and fatigue. Cramps are most common in runners who sweat profusely and are “salty sweaters.” They need more sodium than the standard recommendation of 2,400 mg/day. Losing about 2 pounds of sweat during a workout equates to losing about 1,000 mg sodium. (Note: 8 ounces of sport drink may offer only 110 mg sodium.) Salty sweaters (as observed by a salty crust on the skin of some runners) lose even more sodium. If that’s your case, don’t hesitate to consume salt before, during and after extended exercise. For example, enjoy broth, pretzels, cheese & crackers, pickles and other sodium-rich foods. The majority of active people can easily replace sweat losses via a normal intake of food and fluids.

Final words of advice: If you can make time to train, you can also make time to eat well and get the most out of your training. Optimal sports performance starts with good nutrition!


Nancy Clark, MS, RD, CSSD (Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics) counsels both casual and competitive athletes in her practice at Healthworks, the premier fitness center in Chestnut Hill MA (617-383-6100). Her Sports Nutrition Guidebook, Food Guide for Marathoners, and Cyclist’s Food Guide are available via nancyclarkrd.com. See also sportsnutritionworkshop.com.

***I'm always trying to eat better and feel better after exercising, so these definitely will prove to be helpful to me.***

On that note, I HOPE AND PRAY that I was selected to participate in the Women's Nike Marathon in Oct. '09!!! My credit card was charged and I have been scouring the entire Nike website for hints that I was selected. Running for a Tiffany's necklace is as good as ever a reason to run a marathon...cuz the bf ain't gonna get me nathan in that lil' aqua blue box.


::sniffles::
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hello .twitter. world

It's the latest networking craze (or stalking tool): twitter!

I tend to retreat into my shell every now and then (more so lately), but catch me here if I gratuitously wind up typing some tweets out on my Blackberry: http://twitter.com/shoulderleen.

I have so many goals I'm ambitiously trying to accomplish as of late- I need to catch up on too many things!


Surreptitious mode (o' the irony in light of this post) forreal,
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triple post threat: I <3 Bethenny Frankel!!!

My mind has been racing lately with a litany of thoughts, so I've been exercising a lot to try to tame them; therefore, PARDON THE LONG POSTS! If you really love me, you'll read 'em ;)...okay, so don't read 'em then.

Anyway, I look forward to Tuesday nights-mainly for the new episodes of "The Real Housewives of NYC" ( T.V. shows use quotations? Too lazy to research...). My FAVORITE, FAVORITE woman on there has got to be Bethenny Frankel. Some adjectives to describe her:




1. acerbic: I love her quick wit and repartee, not to mention her total bitch attitude and no-nonsense demeanor. If only I had half the indiscretion she had! I'd be at places already. I am not too fond of Luann and her subtle jealousies; I loved how Bethenny underhandedly told that bitch off with such finesse at the lunch about the "airbrushing incident". haha. Women can be such haters.

2. independent: I love how even though her past relationship didn't exactly work out, she was able to latch onto her passions in life (cooking, surfing) as a means of positivity. She is very career-oriented and it's inspiring to see a woman as ambitious as her.

3. integrity: I must say, even though Ramona called Luann out on her old-ass husband-and Bethenny could have jumped in for the cat fight (especially after the "airbrushing incident")-she kept her composure, prepared that salad, and waited until the opportune time.

4. gorgeous: I loved how she got to be on the cover of a magazine (eff you, Luann; you're just jealous!)...and she sure keeps her physique in tip-top shape. I have a fetish for nice legs, and she sure has some gams. I need to cop that magazine so I can take a closer look at these "re-touched" photos of her; I doubt they were even re-touched. Why wasn't I blessed with her legs?!

EDIT: 5. comical: How could I forget that this woman is funny as all hell. I love her impersonations of Jill and her dry, sarcastic wit in general. She would definitely be a best friend of mine since most of my close compadres always have a sense of humor complete with smart-ass remarks. :D

Overall, this woman is awe-inspiring and her frankness (fitting surname, by the way) is quite endearing. I definitely want to buy her book: Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinnygirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting.

I have a couple of words for Bethenny though--Damn you for having your book signing tomorrow in the Tribeca, which I can't make (for obvious reasons)! And double damn you for having all the CA book signings in Santa Monica!!!

Hey, I was just being frank.
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'quants'- the shift from science to finance

***I'm shifting gears here and going back to the economy! Love this article.***




March 10, 2009
They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Emanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985.

After all, for almost 20 years, as a graduate student at Columbia and a postdoctoral fellow at institutions like Oxford and the University of Colorado, he had been a spear carrier in the quest to unify the forces of nature and establish the elusive and Einsteinian “theory of everything,” hobnobbing with Nobel laureates and other distinguished thinkers. How could managing money compare?

But the letdown never happened. Instead he fell in love with a corner of finance that dealt with stock options.

“Options theory is kind of deep in some way. It was very elegant; it had the quality of physics,” Dr. Derman explained recently with a tinge of wistfulness, sitting in his office at Columbia, where he is now a professor of finance and a risk management consultant with Prisma Capital Partners.

Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs and became managing director, was a forerunner of the many physicists and other scientists who have flooded Wall Street in recent years, moving from a world in which a discrepancy of a few percentage points in a measurement can mean a Nobel Prize or unending mockery to a world in which a few percent one way can land you in jail and a few percent the other way can win you your own private Caribbean island.

They are known as “quants” because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.

This flood seems to be continuing, unabated by the ongoing economic collapse in this country and abroad. Last fall students filled a giant classroom at M.I.T. to overflowing for an evening workshop called “So You Want to Be a Quant.” Some quants analyze the stock market. Others churn out the computer models that analyze otherwise unmeasurable risks and profits of arcane deals, or run their own hedge funds and sift through vast universes of data for the slight disparities that can give them an edge.

Still others have opened an academic front, using complexity theory or artificial intelligence to better understand the behavior of humans in markets. In December the physics Web site arXiv.org, where physicists post their papers, added a section for papers on finance. Submissions on subjects like “the superstatistics of labor productivity” and “stochastic volatility models” have been streaming in.

Quants occupy a revealing niche in modern capitalism. They make a lot of money but not as much as the traders who tease them and treat them like geeks. Until recently they rarely made partner at places like Goldman Sachs. In some quarters they get blamed for the current breakdown — “All I can say is, beware of geeks bearing formulas,” Warren Buffett said on “The Charlie Rose Show” last fall. Even the quants tend to agree that what they do is not quite science.

As Dr. Derman put it in his book “My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance,” “In physics there may one day be a Theory of Everything; in finance and the social sciences, you’re lucky if there is a useable theory of anything.”

Asked to compare her work to physics, one quant, who requested anonymity because her company had not given her permission to talk to reporters, termed the market “a wild beast” that cannot be controlled, and then added: “It’s not like building a bridge. If you’re right more than half the time you’re winning the game.” There are a thousand physicists on Wall Street, she estimated, and many, she said, talk nostalgically about science. “They sold their souls to the devil,” she said, adding, “I haven’t met many quants who said they were in finance because they were in love with finance.”

The Physics of Money

Physicists began to follow the jobs from academia to Wall Street in the late 1970s, when the post-Sputnik boom in science spending had tapered off and the college teaching ranks had been filled with graduates from the 1960s. The result, as Dr. Derman said, was a pipeline with no jobs at the end. Things got even worse after the cold war ended and Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, which would have been the world’s biggest particle accelerator, in 1993.

They arrived on Wall Street in the midst of a financial revolution. Among other things, galloping inflation had made finances more complicated and risky, and it required increasingly sophisticated mathematical expertise to parse even simple investments like bonds. Enter the quant.

“Bonds have a price and a stream of payments — a lot of numbers,” said Dr. Derman, whose first job was to write a computer program to calculate the prices of bond options. The first time he tried to show it off, the screen froze, but his boss was fascinated anyway by the graphical user interface, a novelty on Wall Street at the time.

Stock options, however, were where this revolution was to have its greatest, and paradigmatic, success. In the 1970s the late Fischer Black of Goldman Sachs, Myron S. Scholes of Stanford and Robert C. Merton of Harvard had figured out how to price and hedge these options in a way that seemed to guarantee profits. The so-called Black-Scholes model has been the quants’ gold standard ever since.

In the old days, Dr. Derman explained, if you thought a stock was going to go up, an option was a good deal. But with Black-Scholes, it doesn’t matter where the stock is going. Assuming that the price of the stock fluctuates randomly from day to day, the model provides a prescription for you to still win by buying and selling the underlying stock and its bonds.

“If you’re a trading desk,” Dr. Derman explained, “you don’t care if it goes up or down; you still have a recipe.”

The Black-Scholes equation resembles the kinds of differential equations physicists use to represent heat diffusion and other random processes in nature. Except, instead of molecules or atoms bouncing around randomly, it is the price of the underlying stock.

The price of a stock option, Dr. Derman explained, can be interpreted as a prediction by the market about how much bounce, or volatility, stock prices will have in the future.

But it gets more complicated than that. For example, markets are not perfectly efficient — prices do not always adjust to right level and people are not perfectly rational. Indeed, Dr. Derman said, the idea of a “right level” is “a bit of a fiction.” As a result, prices do not fluctuate according to Brownian motion. Rather, he said: “Markets tend to drift upward or cascade down. You get slow rises and dramatic falls.”

One consequence of this is something called the “volatility smile,” in which options that benefit from market drops cost more than options that benefit from market rises.

Another consequence is that when you need financial models the most — on days like Black Monday in 1987 when the Dow dropped 20 percent — they might break down. The risks of relying on simple models are heightened by investors’ desire to increase their leverage by playing with borrowed money. In that case one bad bet can doom a hedge fund. Dr. Merton and Dr. Scholes won the Nobel in economic science in 1997 for the stock options model. Only a year later Long Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund whose directors included the two Nobelists, collapsed and had to be bailed out to the tune of $3.65 billion by a group of banks.

Afterward, a Merrill Lynch memorandum noted that the financial models “may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore reliance on these models should be limited.”

That was a lesson apparently not learned.

Respect for Nerds

Given the state of the world, you might ask whether quants have any idea at all what they are doing.

Comparing quants to the scientists who had built the atomic bomb and therefore had a duty to warn the world of its dangers, a group of Wall Streeters and academics, led by Mike Brown, a former chairman of Nasdaq and chief financial officer of Microsoft, published a critique of modern finance on the Web site Edge.org last fall calling on scientists to reinvent economics.

Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, who was one of the authors, said, “What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities.”

But it is not so easy to get new ideas into the economic literature, many quants complain. J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the founder and former chief scientist of the Prediction Company, said he was shocked when he started reading finance literature at how backward it was, comparing it to Middle-Ages theories of fire. “They were talking about phlogiston — not the right metaphor,” Dr. Farmer said.

One of the most outspoken critics is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader and now a professor at New York University. He got a rock-star reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos this winter. In his best-selling book “The Black Swan” (Random House, 2007), Dr. Taleb, who made a fortune trading currency on Black Monday, argues that finance and history are dominated by rare and unpredictable events.

“Every trader will tell you that every risk manager is a fraud,” he said, and options traders used to get along fine before Black-Scholes. “We never had any respect for nerds.”

Dr. Taleb has waged war against one element of modern economics in particular: the assumption that price fluctuations follow the familiar bell curve that describes, say, IQ scores or heights in a population, with a mean change and increasingly rare chances of larger or smaller ones, according to so-called Gaussian statistics named for the German mathematician Friedrich Gauss.

But many systems in nature, and finance, appear to be better described by the fractal statistics popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM, which look the same at every scale. An example is the 80-20 rule that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work, or have 80 percent of the money. Within the blessed 20 percent the same rule applies, and so on. As a result the odds of game-changing outliers like Bill Gates’s fortune or a Black Monday are actually much greater than the quant models predict, rendering quants useless or even dangerous, Dr. Taleb said.

“I think physicists should go back to the physics department and leave Wall Street alone,” he said.

When Dr. Taleb asked someone to come up and debate him at a meeting of risk managers in Boston not too long ago, all he got was silence. Recalling the moment, Dr. Taleb grumbled, “Nobody will argue with me.”

Dr. Derman, who likes to say it is the models that are simple, not the world, maintains they can be a useful guide to thinking as long as you do not confuse them with real science — an approach Dr. Taleb scorned as “schizophrenic.”

Dr. Derman said, “Nobody ever took these models as playing chess with God.”

Do some people take the models too seriously? “Not the smart people,” he said.

Quants say that they should not be blamed for the actions of traders. They say they have been in the forefront of pointing out the shortcomings OF modern economics.

“I regard quants to be the good guys,” said Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist who runs the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan. “We did try to warn people,” he said. “This is a crisis caused by business decisions. This isn’t the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn’t understand volatility or correlation.”

Nigel Goldenfeld, a physics professor at the University of Illinois and founder of NumeriX, which sells investment software, compared the financial meltdown to the Challenger space shuttle explosion, saying it was a failure of management and communication.

Prisoners of Wall Street

By their activities, quants admit that despite their misgivings they have at least given cover to some of the wilder schemes of their bosses, allowing traders to conduct business in a quasi-scientific language and take risks they did not understand.

Dr. Goldenfeld of Illinois said that when he posted scholarly articles, some of which were critical of financial models, on his company’s Web site, salespeople told him to take them down. The argument, he explained, was that “it made our company look bad to be associating with Jeremiahs saying that the models were all wrong.”

Dr. Goldenfeld took them down. In business, he explained, unlike in science, the customers are always right.

Quants, in short, are part of the system. “They get paid, a Faustian bargain everybody makes,” said Satyajit Das, a former trader and financial consultant in Australia, who likes to refer to them as “prisoners of Wall Street.”

“What do we use models for?” Mr. Das asked rhetorically. “Making money,” he answered. “That’s not what science is about.”

The recent debacle has only increased the hunger for scientists on Wall Street, according to Andrew Lo, an M.I.T. professor of financial engineering who organized the workshop there, with a panel of veteran quants.

The problem is not that there are too many physicists on Wall Street, he said, but that there are not enough. A graduate, he told the young recruits, can make $75,000 to $250,000 a year as a quant but can also be fired if things go sour. He said an investment banker had told him that Wall Street was not looking for Ph.D.’s, but what he called “P.S.D.s — poor, smart and a deep desire to get rich.”

He ended his presentation with a joke that has been told around M.I.T. for a long time, but seemed newly relevant; “What do you call a nerd in 10 years? Boss.”

vanity

With the advent of online networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, perhaps some of us have gone to great lengths to taking the "perfect" picture OR not posting fugly pictures of ourselves or others!

In the name of vanity, I stumbled across a How-To article that maybe some of you will enjoy and even adopt:






How to Look 10 Pounds Thinner in Photos
5 Red Carpet Secrets to Posing for Photos
By Julyne Derrick, About.com

Why is it that celebrities always look skinny in red carpet photos? I live in NYC's West Village and I can vouch that your average celebrity Ain't All That. She tends to be short and bobbleheaded with proper child-bearing hips just like you and me (except for Giselle Bundchen and Sienna Miller, the skinny little...).
So how is it that in pictures they all appear so slim-ly terrific? More importantly, how can we look 10 pounds thinner in photos?

The secret is in the pose. (That, and the fact that they starve themselves a week before events and get sprayed by professional tanning people and wear gut-sucking Spanx and ...). Back to the pose. Here we share five secrets to appearing 10 pounds thinner in photos. You can practice these tips in front of a mirror, but we suggest locking your door first so as not to be caught appearing vain.

Secret No. 1: Turn partially sideways to the camera, planting one foot in front of the other. Point your toe to the camera and place your weight on your back foot.

Secret No. 2: Pull head forward slightly to minimize any appearance of a double chin.

Secret No. 3: Hold arms slightly away from your body. This keeps upper arm flab from flattening out and therefore appearing flabbier (much like thighs do when one sits on a couch).

Secret No. 4: Pull shoulders back, chest forward and gently suck stomach in. Be careful not to suck stomach so far in that your ribs show, thereby causing those who later see the photo to cluck to themselves in a bemused, sing-song voice, "She's sucking i-in."

Secret No. 5: If you can get away with it without looking like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Girl wannabe, try the look away trick. To do this, look away from the camera, then turn towards it, breaking into a smile just before the camera clicks. Your smile will appear fresh, not frozen. This trick takes practice behind closed, locked doors.

When taking a photo it's also important the photographer does not snap the picture from below. This adds another 20-50 pounds to the 10 pounds automatically and annoying added by the camera. Find out why cameras add 10 pounds in this article by Geek Sugar.

More tips on looking 10 pounds thinner in photos:

Use objects you are holding to your advantage by placing them in front of parts of you you'd prefer to hide. A purse or corsage in front of your belly. A jacket slung over the shoulder. (Gwyneth Paltrow used a perfectly placed purse to hide her baby bump before she announced her pregnancy with Apple).

Check out Spanx hosiery. The very modern version of the corset, Spanx are famous for making women all over the world appear 10 pounds thinner. I own four pairs. (Don't invest in the panty hose, like most hose, they tend to tear and these are pricey).

Fake tans will make you look and feel skinnier. Unfortunately, they tend to reek, except for GlowFusion, a spray tanner I swear is not odorous.

It's not just black that makes you look thinner. Wearing an entire outfit of just one color will do the trick as well, whether it be white, beige, brown, blue or red. One color tends to elongate your figure. Avoid entire outfits in pink, however, unless you are four years old or younger.


***I know this is a rather somewhat superficial post, but I'd like to think I was helping myself and others in the campaign to take advantage of a photo-op and make that picture moment yours. Really now, a photo can really make or break a person's self-esteem...come on, everyone wants to look good, so don't front.

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purchase Molly Wizenberg's new book

I have been reading Molly's blog (Orangette) for about a year now (I forgot how I stumbled across it) and have a subscription to Bon Appetit, where she writes articles monthly. Her new book was just released this month and I am truly looking forward to purchasing it. She makes me feel more passionate about cooking and reminds me that food always has a story of its own to tell.

Here is a little about her (according to Amazon):

About the Author
Molly Wizenberg is a freelance food writer and the creator of the award-winning blog Orangette. She is a regular contributor to Bon App - tit, and her writing has been featured on NPR.org and PBS.org and has been praised in The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Seattle Times. Wizenberg has degrees in human biology, French, and cultural anthropology, but in 2005, she left the world of academia to write full-time.



***Wow! Three bachelor degrees!

Anyway, I love her writing style (although, I have to admit, I have to take breaks from the fluffy, frou-frou "foodie diaries" every once in a while and read stuff a bit more raw and dramatic) and so will you, so go get that book.

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don't forget to 'Spring Forward'...a summer segue

This is probably my most favorite time of the year--Daylight Savings Time! I love not having to drive home at 5 pm when it's already dark. Click here for a science read about daylight savings time: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077304?GT1=43001 <--very informative. :D

I love how summer just seems just around the corner...I'm really looking forward to having BBQs and sunbathing to my heart's content whilst hopelessly, shamelessly reading gossip magazines and fun beach reads. I'm really going to feel guilty about being a sun goddess this summer though mainly because Momma Dukes really knows how to turn on the guilt feelers when she tells me, "Pauline, you know you're almost 30 ha...you'll look 40 by the time you're that age!"

Okay, maybe she could be right.

Oh geez, let's just get past spring and then I can start strategizing how I can get a damn tan without having to 'fend myself from the degenerating, dangerous rays of that heavily sought-after sun.

proselytized: organizing your inbox

My inbox has been the crux of my stress-impacted week on the emotional front. For the past two days, I've felt nothing but being upset at a certain incident. Maybe if I convert my inbox into simplicity-as with other things in my life- my days will certainly fare better.

Here is what the NY Times had to say about de-cluttering your inbox:

March 5, 2009
Basics
An Empty In-Box, or With Just a Few E-Mail Messages? Read On
By FARHAD MANJOO
SINCE e-mail became a fixture in our professional and personal lives, many academic researchers have investigated the complex mix of feelings brought on by the technology.

We feel guilty about being late in responding, about our in-boxes being disorganized, about the tens of thousands of unread messages that we’re sure we’ll never get to. What is it about e-mail that consumes us — that invades every corner of our personal space, demands ever more sophisticated methods of organization, and makes us wish for extra hours in the day to deal with the deluge? More important, how can we overcome it?

In the last few weeks, I set about finding a cure for e-mail anxiety. It was not the first time I’d done so; I’ve been looking for better ways to handle my mail since shortly after logging in to my first in-box.

Over the years, I’ve discovered many methods that worked for a while, but never permanently. For a while, I set up elaborate filters meant to automatically categorize every incoming message according to who sent it. Another time, I instituted a complicated system of color-coded labels aimed at getting me to understand which e-mail messages I had to respond to, which I had to save and which I could ignore.

But eventually every finely honed trick to tame my mail would collapse, and I’d backslide into a messy, undisciplined in-box. So in my search for a new way to deal with e-mail, I followed one guiding principle: Keep it simple. Any method that made too many demands on my time or my brain was bound to fail.

Fortunately, after much experimentation with various experts’ many tips, I’ve found something that works. Here are the basic rules:

LIMIT YOUR TIME WITH IT Turn off all auto-notifications that alert you to incoming mail, and if you must check mail while you’re on the go, keep it to a minimum. Here’s a good guideline that worked for me: Don’t dip into your in-box more than three times an hour. It’s unlikely that any message is so urgent that it can’t wait 20 minutes for your response — if it were, the sender would call, send an instant message or find some other way to reach you.

CLEAR OUT YOUR IN-BOX Set aside an hour or two to respond to every important message that has dogged you in the last couple months (anything older than that is too ancient to bother with). Next, move everything else into a new folder called Archive — this will be your storehouse of old mail.

Your in-box should now be empty. Think of this as its optimal state — your goal, from now on, will be to keep this space as pristine as possible, either empty or nearly so. To realize that goal, live by this precept: Whenever you receive a new message, do something with it. Don’t read your e-mail and then just let it sit there — that’s a recipe for chaos.

This isn’t always so easy. A day’s worth of mail demands a variety of complex actions, and the daunting task of figuring out how to respond to each message is probably what made your in-box untidy in the first place.

That’s where the next steps come in — an algorithm for dealing with incoming e-mail messages. For each new one you receive, take one of the following actions:

ARCHIVE IT Most e-mail messages require no action or response on your part — messages from Facebook letting you know that an old college pal has commented on your wall, for instance. Skim through these missives (or leave them unread), then shoot them into your archive and forget them.

RESPOND TO IT If the e-mail message calls for an easy answer, send it. Say a colleague wants to know if you’re up for dinner at his place on Saturday, or your boss wants to praise you for a job well done. Shoot back a quick response — “Yes!” or “Thanks!” — and then push the original message into your archive. The productivity guru and “Getting Things Done” author David Allen has a rule of thumb that comes in handy here: If responding is going to take two minutes or less, you’re better off doing it now than procrastinating.

FORWARD IT If the message is better handled by someone else — your boss, your sister, anyone but you — send it off to that person, then archive it.

HOLD IT FOR LATER This is the trickiest option. Some e-mail messages demand complicated answers. You don’t really want to dine with your colleague, but coming up with an excuse will take longer than two minutes. Other messages simply require information not yet available. Your friend wants to know if you’re up for watching the game on Sunday, but you’ve got to check with your spouse first.

You can leave these messages in your in-box with a promise to come back to them soon. (Depending on the mail program you use, you might want to set a reminder or a flag to make it stand out — in Microsoft Outlook, you can click the flag icon, or in Google’s Gmail, the star).

Be careful to avoid letting many such messages pile up. Carve out a short amount of time — perhaps 15 to 30 minutes at the end of the day — to respond to all flagged e-mail. Remember, your goal is to keep your in-box empty. Each message sitting there should serve as a stark, visible reminder of your undisciplined ways.

Notice that my system doesn’t include any complex method for organizing e-mail — I don’t categorize my messages into folders by sender, subject matter, date or any other scheme. That way lies distraction.

E-mail isn’t a test of your skills at making things look pretty; indeed, making things look pretty will only take time away from your goal of actually getting through your mail. Most modern e-mail programs include search engines that are powerful enough to find any message you need without the aid of a taxonomy.

Note, too, that this system is far from new. It was inspired by Mr. Allen’s ideas, and it’s been proselytized, in various forms, by a host of efficiency experts and people who have spent a lot of time wrestling with e-mail.

In particular, I relied partly on a series of essays and lectures put together by Merlin Mann, proprietor of the Web site 43 Folders, which aims to help you get a handle on how much attention you focus on unrewarding tasks, like e-mail.

It wasn’t easy for me to curb my time in my in-box. E-mail was like a drug, and I needed a constant fix. That’s a good sign you need help.

“People arrive at this because they’re feeling overwhelmed,” Mr. Mann said. “They feel like the train is going off the rails.” He was careful to add that much of what troubles people about modern life goes beyond e-mail — but you can think of fixing your in-box as a private victory for modern professionals. Once you deal with your e-mail, you’ll be able to tackle stuff that really matters.


**I can't wait until Friday, people!**
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etiquette 101

I never knew these blunders were as bad as described; check 'em out and see which ones you agree on (I know I spit in public, so shame on me):

The Worst (And Most Common) Etiquette Mistakes (according to Yahoo!)

Party Poopers When you receive an invitation to a dinner or party--whether by Evite, voicemail, or casual email--RESPOND. Yeah, that’s what that little “RSVP” thing means. Everyone knows it, yet it’s amazing how many don’t respond. Even for weddings! Planning a party or event requires a lot of work, so do the host a simple favor and let them know if you're coming or not.

Nickel & Dimin’ How annoying is it when you go to dinner with four or more people, the check finally arrives, and one of your meal companions begins to divvy up the check down to the last penny? Sure, we get that Sally had a shrimp salad, and Janet had two iced teas, while Beth only had water, and you ordered a slice of peach pie (a la mode, which is extra). The point is, if you go out to dinner with a group, be prepared to split the bill more or less evenly. If there's an outstanding cost differential, fine, estimate it and be done with it. The person who spends twenty minutes dividing the bill to the dime comes off as a cheapskate –- and kills the festive mood.

The Line-Up Lines are a fact of life. At the post office, the supermarket, just about everywhere these days. For starters, moaners who huff and gripe about standing in a line of three people for all of five minutes are tops on our list. Get over yourself -- if you don’t have a few minutes to wait to buy that loaf of bread, then pick it up another time. Another thing: Don’t show your impatience by creeping up so close to the person in front of you that they can feel your breath. Crowding those around you will not get you to the front any faster, so give them some space. Finally, cutting in line or trying to ignore the fact that there IS a line –- stop it! Everyone’s time is valuable.

The ME Show It’s great to hear all the crazy, wacky, wonderful things happening in the lives of others. Jobs, engagements, breakups, boyfriends, puppies, pregnancies, vacations — very good stuff, all of it. But once you’ve listened to a friend, family member, or colleague spout about their own fabulous life for an hour (or two), it’s normal to expect them to ask, “So, what’s going on with you?” Those who blab on about themselves while you listen intently, then don’t ask a thing about you in return are just plain rude.

Baby Biz Changing a poopy baby diaper around others is nasty -- and we're moms. Changing the other kind of baby diaper in public is one thing, but still should only be done when absolutely necessary!

Mobile Madness As much as we love the modern age, there are days when we long to go to a coffee shop, movie theatre, bookstore, or post office and not hear some teen queen dishing to her friend about last night's hot date with Todd or eavesdrop (unwillingly) on a screaming family feud. Mobile phones are essential, but please, people, pleeeeeeease, use a little restraint on the when's, what's, and where's. We're happy that Todd is "totally built" but we're going to have to start walking around town and slapping people with "TMI" tickets (yes, too much information).

Smokes Everyone has a right to smoke in public, but be conscious of whose face your smoke is blowing into. Are there kids nearby? And we just might kick the butt of the next person we see throwing their burning butt on the ground without putting it out. Really, find an ashtray or trashcan where you can extinguish and dispose of it properly -- that thing is garbage, not decoration for our streets and sidewalks.

The Pee & Flee Public bathrooms get used by everyone -- yup, they're public! So, making a mess of the toilet seat, and then prancing out without bothering to wipe it up -- not cool. Leaving a mess for the next visitor is completely unacceptable (and disgustingly unsanitary, of course). Take 10 seconds to rip off a piece of toilet paper, toilet seat cover, or a paper towel, and do your due diligence!

Stealing...a parking spot, that is. Yeah, you know who you are. If someone has their blinker on and is patiently waiting for a spot, it's theirs. And if you've already passed a spot up, it's gone. Treat others as you expect to be treated, and the parking goddesses will smile down upon you... eventually.

Belly Baring Men, women -- anyone who's passed puberty, everyone who isn't lounging poolside or oceanside -- resist the urge to bare those bellies. They may be beautiful, Buddha-like, jolly, but sometimes they can be flabby, hairy, and not ripe for public consumption. If you're jogging, fellas, t-shirts or tanks won't hurt your workout, so throw one on. Gals, midriff fashions are never really on our "Do" list, and that goes double if your age doesn't contain the word "teen." There are plenty of ways for all of us to flaunt what we got without sharing our tum-tums with the world.

Spitting This gets especially yucky when it's one of those enormous globs that looks like it could be alive. Some people (males, in particular) think it's kind of a cool-guy thing to do. We're here to tell ya that no one wants to see you hock a big gooey one out of your car, onto the sidewalk, or anywhere else for that matter. Try a tissue.

Honking Problem People who honk too often, too unnecessarily, or just to express their emotions are on our list of Most Etiquette Challenged. If you're trying to warn someone about a collision or problem, fine, otherwise it's not that serious. Give it a rest!

the gender divide

I couldn't sleep last night, so I started reading this book-mind you, Lats and I scoured all of Fremont's bookstores for this darn book- and I'm not entirely impressed thus far. This book was sold out all over the place, so it has to be stellar.





I'll let you know how it goes in my future book review.

I'm in such a crummy mood today and a good read would actually lighten my spirits a bit.

:(
P

**EDIT: I returned this damn book this afternoon. DO NOT pay attention to the amazon.com reviews (they are usually spot-on with their ratings, but not this time)! This book makes too many blanket statements and gross generalizations; not to mention, I was totally aghast from the moment I started the first sentence of the first chapter because I ain't never met no man (pardon my ebonics) like the men he was describing. I just don't see how that book received 112 reviews and all of them averaged to ~4.8/5 stars. At least my Girlfriends, Season 6 DVD set proved fruitful. =)

Going public...

I always wondered if it was more advantageous to attend a private school over a public one. I attended public schools for most of my formative years going into high school and decided to try a private college for a change. All in all, it was an interesting experience but considering the fact that I have and always be a "late bloomer", maybe a parochial, Catholic education during a period where I wanted to wile out and break out of my sheltered upbringing proved to be futile and almost worked against me. Come on, can you imagine the "Catholic guilt" that was playing on me when I would do impious acts (i.e., GETTING KRUNKED! :D) on a Catholic campus-I'd have to say my entire tenure in college was spent being a walking-hypocrite.

I'd like to say I feel bad for the parents right now that are contemplating on "going public" and switching their children from the private school system to the public school districts, but maybe we all need that lesson in living within our means and cutting out the unnecessary bullshit (for lack of better terminology). Check out this NY Times article on the switch that is happening: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/fashion/01private.html?em. I've always been a proponent in attending public school over private because one usually gets a better cross-sectional in how "real" life operates versus being immersed in the milieu of trust-fund babies or the wealthy upper crust. However, if your parents can afford to provide you with private school education, why not take it?

I swear, the dour status of the economy makes you realize what really matters in life.