Car Problems Solving Car Problems

So about 5 years ago, I had a Chrysler Le Baron that I drove into the ground. I'd purchased it in California and junked it in Pennsylvania.

Now for some reason, even though the salvage yard in Pennsylvania had a junk title for it, the California DMV thought I still had the car. Every year, when I'd go to do my state taxes, the Franchise Tax Board for the state would keep my whole return, saying I owed it for registration fees on that Le Baron. Every year I'd call and gripe, every year they'd say to mail them a copy of that junk title and everything would be fine, and every year it would happen again.

So this year, the same week I sent in my taxes I went down to the DMV and spent about an hour while a couple of very nice people did what five years of people couldn't do for me--they solved my problem and got me my money back.

So this week, when my car started doing the shimmy-shimmy and my check engine light came on, I was able to get it all going again for less than half the amount of the check the DMV sent me back.

I still have enough left over to pay for next month's discount adventure with the girls--and this one is going to be even better than Chuck E. Cheese.

Stay tuned.

Doing The Town--On A Budget

So how to you show two little girls a good time when you're trying to keep from spending any extra pennies?

Well, here's how we did it tonight.

On an online "Freebie" forum, I found out about a thing where Chuck E Cheese was looking for mystery shoppers. If you signed up, they'd mail you a packet of little coupons to give out to people who did a good job, a coupon to give to the kitchen if you got your pizza in 10 minutes, etc. Once you went (with your own money) then they'd send you out a "guest pass" to get your next visit free.

Now we, being the relentless coupon clippers that we are, had some Chuck E Cheese coupons already clipped and saved away.

Tonight we took both the girls, got pizza, soda, and a bunch of tokens for about 20 bucks with the coupon, and we'll get it all again after the guest pass comes (The guest pass is for one large pizza, four drinks, and 30 game tokens--exactly what our coupon was for). Two visits to Chuck E Cheese for just over 10 dollars each visit. Not a bad deal.

We made it by the skin of our teeth--the deadline for the project was tomorrow.

I was proud of myself for finding this one myself. Usually we find out about such things through the "Mommy Chain." One Mommy tells another Mommy tells another Mommy. Our kids got to meet Bedtime Bear and decorate their own picture frame at Toys Backwards R Us towards the end of last year thanks to a bit we picked up on the Mommy Chain.

Anyway, the girls had a great time. They watch a lot of PBS, and since the skateboarding mouse is such a "proud sponsor" of so many PBS kids shows, they've wanted to visit him for quite a while now. I'm glad ol' Chuck E. showed them a good time.

One bit of advice, though.

If you're looking at the 15 ticket prize bin, don't get the whistles.

Gambling: Slot Machines

Yeah, I know you've been waiting for this one. You're dying to know all about those whirling icons with the pull handle.

A while ago, I asked which game the house kept the highest percent on.

In Jeapordy fashion, here's the question to go with "Slot Machines":

On which game to casinos make the most money?

Which adds the corralative question:

Which game does the public lose the most money on?

Yup. Those coins you pump into that "one-armed bandit" go a long way towards paying for the fancy carpets, the gold plated furniture, and the complimentary meals for the high rollers upstairs.

So what' the house percentage? In Atlantic City, it is limited by law to 17%. This is worse than roulette, worse than blackjack, worse than any game except keno. It means the casino keeps nearly a buck for every five that get put in the machine.

Of course, Vegas is the hot spot, and in Nevada, there's no legal limit on how much the house can keep. They can set the machines to pay at whatever rate they want.

This means you should never, ever play a slot at a grocery store, or the airport, or at the gas station, or any of the other places that aren't mainly concerned with gambling. They don't care if you come back, so they can set that machine to pay out as little as they want.

Usually, the casinos go something like this:

Since the nickel slots are seen as "introductory," the house sometimes keeps a slightly lower percentage on it--around 10-15%, so you'll see yourself winning some coins sometimes. Not all of them--maybe as high as nine for every 10 that you play.

Of course, if you pop all nine of those back in, you'll only get eight back, and so on and so on until it's all gone. Obviously, it won't happen as perfectly cleanly as this example, but overall, that's the general result.

Some of the dollar slots have better odds--around 2-3% for the house PC--but when you're losing, you're losing money five times as fast. Where with keno, it can take you an hour and a half to lose ten bucks at a dollar a game, here you can do it in less than three minutes.

Are there tricks to finding a slot machine with a lower house PC? You bet. Obviously, the ones in view of the doors and restaruants pay more, because they want other people to see the winners.

But as with card-counters, Vegas makes a lot more money of people who think they're "in the know" than they lose to people.

The biggest suckers of all are the ones who look for "patterns." They look for a machine that's been cold for a long time, thinking it's "due" for a payoff. Or they look for a machine they think one because they think it's "hot." Then they put coin after coin into this machine, because they are bound and determined to prove themselves right.

And the casino owners are completely willing to let them keep right on trying. After all--they need another few bucks to comp that expensive bottle of wine to the high roller upstairs.

Okay, Some Personal Stuff

After yesterday's post, I thought I'd post some personal stuff, just to throw everybody off.

So on Wednesday was my day for legs and abs. My brother Greg, who I'm working out with, decides to break out the medicine ball and we go through quite possibly the roughest workout routine I've ever done.

After we finish, I start getting worried. I've had some pretty bad days after working my abs too hard. It's like having a stomach ache without getting to stay home from work ("Gee, sorry, boss. My abs are too sore").

And, I knew it was going to be a tough day anyway, because I had to move furniture around at the office that flooded and helped me lose the six pounds, because now they were taking up the carpet.

But then, to my surprise, the pain wasn't too bad. I got through the whole day without really feeling it. I was proud of myself.

And then, on the way home, I sneezed.

Oh. My. Word.

I thought my insides were going to burst out. It was indescribable.

I'm trying really, really hard not to sneeze again.

This Blog

So I'm always wondering what tone to take with this blog.

Sometimes I feel I'm being too basic, but I know that there are people reading this blog who know nothing about the subjects I'm talking about.

Sometimes I feel I'm getting too complicated, but I know there are people reading this blog who could teach me far more on these subjects than I could ever teach them.

I try to strike a balance--just spouting what I know (or what I research that night) about a particular topic I find interesting, in the hopes someone else will find it interesting, too.

I don't post a lot of personal stuff--stuff like "Today I wore a shirt that's been too tight for months now, and it fit pretty well!" I don't know how interesting people would find that stuff--I personally find it exciting, but can't imagine why anybody else would.

I guess what I'm mostly looking to give are insight and excitement. A sense of what you can accomplish and how. Do I succeed? Who knows. But in the meantime, it keeps me going with my goals, and keeps me looking for new insights and new reasons to be excited.

Simple Starter Diet Changes--Food Choices

A while back, I posted my Simple Starter Diet. I pointed out that it was an eat-anything-you-want diet that would work for anyone who had significant weight to lose.

However, you may want to fine-tune it some.

Think of the diet as a framework--you're then free to make certain changes to it to best suit your needs. You just have to make sure you stay within the basic guidelines. I'll try to outline these guidelines for modifying the diet over the next few weeks.

The first modification you could make would be in your food choices. After all, even though I could lose weight eating nothing but twelve fudgesicles a day, that type of diet wouldn't give me any energy, and it certainly wouldn't leave me feeling very good.

So what food choices can you make that would maximize your nutrition and give you the most energy?

Look for whole foods--in other words, foods that are as close to their natural state as possible. An apple, for example, is a "whole food." Even if the apple is cut up, it's still in the same state nature made it in, so it's considered a "whole food."

The opposite of whole foods are "processed foods." These are foods that have been dramatically altered from their natural state. Think of a Twinkie. You can't go pluck a Twinkie off a tree, or scoop that white stuff out from anywhere.

One of the main differences between processed and unprocessed foods is calorie content. An apple has lots of water and fiber and minerals that fill you up without adding to your calorie intake. Since the ingredients in a Twinkie have been processed, so all the fiber and most of the nutrients have been removed.

A Twinkie has about 150 calories. If you cut yourself a slice of apple that weighed the same as that Twinkie--43 grams--you would only have about half a small apple, and it would only have 28 calories. In other words, you could eat 5 times the weight in food if you chose apples rather than Twinkies before you'd reach 150 calories.

Of course, if you go with vegetables, well, medium sized carrots have around 25 calories each, as does a cup of broccoli, as does a medium sized cucumber. There's 30 calories per cup of asparagus. Man--we're still not even up to the calories of the Twinkie. You'd have to eat a whole head of lettuce to make up the difference.

Now I realize that vegetables aren't everyone's cup of tea, but the principle should be clear now. The closer to its natural state a food is, the less calories it will have, and the more of it you can eat.

For this reason, I stick to whole-wheat bread and pitas. I even buy whole-wheat tortillas.

The wholer the food, the more fiber and nutrition it will contain.

Also, because there's more "stuff" in the food for your body to digest, it slows the rate at which your body absorbs the calories. This gives your body time to use those calories rather than store them. Think of it like a "time-release" system for distributing your calories over the day as you need them.

Otherwise, your body digests the food quickly and, since you aren't using it as quickly as you're digesting it, your body is forced to store the rest as fat. By slowing that absorption rate, you're decreasing the chances of it ever reaching your hips.

Now, some words of warning:

Be careful. Some foods can be deceiving. For example, homemade salsa is usually really low calorie and nutritious, because it's made from whole vegetables and fruits. However, many store bought brands add sugars and preservatives that can up the calorie count and lower the nutritional value.

And I know lots of us like to let our veggies soak in some kind of dressing or oil, but these often more than offset the calories we saved by eating the veggies. For example, the Wendy's Spring Mix Salad has only 180 calories, but the recommended dressing--the house vinaigrette--has 190 calories. The Mandarin Chicken salad has 170 calories, but if you add the "crispy noodles" and the dressing, you're adding 250 calories (On the simple starter diet, those would constitute a meal by themselves).

So just because something says "Salad," doesn't mean it's healthy. The Chicken Club Salad at Jack In The Box has 825 calories. That's more than their Bacon Bacon Cheeseburger (780 calories).

Short Range Goal

So here's my new short-range goal:

I will be below 240 by the April 3rd weigh in.

That gives me exactly 4 weeks--the first 3rd of the Body For Life challenge.

But it will put me at the halfway point to my first milestone goal, which is 220 pounds by the July 11th weigh-in.

When to Weigh

First off, I just want everyone to know that as of today, I am officially beginning Bill Phillip's Body-For-Life challenge. I have attempted this before, but as I now know, I have never come close to performing this routine at the intensity at which it was meant to be done. We worked hard this morning, and I'm confident this routine will work for both of us.

Because I was working so hard, I was taking in more water than Monstro the whale.

So by the time I get to the Department of Weights and Measures, where I traditionally weigh myself, I've got to go to the bathroom really bad.

And I think to myself, you know, in the name of science, I should weigh myself both before and after, just to see what the difference is.

But I don't do it. I've got to go the bathroom too bad.

After I'm done, I go weigh myself, and I'm 246. Up a pound from last week. Which I sort of expected. I've snacked on cinnamon rolls for the last three days--my wife made a batch to take to somebody who ended up not neededing them, which means these little lumps of white bread covered in sugar are sitting on the table right behind my computer.

I go to visit with my Dad for a while--about half an hour, actually--and by the time I'm done, I have to go to the bathroom again. This time, I decide I do want to weigh myself afterwards--you know, for science.

And I end up back at 245.

So that is the weight you see before you.

Sunday Book Review: The Zone

Before Atkins became all the rage, there was a little book by Barry Sears called The Zone. There were even a few foods that were labeled as "Zone Approved" and there were "Zone Certified Physicians."

Actually, The Zone was, in a lot of ways, a great gateway book for Atkins. It taught that fat was not the enemy, as the nation had previously thought, and it taught about "insulin response," a subject that the nation has come to feel is the sole reason they gain weight.

Here, however, the differences end.

The Zone diet, you see, was sane.

What Dr. Sears teaches is this:

We all know that taking medicine can affect the way our body works, right? You take a pill in the hopes your body will do certain things because of that.

Actually, that's true of anything you eat. Because you ate it, your body is going to do certain things in response.

For example, if you eat carbs, it will give you energy. However, if your body processes them too quickly, it can also spike your blood sugar.

Eating fats help you to feel full. Certain fats also help keep your cholesterol low, and other fats can make it worse.

Eating protein can help offset some of the blood sugar spike carbs give, and it's a building block for muscle. Too much, though, can cause problems in your digestive system.

All the food types are necessary--to eliminate one or another would eliminate a needed aspect of your diet. However, all the food types also have problems--to focus solely on one would be equally damaging.

What Dr. Sears tried to create with "The Zone" was the optimum balance of each of these nutrients in each meal. If you're eating in the right proportions, you're eating "in the Zone."

Enough carbs to keep you going, enough protein and fiber to keep your blood sugar from spiking, and enough fat to help you feel satisfied.

You keep your energy up by eating these zone-perfect meals throughout the day.

And, like any good diet, you also limit your portions at each meal.

Many diabetics swear by this diet, and to me it seems like the most logical and sensible of any of the "gimmick" diet books I've read.

I've heard critics of the book say that Sears, "oversimplifies complex physiological responses." Sears does go so far as to predict that nutrition-based solutions to problems are the wave of the future. I adore this idea.

But the book itself isn't so pie-in-the sky. It does require a good amount of adjusting to one's current diet--a section on how to adopt fast-food meals to become more "Zone Perfect" includes buying two sandwiches and then combining some parts of them while throwing out others--but I think everything in here is as sensible and accurate as any advice you'll get.

If you've fallen for the Atkins hype, please, give this one a read.