Happy 2009 everyone

So it was brought to my attention by one of my tweeple friends that I haven’t blogged, specifically about the “no meat experiment” recently.  Since before Christmas.  So here it is!

Christmas was not fun.  And from now on i’m not going to celebrate it anymore.  Using vacation time to spend forced time with people i’m just not compatible with is just stupid to continue.  Guilt is not a “holiday spirit”.  There’s not much more to say about that.

However, Christmas was the first time I had unlimited meat choices to select from… and opted to have none of them.  I never mentioned it to anyone, I just didn’t eat ham, or meatballs, or mini hotdogs, or anything.  I just stuck to everything else.  Nuts, veggies, cookies, pasta.  I just didn’t care to have anything else.  I planned on eating at least the ham, but I just had no desire to when it came down to the execution of it.  Nobody but my Dad noticed, and that was for the best.  The last thing I wanted to talk about was removing meat from my diet and trying to justify myself.  Besides, I don’t have a valid answer.

So now that I made it through Christmas… what next?

The first week back Cassie and I thought we’d do something crazy… go for Philly cheese steak sandwiches.  My first real time eating meat (aside from trying a piece of beef jerky once) and it didn’t go as well as expected.  I got about half way through and I started feeling pretty lousy… my stomach was pissed.  I couldn’t eat any more after that.  We had “light meat” on our cheeseburger pizza at the pizza shoppe last night and that was ok, but it was almost nothing.

People ask if i’m feeling any better or losing any weight.  No for both.  I had a bit where I felt pretty lousy at first, but I think my body was just going through a period of adjusting.  The stuff I relied on to live was removed.  But now, I feel the same as if I was eating meat, but I’m just a lot more frustrated when finding meals.  But maybe I just haven’t given it enough chance.  I’ll keep up with it until I don’t want to anymore.

Kat took me to McFosters, an all meatless restaraunt and it was awesome.  You don’t have to find something to eat.. you can eat anything.  It was nice to see and I’d like to go there often.
My goal of being less red meat dependent I think has not come to fruition.  If I were to put meat back in my diet today it would be a flood of hamburgers and tacos.  For all I know i’d be worse than before and just binge on cow.

So that’s that.  I still don’t eat meat.  And I haven’t died from it yet.

My poor little project

Poor PandoraFM.

I left it in a near-death state for the past couple weeks.  I didn’t know what was wrong with it, and I wasn’t finding the time needed to really dig into it until last night where I figured it out and fixed it.  But damn.  That was really douchey of me.

Admittedly, it’s run pretty flawlessly for years now.  I just set it and forget it.  But something happened on Last.FM’s side and I had to make a small adjustment.

Again I find myself wishing I could hand off the project to someone who wants to put time and energy into the next generation of it.  A lot of people still use it (almost 4,000 tracks were queued up during this downtime), so it’s still worthwhile… people rely on it.  It’s just not something that’s a priority for me anymore, and it deserves to be.

I do miss all the effort I put into it back when it was in development.  I’d hide in my room for hours every day working on the new version.  Spending even more time on top of that talking to users and getting feedback and beta reports.  I was a real developer one time.

Maybe some day i’ll be passionate about something again like that, but it won’t be PandoraFM.  I see that project really “as good as it’ll get” as far as the feature set.  In fact, it probably has more features than anyone really needs… but that’s what happens when one makes choices for the many :)

Almost time to take off for lunch.  Cassie is picking me up.  Then I have the remainder of today, all of tomorrow… and then i’m off for a week.  I’m catching a flight from Omaha to Madison on Monday, and then driving with my parents from Madison to the UP of Michigan.  Argh.  Why can’t I be from somewhere more rad than the UP?

And yes.  Still no meat.
Keep on rockin.

I’m still a frackin vegetarian

I made it over a week without meat.  Who would have guessed?  I knew I could.

I’m already seeing some success from this experiment.  It’s easier to eat food I have at home than to go out and find somewhere convinient that has a tasty non-meat meal.

When eating out I’m already finding new options that are probably better than before and loaded with veggies.  Noodles and Company has been a great find.  However at Burger King when asking for the Veggie Whopper (what they used to call it anyway) I got got a whopper with no patty of any sort, veggie or otherwise.  Fail.

Every day is an adventure, and it’s added stress.  What am I going to eat?  I’m still trying to figure it out every day.  But I think eating out less is going to happen a lot more and in turn it’s going to be easier to eat quick veggie meals.

I forgot to grab my lunch to bring to work today, so i’m about to go out in the cold-ass weather and get something.  Boston Market I think.  Oh man meatloaf sounds so good.  God damnit.

Followup on ingestion tactics

Today is Thursday.  The 4th full day without any meat.  I’m sure it’s by far the longest stretch of doing so in my whole life.  *maybe* i’ve gone a whole day without eating meat once.. maybe.

But four days is nothing.  But I felt it was worth updating anyway.

The first couple days I didn’t think anything of it.  Just started eating different foods.  Yesterday, day three, it hit me.  I wanted meat.  Maybe it’s all mental, but I also wasn’t feeling that well.  Not sick, but weak.  I talked to Kat and she asked what it is I have been eating.  Apparently the technique of replacing meat with tomatoes isn’t going to work and explains my slight fatigue.  I currently have no protein in my diet and haven’t had any for days.  I feel a little worse than I did yesterday, and I got a good night sleep and everything so I can only attribute it to that.  So it looks like I need to remedy this situation.

To go along with whatever it was I started feeling yesterday I also had my first meat craving.  Argh.  I wanted taco bell, I wanted wendys, I wanted everything.  It hit out of nowhere.  But I won’t cave.  Oh no.  My guess the craving is because my body is pissed and requires something I refuse to put in it.  Anyone who said “I felt better the first week after removing meat from my diet” is lying.  They’re a pretencious bastard who will try to make you feel bad for eating delicious murdered animals.  Don’t listen to them.  mmmmm… murder.
Went to dinner with Kat last night to Noodles & Company.  Awesome.  I think i’ll eat there a lot.  Most everything is without meat, but you add whatever meat you want to it.  I had a delicious thing that I didn’t even know what it was and I didn’t even miss the meat.

My fear is by the time I think I’m done with the experiment and I should eat meat again… I won’t want to.  Oh god, what am I doing?

Pickles

As of last night, around 5pm I’ve cut out meat from my diet.  I’ve been planning this since around last night at 4:59pm or so.

It all started yesterday morning when Cassie and I were out to breakfast.  She convinced me to try a piece of egg, a food item I haven’t had for about 15 years.  It’s a slight phobia of cracking open the unfertilized birthplace of an animal.  I’m well aware egg is in pretty much everything, and that doesn’t bother me.  I just don’t want to look at it.
It was at dinner where I was looking at sauce options at spaghetti works and Cassie recommended I try the one without meat and I figured… why not.  Not only will I eat this without meat, I’m going to eat everything else without meat too.  Instead I can attempt to put things into my diet that I wouldn’t normally eat.  So I made my order, and the waitress asked “Would you like a meatball with that?”  Bitch.
So it began, a spur of the moment decision impacting things I do every day.

I don’t plan on doing this forever, but I see it as an experiment.  Can I start eating things I wouldn’t normally eat because I’ve cut out the standards?  Will I feel better?  Will I lose weight?

Lunchtime comes today and I have to make a decision on what I’m to eat.  So I go to a local sandwich place by the office and for the first time in my life utter the words “veggie sub”.  I even looked around to make sure nobody could hear me first.

He takes out some bread and layers with tomatoes.  I don’t like tomatoes.  He looks at me and says “what else do you want on it?”  I look around and complete the sandwich with american cheese, onions, lettuce, oil and vinegar and finally pickles.  I brought it back to my desk and took a bite without even looking at it first.  First impression… i really like those pickles.

After work today i’m going to whole foods and see what I can try and hack together as far as grocery shopping.  I see veggie pizzas, noodles, pasta and bags of salad in my future.  Things I still don’t have to figure out how to cook… but just things I already like that won’t have meat in it.  I’m not trying to eat healthy… i’m just removing my default and still going to eat like crap.

I recalled the story to Cassie last night on how I started drinking only diet pop.  I stopped drinking regular pop for a whole year first and only drank water.  Once you lose your comparison then settling for something not as good is easy.  So I don’t think you’ll see me eating tofu anytime soon, but I’ll stick to things that I’m already familiar with and in time i’ll try eating things i’m not.  By that time I won’t know any better?

Being this is an experiment I don’t see it lasting more than a couple months unless my life dramatically changes for the better because of it.  I have no idea with slaughtering animals and then ripping the flesh off their tasty bones so i’m sure i’ll be eating meat soon enough.  Besides Christmas is coming.. so that’s a given.