Sunday 5 February 2017

Preparation, Playmobil and Perfect Fetts

The word of the week is remonstrate.

Jan 30 – Better than apples?

A grape a day may keep the doctor away - or something similar.

A new study has found that eating 2 servings worth of grapes each day significantly cuts the risk of early-onset Alzheimer's disease, the first study to directly link the intake of a single route to a significant decline in this terrible affliction.


It's one thing to have a healthy body, but it means little if the mind is deteriorating at a faster rate. I know that for myself, I am more concerned about losing my wits then losing my health, especially as Alzheimer's currently has no known cure or effective treatments.

While the study didn't specify whether red or white grapes were used, it's a significant step forward as the research will now move forward on what specific benefits grapes can for towards staving off Alzheimer's in those who consume them.

Maybe in the near future, wishing someone 'sour grapes' will turn into a phrase linked to wishing them good health?


Jan 31 – Preparing the road...

Six months from now, I hope to have my home business up and running.

Which means that I have to get all the groundwork in place now, so that when my Glowforge arrives I can immediately get to work with it and start to repay my investment.

Part of my business plan is to offer my services to folks in the USA, as it's a large market and while there's plenty of Glowforge owners out there, not all of them are going to be offering their services over the Internet as I will be.

However, part of the problem is that shipping is so darn expensive and back goes all the moreso for sending to the USA. To date, I haven't found a decent solution to the problem of significant cost being added to what I would be charging for my various services.

That is, until I came across a random post that mentioned a company called ChitChat Express, whose business is to assist Canadian customers with sending packages to the USA and internationally for significantly less cost than Canada post can offer:


I'll have to check it out in more detail, but it's encouraging to have found the company like this, as it means that my market isn't limited to just a customers but can include those both south of the border and internationally.

Small steps...


Feb 1 – Playmobil is Busting It...

New month? New toys! Er, collectibles...

Yes, I realize that I seem to be on a bit of a collectible theme lately, but when something really cool comes out that speaks to me( or more accurately, my inner child )then I feel the need to comment... and heck, it's my blog, after all!

Obviously, I'm a huge Ghostbusters fan, as many kids of my day were. As such, I felt that the toys of the time weren't all that great, in that they were really usable with anything else and necessitated year collecting a whole bunch of odd-looking toys that only worked within their own line, like so:


Now it's 2017, and the age of liscencing has brought us: Playmobil Ghostbusters! Feast your eyes on these magnificent figures, all of whom are perfectly compatible with the entire Playmobil line, meaning you can( if you own them )line up the Ecto-1 to bust some ghosts in a City playset, or similar environments with the new Ghostbusters line:

So cool!

It's really a huge step forward for Ghostbusters fans. Playmobil has released thousands of different playsets over the last few decades, all of which are interoperable and having the Ghostbusters as part of this will make it a ton more fun. Not that I'll be buying any Playmobil anytime soon, as I sold off( well, mainly gave away )most of the old sets I had, which were admittedly rather play-worn.

Well, maybe I can get the Demon Dog set...


Feb 2 – It's THAT day again!

I know I know, I do this every year, but I can't help myself.

It's Groundhog Day!


My sister and I watched the movie again tonight, as has become our tradition every year. I don't think there's any movie that I've ever enjoyed re-watching as much as I do this particular one, and each time I read watch it I find something new that I hadn't noticed before or that I love about it.

Heck, this year I learned that Groundhog Day was a special day in the recent Doctor Strange movie, as it was the day that Stephen Strange began his hero's journey by crashing his car and losing control of his surgeon's hands.

That's all I've got, save a fading glow from seeing the film again.

I can't wait until next year!


Feb 3 – Keeping Steady

One thing that's still bothering me though is how much I can currently eat.

It seems that in the last few months, my ability to eat a decent sized meal has decreased, probably exacerbated by my illness after Christmas when I couldn't eat my regular meals, having to resort to proteins shakes and the like for nourishment. As a result, I think my stomach has shrunken, and combined with my inability to process meals quickly thanks to my lack of a gall bladder, it's proven somewhat problematic when it comes to digesting things.

My solution? Continue to eat smaller meals more often, while adding water to each of them before, during and after to assist with general lubrication and digestion. My theory is that this will assist the meals and moving along normally, and I'll probably add some digestive enzymes to the largest meal of the day, which I'm expecting will be lunch, as that will give me time to help things move along before bedtime instead of running into problems after midnight as I have before.

I'm just a work in progress....


Feb 4 – Fett On The Shelf!

"He's no good to me packaged..."

I've always had a soft spot for the gruff-and-ready bounty hunter from Star Wars, who always gets his target, yet for some strange reason I've never actually owned a Fett figure, which in retrospect is for a fairly obvious reason:

None of them looked authentically badass enough. Until this arrived yesterday:


Now, me being me, I wouldn't justify any Boba Fett figure... though I will admit that I drew the line at spending more than $50 before shipping, as some of those collectible figures out there can run into hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

That being said, the above figure from MaFex is the best version of Fett ever released, among what surprised me to learn are far fewer figures of Fett compared to dozens of Chewbacca's, for example. There's even a Top Ten Fett Figure review that goes through some really cool figures and lists both the ESB and ROTJ figures as their #1 pick... it doesn't get better than that!


Part of my evening was spent watching Venture Brothers and Dirk Gently with my lady, a thoroughly delightful experience for us both. I've become quite enamoured of Dirk Gently, and I'm a bit sad that after tonight there's only two more episodes left.

Ah, but it's good to see more of Douglas Adam's work done well on the screen!


Feb 5 – Winding Down

It was a busy weekend, with this and that.

So I was glad to just relax today, do the usual household tasks, and think back on how it was a solid week, with some great highlights:

I had more good news on Friday, when I saw a Rheumatologist who told me in fairly certain terms that I didn't look to have any sort of disorder of my joints, muscles, and ligaments - w00t! She also said that there's no particular reason to be off gluten and dairy, so I'm going to ease those back into my diet one at a time, and see if there's any inflammatory effects from either, though I'm going to steer clear of excess for either, as well as dairy cheeses for now, darn it.

That good news, coupled with the solid EKG earlier in the week, has gone a long way to alleviating my overall anxiety levels, which have been dropping steadily the last week anyway: my heart's been beating a solid, steady pace and I've experienced no chest pains whatsoever, leading me to eliminate a few more 'ticks' from my What Is it? list of things that are causing me discomfort of late.

Good stuff.

So let's end the weekend on a high note, with a haunting voice in winter:


Right now, the biggest hurdle I have day to day is a tense solar plexus, which apparently is directly related to anxiety AND interferes with digestion, being called the 'abdominal brain' as it's a mass of nerves. So I'm working all this week to relax my abdomen and KEEP it that way, so I can enjoy more than just the occasional small solid meal...