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Happy Halloween

October 31st, 2008

jack-o-lantern“It’s the most wonderful tiiiiiiime of the year…” Whoops! Sorry, wrong holiday. But I still feel about the same way. I’m sure Andy Williams does too.

And it’s doubly good that Halloween falls on Pizza Night this year. Though frankly, every Halloween is pizza night in our house. For the same reasons pizza is convenient on Friday nights, it’s convenient on holidays as well. I highly recommend it for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, … heck, come to think of it, I can’t think of a single holiday where pizza isn’t appropriate.

The typical Halloween day goes something like this:

  1. Wake up.
  2. Go to work.
  3. Leave work early to make it home for my favorite holiday.
  4. Mad scramble to get kids dressed in their costumes and ready to hit the streets.
  5. Mad scramble to finally put up the decorations we’ve been trying to get put up for the last three weeks.
  6. Wracking my brain for a pumpkin carving idea.
  7. Realizing we don’t actually have any pumpkins.
  8. Mad scramble to buy pumpkins.
  9. Begin carving pumpkins about twenty minutes before Trick or Treating begins.
  10. Realizing I’ve chosen a three hour carving task.
  11. Realizing I’m hungry.
  12. Pizza time!

Our favorite kind of pizza for the Halloween Scramble is: frozen. Yep. No carry out. No ordering in. Just flip on the oven and throw in a disk of mozzarella coated cardboard. It’s quick. It’s easy. It only costs about two bucks. Everyone’s happy.

If you’re asking what kind of frozen pizza, well, there’s really only one. Tostinos:

tostinos

It’s America’s best selling frozen pizza for a reason: because I’ve purchased several million of them. Hopefully a few of you will go out and buy a couple and help pick up the slack a little.

Now, with my tummy full and my pumpkin half carved, it’s time to resume the final steps of the evening:

  1. Set pumpkins on fire.
  2. Send kids on a candy-finding mission.
  3. Sit out on the front porch, wearing plaid shorts and black socks.
  4. Hand out candy to three year olds and seventeen year olds (there are rarely any kids in between).
  5. Wait for kids to return.
  6. Raid the candy bags, extracting every Almond Joy or Mounds bar I find.

Lastly, when the candles have burned low and the streets are quiet, I bring in the pumpkins, turn to say farewell to the evening, and shed a metaphorical tear for another pumpkin season come and gone in the blink of an eye.

Then I eat all that candy.

Posted in Pizza Night | 10 Comments »

Caveat Emptor

October 30th, 2008

Trying to eat right and buy healthy foods is hard enough as it is. But then we have to deal with highly paid marketing departments whose sole purpose is to trick us into buying crap we don’t need. Now I can’t really fault them for that. That is, of course, their job. They get paid for it, take the money home to their families, and use it to buy crap that they don’t need either, some of which was probably made by the company you work for. It’s the Circle of Life.

So when visiting the grocery store to stock your cupboards, remember these words: caveat emptor. This is an important Latin phrase made up of three important Latin words: caveat which means “Watch your back”, emp meaning “while you’re walking through the grocery”, and tor meaning “store or you’ll buy a bunch of stuff you neither need nor want.”

Safe navigation of the grocery store requires, in the words of the immortal Mad-Eye Moody, CONSTANT VIGILANCE! You not only have to read the labels but also have to translate them into common ordinary language. And therein lies the rub.

But fear not. I have gone ahead and done all the hard work for you. That is, after all, why I’m here. Just print out this handy cheat sheet, head to the store, and you’ll be armed and ready for any marketing attack.

What It Says What It Means
Trans Fat Free Full of Good Old Fashioned Regular Fat
Sugar Free Chemist’s Delight
Fat Free We Doubled The Sugar
Low Sodium 100% Taste Free
Made with Whole Grains Two Cups of Sugar’ll Fix That
A Good Source of Vitamins Not a Good Source of Vitamins
May Reduce Cholesterol If You Eat Fourteen Bowls of it per Day
Whitewheat Bread White Bread
Ready in Ten Minutes! Your ambulance, that is.



I hope this helps you on your journey to a better self. Before signing off for the day, I leave you with this scary product:

omg

OMG! Cholesterol!!!

Posted in No Help Here | 11 Comments »

Pumpkin Carvings

October 29th, 2008

“Boys and girls of every age, wouldn’t you like to see something strange?”

Yes, kids, this is Halloween—and just about the bestest time of the year. I love the change in the weather, the honeycrisp apples, the pounds and pounds of Mounds candy bars, and most of all: carving pumpkins.

The annual carving ritual started as far back as I can remember. I must have inherited this interest and skill from my dad, because I’m positive he enjoyed this then as much as I do now. Since the first time I could hold a knife by myself without destroying life or property, this was the design I carved:

pumpkin-original

[Note: you can hover over the images with your mouse for additional information. Note: you can do that on every interior image I post.]

Year after year, it was the same design, and I never tired of it. Well, that’s not true. Once I got into my mid twenties, I knew there was more to carving pumpkins than this, but my dreams were always limited by thick-bladed kitchen knives. Then in 1994, Pumpkin Masters hit the scene (at least I don’t ever remember seeing them before then). Their carving kits started showing up in stores like nobody’s business. I saw tiny little saws and suddenly realized my pumpkin carving dreams were about to come true.

pumpkin-1994

The pumpkin on the left was my 1994 carving. It was time-consuming, but worth every minute. Further, I was inspired. So the very next year I decided to create my own design from scratch. I wasn’t able to find all the photos and/or video this week, so I whipped up this sketch.

pumpkin-1995

For the next three years, I did standard Pumpkin Masters designs until 1999 when I decided to carve Darth Maul. Again, I lost that photo, but I found this one on the interwebs that looks remarkably similar to the one I carved.

pumpkin-1999

I have no idea what I did in 2000. Yet again, I cannot find any photographic evidence. In 2001, I didn’t have much time, and fell back on another Pumpkin Masters design I’d done a few years earlier:

pumpkin-2001

No idea what the 2002 pumpkin was. But I do remember the 2003 pumpkin: Spongebob Squarepants! I really liked that one, therefore, I do not have a picture of it. Hrmph! The following year I did Shrek. I have half a picture of that one:

pumpkin-2004

In 2005, I tried to carve people for the first time. Neo looks okay, Agent Smith looks a lot better. I just wish I had a clearer photo:

pumpkin-2005

Short on time and ideas the following year, I continued The Matrix theme by carving Morpheus. Unfortunately, it looks more like an overweight Ghandi to me:

pumpkin-2006

And we’ll wrap up this overly long post with last year’s entry, the Balrog-o-Lantern:

pumpkin-2007

For those who haven’t seen Fellowship of the Ring, that’s a dude you do not want to mess with. Here’s a screenshot from the movie, for comparison:

pumpkin-2007-ref

So there you have it, kids. A small subset of my pumpkin carving collection. Hope it wasn’t as boring as the slide show of my Grand Canyon trip. And who knows, maybe you picked up a few ideas for your own pumpkins.

Happy Halloween!

Posted in Leftovers | 10 Comments »

Size Matters

October 28th, 2008

Many moons ago, when I was younger (as opposed to ‘many moons ago when I was older’?) a small group of friends set out on a quest: find large cheeseburgers and eat them. It began innocently enough with a set of Hardee’s Monster Burgers and ended with a four-pound Grandma Max Burger. At the time, we thought we’d seen it all. How sheltered we were.

Some time later, I’m not exactly sure when, I discovered Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub. Not to be confused with that Denny’s, this perfectly quaint restaurant, located in beautiful central Pennsylvania in the wonderful town of Clearfield, is known the world over for big hamburgers.

Really big hamburgers.

How big? Well, I’m glad you asked. For normal, regular, everyday stomachs, they serve a half-pounder. Already, here at the bottom rung of the ladder, they have exceeded anything ever labeled “big” at your average fast-food chain. Next up is a full one-pound burger (and we’re talking about the weight of the meat: not the entire sandwich). Still too wimpy for you? Don’t worry, there’s the two pound Pub Challenger. “Pshaw,” you say? Okay, how does the three pound Pub Super Challenger sound?

I know, I know. There are thousands of restaurants that serve burgers this big. There has to be something worse than this.

There is.

Enter Ye Olde 96er: the Six Pound Grand Challenger. If you’re up for it, you have three hours to go from a giant stack o’ meat to the clean plate club. If successful, you receive a T-shirt, an official certificate, entry into their Hall of Fame, and—best of all—you don’t have to pony up $36 for the burger. Just remember to give them twenty-four hours notice before ordering.

But it doesn’t end there. Of course not! As we learned last week, we humans are not capable of being satisfied with any significant achievement. We must constantly exceed or die, apparently. So what’s after the six pound burger? Seven? Eight? Nine pounds?

How about fifteen pounds:

denny1

Here you see Brad Sciullo. Here you see Brad in the proverbial “before” state. Remember, that’s fifteen pounds of meat. The entire sandwich is just over twenty pounds. It’s hard to imagine five pounds of bun, cheese, and condiments.

denny1

Here you see Brad in the proverbial “after” state. He had five hours to eat it to meet the challenge. He did it with twenty-one minutes to spare. He ate a twenty pounds of food in one sitting. The only explanation is that he is a robot. That’s how I sleep at nights.

Well, I hope you enjoyed your tour of really big bur… riiiiiiing. Hold on, that’s my phone. Hello? … Speaking! … What? It’s not the twenty pound cheeseburger? … You’re kidding, right? … You’re not? … Okay, I’ll tell them.

Me again. I guess that’s not the biggest burger they make. Apparently if you have $179.95 you can buy a burger with a fifty pound patty. FIFTY POUNDS. I can’t imagine making a burger bigger than that. So until next time, this is Char… riiiiiing. Sorry. Hang on a sec. Hello? … What? … You can’t be serious! … Yes, yes. I’ll tell them.

Me again. All right, if you have $379.95 and can give seventy-two hours’ notice, apparently they will cook you up a ONE HUNDRED POUND hamburger patty:

denny1

I’d say, “Call Guinness,” but someone already has. It’s official: this is the world’s largest commercially available burger on the planet.

So, who wants to meet me in Clearfield, Pennsylvania this weekend?

Posted in You Know What Sounds Good Right Now? | 15 Comments »

Wins and Losses

October 27th, 2008

braveheartYou could say that William “Braveheart” Wallace was a man with a mission. He had a clear vision, a strong sense of purpose, and a really nice kilt. He believed in something and fought to his death to achieve it.

I’d like to think that Charlie “Brave-stomach” Hills is not unlike him. I too have a clear goal and am taking all the necessary steps I can think of to rid my lands of the tyrannical English lose some weight. And, if the last twenty years are any indication, mine too will be a battle to the death.

Sometimes things go as planned. Every so often you map out a decisive battle and you actually pull it off (like the Battle of Stirling Bridge). And once in a while things go awry (like in the film version where the Battle of Stirling Bridge didn’t actually have a Stirling Bridge in it). But that’s okay. As long as the tally marks in the “win” column outnumber those in the “loss” column, you’re moving forward.

I had another one of those win/loss weeks and I will definitely say it was more win than loss. The win? Not a single uptick on the scale all week. Look at these seven days: 209, 208.5, 208, 207.5, 206.5, 206.5, 206.5. Every day was at or below the previous day.

Day 91
Starting Weight 224.0
Current Weight 206.5
Change from Last Week -2.5
Lost So Far 17.5
Pounds To Go 7.5

In fact, as you can see from the chart, I hit my lowest point of this diet (which began on July 28). Not only that, this is better than my low point on my highly successful low glycemic bid a year ago. And not only that, this is the lowest I’ve been since around the middle of June 2006. So why would anyone have anything bad to say about this? Because I’m a pessimist that’s why. (To be fair, I’m actually a realist. But realism looks like pessimism to most people, so we’ll just go with that for clarity.)

No, what bothers me is four days in a row at the exact same weight. Four days where I did pretty well for myself—even avoiding the Saturday Bump of which I spoke last week. No, I’ve seen this before and this is what “bottoming out” looks like. Something snaps at this point and the slow reversal begins.

Hopefully next week, I’ll prove myself wrong. I’ll look back on this and laugh at my realism pessimism, and will have lost another pound or so. That would be good. In fact, if I could pull that off, I bet I’d start lookin’ pretty good in a kilt.

Posted in Return to Onederland | 5 Comments »

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