dria.org

So I’ve been doing the EATracker daily diary/assessment for five days now. Here’s a rundown of the results.

• Fri, Jan 27: consumed 1002 calories and was low on every food group.
• Sat, Jan 28: consumed 1923 calories (yay for Wendy’s double cheeseburger combo), and was OK for Grains and Meats.
• Sun, Jan 29: consumed 1662 calories, and was OK for Dairy and Meat.
• Mon, Jan 30: consumed 1605 calories, and was OK for Dairy and Meat.
• Tues, Jan 29: consumed 1689 calories (I probably won’t eat again today), and was OK on Grain, Fruit/Vegetable, and Meat.

So, what was different today was that I went to the grocery store and was a bit more deliberate in my food choices. The list included: apricots, grapes, bok choy (x2), romaine lettuce, carrots, shitake mushrooms, garlic, ginger, lemon (x2), avocado (x3), dried apricots, raisins, yogurt, chicken breast, pork tenderloin, goat cheese (mm), and a big thing of cranberry juice.

Tonight’s dinner was stir fried chicken + bok choy (with shitake mushrooms) and short-grain organic brown rice (which we eat regularly now because it’s so friggin’ yummy). Dessert was an apricot! Yum.

Tomorrow I’ll have cereal with raisins for breakfast, a romaine/avocado salad for lunch with goat cheese and a lemon-balsamic dressing, yogurt, and then leftover chili for dinner. I’ll probably also eat a couple of apricots because they’re awesome.

We’ll have the pork on Thursday probably. Then we’re off to Montreal for the weekend where we’ll be eating relentlessly and utterly shamelessly for 48 hours (because that’s what Montreal is for). Mmf.

I need to find a good source of fish around here. I can get pretty much any meat I want within two blocks (quail, venison, rabbit, any cut of beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, duck, pheasant, etc), but the fish selection is atrocious. Sad, really, because I like seafood occasionally, I’ve just never had a ready source. Hrm.

I found another interesting site about food over here: The World’s Healthiest Foods. Yum.

I just made another huge batch of chili which we’ll be having for dinner with some 2yr old cheddar and fresh-this-morning 12 grain bread. Here’s what’s in it:

• 2 lb extra-lean ground beef, browned and drained
• 1 large spanish onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 14 medium white mushrooms, quartered
• 2 green peppers, chopped
• 4 celery stalks, chopped
• 1 can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can white kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 1 can corn niblets, drained and rinsed
• 2 cans (28oz) crushed tomatoes
• 1/4 c regular chili powder
• 2 tbsp chipotle chili powder

Method is simple: Brown the beef and drain it. Throw in the onion and garlic and cook for a bit. Throw in the mushrooms and cook for a bit. Add 1 can of crushed tomatoes and chili powders and cook for a bit. Add green peppers and celery and cook for a bit. Add all beans and corn, mix. Add 2nd can of crushed tomatoes, mix. Leave on low for a few hours. Done!

This desire to play D&D again isn’t a really recent thing. I’ve been thinking about it on and off for a few months now, which is one of the reasons I cleaned out the storage space last weekend (my D&D books + dice were in a box in there, buried behind a bunch of other stuff).

Last night I decided to see if I could figure out how to draw maps with Illustrator, since, really, drawing maps on graph paper with a pencil is so…20th century. Several hours of fiddling later, and here are the results (no scale, no legend…I’m still fiddling):

Or see the big version.

For what it’s worth, this is (theoretically) a map of Perrowaithe, a largish island continent (probably a third of the size of Australia) that is home to seven kingdoms, the great port city of Hav’non, a pantheon of 42 gods, and roughly 12,000 years of civilised history. Among other things. I first dreamed up Perrowaithe probably 15 years ago, and, well…I’ve got about 300 pages of handwritten notes and maps about it in a filebox here. Yes, I’ve been a nerd for a really long time.

I say “theoretically” because I actually have other ideas for this particular map now that I’ve drawn it, but we’ll see.

What a silly fun way to spend a chunk of the weekend. :)

More specifically, I want to DM a campaign. I want to create the world, the pantheon, the maps. I want to craft the realms, the political intrigue, the new rules of play, new classes, new languages, skill modfications, feats. I want to create modules on top of all of this, dozens of them, with the maps and monsters and tricks and traps and treasure. I want to run the game on a set schedule — once per week, six to eight hours of play, with pizza and beer.

I miss pencil and paper roleplaying a lot. From those games came my strongest friendships and some of the most indelible memories of my gaming life. Computer games don’t even come close. But running a regular game with people my age (mid-30s) is a scheduling nightmare. It’s just not possible, particularly given that my friends are scattered across a half-dozen timezones.

Bah.

Ok, so I’m getting older and have been slowly working on improving my diet and nutrition as well as doing more exercise. I found a handy dandy website that does everything I want a website like this to do — it lets me easily enter in a daily food/activity dairy, it will track my history over time, and it gives me a comprehensive (seriously, it’s 3 pages long) report on my daily food/nutrition/activity levels.

Best of all: it’s free, and it’s done in cooperation with the Dietitians of Canada. Neato.

Here’s the linky (and a funky websticker):