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helwenAs I sit here looking out the window at all the snow, reading about how hard the Midwest is getting hit with the storms...
1) Click here: Pedal-A-Watt Stationary Bike Power Generator and page down to get to the actual text and info. Very interesting stuff... you can buy it assembled or get the plans and build your own (or both...)
Definitely looking that over, although we'd probably go with getting the plans first, and go from there.
2) Crank LED Lanterns for your camping and emergency needs. Good for if you want to save electricity when doing some basic tasks around the house too. Great for the folks with asthma!
One lantern
Another lantern
And one more
There were a couple of the Coleman ones at the family Christmas gathering that we were all messing around with - easy to crank, brighter than you might expect, and IIRC, cranking for a minute gives you an hour of light.
****
Well, didn't stay off the PC completely yesterday, just off email. Read an interesting article on dopamine and a study they did with monkeys, measuring dopamine levels while giving them juice. Seems that while dopamine levels shoot up or down when the amount of juice is increased or decreased, once the amount stabilizes between feeding times, so does the dopamine level. The article went into quite a bit of detail on how our brains work on remembering positive things and memory-related stuff... positive feedback means you'd like to do it again (food, sex, sports, internet, information, entertainments, etc.).
Problem is that a person can want too much of something. Living in a society with so many stimuli, the body weakens the dopamine receptors to damp some of it out. Then a person may want more stimulus -- kind of like a drug addict - at first it feels good, then one needs more in order to just feel normal.
Which can make diets, cutting back on things that use electricity, driving, etc., more difficult. The best intentions can be undercut by the crash from the lack of stimuli one is used to. Like being on the PC... I should have asked L to move the loom sooner, but checked out the blogs I usually check instead. I did have him move it later though, and did do quite a bit of weaving yesterday - 20" on a scarf!
***
So, weather wasn't great yesterday so I stayed indoors. Did Tai Chi (Yang 24-form), PT, walked/jogged in the apartment, read more of William James (it was right after that book that I got online), cooked, looked out the window, meditated, and started research on the next Ogham letter. Haven't heard back on the art/book project, but I want to learn more about the Ogham anyway.
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fitzw made more linguini with our new pasta maker; large batch this time. I set up the drying rack and helped with hanging them up to dry.
We've only used the pasta maker once before this, a few weeks ago. They take a little while to make as the dough needs a lot of conditioning before it holds together properly. Conditioning is running the dough through the pasta maker ~25 times at a wider setting. He made a few noodles, then he tried out conditioning several pieces and letting them rest. Then he went back to the first conditioned piece and made it into noodles -- this seems to work pretty well.
Homemade noodles take time to make, and they are only good for 7-10 days. Which makes you wonder a little about the ones in the stores.... although that could just be really good commercial dehydration. Anyway, they do take time to make, but they are _incredibly good_. The texture and the taste are simply better. Richer, fuller, almost buttery smooth, even though there's no butter in them, just eggs and flour. Yum....
Going back to the dopamine thing, I'm thinking one of the reasons that changes in diet and lifestyle can be hard to keep up -- what's new needs to be sufficient to replace the old ways and old comforts. Hm, maybe it's time for me to start up some other projects again... in the winter it's more difficult for me to keep busy, since there are still things I can't do, or in weather like today, can't do right at the moment. I can still only do so much reading at a time (although I do pretty well reading aloud to L in the car), and weaving is also a limited activity. Even painting and drawing have limits... probably why I end up on the PC so much right now. And time to get back to playing cards and backgammon and such too!
One of the new habits I'm trying to develop is changing up my activities every hour or so. Each activity uses the body in a different way, tiring different sets of muscles while resting others. I have it down pretty well for summertime, but not for winter. It's actually a healthier way to live, for anyone not just me.
***
We did strength testing at PT this morning, and I did pretty well on most of them. The failures were pretty dramatic, and made me laugh because of the contrast between the successes and failures. ROM is good and continuing to improve, but I have a lot of work to do on the mid and lower traps. Learned a new stretch today and got reminded of another one that I should still be doing (probably forever, since it's for the forearms and I use them a lot).
Today, I have some ground beef (grass-fed) defrosted and also some of the tomato puree from this past summer's garden. We'll be having a lovely homemade marinara and linguini for dinner tonight.... Yum!!
1) Click here: Pedal-A-Watt Stationary Bike Power Generator and page down to get to the actual text and info. Very interesting stuff... you can buy it assembled or get the plans and build your own (or both...)
Definitely looking that over, although we'd probably go with getting the plans first, and go from there.
2) Crank LED Lanterns for your camping and emergency needs. Good for if you want to save electricity when doing some basic tasks around the house too. Great for the folks with asthma!
One lantern
Another lantern
And one more
There were a couple of the Coleman ones at the family Christmas gathering that we were all messing around with - easy to crank, brighter than you might expect, and IIRC, cranking for a minute gives you an hour of light.
****
Well, didn't stay off the PC completely yesterday, just off email. Read an interesting article on dopamine and a study they did with monkeys, measuring dopamine levels while giving them juice. Seems that while dopamine levels shoot up or down when the amount of juice is increased or decreased, once the amount stabilizes between feeding times, so does the dopamine level. The article went into quite a bit of detail on how our brains work on remembering positive things and memory-related stuff... positive feedback means you'd like to do it again (food, sex, sports, internet, information, entertainments, etc.).
Problem is that a person can want too much of something. Living in a society with so many stimuli, the body weakens the dopamine receptors to damp some of it out. Then a person may want more stimulus -- kind of like a drug addict - at first it feels good, then one needs more in order to just feel normal.
Which can make diets, cutting back on things that use electricity, driving, etc., more difficult. The best intentions can be undercut by the crash from the lack of stimuli one is used to. Like being on the PC... I should have asked L to move the loom sooner, but checked out the blogs I usually check instead. I did have him move it later though, and did do quite a bit of weaving yesterday - 20" on a scarf!
***
So, weather wasn't great yesterday so I stayed indoors. Did Tai Chi (Yang 24-form), PT, walked/jogged in the apartment, read more of William James (it was right after that book that I got online), cooked, looked out the window, meditated, and started research on the next Ogham letter. Haven't heard back on the art/book project, but I want to learn more about the Ogham anyway.
fitzw made more linguini with our new pasta maker; large batch this time. I set up the drying rack and helped with hanging them up to dry.We've only used the pasta maker once before this, a few weeks ago. They take a little while to make as the dough needs a lot of conditioning before it holds together properly. Conditioning is running the dough through the pasta maker ~25 times at a wider setting. He made a few noodles, then he tried out conditioning several pieces and letting them rest. Then he went back to the first conditioned piece and made it into noodles -- this seems to work pretty well.
Homemade noodles take time to make, and they are only good for 7-10 days. Which makes you wonder a little about the ones in the stores.... although that could just be really good commercial dehydration. Anyway, they do take time to make, but they are _incredibly good_. The texture and the taste are simply better. Richer, fuller, almost buttery smooth, even though there's no butter in them, just eggs and flour. Yum....
Going back to the dopamine thing, I'm thinking one of the reasons that changes in diet and lifestyle can be hard to keep up -- what's new needs to be sufficient to replace the old ways and old comforts. Hm, maybe it's time for me to start up some other projects again... in the winter it's more difficult for me to keep busy, since there are still things I can't do, or in weather like today, can't do right at the moment. I can still only do so much reading at a time (although I do pretty well reading aloud to L in the car), and weaving is also a limited activity. Even painting and drawing have limits... probably why I end up on the PC so much right now. And time to get back to playing cards and backgammon and such too!
One of the new habits I'm trying to develop is changing up my activities every hour or so. Each activity uses the body in a different way, tiring different sets of muscles while resting others. I have it down pretty well for summertime, but not for winter. It's actually a healthier way to live, for anyone not just me.
***
We did strength testing at PT this morning, and I did pretty well on most of them. The failures were pretty dramatic, and made me laugh because of the contrast between the successes and failures. ROM is good and continuing to improve, but I have a lot of work to do on the mid and lower traps. Learned a new stretch today and got reminded of another one that I should still be doing (probably forever, since it's for the forearms and I use them a lot).
Today, I have some ground beef (grass-fed) defrosted and also some of the tomato puree from this past summer's garden. We'll be having a lovely homemade marinara and linguini for dinner tonight.... Yum!!
