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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 01:11pm on 2009-03-03

*grumble* I dropped the jar of stevia powder while trying to put the lid back on. Expensive fumble, that. I still have about 1/6 of the jar left. And fine white powder in various cracks and corners.

I also nearly flung a soapy dish into the wall, but recovered my grip just in time.


Perrine doesn't vocalize all that much, when asking for things. She usually just stares and tries to beam her thoughts into my brain (it's not working very well) or reaches up with a paw, but she does give a little cry to ask me to turn on the water for her.

Today, the thing that was urgent enough for her to meow at me repeatedly for turned out to be, "Lie down so I can sleep on your leg."


No second period of wakefulness yesterday. I think the cold temperatures are getting to me (how much colder is it outside, that the expensive-to-operate electric space heater in the bedroom isn't able to even maintain the temperature that it could do a month or two ago, before I caulked the windows?). Today's plans altered due to beaurocratic stuff; have to pick up a prescription that the pharmacy was out of last week and then try to convince myself I feel like going to the grocery store. But I did finally muster the energy to deal with the dishes in the sink. (I switched back to using real dishes when I thought my hand was healed enough for washing dishes to be safe, but unfortunately was hit with a spell of "don't want to stand up that long" around the same time, so a backlog piled up.) Feeling fragile, so a key constraint on my day will be to not become too spoonless to go to HCB tomorrow.

Unfortunately, my sleep lack-of-pattern is, well, a lack. Slept through television prime-time and long distance phone call time again last night, but this time instead of waking up in the wee hours and not getting back to sleep, I woke briefly several times and then rose for real at a sane hour of the morning. So maybe, maybe (knock wood) this'll mean that tonight/tomorrow I'll be on an approximation of a normal-ish schedule. Now if only I hadn't been in so much pain each time I woke ...


Right now the two warm rooms in the house are the bathroom (sort of) and the kitchen (variably). I got around to hanging a heavy cloth in the kitchen doorway a while back (I don't recall how many weeks ago), so the heat from the not-set-very-high convection heater in there, and more importantly any heat that's a side effect of cooking, stay there instead of dissipating into the dining-room-that-I-use-more-as-a-hallway. This does mean that less of the kitchen heat makes it up the back stairs to help warm the bathroom, and it also means that setting a big pot o' water on the stove to humidify the house now only affects the kitchen (petting the cat is a rather crackly experience for both of us), but it also means that I'm not thinking "gotta get back under warm blankets" the whole time that I'm trying to feed myself (food indecision and the state of the pantry another time, maybe). It does help to make a preparatory trip down there to set water to boil with enough extra in the kettle that there'll still be enough to make coffee after I let it go for a while, and to preheat the oven if I'm going to use it, then retreat back upstairs for a quarter hour or so, so that when I'm trying to actually cook or eat, the kitchen's already warmed up.

But I can't spend all my time in the kitchen, so it'd be nice to get the bedroom a smidgen warmer. Or at least figure out an arrangement of layers of blankets and comforters that doesn't try to screw itself cockeyed while I sleep and expose bits of me to corners that have gone inconveniently diagonal on me.

Hey, at least the computers in the server room don't have to worry about excess heat. (And yes, the thought did occur to me to curtain off a little area around the noisy servers, to be heated by their CPUs, and stick a mattress in there. I'd take a far bit of rearranging though.)

With any luck, Spring will be here soon and I'll be complaining about allergies and insects (well, terrestial arthropods of various numbers of legs and body segments in general) instead of dealing with the urge to hibernate to escape the chill.

At least today I'm feeling together enough to have a proper sense of what day it is, unlike my timekeeping difficulties last week.

There are 5 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] dr_silmaril.insanejournal.com at 12:33pm on 2009-03-03
You taught me something new today (I went and looked up "stavia".) So where does one obtain more of that?
ext_45850: guitarist seen from behind, playing acoustic guitar behind head, with legend, "Can you hear me now?" (Default)
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.insanejournal.com at 12:56pm on 2009-03-03
Trader Joe's carries it, and I'd bet some health-food stores would as well. Since I kept not managing to get to TJ's when they were open, I wound up ordering it online (I have to go look up where I ordered it from).

Stevia was the subject of FUD from big food corporations, who obstructed attempts to get it okayed as a food additive (so it's sold as an herbal supplement, but doesn't show up as an ingredient in packaged foods and beverages), but, revealing what their real objection to it was, Coca-Cola is now touting stevia's virtues now that they have a processed version, Truvía[1], that they can charge more for and license the patent on, etc. It's in Giant and Safeway, I think; not sure where else. It's also waay more expensive per serving than plain stevia powder. (But it does, as Coca-Cola claims, reduce the aftertaste that some people dislike.)

Some folks don't notice an aftertaste with stevia, others can't stand the stuff. I find that if I mix it with sucralose, I can keep the concentration of each below its Glenn-notices-objectionable-aftertaste threshold and get my coffee (and my cinnamon yogurt) to the right sweetness.

The thing about straight stevia is that you have to use miniscule quantities. It's one of the super-sweet, "essentially non-nutritive just because you can't use enough of it at once to add up to measurable food-value", sweeteners, not one of the not-metabolized ones. If you put a pinch in the palm of your hand and lick it, it tastes seriously metallic, but half a pinch in a cup of coffee doesn't taste like much other than being sweet.

(In addition to plain stevia powder and liquid extracts, it's also sold with fiber and some quackery-sounding anti-diabetes substance added to it, which makes it easier to measure (by adding bulk) but also produces a white film on the surface of your coffee. The brand of nothing-added stevia powder I bought has an itty bitty plastic scoop to make measuring easier, thank goodness.)
 
posted by [identity profile] dr_silmaril.insanejournal.com at 01:08pm on 2009-03-03
I'll try to see if the UMD food co-op has it, and if it does, I'll try to send a jar up there.
ext_45850: guitarist seen from behind, playing acoustic guitar behind head, with legend, "Can you hear me now?" (Default)
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.insanejournal.com at 01:25pm on 2009-03-03
Thanks!
ext_45850: guitarist seen from behind, playing acoustic guitar behind head, with legend, "Can you hear me now?" (Default)
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.insanejournal.com at 01:07pm on 2009-03-03
[1] When I saw the box, and later saw print advertising, I assumed that the name of the Coca-Cola product was pronounced 'TROO-vee-ah', similar to the stress pattern I've always heard on "stevia". When I finally heard the name in a radio or television ad (I forget which), it was pronounced 'troo-VEE-ah'. It turns out that the swooshy tittle in the logo is supposed to be an accent aigue, which wasn't clear to an English speaker looking at a box labelled in English from an American company. I'm more than half inclined to continue saying it with the other stress just as a sort of wee rebellion against Coca-Cola, to emphasize that it's based on the non-patentable stevia, and as a protest against ambiguous typography.

I keep hearing that Pepsi is moments away from introducing their own stevia-based, patented, processed product, but I don't know what it's called. Nor when we'll see stevia-sweetened diet soft drinks (which, unlike all previous versions of diet sodas, I might actually be able to stand the taste of).

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