The Endorsement Series (Part 6 in a Series)

While going to Weight Watchers meetings may not make you lose weight (I weighed in at 148 last week-- a loss of 4.2 pounds in two months -- but that was before pizza night... and chip day... and taco night...), it does keep you abreast of all the latest high-taste/low-point foods on the market. I immediately discredit anyone who says, "The fat free dressings really aren't that bad once you get used to them," since I know the fat free dressings that are intended to be creamy are complete garbage. I'd rather dress my salad in water than let it swim in that sugar syrup with rehydrated chives crap. The people you can really believe are the ones who come in and say, "You can eat 51 Goldfish crackers for only two points. That's 51 cheesy snacks!" Those people know how to stretch food the way it was meant to be stretched. It's flavor value. It takes talent.

When a guy mentioned that he'd tried the latest Fiber One granola bars at my last meeting, I was a little apprehensive. I hadn't heard him contribute any suggestions before that meeting, so it meant he was new and knew nothing or he was quiet and finally found something worth talking about. Turns out, he's a genius.

My co-worker Molly, who is basically California's version of Jennifer, took the Fiber One Challenge first, and immediately showed up to work with a box of Peanut Butter & Oat flavored sticks of heaven for me to try. They were divine. Chewy, smooth, peanut buttery with real live peanut butter chips in them and a zig zag of peanut butter drizzle across the whole slice of goodness. De. lish. us.

Fiber One is known in the WW as the most bang-for-your-buck cereal, meaning that you can lace an entire tube of fiber pellets in a bag of melted semi-sweet chocolate morsels and come out with 16 haystacks of Kit Kat cousins that are only two points apiece. And now, they've mastered the two-point granola bar.

When "diet food" is so good you'd eat it if you could eat anything you ever wanted, it has succeeded. Whether Mack agrees with my new-found, fiber-full friend, well, that's a discussion for another day.

(Fiber One Bars are in the granola bar section of the grocery store. They're $3.99 for a box of five, but I've picked up the chocolate version at Target for $2.49. And, they're so new, I acutally had to take a picture of the box myself since I can't find one on the web to steal. That's how new this endorsement is!)

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Mack told me about this new artist who was preserving bodies and dissecting them in interesting poses forever ago, so when I saw a "Bodies: The Exhibition" ad cruise past on the top of a taxi, it was immediately added to the To Do list. It turns out that this new artist is actually a team of noted dissectors in China, but that didn't detract from the sick desire to see what's really inside all of us.

We paid entirely too much for our tickets and then took a trip through all the systems of the body. At first, it was kind of gross to see people standing there with yellow toenails, eyebrows, smiles and no skin, but it quickly became fascinating.










It was cool to see muscles splayed open like pinwheels to reveal metal rods and artificial joints. It was amazing to see a brain and try to imagine how that traceless mass of playdough controls everything we do. It was strange to see how our bodies look from a cross-section perspective. It was interesting that most of the bodies that were on display were men and looked Asian, as much as a skinless face with lips and eyebrows can look like any particular ethnicity.
Apparently there is a pregnant woman on display at some of the exhibitions, but she wasn't at ours. I can't imagine what that would have been like to see. Or imagine how her family came to the conclusion to donate her body, with fetus still therein, to this project.

My favorite part of the exhibit was the blood vessels. They have some process where they inject the circulatory system with these different colored polymers, and it makes the most stunning, colorful sculptures. They reminded me of coral reefs, little lung coral reefs and heart coral reefs and brain coral reefs -- evidence of beauty way beneath the skin's surface.

I'm a Whale Watcher (to be sung to the tune of the Wheel of Fortune promo song)

The Thomases braved temperatures in the high 50s and light, sprinkling rain to go whale watching yesterday. Tom, Shahin, Mack, Laila and I all boarded a boat that was half as seaworthy as the yacht we were hoping we'd be going on and twice as full. Of kids with that frozen green snot stuck in one nostril. And parents who thought that a slippery, rocking deck meant playground on the sea. And reasons not to follow that life path.

After about a 45-minute drive to Long Beach and a 45-minute cruise toward off-shore oil drilling platforms (in California?!!?), we spotted our first "blow." It was the typical puff of water and air that cartoon characters stand on top of, but much less dramatic and long-lasting. Regardless, it offered promise that we would see a gray whale.

This is what we were looking for.

Gray whales migrate from Alaska to Baja California every year between December and April to breed and give birth. There is another population of grey whales in the Pacific that travels between the Sea of Okhotsk and southern Korea, but it is smaller than the California clan. A third population in the North Atlantic was hunted to extinction 300 years ago.

At 52 feet long and weighing 36 tons, the whales live to be about 50–60 years old. They are one of the oldest species of mammals, having been on Earth for about 30 million years, which is weird because Jesus wasn't even around then. Curious.

As we charged ahead to catch up to this whale, we were told that we were pursuing a mother and her calf, and that if she felt threatened, she could speed up or change direction in an instant. Tail-tell (you can pause an admire the wit right there) signs of her course, however, float to the surface and are called footprints. Whenever the whale moves its tail, it interrupts the surface of the water and leaves it looking a little calmer and more glossy than the rest. By following their footprints, you can start to guess where they'll surface.

Can you spot the footprints?

I was expecting a little bit of pomp and circumstance surrounding the surfacing, but, to be honest, it blows (again, feel free to pause and admire the wit). You see a little water explosion, and then a strange, fleshy, cold mass peeks out through the matching waves for an instant, and then it disappears again, leaving you wondering if that was the whale or just weird light on the wave. I wouldn't be nearly as let down if everything I'd ever seen about marine life wasn't courtesy of Sea World. Once you see killer whales jumping through fiery hoops and dolphins launching their trainers fifty feet in the air, well, a whale poof and a part of its back in nature -- the kind that's in view of an off-shore oil drilling platform -- just doesn't get the heart racing.

Share our experience. Save your $25. Preserve your feelings about the general public. And their kids. And the majesty of whales.

This is what we were expecting...

This is what we got.

And a pretty view of Catalina Island.

And lots of pelican sightings.

And a pretty rainbow.

I Guess I Should Be Flattered

Being married comes with such bonuses as someone to bring in all the groceries, someone to park the car and someone to deliver the rent check. It also keeps you from having to go to the movies alone and makes cooking dinner a little more rewarding. But my favorite part of being married is that arsenal of secrets that gets bigger every day you're together because you just can't hide your true self. For instance...

Sometimes the urge to dance takes control of my body and I end up flailing my arms and gyrating my hips in the middle of the kitchen at totally inappropriate and uninspired times. Fortunately, Mack isn't gifted in the area of dance, so when he laughs, I know he is laughing with me and not at me. Normally he just cocks one eyebrow and does a laugh/sigh/huff combo while trying to keep his eyes from rolling back into his head. It's very sweet.

But yesterday, I saw through his masked kindness. My dancing was inspired for once, as I'd just finished watching J. Lo's MTV show Dance Life, and I went to celebrate something, like paying the rent or finally having food, with my mad skillz. Mack, entranced by the World of Warcraft, glanced my way before saying, "You remind me of Domo Kun."

He's said this to me before and explained it, but part of what makes our marriage work is that I forget everything he tells me and that makes his stories seem brand new every time. It was part of the contract. So, I couldn't remember Domo Kun, but I could remember having mixed feelings about it. Here's why...

Domo Kun is potentially adorable, potentially fierce, and potentially a fuzzy turd with an angry mouth. He is sturdy, but square, strong yet shapeless. He has nice, bright teeth. He is either scowling or laughing uncontrollably.

Since the association isn't exactly clear to my delicate id, let's look further.

In social situations, Domo Kun appears to be helpful, although he could also be leading other creatures to dangerous situations or justifying abandoning them altogether. He watches television and either interacts with it as a friend or battles it like a foe. I, for one, tend to smile vacantly at the television, whether I'm watching High Maintenance 90210 or Man Vs. Wild. Mack is the one who yells at the television from across the room, especially if White Rapper is on.

I'm still not entirely convinced that the association is a good thing, but I guess it could be worse. At least he's not saying, "You remind me of a fuzzy square turd who tries to eat kittens and lead others to certain death."

Old Dog, Old Tricks

She did it again. I have no idea where she finds these things. This time she crunched her way through it like a starving beaver, so I got to see just how stale and funky it was on the inside. I guess she didn't like what we were having for dinner.

Supper Time

Because Mack was still at school, the ham was moldy, the leftover green curry wasn't really very good when it was fresh, and I can't eat pasta one more night, I present... the Dinner Challenge.

It wasn't microwave popcorn night. It wasn't green beans night. Just what was Thursday's dinner???

Thank god I don't have kids. I couldn't see them being very forgiving of my lazy culinary habits.

All Work and No Play

Out here in sunny SoCal, I work for a women's website called Capessa. We went live on Dec. 21, through Yahoo. It seems like a pretty small thing, considering it comes out of three cubicals, but I'm starting to absorb just how big it really is.

Today we were featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal. Which is pretty awesome. Especially since the only major paper I've ever been in is the Herald-Leader. A couple times with letters to the editor, a couple times on behalf of Nougat, and once when I was in high school and I hit a grand slam. They actually used the word "fireworks" in that one. I mailed it to relatives.

Even though I'm not actually in the Wall Street Journal article as Amber, I am there as Capessa. And, my blood relative Leiah is actually pictured and named, so my energy is directly featured. Dear Elijah Maples is also pictured. Woo hoo. Check it out.

And then come to Capessa, join the Capessa group and celebrate the collective wisdom of women. Girls rule.

An Apple a Day...

The sweetest doll ever born is in the hospital. Betsy went from watching Real World/Road Rules Duel and eating pickles to being in the midst of an intestinal bloodbath in a matter of four hours. No one knows what happened. No one knows exactly what she had yet. Suffice it to say that this exquisite angel and well-versed hospital patient acutally asked her mom, "Am I going to die?"

The thought of her being that scared and that sick just makes me quiver with agony. In situations like this, it is a curse and a blessing that I am half a country away.

Trying to figure out how she went from fine to literally wasting away is an exercise in futility. The doctors seem to think it was something she ate or accidentally injested. The culprit could be an unwashed apple carrying an invisible but deadly bacteria that grows even faster when it's cold. It could be something hand-selected and hand-delivered as she touched her mouth. It could be something not yet described on the Center for Disease Control website, especially since the closest thing to her symptoms is E Coli. You know, the sickness that comes in bags of spinach and kills all those other people on the news.

My mom and I started doing what controlling Tauruses do... looking for ways to ensure it won't happen again. Get the vegetable wash, since water doesn't really clean them. Microwave everything for at least 30 seconds before eating it. Peel all fruits and vegetables to get the contaminated skins off them. In the end, we had to admit that we were helpless.

No matter what we do, there is a farmer trying to cut costs and maximize production, a corporation trying to get one more dollar by injecting animals with hormones and antibiotics, and a bacteria out there trying just as hard to live and adapt as humans do. No matter what, anytime someone gets that sick, it's going to be completely unexpected. There is going to be no one to blame but nature -- the nature that humans helped create by exploiting it and demanding too much from it.

I love that we have a global economy, that I can get shoes from Spain and Christmas cards from China. With a global economy has come global awareness, global tolerance, global explorations. But when it comes to food, to water, does it really make sense that we're getting apples at unseasonal times of the year from a part of the world as hungry for global participation as the United States? Is it really good business to reject what your own community can produce so that you can have more to choose from? Are we supposed to be comforted by the fact that we can't trace where the food we eat comes from, even if it could kill us?

Betsy should be fine. She seems to be getting better everyday. They're still trying to figure out what she picked up in safe and sound Louisville, Ky., where my mom and dad shop at legendary produce markets and make concerted efforts to buy healthful foods. Betsy's progress is wonderful, promising, most of all relieving news. But what if a pregnant Shannon or nursing Leiah or older grandparent had picked that apple instead of a healthy Betsy? How many other people have to fall victim to their pantries before we change the way we consume?

I don't have any answers, but I think Local Harvest may be onto something.

Ben & His Auntie Am

This is bragging. Although, didn't Dan Bern say it ain't bragging if it's true? Or was that Muhammed Ali? Whatever the case, this is not bragging. This is shoving a cute baby down your throat because I love him!