keto – Page 2 – Philoquialisms

Weekly status update [0020/????]

It’s kind of amazing to me that I’m 20 weeks, 140 days, into retirement. It both doesn’t feel that long at all–I can still remember driving into work and hunting for a parking spot, sometimes the most challenging thing I did all day–and impressively far in the past. That second part excites me; I was a little worried that the days would quickly start disappearing into a blur of nothingness, but instead I feel like I actually get quite a bit out of most of my waking hours. Sure, it’s reading, or playing games, but those are both things that I wanted to do more of in the past and didn’t have the time for. Now that I do, it’s nice. Really nice.

I’ve officially given up on the whole USPS situation. Dealing with their international handling department is a special kind of hell. I got replacements for all of the items, so I don’t really care that much now; I’m mostly just angry I wasted time contacting them in the first place. More fool me for trying to do the right thing.
I fasted most of this week, and I think that was successful in recalibrating my hunger levels… but then I went and ate way too much today in a sort of rebound effect. Sigh. I still stuck with the keto side of things, so I’m not worried about that, but we’ll have to see in the days ahead if I screwed it up.
Still haven’t done much in the way of puzzles. The dot-by-dot book I got in my last order from Japan is actually really disappointing; it has a bunch of cheater art in the background of most of the puzzles, so you almost always know what the picture is going to be before you start. Boo.
Played a whole lot of videogames this week. I finished Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction after putting it aside a couple of months ago, and tore through Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty in a single sitting the next day (it’s short, though). I still haven’t made much more progress in Shining in the Darkness, though; I’m not sure why. I was enjoying it when I was playing it. Instead I picked up the original PlayStation version of Final Fantasy Tactics digitally and started playing it on my PS3… but I think I’m gonna force myself to set that aside and get back to the Shining series.
I’m a good chunk of the way into The Moon and the Other, which is an interesting sf novel by John Kessel. In some ways its setting is an inversion of The Handmaid’s Tale, which makes for really interesting compare-and-contrast reading. I didn’t do that intentionally… but it’s a neat result.
Watched a whole lot of Landail on Twitch, as he was playing a game I particularly like (Tactics Ogre) most of the week. Actively spent less time in some of the other online communities I’m a part of due to frustration with some of them.
My back’s not in great shape again yet, but it’s better every day, I feel, and I’m taking an ibuprofen every morning to help reduce the inflammation.
On the other hand, I haven’t needed my wrist braces for days, which is very nice.

All in all, despite the frustrations I had earlier in the week, I feel pretty good about how it ended. Even the tiniest dent in my gaming backlog’s a good thing, and I’ve really been enjoying my recent reading level. Hopefully next week will continue the up and to the right trend.

Weekly status update [0019/????]

A pretty quiet week, overall.

Still very light on the TV (I watched maybe two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and no puzzles at all.
Video games, though, I played a lot. I spent an entire day playing Let It Die, and played a lot of it in the gaps throughout the week too. I also made a lot of progress in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood; I’ve set aside Horizon: Zero Dawn for the moment. I made some more progress in Shining in the Darkness as well, but didn’t play it a whole lot.
I also read quite a bit. I tore through Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential for the first time; I feel that writing up an article on it is a little too much whistling past the graveyard, given his recent passing, but it’s an excellent autobiography and excoriation of the restaurant business. I never really watched any of Bourdain’s shows, but having read the book I’m actually more interested in them now.
We had an extended game night Tuesday. It gave me something of an epiphany.
I was more social than I usually am; along with the board games on Tuesday, I went to A Thing Saturday night, had a friend hang out most of the day Sunday, and had dinner with an old coworker just a few hours ago this Friday evening. It was nice seeing everyone.
I spent a lot of time working on my music collection. I’m still way, way behind on having it all nice and tidy, but every little bit counts.
Down a size on my pants: keto, woo!

Yeah; nothing terribly exciting, that’s for sure. But I’m still very content with the slow rhythms of my retirement nineteen weeks in. This bodes very well for the future.

Weekly status update [0018/????]

Oh, hey, I’m actually writing this on Friday for a bit of a change.

I’ve moved on from reading Stephen King’s crime trilogy to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I’m about halfway through. It’s excellent and dark as hell.
I actually beat Phantasy Star this weekend. The game got very repetitive near the end, with mostly the same enemies in the last four or five dungeons. I stopped mapping the game myself and switched to using online maps in my frustration, tearing through the endgame as quickly as possible. The mid-game was a solid RPG, and the game was technically amazing; it honestly looked better than many SNES RPGs. But was it fun all the way through? Definitely not.
I’m now playing Shining in the Darkness. It’s another “map it out on a piece of graph paper” game, but I’m enjoying it quite a bit more, at least for the time being. The levels are huge, 30×30 each; fortunately the graph paper I bought has a smaller-scale grid on the back of each sheet, so it’s not a problem to map.
I finished the PS4 remaster of Assassin’s Creed II and started both AC: Brotherhood and Horizon: Zero Dawn. They’re good games both, if a little too similar to each other. I should pick just one to stick with for the moment.
While I was dealing with Linux being idiotic yesterday, I was also having to fight with the USPS. They destroyed a package of board games from amazon.de, and apparently I’m going to have to fill out a bunch of forms to claim the insurance on the package, never mind the fact that they have a case file with a bunch of evidence that it is, indeed, destroyed. Sigh.
Not a lot of TV. I watch an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine every couple of days, but that’s it. Same with puzzles; I don’t think I’ve solved a single one in the last week. I have been continuing my watching of Landail play games on Twitch, although at the moment it’s mostly hate-watching due to the game he’s playing.
Keto continues apace.

It’s been something of an exhausting week, mainly due to the stress of dealing with USPS and my computer. I’m actually glad that it’s the weekend now, which is honestly a bit of a strange thing to say nowadays, but there you have it.

Weekly status update [0017/????]

I had a couple of conversations yesterday evening about my blog; I was at a social going-away party thing that had a lot of people I hadn’t really talked to since before I retired. And it made me realize that in some ways, yeah, this blog is exactly the sort of obligation I’m trying not to have this year. I’m not gonna lie. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with something even semi-interesting to write about, and I feel that as a sort of weight around my shoulders. But I also realized that a little obligation, a little “hey, you need to do this at least a couple of times a week” is actually a good thing. Never mind the practical, useful side of it, the fact that writing here is good de-rusting for whatever future tippy-tappy endeavors I embark on. A tiny bit of discomfort that results in something that others seem to enjoy? That’s the best kind of obligation.

I don’t think I even cracked a puzzle book once this week. That might be a first since retirement.
It’s because almost all of my time has been spent reading. After finishing off King’s The Outsider, I immediately put his “crime trilogy” on hold at the local library. It was a long weekend, so I couldn’t get them until Tuesday, but snag them I did. I’ve already finished the first two and plan on spending the rest of today reading the third.
I got them in large print, too. It’s nice. I had already jacked the font size way up on my Kindle back when I read the first Wheel of Time book, and having something much like that in a physical volume is handy. Unfortunately not a lot of my favorite genre (science fiction) gets large-print editions, so I’ll have to enjoy this luxury while I can.
I didn’t really watch TV either. I did play some video games, but it’s mostly the usual free-to-play suspects.
Keto’s going well. I still haven’t weighed myself, but I had the most important signifier Friday morning: the shorts I had been wearing off and on the last few weeks were loose enough I had to hitch them up repeatedly at Walmart. Woo!
I saw Deadpool 2 with some good friends from work last Saturday. It was… exactly what I wanted out of Deadpool 2. If you saw the first, and thought of it as “a comic book movie cranked to 11,” then Deadpool 2 was the same thing cranked to 13 or 14.
No further movement on the “getting rid of boardgames” front to report.
Dove deep into reading about modern abstract boardgames again, which happens every six months or so. The result this time was some code changes to Giles to make one particular game more flexible. The desire to implement a whole new game or two has mostly passed, unfortunately, but even this little bit of programming felt good.
Still no actual prose on a page, although stuff is aggressively percolating. Soon. Soon.

Soon. (Man. That doesn’t even look like a word to me now.)

Here’s a food thing: Great Value drink enhancers, considered opinion edition

After spending several weeks using them heavily, I think it’s time that I write up my final thoughts on the Great Value drink enhancers previously discussed here. Some moved up, some moved down, and I figured out a neat trick.

Neat trick first: for pretty much any of the “fruity” flavors, you can add a bit of the Black Cherry to it. It acts as an en-tartening agent (that’s not a word, but whatever) without messing with the flavor profile too much. It works particularly well with several of the flavors, which I’ll mention below.

Also, a note: the bottles say “24 servings”, but I get a whopping 10 out of them, so apparently my potency is 2.4x what Walmart suggests. Given that I use the enhancers as a replacement for both soft drinks and candy, that’s not too surprising, but your personal tastes may vary based on just how much you squeeze into the glass.

D Tier

Lemonade: This ended up being the only flavor I actually dumped (well, squeezed) out into the sink after three or four glasses. Country Time lemonade powder just isn’t my thing, and it’s no better in liquid form. It didn’t even last long enough to make it to the Black Cherry mix-in, but I can’t imagine that would have improved it much.

C Tier

Cherry Limeade (has caffeine): How the mighty hath fallen. This was the flavor that encouraged me to try this whole thing, and to be honest I was surprised by how good it was with my very first glass. The problem: it’s not as good as the rest. Perfectly drinkable, sure, but also noticeably artificial, too strong on the cherry and not strong enough on the lime. I found myself very weak on it by the end. Disappointing, but other surprise flavors have picked up the slack, so it all works out in the end.

Black Cherry (has caffeine): This is a flavor they didn’t have the first time I picked up the drink enhancers. I bought it hoping for something better than Cherry Limeade. It is, but Black Cherry is still not amazing. That is, it’s not amazing by itself. Added to several of the other flavors, it significantly enhances them, at least for a tartness junkie like me.

Orange Blast: New as well. I avoided this one the first time because I’m generally not a fan of artificial orange, but it turns out that this is essentially liquid Tang, and I actually kinda like the flavor of Tang for some reason. I don’t love it, but it’s perfectly fine. It’s not special, though, hence the lowish ranking. A pleasant surprise nevertheless.

B Tier

Pineapple Mango: Another new flavor. I wavered on where to put this, either C Tier or here, because I have a problem with it: it tastes very mango-y, and I’m not a huge fan of mangoes. I love pineapples, though, and I can’t deny that this particular flavor tastes exactly like fresh pineapple and mango juice. It’s a bit freakish, to be honest. Despite my lack of love of mango, though, I enjoyed every glass of this that I had, which bumped it up to B Tier.

Blue Raspberry: The third and final new flavor. I actually bought this one last; I kept ignoring it, because I consider “blue raspberry” a stupid stunt flavor. That turned out to be silly, because it’s actually quite good. Not mind-blowing, but a perfectly pleasant raspberry flavor. It’s definitely a bit better with Black Cherry added… and also turns a particular shade of purplish blue that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a kid. I freely admit that might bias me.

Strawberry Watermelon: This one moved up the ranks. It still tastes like a Jolly Rancher, but the flavor’s better than I realized that first glass. Don’t bother putting the Black Cherry into it, though; that just makes it taste exactly like Fruit Punch. I mean, I guess you could, rather than buying Fruit Punch separately, but… why?

A Tier

Strawberry Kiwi: Nothing changed about this flavor, really; it’s still exactly like Crystal Light’s version (or Jell-O, if you have fonder memories of wiggly food than ’90s diet beverages). I just realized I actually really like the taste of strawberry kiwi. A hit of Black Cherry in it improves it even further.

Berry Blast (has caffeine): Still a tasty blueberry/strawberry mix, still very good, still an unfortunate color. (I love purple! I just don’t like drinking it.) Black Cherry boosts this as well, and I’m honestly not sure I’d drink it without a squeeze of Black Cherry now because of how much the tartness enhances it.

Fruit Punch: I realize it might be weird to give Lemonade such a low ranking and this flavor such a high one when they’re both replicating specific, very artificial flavors. Whatever: I loved Fruit Punch Kool-Aid, and I love this. Its only flaw is that it isn’t tart, but hey! That’s what Black Cherry is for. With a bit of that, I’d put Fruit Punch at low S Tier. As is, it’s still delicious.

S Tier

Raspberry Lemonade: Still the (utterly shocking, to someone who’s not crazy about raspberry) champion. It’s not just me, by the way; everyone I’ve had try it loves it. I dunno what it is about this flavor, but it’s got all the magic necessary to go the distance: tart and fruity in a perfect balance. It’s possibly the only one that is actually made worse with Black Cherry, as that increases its tartness to an almost unpleasant level. No, Raspberry Lemonade is perfect where it is.

So, there you have it: an extensive review nobody wanted. I’ll note that I’m still not brave enough to try the Grape, and I don’t like tea, so the various sweet tea variations are very much Not My Thing. If you’ve tried any of those flavors, feel free to leave a comment as to what you thought. I’d be curious to know!

You might ask: which ones do you plan on keeping around? Well, I bought three more bottles of Raspberry Lemonade today, and I have an unopened Fruit Punch. I think I’ll pick up a Berry Blast, Strawberry Kiwi, and maybe even Pineapple Mango the next time at Walmart… plus more Black Cherry for mixing. In the end, I’ll probably cycle through all the lower-tier flavors that I enjoy… with a whole lot of Raspberry Lemonade betwixt it all. So good. So, so good.

Weekly status update [0015/????]

Sorry for the late update; last night was a bit rough and I had a friend over today.

Keto is going well. I fit into a couple of pairs of shorts I haven’t been able to wear in a while, just in time for the hot summer months.
I finished up The Punisher, which was Just Fine. Time to start Jessica Jones season 2.
I actually watched a couple of movies recently; specifically, I caught up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, watching both Black Panther and Spiderman: Homecoming. Both of them were great in different ways.
Still slowly reading Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds, which hasn’t grabbed me the way most of his books do. After that I’ll go back to the Wheel of Time series, at least for one more book.
Did a bunch of puzzles, including the single largest Kakuro I’ve completed. It took me about six hours (!), although at least two of that was because I screwed up and had to erase over half the puzzle. Ugh. I persevered, though, which made me happy; a younger Phil would have scratched through the puzzle and moved on.
Speaking of puzzles, my latest order of Japanese magazines came in. I also ordered a pair of books for the daughter of one of my friends, who has done a bunch of Sudoku but not much else. It was fun walking her through some of the different puzzle types. I gifted her one of my precious Zebra M-402s. She’s aware that’s the only one she gets.
My wrists are behaving way better than they had been, which is good, because my old braces finally gave up the ghost. I ordered some new ones just a few minutes ago, actually.

A pleasant, quiet week overall. I’m almost done with all of the first round of the Great Value flavor enhancers; expect to see an up-to-date review/ranking sometime this coming week.

Weekly status update [0014/????]

A mostly quiet week. That’s not a bad thing.

Keto’s going well. I’ve been eating a lot of Walmart’s rotisserie chickens, as they’re low-carb and cheap besides. And drinking tons of Atkins shakes, something I’ve been doing off and on for… a long time now, sadly. I’m not weighing myself, because hard numbers tend to be a demotivating factor for me, but I can already see that my face has slimmed down a bit. Just another 24 months or so to go…
I’m most of the way through reading Eye of the World. It’s actually been quite a bit better than I feared, but the remaining three trillion words are still a daunting task I see ahead of me.
I started watching Last Man on Earth just in time for the announcement that Fox is cancelling it… along with Brooklyn Nine-Nine, where I’m most of the way through the second season. Why, Fox? Why? Anyhow, Last Man is actually quite good; it’s got an interesting concept, the cast is great, and it’s shot beautifully for what amounts to a weird-as-hell sitcom.
Landail finished up Wild Arms, one of my old favorites and started playing Shining the Holy Ark, a dungeon crawler for the Sega Saturn. After watching for an hour or so I realized that I really want to play the game without having it all spoiled. But there’s a problem: I have to play games in order, which means going all the way back to the original Shining in the Darkness for the Genesis. And… I didn’t have graph paper for mapping, so I ordered some off of Amazon and started to play the original Phantasy Star in the interim. I had clearly forgotten that it, too, has first-person dungeon crawling segments. Sigh. Anyhow, the graph paper came in this morning, and I’ve already mapped several dungeons in Phantasy Star. I’m going to finish it up before shifting back to Shining in the Darkness. Maybe I’ll actually get to Shining the Holy Ark sometime before 2052.
I have a very, very extensive music collection, carefully curated and organized in digital form on my computer and an external drive. For the first time in literally years, I spent at least a little bit each day for the last several days adding more stuff to it. It’s all things I’ve already downloaded–from Bandcamp, mostly–but it’s got to be renamed, re-encoded, and all that jazz. I hadn’t felt motivated to touch my music collection in a really long time, so this has been a pleasant resurgence. We’ll see if it lasts.
I continue to love (most of) the Great Value drink enhancers. Expect a followup post once I finish off the original bottles I bought, probably this coming week. (I’ve already bought more raspberry lemonade, because, well, S-tier.) Quite a few flavors have shifted their rankings, and I have a Certified PhilHack(tm) to “kick it up a skooch” that I want to share.

Huh. Apparently I had a lot to say despite the quiet. Shocking, I know, particularly if you’ve ever met me.

Here’s a food thing: Great Value drink enhancers, hot take edition

[Welcome to Here’s a thing, my take on reviews. Yes, the Solving post from last week should have been one of these. Anyhow, inspired by Movies with Mikey, I’m not going to bother with negative reviews. Instead, these posts will showcase things I like. No promises as to frequency, mind you; I don’t want this to become a review blog. But I do plan on reviewing things on the semi-regular.

Also, you should watch Movies with Mikey. It’s one of my top five channels on YouTube.

Monday update: These rankings will have to be updated once I finish off the bottles; several have shifted after a day’s tasting. The title of this post has been updated accordingly.]

I’m back on a ketogenic diet, and in fact currently fasting. Part of the problem with keto, particularly for someone like me who lives alone and doesn’t get a ton of pleasure out of cooking for one, is maintaining variety in what I consume. I’ve been drinking a lot of diet soda recently–way, way too much diet soda, to be honest–and last night I remembered Mio.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Mio is a “water enhancer.” It’s a little squeeze bottle filled with a sugar-free hyper-concentrated liquid that you squirt into a glass of water or water bottle. It’s Crystal Light in a much more convenient form, really, and its only real downside is that at the flavor concentration I prefer it ends up being almost exactly as expensive as actual 12-packs of Coke Zero Sugar.

But it’s better for you, for sure, and way better for your teeth, so I was all prepared to place an order for a ton of different flavors on Amazon this morning when a pair of lines in one of the reviews stopped me: “Get walmart brand for about 30% less. Tastes the same.“

Now, I don’t know about you, but my general experience with Walmart’s Great Value brand is that it’s hot garbage. Their sodas are terrible, their knockoff of La Croix is even more undrinkable than the original (an impressive feat), their cookies taste like cardboard, and so on. I’d say that my success rate with the brand is in the low single digits.

On the other hand, it’s cheap, and I wanted to get out of the house today anyway. So I cruised on over to the Super Walmart in Lenoir and picked up seven different flavors for a whopping total of $14.14 and brought them home. Imagine my surprise when, pouring myself an ice-cold glass of water from my Brita pitcher in the fridge and squeezing the first flavor in–Cherry Limeade, the best-reviewed of the bunch–I discovered that, huh, this is actually really good!

I’ve actually made myself a glass of all seven flavors I bought today already. What can I say? I’m a thirsty boy, and an inquisitive one. Below are my hot-take rankings of the seven flavors, from best to worst, broken up into tiers a la characters in fighting games… because why not.

C Tier

Lemonade: It tastes exactly like Country Time lemonade powder, which doesn’t taste anything like real lemonade. I imagine if you have fond memories of said beverage this would end up higher on your list; I don’t, really. It’s not disgusting, it’s just not what I want lemonade to taste like.

Strawberry Watermelon: This flavor is completely inoffensive, but it tastes like a watered-down watermelon Jolly Rancher, which is already one of the least strongly-flavored sugar delivery systems I know. Wherever the strawberry tones were hiding, I couldn’t find them. I still like it more than actual watermelon, though, so there’s that.

B Tier

Strawberry Kiwi (has caffeine): Tastes identical to Crystal Light’s flavor of the same name. I used to love the crud out of said drink, so that speaks highly of the other flavors we’re about to discuss. You definitely get both the strawberry and the kiwi. Had this been the best flavor that Walmart brought to the table, I would have been mildly disappointed but also a bit surprised, given my general opinion of their house brand. But it doesn’t even make the top half.

A Tier

Berry Blast (has caffeine): I took a sip of this and went, hmm, blueberries and strawberries. Then I looked at the picture on the label: blueberries and strawberries. Nailed it, me! The only real problem with this one is that it’s purple; I can’t stand artificial grape flavor thanks to taking Dimetapp when I was a kid, a cold medicine that transcends grapeness to taste purple. So I have an uncomfortable mental association with any beverage that looks like it might be even slightly Dimetapp-adjacent. Fortunately Berry Blast transcends its color. Totally yum.

Cherry Limeade (has caffeine): Turns out people were both right and wrong. This flavor is quite delicious! But it’s not the best. The cherry overwhelms the lime a bit, and as a major lime partisan I really wish the citrus tones were stronger. It also has a bit of a weird smell, although it tastes just fine. A slight tweak to the formula and I think it’d be at the top of the list, but even so I’m more than happy to drink it.

Fruit Punch: I may not have fond memories of Country Time lemonade powder, but I do have fond memories of fruit punch Kool-Aid. This tastes exactly like that; maybe a little weaker unless you really squeeze the bottle, but that’s actually a good thing. Of course, if this particular totally artificial flavor isn’t your thing, this one’s going to drop down to C Tier. I love it, though.

S Tier

Raspberry Lemonade: Here’s the thing. I don’t even really like raspberries. I almost didn’t buy this flavor because of how “meh” I am on them. That would have been a damn travesty, though, because holy moly this is delicious. Unlike the Cherry Limeade, the lemon and raspberry components are perfectly balanced, and every sip is crisp and refreshing. I would have never ever guessed before all of my tasting that this flavor was going to be the winner… but it was so good that I had to tell my mother that she needed to go pick up some from her local Walmart pronto, since she loves raspberry.

Overall, I was really impressed. Even my least-favorite flavor, Lemonade, is totally drinkable, and the top three or four are worth keeping on hand at all times. I suspect I’ll be going through the Raspberry Lemonade like it’s going out of style.

For those of you who don’t drink a lot of water, or just want to try something a little different, hopefully this review will give you something out to try. (They’re in the “drink mixes” section, along with Kool-Aid, Crystal Light, and friends.) I’m curious as to your thoughts, in particular if you try these out yourself. Which flavors do you love? Hate? There were others at the store, but most were flavors that didn’t interest me at all; I’m not a sweet tea drinker, for example, and I find artificial orange to often be very cloying. Let me know if you give them a whirl!

Weekly status update [0013/????]

Getting back into the groove of being home. I honestly miss being around other people… but I also really like being by myself. The eternal conflict.

After months of very laissez-faire eating habits, I’m back on keto. I’m actually in the middle of a mini-fast; I had been eating many thousands of kilocalories more than I should have per day, and fasting is the… er… fastest way I know to get my body back to a more regular level of craving. It’s miserable, of course, but it’s also almost over. I plan on shifting to a regular ketogenic diet come Monday.
Did quite a few puzzles, mostly Sudoku; I’m at that point in one of my puzzle books where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, which means I tend to focus on it rather than the fifteen others sitting next to my chair. I think I’m going to intentionally not replace that particular book for a bit, so as to give some of the other puzzle types a bigger part of the rotation.
Still watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine (hilarious) and The Punisher (tolerable).
I actually wrote some small patches for Giles this week. For a brief, shining moment I thought I might be diving back into coding. Then I remembered that no one cares about Giles other than me and I have nothing to prove in re: my coding ability, so… not so much.
Still grinding out dailies in the same four games, although I actually put some real time into Let It Die. I think I’m actually going to try and make some real forward progress this weekend or, at the latest, next week.
We had an “extended game night” this Tuesday; it was supposed to be at Fercott Fermentables, but they were closed. One of the players stepped in at the last minute to host. Thanks, Derrick! It was an excellent game of Antike II, and one I’m still thinking about now.
I ordered board games for the first time this year while still riding high on the high from that game night. As always, I bought way more than I should have. Sigh.
Not a lot of reading, alas. The Eye of the World is fine, but it’s not exciting me… and I feel obligated to finish at least that first book in the Wheel of Time series before moving onto something else.

All in all, pretty much the same stuff that I was doing before the trip, plus the whole diet thing. If you find any of this surprising… you haven’t been paying attention.