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You know the Atkins plan has taken over the collective consciousness when 7-Eleven, home of the Big Bite hot dog and the Supersize Slurpee, hawks Atkins products. (Subway and T.G.I. Friday’s are similarly on board, but somehow those product pairings don’t seem quite so obscene.)

I can’t help thinking that the success folks’ get on Atkins has more to do with _controlling_ their carbs, rather than controlling their _carbs_. E.g., if you watch what you eat, you generally eat less. In full disclosure, our one attempt to do Atkins succeeded for only two weeks or so, after which point I lost next to nothing and hubby lost only a smidge more, so I have a bias as to the plan’s results. My dad-in-law, though, has had great success – but those pork rinds he gets to eat for snacks just strike me as wrong, somehow…

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It’s rare that I go out to eat for lunch. Takes too much time, between getting somewhere, ordering, eating, socializing, … And either I’m just generally too cheap, or I don’t value the experience enough, because spending $10 or so on a midday meal doesn’t strike me as reasonable, no matter how big the portion sizes are. (Cut my portion size and charge me less: I’ll eat less, making me happier both for my wallet and for my waist line.) Today I decided to venture out, though not for a dine-in experience. I was looking for a Caribbean restaurant that I had heard mention of on Chowhound. For whatever reason, I was craving something different, some sense of culinary adventure. Jason and I used to regularly hunt out new dining experiences when we were dating, but the required marital attention to budgets and kid-friendly dining have severely limited those expeditions.

Didn’t find the Caribbean place, but did find a Latin restaurant / take-out. Latin to the point of Spanish television channel on, other patrons speaking Spanish exclusively to the wait staff, and a Spanish beer other than Corona being featured prominently. Picked an order nearly at random and headed back to the office. Ordered the rotisserie chicken, fried yucca, and fried plantains. Yum! I’ve had plantains before – I think we had them on our honeymoon. The chicken smelled wonderful and was absolutely delicious, but still, it was chicken – nothing particularly adventurous there. Yucca was a new experience. At first I thought the server had goofed – this stuff sure looked like french fries to me. Doing a bit of poking online, discovered that they’re supposed to look/taste like potatoes. And that they have vitamin C, as well as are a good source of dietary fiber.

Cora’s a fan of french fries – she’ll happily ignore the entree in any kids’ meal and scarf down the fries. That causes me no small amount of mommy guilt. But I see yucca possibilities here…. Definitely worth a venture to a Latin restaurant with our two year old – see if we can pull off the Folgers’ yucca switch. And I think I may regularly try to find other interesting dining around my work… woman cannot live by brown bag lunch alone. (Or she could, but it’s a lot more interesting if she doesn’t.)

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Enjoying simple pleasures today. The joy of a 2 1/2 month old sleeping through the night. The joy of a new purse, appropriately organized so that I can now easily find that ringing telephone. The joy of a longish-running test case that both helps me track down a memory problem, and lets me write a blog entry. The joy of a 50 degree day at the end of December. The joy of brilliant blue skies. The joy of an easy commute, compliments of all of the other folks who stayed home this week. The joy of anticipation, looking forward to a chance to go out on the town tomorrow night with my husband. The joy of accomplishment: the deliverables are out the door, and we don’t have any more staring us in the face near term. (Not that there’s not a lot of work to do – it just isn’t technically due for a while yet.) The joy of hugging my daughter, and helping her tuck herself into bed next to her daddy (rather than her usual thump on him, “get up!” approach to rousing dad).

Gotta have a day like this once in a while… Here’s hoping that hubby’s having just as good a day, and that maybe you are, too.

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My New Year’s resolution for 2004: “Less talk, more do”. More hands-on software development, less reading about others’ work (proportionally, that is). More half hours on the treadmill and reps with the weights, less dreaming of marathons and a perfectly trimmed waistline. Take things in small manageable chunks, rather than big overwhelming aspirations.

Accomplish, rather than dream. Take a step towards the outcome now, rather than plan the perfect journey and never progress towards the goal.

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I spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Project 2000 this week. I’d count myself as an intermediate user, which means I can deal with resources, tasks, Gantt charts, durations, constraints, and the like, but I don’t yet do much with PERT analysis, cost tracking, earned value analysis, or tracking against a project baseline. After spending literally days working on a project plan for a project that has a defined start date and end date, with an extreme (impossible?) amount of stuff to get done in the middle, here’s my take on how Project could have been more useful.
* more than one undo operation – what other Microsoft app only allows one level of undo????
* better help in figuring out circular dependency relationships
* spell-check that highlights the spelling error, rather than pushing me to a task number – showing me a dialog box that lists a task number does me no good. Take me to the offending task and show me the “error”.
* warnings when data gets truncated in text fields: we overloaded the text1 field to include a description of the task so that we could export a WBS dictionary. Project happily and quietly chopped our text.
* show me what’s going to change down the line, in terms of time lines: given that our end date is fixed, I spent a lot of time trying to get things to line up precisely to end on May 28. I didn’t appreciate it when making a change in March for a task that wasn’t critical path pushed out my schedule in May. Wish I could tell Project – hold the beginning _and_ the end constant.
* a how-do-we-fit-all-these-tasks-in template: My wish – I give the beginning and end date, and you make up a story as to how it will all fit in nicely. Options could include lengthening the work day, adding more people, shortening tasks, hiring nuns to offer prayers on our behalf…

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Passed a nativity set yet this Advent season? Take a look at the Real Live Preacher’s expanded Christmas narrative for a desanitized description of the Christmas narrative. The RLP is putting the story out in 8 parts, starting a few days ago and going until Christmas. Ever thought about what the Virgin Mary’s parents thought when their daughter came home pregnant??

If you like the RLP’s description of Christmas, check out Phillip Yancey’s book, The Jesus I Never Knew

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Shakespeare said (or more specifically a character in one of his plays): “The play’s the thing”. In this blog, the entry’s the thing. Sometimes, even the idea for an entry that never gets written is the thing. Cogitating on blog entries, rolling the ideas around in my mind, and then typing them out for the world to see helps me to focus my thoughts and even recognize some ideas that otherwise might have just floated away as worthy of more exploration. So, the blog’s for me, more than for the audience. The ideas expressed here, though, expose something of me to my readers. That I’d find an idea worthy of exposition tells something about me, before you even read what it is I actually write about it. For some bloggers out there, I think the reason that the blog is to do some sort of intellectual streaking – baring themselves before the world for the thrill of it. But just as I’d be more embarassed to have my mother-in-law or my boss see my bare bum running down the road than I would a stranger seeing me, I have to consider who may actually know me among my audience before deciding what to post. Friends know who we are; co-workers have now visited the site; I’ve even been approached by my clients at work or folks in our church. It’s not as if our site is a secret: if we give you our email address, it’s pretty easy to find the site. But I don’t always connect the thought that letting someone send me email is the same as giving them a blinking arrow to my blog.

As a concrete example of the complications involved, playing with ideas of impending motherhood wasn’t doable until work knew that we were expecting. Making jokes about the in-laws? Not cool, when your readership includes your mother-in-law. Providing op-eds on gay marriages? Only OK if I’m willing to be challenged on my opinion on Sunday in church. Either makes for a very tame weblog or a choice to accept flak for opinions expressed, since they _are_ the opinions of the writer. So far, I’ve walked a more tame route, but it feels chafing. Censorship is a confining sensation, even if it’s self-censorship. I’m contemplating free range ideas, setting those little dogies free from their pens and seeing where they wander. Figure out then how much I need to rope ’em in. The fear is that I wouldn’t need to rope ’em in at all – that I’m that tame that I never raise an eyebrow anywhere. Bland is not only boring to the listener, but ego deflating.

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Wish there were just a few more hours in your day? Want just a little bit more time added in somewhere to think deep thoughts, catch up on television, or sift through that stack of magazines? I have the solution you’ve been looking for – have (or adopt) a kid. No longer will your nights be spent slumbering. Those hours previously “wasted” on sleep will be yours… as long as whatever it is yu want to do can be done with a child in one arm.

This blog post brought to you courtesy of Callie, and through the one-handed typing skills of my right hand…

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Peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches?? What a weird, tasty combination, tastefully prepared for me by my husband. For other ideas of peanut butter sandwiches, see Sally’s Kitchen. For the record, I’ve now tried all combinations except the peanut butter and bacon combination. Pig and peanut butter – culinary combination designed to clog your arteries in record time.