Author: sandcastle

Getting Healthy: Weight Watchers

Since we plan to be parked in one place for four months this seems like a good time to try the Weight Watchers® weight loss plan. I’ve never done Weight Watchers before so it’s all new to me.

I, of course, started by looking them up online. They offer several plans but only one of those plans looks like the right one for me. Fortunately, it also the cheapest plan. It’s called the monthly pass. With it I can go to any meeting anywhere without paying at the door. Plus I can use the online tools to keep track of what I eat. And I can join an online community if I decide I want that type of support, especially after we move on from here.

So, I went to my first meeting and got lots of paperwork.

The I went to the grocery store and stocked up on low-calorie frozen entrees.

After all I want to make this as easy for myself as possible, right?

Then I used my iPad to go online to track my food. Oops. The iPad can’t read the online food tracker because the iPad does not do Flash. No problem; there’s an app for that. And the app is free. It is designed to be used on an iPhone, though, so it’s not a full screen app on the iPad and it does not rotate. Still, I can tell the app what food I ate and it will calculate how many points I used and how many I have left for the day.

Now the Weight Watchers Smart Ones Entrees have a lot of dairy in them. If they don’t have a cheese topping they likely have a cream sauce. Which would be fine except…

… I’m a cheese-aholic. Once I get started eating cheese it is very hard for me to stop. So, now I’m snacking on cheese and crackers in addition to the cheese in the entrees. Which makes me frustrated. And the food I crave when I am frustrated is…

That’s right, Cheetos. A big bag of Cheetos. Which, for me, is two servings. So I eat half a bag of Cheetos for supper and log that into my food tracker.

The next day I eat the other half a bag for lunch and log that into my tracker.

The next day, I am gassy and bloated from all the dairy I’ve been eating. My clothes are tight which usually means a weight gain. But, I go weigh in a day early anyway because I don’t want to have to do it during the predicted thunderstorms tomorrow.

And I’m down 4.4 pounds.

What kind of weight loss program let’s you make a meal of Cheetos while losing weight?!!!

Apparently the Weight Watchers kind. They said I could eat anything I wanted as long as I stayed within my weekly points. But, I still don’t believe it.

Down 4.4 pounds. And I haven’t even started exercising yet.

Now how do I do this without all that cheese? After all, no one wants to live with a gas factory. Including me.

TTYL,

Linda

Packing for errands

It has been rainy/stormy most of the time since we moved to Minnesota for the summer. That means we have not been running as many errands as we should. So, when we realized today would be sunny with the temperature mostly in the 60s we decided to head out.

Things to take to the car included:

1. the trash to drop off at the dumpster on our way out of the park

2. a couple bags of clothing to be dropped off at Goodwill

3. the new backup drive that turned out to be defective so needed to be exchanged

4. my Nook to be mailed off to our daughter even though it hasn’t been packed up yet

5. the battery for my scooter, said battery not being safe to leave in a hot car

6. my lumbar pillow which travels back and forth between the car and RV because we’ve not been able to find a suitable replacement yet

7. my beverage since I rarely go anywhere without one

8. my phone which needed to be unplugged from the charger to go with me because our daughter sent me an email this morning saying she wants to chat today so I will call her while Dave exchanges the hard drive

9. my iPad because it has addresses on it I’m going to need while out

10. my chair/cane which goes everywhere that I might need to sit down while waiting for anything including cashiers

11. and my “bag” which carries a lot of stuff including those things most people carry in a pocket or purse

So, off we went. Dumped the garbage, dropped off stuff at Goodwill, stopped for lunch, and exchanged the disk drive. Next stop the Segway shop to sell back to them the Segway they sold me three years ago.

Oops! The bag of Segway accessories, including the keys for it, is still at home in the RV. How did we ever mange to overlook that while packing for the day’s errands?

TTYL,

Linda

iPad App: Numbers, Part 2

This is a mini-tutorial on how to transfer a spreadsheet from the laptop to the iPad then use it there. Most of you won’t want to bother reading this but I feel compelled to share this for those of you who want to use Numbers but don’t live with a Dave who can teach you how.

I already told you to start by saving your spreadsheet as an Excel document if it didn’t start out as one. I save mine to the desktop to make transfers easier.

When you plug your iPad into your laptop it will sync most things automatically. Your apps, however, don’t happen that way. So once the basic sync is done you need to select your iPad from the left column of the iTunes screen on your laptop.

Then go to the top of the iTunes page and select “Apps”.

Scroll down that page to the “File Sharing” section which will list the applications you have that can transfer files back and forth.

Select Numbers then simply drag your document from the desktop onto the list and sync it.

Now your spreadsheet is on the iPad–sort of. Disconnect your iPad from your laptop then open Numbers on the iPad. Do not panic when you do not see your new document. It’s there but you need to finish bringing it in.

To do that click on the down arrow and select “Copy from iTunes”.

Then click on the spreadsheet you want to bring in.

Because Numbers for the iPad and Excel don’t have all the same characteristics you likely will get some errors in the data. None of mine have been critical.

Ta da! Your spreadsheet is now available to use on the iPad.

Because it is too small for me to use comfortably, I use Apple’s reverse pinch move to enlarge it.

Now when we discover something while on the road that I want to know about in the future, I can update it on the fly.

Double clicking in a cell (The cell selected is for the Flying J in Tooeley, Utah.) brings up a keyboard that I find to be large enough for me to touch type on it.

Unless the cell I click on has been defined as a number cell then double clicking brings up this keyboard instead.

That green bar box is where your mark your insertion point if you want to edit a previous entry. The boxes to the left of it are where you can change your keyboard from numbers to calendar to text to formulas to make it easy to enter which ever type of data you want to put into that cell. When done just click on the done box and whatever keyboard you have been using will disappear.

Numbers is a really smart application. Play with it a bit and you’ll soon learn how to insert a row, sort columns, drag numbers down a column, cut and paste data, etc. Just be sure to transfer your updated spreadsheet back to your laptop before your begin working over there again. Although, the iPad is smart enough to give it a new name if you try to bring back an existing spreadsheet.

I hope you find this application as useful as I do.

TTYL,

Linda

Storm Warning

At 6:30 pm last night the National Weather Service issued a storm warning for our part of the world.

On a map, the places listed look like this. The tan ones are the named locations and the white one is us.

Most storms in the area travel northeast so, yes indeed, we are in the path of that storm warning. So we checked the radar. The arrow points to our location.

And the view out our window looks like this. Note Dave holding his hand over our weather radio to muffle the storm warning announcement a bit. Otherwise, it is loud enough to wake the dead.

It looks like we’ll have a thunderstorm passing on each side of us but not directly overhead so we decide to wait and see.

After a bit the radar says yes we are in the thunderstorm warning area but, as we predicted, the actual storms are passing on either side of us.

And the view out our window still looks like this. And the weather radio is silent.

Suddenly a red box appears on our radar. Someone thinks they saw a tornado!

But that box is east of us and it is traveling northeast and no new warning is issued for our area. And the sky outside our window does not have the greenish look that says tornado to us. And the last line on the original warning says they are not calling out the early warning storm watchers which means they did not expect any tornadoes to develop in this storm. So we can’t help but wonder what it is that someone thought they saw.

The storm warning passed and the tornado box moved further east.

And the most we got was some fairly heavy rain.

No hail. No 60 mph winds. Just rain.

Dave and I, having lived in the Minneapolis area for 60 years and 45 years respectively, do a pretty good job of reading weather forecasts for this area. We can judge pretty well when we need to go to a storm shelter and when it’s safe to wait. We don’t try to do that for other parts of the world and we don’t recommend newcomers to our area wait.

But, we are safe once again.

TTYL,

Linda