Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Some fun facts about cholesterol (taking from my LC forum)

Some fun cholesterol facts:

Dietary cholesterol only raises serum cholesterol in the short term. Most of the body's cholesterol is produced by the body, and production will decrease to compensate for an increase in intake.

Cholesterol is an antioxidant.Cholesterol is a natural steroid. That's one reason eating eggs can help bodybuilders get ripped.

Your cell walls are mostly made of cholesterol.

Cholesterol helps you repair damaged cell walls. When inflammation in the body is high, more cholesterol is produced to repair it. So blaming it for disease is like blaming the paramedics for your injury.

There is no clear link between high total cholesterol and heart disease.

There is a link between very low total cholesterol and cancer.

Your brain is mostly cholesterol. Low cholesterol may lead to depression and even violent death.

The official dietary recommendations for cholesterol intake were never based on any studies. They were a compromise figure reached between those who believed cholesterol was harmless and those who did not. It was an entirely political decision.

Almost my birthday!

Well, technically Jim, Mom, Kate, and Jesse all have birthdays before mine, but it's coming up~ Actually, we are celebrating all our October birthdays next weekend. Mom got a job and will have to work weekends, I always work weekends and soon Velvet will too, so this was the easiest date to get us all together in one place. Of course, it has to be earlier in the day because I'll have to dash off to work later on.

Speaking of work, I'm still liking my job. They had overtime available last week, so I worked about 18 hours of OT, and I have to say that while I enjoy getting paid time and a half, I do not enjoy putting in the extra hours. After awhile I was just getting burned out. 12-hour days are not the most fun. I didn't really have time to chill with Jesse and I didn't have a lot of time to make food for myself. So I'm ok that the OT has come and gone. Of course, when Christmas hits I'm going to be cursing myself for not working more hours to save up for shopping. Oh well. One of my coworkers worked almost 22 hours straight, then went home to help his fiancée move into their new apartment. That's crazy! And I told him so.

I bought some wall-art stickers at the dollar store today and while I am no professional, I think they brighten up the bedroom and kitchen. The kitchen I placed pineapples stickers on the tiled backboard over the sink, and in the bedroom they are these colored circles. Now, the packaging says that they come off easily and don't remove the paint or anything, but one of the larger circles looked off so I went to move it and it seemed pretty intractable to me...so hopefully Jesse doesn't mind that I stickered up our bedroom. I bought some Halloween static clings for our living room windows. Gotta love that dollar store. I'm hosting the monthly Bunko game, so I'm going to have a Halloween theme; I bought crepé paper streams in black and orange, and Halloween-themed paper plates, cups, and bowls. Not sure what I'll be serving for dinner. See, we're supposed to serve the other ladies dinner, and while I am totally down with just a bunch of finger food, usually people make more of a meal-type dinner. I'll have to think about that for awhile, though not too long because it's set for next Wednesday.

Our 180-gallon tank is all set up and the fish seem to be pretty happy. Well, except Carlos, one of our clowns, is harassing another clown. We think maybe because this other clown is kind of bigger so maybe Carlos is kind of afraid of losing his status, but who knows that is in the minds of fish?

A coworker and I went to see "UP" at the dollar theatre (I'm all about things costing around a dollar these days!) and it was quite fun. I don't have many friends in Utah, so it was great being able to go out and do something on my day off. Another cool thing about my work is many of my department have the same days off that I do.

I went birthday browsing for myself today, to give Jesse some ideas. I found about 5 items at Fred Meyer Jewelers, so I wrote them down for him. I figure, I give him ideas but let him choose and that way it's always a surprise. I'm not sure what he would get me if left to his own devices. One thing I wish is that he would be more romantic/surprising, you know, bring me a flower once in while, but if that element is all he is lacking I think that's pretty good:)

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Another day, another dollar

Velvet got hired on at eBay, too! How excited am I?! Super excited! And she's hired on in my same department, although I don't know if we'll be on the same team, doing the same things. She works the same shift, as well. But our days off don't match. Oh well, you can't have everything.

Speaking of work, I really frickin' love it. It's fun and my coworkers are good people who have rockin' sense of humor. Apparently pranks are huge at eBay, although I haven't witnessed them yet. Give it time, I guess. I think I challenged someone to a foosball-off when I am back from the weekend. I'm crap at it but I can talk the big talk.

I'm never sure what to do with myself on my weekends. Jesse and my weekends don't match up, so I kind of just kick it. I went over to Velvet's this afternoon and then came home. I'll probably play some of my Guild Wars game...tomorrow I think I'll be going over to Jess' niece's place to see her new baby.

I've been reading Pride and Predjudice and Zombies at work during my breaks and holy crap is it weird. I mean, it's totally in the style of Jane Austin; in fact, a lot of the words are taken directly from her book, but then there is also zombie mayhem. Pretty weird.

Our aquarium is coming along nicely, albeit most costly than we had expected. It's a 180-gallon tank (that's 3x the size of our previously largest size, for those of you keeping track at home) and so far we just have the water and sand in it. We're expecting to get more rock tomorrow and then maybe in a week or two we'll start transferring over the fish.

We've been having trouble with our water pressure in the shower lately. It will start off fine, but suddenly the cold water drops off and we're being scalded with hot water, even if it's not on very high. It's the complete opposite of the kitchen water pressure where as soon as the water heats up, then *it* drops off in water pressure. In any event, it's quite the pain when you're at the far end of the shower when the scalding commences, because then you have to brave the water to get to the cold knob, and inevitably turn that knob too far and suddenly it's like icicles and taken over. This is probably something our maintenance people could fix, but I don't really want them in the apartment until the tank is all set up. I have a theory they will be less likely to make us take it down that when it's in the rudimentary stages. I mean, I asked ahead of time if we could have a tank and they said yes...I just didn't mention how large it is.

So for now, I suppose we just have to deal with the weird water pressure, and then in the future when we call in the maintenance guy, he can say, "Hey, I really like your aquarium," and we'll be all, "Thanks, guy."