Pollywogs!

31 Days as a Vegetarian, 28 Days (and counting) as a Vegan
By Kelley

Ugh, OMG, I’m dying, gimme a hamburger, I’m starvin’ over here…weak, so weak, must eat animal flesh…bacon, cheese…
Just kidding.

Some of you already know that I was a Vegetarian for 3 years when I was younger (I recently remembered that it was the movie City Slickers which convinced me) …unfortunately I let society (and my own selfish wants) get to me and became an animal eater again (looking back on it…an unfortunate decision).  So the past 59 days really have not been that bad.  I have to admit that once you make your mind up about something like this, sticking to it is very easy (at least it has been for me)…except for one slip up which was a result of the incompetence of a local Italian restaurant.  I seldom have any cravings and when I do I just simply nip it in the bud by telling myself it is not an option…that food is not in my diet anymore (same thing I had to do when I quit smoking).  Yes, I had a love affair with a certain BLT at a certain local watering hole but…it’s dead to me now, literally…it’s dead, pig flesh, dead.  The cravings vanished with the relationship.  The same can be said for my love of ham, pepperoni, turkey clubs and most recently, ice cream and cheese. See ya later alligators!

I’m not sad, I’m not grieving for the loss…in fact, in a strange sadistic way I feel powerful, I feel like I am in control, I am calling the shots.  I am getting an odd pleasure from restricting myself…it feels good. Seriously. I suppose that sort of thing could be bad, say if I was anorexic but I’m not (been there, done that) and the pleasure I receive from restricting my diet mainly stems from the fact that I feel like I am making an important decision, a humane and empathetic nod towards animals in general, not to mention the environment. Sure I also derive pleasure from knowing that I am (mostly) eating healthier and I am not being loaded down with saturated fats and cholesterol. But mainly the satisfaction comes from the feeling that I am being truer to myself.

I am a huge animal lover. Anyone who really knows me should know this about me…I have a very big soft spot in my heart for animals of all sorts, and not only animals but birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, even insects (okay, I don’t love insects but I feel they have just as much right to be alive as me). I break for anything that is on or crossing the road, I try to save mice from my cats, I don’t kill spiders or ants (okay I do admit that occasionally I put out ant poison when they come in the house and get into the cat food and recyclables), flies..Mi casa es su casa basically. I truly feel that we humans have invaded this land and I would be a an egotistic fool to try to keep the natural habitants from living as they normally would. Deer, sure it pisses me off that they eat off the trees we are trying to grow…but it’s their land as much as it is ours. If I really really had a problem with it, there are safe, environmentally, humane ways to deal with it..but it just doesn’t rile me up enough.  I feel terribly sad when I see a dead animal along the road, even if it is an opossum and especially if it is a cat.  I love bears (could care less that they have the potential to maul me) and I would love to see a mountain lion.  A few years ago I saw a porcupine waddling down the road and I just thought it was the cutest and neatest thing…I would hug it if I could. If I could, I would take in every stray cat that came across our patio and I would end up the crazy old cat lady with 50 cats.  This is me, this is who I am, who I’ve been all my life. I love animals, all of them…and eating them just doesn’t seem right to me, it hasn’t seemed right to me for a long time (probably starting when I was a little girl and got to witness the horrifying event that was my parents slaughtering chickens). And the more I thought about, the more mature I became and the more I sought out and read about factory farms…it all just clicked.  Sure cows, pigs and chickens are not cute and cudly like cats or dogs, but to me this does not give me the right to eat them.  They are life, sentient beings who have thoughts (perhaps not language based thoughts), feelings, sadness, pain and most of all they fear. Fear, terror, pain…imagine for a moment (please just indulge me)…the absolute fear and terror an animal goes through just before and while it’s being slaughtered…and then the pain, some being skinned while still alive. Being skinned, scalded or sliced open while still alive!  It’s outrageous!  I can’t justify it and I can’t continue to wear blinders and supress my true feelings on this devastating matter.

I apoagize for that digression, hopefully you are still with me.  I have been trying to look at the good side of vegetarian/vegan eating.  I am constantly thinking to myself how much healthier my diet has become…how most (if not all) of the food I am unable to eat was really stuff I should not be eating anyway (if I want to eat a healthy diet that is).  I mean, we all know how bad bacon is and pepperoni, cheese…full of saturated fat. Hamburger, hot dogs (weird I don’t even miss hot dogs, and I used to love them!), butter…all bad for your health.  When I think about all the money I’ve been putting into my body via vitamin & mineral supplements (serioulsy, you should see our cupboard…it is overflowing), then think about some of the foods I had been eating…it just doesn’t make sense.  We had been eating pretty healthy especially in the past year or 2…we’ve nearly entirely switched to 100% whole grain bread items, added more fresh fruits and veggies to our diet, fish, and only ate bad snack foods at get togethers (well, except for the occasional ice cream or potato chip splurge).  So we were doing all of this in an effort to get healthier and loose weight yet we were still eating meat and dairy…which is not healthy for you.  No it’s not. Really.

Okay, this is probably where some may argue about needing to get adequate protien and calcium.  I respect that concern but it’s not really a valid concern. It would be if I was not eating a healthy diet filled with a variety of good foods, but I am. I have done some research and have found that most Americans eat twice as much protein as they actually need on a daily basis.  This likely is referring to the meat and potatoes people who eat steak and chicken that is 3 times bigger than the suggested serving, people that eat meat daily, several servings a day.  (Why is America so fat?)  I can eat the suggested amount (50.4 grams) of protein per day by eating such things as:  1 bagel (9 grams) w/ peanut butter (8), 2 slices whole wheat bread (5), 2 cups cooked broccoli (8), 2 TBSP almonds (4), 1 cup pinto beans (refried) (14), 1 banana (2). This equals 50 grams of protien.  Not a single meat or dairy product to be found.  And calcium, lets see. It’s recommended that a person my age should get 1000 mgs of calcium per day. I’ll see if I can find the amounts of calcium in the items I just listed, same serving sizes: whole wheat bagel (104 mgs), whole wheat bread (100), broccoli (124), almonds (70), pinto beans (refried) (79), banana (8). A total of 485 mgs. So I can add 1 cup raw spinich (30), 1 cup leaf lettuce (13), 1/2 cup raw carrots (21), 1 cup soymilk (300), 8 ozs orange juice (300) for an additional 664 mgs, a total of 1149. Ta Da. In your face non-believers!  ;)   These are things that I eat regularly, sure not everyday, but this was just to give an example and to inform others that proper protein & calcium intake is quite easy to acheive on a vegan diet.

Once again, I digressed.  I am finding that I don’t miss the meat so much as I miss the dishes that it’s in.  For example, as a vegetarian, I would be happy to eat any pasta dish with out meat…it’s not the meat that I crave it’s the pasta and marinara sauce, I would be perfectly happy eating cheese lasagna, no meat required.  Same with Chinese or Mexican food  Gimme some nicely seasoned stir fry veggies and rice or a bean & cheese burrito…. Meat is not a necessity.  Now, as a vegan, it is a bit trickier…a bit of a pain in the ass if you will.  Technically I can’t say that I terribly miss cheese yet, or eggs for that matter…I don’t like milk and had been using soy milk for years now (except for cooking) but I feel that living as a vegan long term will be much harder to adjust to.  I want so badly to not want, not have cravings for dairy…but there are so many items out there that are made with dairy…  I’ve become much more diligent at reading ingredient labels and have noticed that milk, milk products (such as whey) are in practically everything!!!  And recently I noticed that the sunflower seeds I had been eating contain gelatin…freakin gelatin!  The label does not say whether it is vegetable or bovine (it should say!) but I have stopped eating them anyway (a big F-U to Plantar’s). I was at the store the other day and I got a serious craving for powdered donuts…turns out there is milk & eggs in the ones I looked at, didn’t know this before.  Meh, who needs donuts anyway? (Why is America fat?) I had a craving for a grilled cheese sandwhch yesterday but it passed and I’m glad I did’nt succomb to Garrett’s insistence that we must go out for luch (to our favorite water hole) so I could support the fact that they had a grilled cheese as the special for lunch (it’s not on their daily menu. As a vegetarian, I wished that it was). Overall, I can say that my cravings have been very minimal, and like I said, as soon as a craving starts (say for pizza, my all-time favorite food) I just nix it out of my mind and give myself a mental pat on my back for being true to myself and the animals I care about.

To leave you with one last thought, I love this quote:  “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated” ~Gandhi

The end.

This time about economics.  However, all is not what it appears…

I’m against the $85,000,000,000 bailout.  Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a “”We Deserve It Dividend”.  To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.  Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..

So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.  My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a “We Deserve It Dividend”.  Of course, it would NOT be tax free.  So let’s assume a tax rate of 30%.  Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes.  That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam. But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500 in their pocket.

A  husband and wife has $595,000. What would you do with $297,500 to $595,000 in your family?

• Pay off your mortgage - housing crisis solved.
• Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads
• Put away money for college - it’ll be there
• Save in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
• Buy a new car - create jobs
• Invest in the market - capital drives growth
• Pay for your parent’s medical insurance - health care improves
• Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean - or else

Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.

If we’re going to re-distribute wealth let’s really do it…instead of trickling out a puny $1000.00 (”vote buy”) economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.  If we’re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let’s bail out every adult US Citizen 18+!

As for AIG - liquidate it.  Sell off its parts.  Let American General go back to being American General. Sell off the real estate.  Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up. Here’s my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn’t.

Sure it’s a crazy idea that can “never work.  How do you spell Economic Boom?  I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion “We Deserve It Dividend” more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC

And remember, The Family plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.

Ahhh…I feel so much better getting that off my chest.

Kindest personal regards,
A Creative Guy & Citizen of the Republic.

Since this was unattributed, I took some liberty with regards to formatting, and corrected a couple typos.  On the surface, this makes pretty good sense to me.  However, let me comment on a couple of the points:

US population is roughly 300,000,000 people.  About 25% of those are under 18, so those benefiting above would count roughly 225,000,000.

I’m not sure where $85 billion came from, it looks like the current legislation could release up to $700 billion.  Let us work it both ways:  if the bailout ends up being only $85 billion, that is a check for a cold hard $377 per adult.  If the entire $700 billion is eventually released, we’re looking at $3,100 per adult (the rich are stealing from you, by the way!!!  socialized losses, privatized profits).  So, why is the author so terribly crippled at math that they’d spend an hour creating this email, but not spend 5 seconds on google checking their math?  I think it is the barb “puny vote buy” which gives away the intent of this device, I believe this is a McCain-machine created email whose intent is to create FUD about Obama and his ideas on economics and tax reform.  Look how much traction McCain’s lies on Obama’s tax plans have, people STILL think Obama is going to raise their taxes simply because McCain repeats it so often…someone needs to tell McCain that simply saying something doesn’t make it so…unfortunately the precedent of the past eight years teaches McCain that the truth is an unnecessary restriction…

…can’t quite remember, but now I’m forced to repost this…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pollywogs/sets/72157602783010702/

One day, I’ll sit down and write an actual blog post about an actual something…

I am not sure if this is temporary or permanent, I’ll see what kind of feedback I get. The old theme had a couple depreciated WordPress tags that I didn’t realize needed updated until I did a little digging yesterday. Once in a while I’d get a “Not Found” message on my homepage, but I didn’t realize that it was occurring for other people and had no way around until yesterday. I updated the offending tags (that I could find with my poor coding skills) but it didn’t seem to fix the problem on the various machines we have around here. So, I threw on a different theme (called Foliage) in case the old one had problems I couldn’t find. This also did not seem to fix the problem, but I ran out of time and motivation, work had caught back up with me at that point…

Anyway, I like this theme a lot, but it has a few issues. It does something weird with the CSS that I can’t figure out that scales the entire page rather than just sets the font sizes.  I increased the font size, and it widens the body?  Why not just define them both independently?  Anyway, I can’t figure out how to change it yet.  You can hold down the Ctrl key and scroll up/down with your middle mouse button to change font size. I adjusted the default font size from 62.5% to 75% after editing the .css, and it now renders pretty nice on 800 pixel width monitors, although on my Firefox/Ubuntu setup the images don’t render very nicely with the font size adjusting the entire width.  This does not seem to cause a problem with browsers on Windows platforms.  Also, note that there is a number to the right of the post title and post date that if you click shows you the comments for an entry. I do like the way it displays comments along side…

Finally, all of my blog-bling is gone. I don’t know what to do about that. I may stick it all on it’s own page. For a long time now I’ve wanted to completely re-vamp the way all of this shit worked. I want garrettsocling.com to be a personal landing page for me, and my domain pollywogsblog.com to be my personal blog (only loosely associated, so that you actually have to dig a little before you equate a baseball bat up John McCain’s ass with Garrett Socling). Perhaps this will be motivation for me to get my butt in gear. This theme would be idea for my personal page, and the Painted Desert theme would be ideal for my Pollywogs. We’ll see if I ever find the motivation…

I rethemed my laptop as well. I had been using a custom theme I composed out of Clearlooks-DarkLime, Buff icons and a few other choices, but I recently switched to this Dust Ubuntu theme, which I like a lot (primarily because now I can read the popup menu when using ThunderBird!). I went with Rodent icons as they are very clean and modern looking, as well as some background I found somewhere. Here’s a before and after:

Old:

New:

Got one a few days ago.  This is one of those ‘forwarded a million times’ emails, and it came to me unattributed.  I may still kiss someone’s feet for sending it my way, even though they did not craft this piece.  Usually I’m less than impressed with the drivel that gets bounced around.  This one, however, struck me and gave me pause.  I liked it, and recognized something in the writer within myself.  Perhaps you’ll find it rises your ire as well.

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Once again, just providing info. I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re ‘exotic, different.’ Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, a quintessential an American story.
If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you’re a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable. Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you’re well grounded.
If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.
If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian. If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible.
If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America’s.
If you’re husband is nicknamed ‘First Dude’, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable. OK, much clearer now.

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Pretty concise, don’t you think?