The Joy of Coming Spring and Other Oddities

This has been a typical late winter week of weather here on the high plains. Monday and Tuesday it was cold and it snowed. Wednesday was undecided. Thursday it was warm, close to 70. Today it is warm but the wind is howling at a sustained 40 mph with gusts up to 55 mph. What will tomorrow bring? Who knows?

Enough about the weather. Let's get on with another topic of late winter - dieting. It seems that the impending arrival of spring has a certain group of people diving head first into the idea of getting rid of the "winter excess". Some have resorted to the more mechanistic approaches:

Others have been a bit more organic in their approach:

In any case, it can suck the fun right out of luncheon meetings when the diet monster is in full rage. Especially if you are the only one not eating a salad. {*grin*}

That brings my meandering mind to the topic of brown rice. The other night L was bemoaning (on the phone to me) the amount of time it takes to fix brown rice up in the mountains because of the altitude. The boiling point of water is so reduced at the close to 2 mile altitude that it takes forever (and at least twice as much water) to prepare brown rice there. Given that it is a 40 minute task down here at just less than one mile of elevation, you can imagine how long and frustrating it is up in the mountains. In any case, I could tell that L was frustrated. (After all, why call me to kill the time while the rice quasi-boiled away. Watching brown rice boil is not noted to be a source of high entertainment value. I can't picture that talking to me while I fixed my supper and watching her rice bubble away has a much higher rating.)


More later ...