Archive for the 'Personal' Category

Do Home Remedies Ever Work?

Published on May 20, 2008 in Personal and recipes. 0 Comments

Allow me to have a little rant.

I have been coughing non-stop for the past four days. I’m losing sleep, getting crankier by the day, and woefully missing my morning swims. Last night was the worst. The cough roused me at least once every 30-minutes. At around 4 a.m. I grew desperate. This is the UK, so no 24-hour CVS pharmacies would save me with a solid dose of Nyquil. In my hazy state I googled for “cough remedies” and found a few home cures for dry coughs.

The most interesting “cure” was this homemade cough syrup from a book called Herbally Yours, made by mixing the following ingredients:

Home Remedy for Cough.jpg

  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1 Tablespoon honey
  • 1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar
  • 2 Tablespoons water

The recipe was posted on a website which, with its turquoise background and liberal use of the Times font, was clearly not professionally produced. Still, I had desperate hopes that the author, one Bonnie K. McMillen of the University of Pittsburg, was a better judge of folk remedies than she was a website designer. Indeed, Bonnie wrote the words that I longed to hear:

I took 3 teaspoons the first time because I had a bad dry cough for over three weeks, and I was desparate for some relief. It worked and I got a good night’s sleep. I have been recommending it to others ever since, and many have confirmed my positive results.

So there I was, at four in the morning, grating ginger into my Pyrex cauldron, hoping this brew would put me to sleep for a long long time.

Surprisingly, the concoction tasted sort of good. I almost liked the sour vinegar with the spicy cayenne pepper. I took a few swigs then crawled under my blanket on the couch (sparing Tim the wrath of my throatal fury) and promptly started coughing again. This went on until about 6:30am, when I eventually gave up and said hello to a brand new day.

(cough. grunt.)

Now that I think about it, I’m kind of embarrassed that I bothered with the Bonnie’s magical elixer. I really wanted to believe it, you know?

Most of all, I didn’t want to shell out £3 for a bottle of night-time cough syrup. But that’s precisely what I did this afternoon. I hope we return soon to our regularly scheduled, fully functional, and very well-rested schedule.

Do you guys have any home remedies that you swear by? Tell us all about them in the comments.

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

Growing SmarterFitter

Published on May 14, 2008 in Freelance Writing, Personal and SmarterFitter. 0 Comments
Dashboard - Google Analytics.jpg

It seems that the QUICK way to building a blog’s reader base is to build SMALL useful things and then get them linked on a popular site. Yesterday, Lifehacker linked to my “Grocery List Templates For Healthy People”. In one day, our subscriber count went from 174 to 249 and our page visits went from 174 to 1,736. And, perhaps more exciting than anything else, I just about quadrupled my daily Adsense revenue to $4.26 which pushed my total Adsense earnings over the $100 threshold needed to get Google to cut me a check. It’s a small income, but it’s an independent income and that’s really exciting.

[Update] Whoops, make that 408 subscribers. I should have waited for Feedburner to update its stats before posting this. =)

When Should We?

Published on April 29, 2008 in Personal. 3 Comments
65B8722C-ABF4-4EF2-8B76-8AC98B2C2DBC.jpg

Tim and his enterprising cohorts have just released WhenShouldWe.com, a nifty collaboration tool that knocks the ad-ridden socks off of doodle.

Agreeing a date that works for everyone is not easy. WhenShouldWe.com simplifies this by allowing people to vote for the dates that suit them. The results are collated in to a single easy to view list.

Check it out and give it a whirl. If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment on this post (Tim reads my blog obsessively).

WhenShouldWe.com

I am a free agent

Published on April 24, 2008 in Freelance Writing and Personal. 1 Comment

Last Tuesday was my last day working at the bank. Today is day number two of my new freelance career and time feels like its whizzing by. I spent yesterday in a sleepy haze after enjoying a few celebratory drinks on Thursday evening. I spent today trying to get comfortable in the new role.

Comfort comes easy when you can work from the couch, kitchen counter, bed, shower, or whatever’s most comfortable at that particular moment. I accomplished a lot today: I pitched an idea to a few editors; I blogged on smarterfitter; I wrote some comments and emails to friends, former colleagues, and fellow bloggers; I did a brain dump of all my various projects and lists and recorded it all in TaskPaper. I also made time for tabouleh, the library and an episode of The Wire.

I feel like I’ve been productive, but I also feel like I’m moving way too slowly. The only way around this sense of urgency seems to be stricter time management around my various tasks. If I give myself two hours a day to work on SmarterFitter, and another two hours to write and pitch story ideas, then I can feel good about doing both things in the time I give them without getting distracted by a sense of guilt that I should be working on the other thing.

An income would also help!

Then there’s all my side projects, like photography, this blog, and a blog I want to build about free data (freedatablog.com, stay tuned!). And the most important project of all: plan my mom’s visit to London in less than a week!

Like I said, I’m still getting used to this. I really don’t want to become one of those GTD-obsessed productivity hounds, so I’ll leave my rant at that and actually DO something, like write about freelancing on this blog, yet another project.

Until tomorrow…

Docklands Treasure Hunt

Published on April 12, 2008 in London, Personal and photos. 0 Comments
Is this really London?

What a way to spend a Saturday. Surreal and strange: the Docklands.

My article in the Telegraph

Published on April 8, 2008 in Freelance Writing and Personal. 4 Comments
437944A3-B257-4EF3-AA6B-BA899051FEDF.jpg

Check it out!

Walk-Running: Jeff Galloway would be proud

Published on March 29, 2008 in Personal, books, fitness and running. 0 Comments

skitched-20080329-141959.jpgLast Sunday, I went on my first run since the injection. I’m taking it slow: about 2.5 km and 20 minutes of running. My ankle was fine, my knees were mildly creaky, and my pride was only mildly offended by my absurdly slow pace. I wish I could say I was thrilled to be running again, but really I felt paranoid. “Am I hurting myself?” I wondered with every step. At the same time, I missed the care-free days of 5 milers down Town Lake on sunny Austin Sundays. But things change.

Today I went for run #2. This time, I alternated running with walking for 5km and about 40 minutes. The run-walk was, without a doubt, the way forward. I was able to cover more distance while keeping my heart rate up, plus it alleviated most of my paranoia around injury. I also felt great. Gone were the creaky legs and stiff joints of last weekend. I could almost recall what it feels like to run. If you’ve done much running, you know what I mean - it’s that feeling of lightness, where the run feels completely natural, the legs are fluid, and it’s easy to breath - to me, that’s running.

But for now, run-walking will do. Though he hesitates to admit it, Jeff Galloway agrees. From his Book on Running:

Our bodies weren’t designed to run continuously for long distances… Sure we can adapt, but there is a better way to increase endurance than by running continously. By alternating walking and running, from the start, there’s virtually no limit to the distance you can cover… Once we find the ideal ratio for a given distance, walk breaks allow us to feel strong to the end and recover fast, while building up the same levels of stamina and conditioning that we would have reached if we had run continuously.

Link to Jeff Galloway’s website
Link to Galloway’s Book on Running 2 Ed

Easter Sunday in Stokey

Published on March 23, 2008 in London, Personal and photos. 0 Comments
Easter Sunday

We even had snow (sort of).

What is Sinus Tarsi Syndrome?

Published on March 6, 2008 in Personal, fitness and running. 1 Comment
skitched-20080306-061211.jpg

The sinus tarsi is “the eye of the foot”, an opening on the outside of the foot between the ankle and heel bone. This canal contains ligaments which can become inflamed if put under undo stress such as high-impact running, jumping, or simply running with bad form. The pain associated with this is called “sinus tarsi syndrome”.

I know all this because I went to have my left ankle looked at by my GP who diagnosed me with sinus tarsi syndrome, apparently very common among sporty people (like me? hah!). Last night he injected some steroids into my sinus tarsal to calm down the inflammation. The procedure was painless, until he said “I’m very deep in the sinus cavity now”, at which point I became a little nauseous. I recovered quickly after a short rest on the couch and a large glass of red wine.

If all goes well I should be able to run again in 10 days time. Here’s to hoping…

Link to Sinus Tarsi Syndrome on Orthoteers

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

A Food Diary That Tracks More Than Just Calories

Published on March 2, 2008 in Personal, food, nutrition and photos. 0 Comments
skitched-20080302-112812.jpg

Time’s photo essay, “What the World Eats”, made me wonder what my typical food week looks like. So as of last Monday, I’ve been writing down everything I eat and when. For example, today’s log so far looks like

  • 6:15am: Two glasses of filtered water
  • 6:30am: Earl Gray Tea with organic semi-skimmed milk
  • 7:00am: Organic porridge oats with an organic Gala apple, organic raisins and organic un-sweetened soy milk

This started as a simple project, but it’s given me so much more to think about than just my week in food:

  • I eat a lot. And often.
  • It’s much more fun to track my diet this way than to tediously count calories.
  • The diary is growing in detail. For instance, on February 25th I wrote “Coffee with milk”. On February 29th, I wrote “Clipper Assam tea and Tesco Organic Un-sweetened soy milk”. Today I started noting which foods were organic.
  • I am still fighting an addiction to Diet Soda, which has only grown worse by my discovery of Pepsi Max, a beverage I shamefully find delicious.
  • Food is much more than a sum of its protein, fat and carbohydrate calories.

Calorie tracking is useful - this is how I painstakingly learned portion control. But I wonder if this could have been achieved by tracking food on this level instead? After all, isn’t our foods’ variety, origin, and quality just as important to our health as our foods’ calories?

This has been such a fun and fascinating exercise that I think I’ll keep it up. Until now, I’ve logged everything in a Google document but have moved it over to the SmarterFitter forums under a new topic, “Food Diaries” (an idea stolen from the FatFree Vegan Board - I hope she doesn’t mind; non-vegans need a place to log their food, too!).

If you’re interested in joining in, feel free to start a new thread with your diary. I’d love to see what other people’s food week/month/year looks like. And I’d also love to hear your ideas on food tracking in general. What works? What matters? What’s easiest?

  • Link to Food Diaries forum
  • Link to Monica’s food diary
  • Link to “What the World Eats”

    • Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

    « Older Entries