Ok, one of my goals for the year was do do some sort of experiment over a month's time, so I am going to perform an experiment (sorta) for 30 days starting Monday.

Starting Monday, November 5th. I am going to change my diet and exercise completely and see what happens. I am going to eat a sensible healthy breakfast lunch, and dinner, and I am going to perform daily aerobic exercise on an Eclipse 1100HR/A Elliptical Trainer. I am not exactly sure how long the aerobic exercise will last each day. I think I am going to shoot for 30 minutes per day at a fast pace for starters, then increase the time each week of the month if possible, maybe by 10 minute increments. I also own a treadmill, but I think the elliptical will be better for my bad knee, and my research indicates that the elliptical may burn more calories than a treadmill.

It will be interesting to see how much weight I lose in 30 days, and what physical changes I see in terms or my daily sleep schedule, my hockey stamina, etc.. This is not an attempt to change my lifestyle for overall better well being, in fact, after the 30 days I full well expect to go back to not exercising except for my 1-2 games of hockey per week, and eating what I normally eat. I would like to lose weight and keep it off, but I am a realist, and I know that has very little chance of happening. VERY few people are able to change their lifestyle to become healthy. I know that I am a large person, and I am perfectly ok with that. Are there days I wash I was not overweight? of course. Do I dwell on it a lot? nope.

I will do an official weigh-in Monday morning and begin the process. I plan to eat a lot of fish and chicken, and red meat in smaller portions that normal, and instead of a bunch of crap, eat a bunch of vegetables, and add some fruits to the party. It should be good times because I like those things anyway. As far as eating fast food, which I seem almost required to do a few times a week, I will stick to Subway sandwiches with no cheese, and salads from various places, or perhaps something like a grilled chicken sandwich.

Anyhoo, I am stoked to embark on the experiment. I know it doesn't seem like much, but it will be interesting to see the overall affects. I will post updates as the month progresses.

Are the people that you work with your friends? More than likely there are plenty of people at work that you hate, that's easy, but are there people that you work with that are really your friends? I am not talking about a scenario where you and your friend got a job at the same place or something like that, I am talking about people that prior to working at your job you did not know, that are now your friends. Also, what level of friendship have you attained with such people?

I know I posted once about people coming and going in life, but today I am focusing only on people at work. How do you refer to people from work when you are talking to someone else? I think I use a combination of terms. Sometimes I'll say, "this guy at work", sometimes its "a friend of mine at work", and sometimes its just "I have a friend who...". I guess I change it to fit the current narrative. I guess for me it sort of comes down to who I trust and why. One of my co-workers was going to Vegas this past weekend, so he told me that if I had any sports wagers I'd like to make, that he would do it for me. I busted out 150 bucks and handed it right to him without a care in the world. If this same character came up and asked me to give him say 750 bucks and he would pay me back later, I would probably do it without even asking why. I guess I trust him with money. If I was explaining this to someone else and I said I gave 150 dollars to a guy at work, they might think its odd, whereas if I said a friend, they would not. So that is one type of co-worker.

Then there are people that I can trust with personal data, but not necessarily with work related data. This category seems self explanatory. Some people may use work related data to try and discover further data, or use the data for their own well being, and in the process may or may not divulge the source of their information, yet would keep any personal info regarding non work related completely safe. Some of these people could also easily fit into the monetary trust category.

Next I guess would be people that you would hang out with outside of work. I think that to truly crossover from a "friend from work" to a friend would require a few external events. This way you can see how people are different at work than when they are on their own time. This is not an absolute requirement by any means. You can have good friend that you know or knew from work that you have never had an opportunity to spend time with outside of work for whatever reason. I know this may seem contradictory, but they are my thoughts, so take a hike sucker.

I guess this jumbled mess of thoughts really produces no outcome, but I have been thinking about it a little bit so I figured I would lay it down before I forgot. There are people that I have worked with in my life, that I would drop everything I am doing, and go straight to help them if they asked, yet I would probably not help them bury a body, and let's face it, that what true friendship is all about.

When I was growing up, there was a certain delicacy that one could only obtain at the cafeteria at whatever school you happen to be attending at the time. This delicacy, was known as "wacky cake". Wacky cake day was always a good time. Back then, wacky cake was the most delicious food product ever invented, at least that's how my fond memories of it are stored. Out of the blue one day I decided that I should reproduce this stupendous feat of culinary mastery. After all, I am the cook in my house. I am always cooking something. I cook some sort of food almost every single day. I am quite good at it, so I decided that I could decode the hidden secrets of this marvelous gem.

I sent an email to my friend, who was able to obtain what could very well turn out to be the exact recipe that the school used for the delicious treat. Could it be this easy? No way, wacky cake is special, and indigenous to only my region of my county of my state. No way someone would easily part with such an item, it would surely be locked away at Fort Knox, under tight government control.

After obtaining the recipe I discovered that it did not contain what type or size of pan would be required for said cake. Oh my, what shall I do? Being an avid chef, I certainly realized that these two key pieces of data could prevent my dream of once again being reunited with my long lost chocolatey friend. I decided to forge ahead, and do whatever it takes to make wacky cake, even if it meant making 1000 crappy substandard wacky cakes along the way.

To minimize the amount of brown chunks I produced before hitting the jackpot, I decided to hit up a few pages I frequent that would have some standard cake recipes, so that I could compare how much raw material went into other cakes in relation to what size pan they used. On a whim, I poked in "wacky cake", and whatta ya know.... there were already wacky cake recipes floating around. After a cursory perusal of them I soon realized that they were basically the same recipe, with a few minor changes here and there for pan size and whatnot. A quick hit of Wikipedia even produced a short writeup on the damn thing.

Apparently, the current accepted theory as to its origin is that it was invented during the rationing days of World War II, when milk and eggs, the most common of all cake ingredients, were extremely scarce. To make up for this, the cake is made to rise through the use of baking powder and vinegar, of all things! Yes my friends, that stupid volcano you made when you were little, could have very well been made into wacky cake instead.

The recipe I obtained did mention the use of a tiny amount of milk, but I am 100% certain that it is not needed, and water could be substituted in its stead. I did include the milk in mine, because I wanted to be as true as I could to the recipe I was given. Maybe this tiny portion of milk made the wacky cake in my school something special.

The recipe is VERY simple. You throw everything that goes into the cake into a bowl, and stir it a few times. Nothing more, nothing less. Here is what that looks like.

This is:
3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp. soda
2 cups water
1 cup oil
4 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. vanilla



and here it is in the pan...



Now I should mention that I was low on cocoa, so I cut everything to exactly 75% of the total amounts, but I was making this in the smaller of my two Pyrex baking dishes, so it should be fine.

The recipe was vague on how long to cook the cake, it simply says " Bake at 375 degrees until just done (springs to light touch.)" Just done? Are you kidding me? I looked back at the online infos I found and they baked their at 350 for 30 minutes, but they were using metal cake pans, so I would have to go longer. Well, I ended up having to go a lot longer. After about 35 minutes I pulled the beast out of the oven and prodded around with a fork. Yuck! in the middle it was still just a lump of fecal colored goo, so I popped it back in and left it, and left it, and left it, and left it. I ended up having to cook the sucker for about an hour and fifteen minutes!



I may have overcooked it just a tiny bit because it was a little bit dry around the edges, but that was the only way to get it done in the middle. I think next time, a lower temperature may be the key. Anyway, so the recipe then says to "punch holes in the cake with a meat fork". MEAT FORK? WTF? Oh well, I lost my meat fork back in the 80s, so I opted to use a normal fork. I poked several holes in the cake, as can be seen here.



Ok, so they aren't exactly holes, they are huge gashes. Who really gives a damn, I am about to eat wacky cake up in here. Only one thing left to do... recreate the magical frosting. the frosting on wacky cake is bizarre to say the least. It is hard, yet soft at the same time. If you were to hold it in your hand for a little while, it would melt. Also, it has a very strange texture when you eat it, almost like a cross between sand and chocolate. I guess it is sort of like melty chocolate sand! Here are a few frosting preparation pictures.





This is:
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 cup milk
1 stick Oleo

This is where the milk comes into play. Next time, I will just try water. The instructions here are again VERY simple. Chuck all this shit in a pan and boil for 3 minutes, then cool for 5 minutes. Then dump it on your cake. Tada!



When the frosting goes on, it is really shines, you can even see the reflection of my Zojirushi in the background!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... The Wacky Cake.


The cake is delicious. Is it as good as it was back in my childhood? I have no clue! It is a real shitter, but since I have not had wacky cake for a minimum of 15 years, I cannot recall if it is supposed to taste like my cake tastes or not. The cake is really good, and it seems... "institutional", for lack of a better term. I do not think it is outside the realm of something that might be served in a cafeteria. The only true way to tell would be if the schools where I grew up still feature wacky cake, then either obtain a true specimen and compare, or have a school-aged child try mine and and provide feedback. Chances are, neither is going to happen, so I will just assume that this is a 100% authentic recreation of my prized delight.

Do you have an advanced directive or a medical power of attorney filled out and stored somewhere safe? I bet you don't. An advanced directive is simply a form that expresses your wishes ahead of time for what type of medical care you want in case you are unable to make decisions for yourself. Basically what it boils down to is do you want to be kept on life support if you are stuck in a persistent vegetative state from which you will never recover? Here is the form, at least for Texans, for this advanced directive:

http://www.dads.state.tx.us/news_info/publications/handbooks/LivingWill-English.pdf

A Medical Power of Attorney is a firm that appoints someone to act on your behalf should a doctor declare you incompetent to make medical decisions on your own. Here is the form for that:

http://www.dads.state.tx.us/news_info/publications/handbooks/MEDPOA-English.pdf

If you are not in Texas, you can just Google the terms and you will find thousands of them. If you do not have a set of these, you should probably hook it up. If your parents are dead, and you and your better half both have an issue where you both are turned into vegetables, you are going to want someone you trust to be making decisions in regards to your medical care, and you also are going to want the doctor to work off of your own wishes as expressed in the advanced directive. There have been tons of lawsuits and such based on various state to state laws in regards to these matters which could have been avoided had victims just been smart enough to plan ahead. Also, you don't want to put anyone in the bizarre scenario to have make medical decisions for you, if they have no idea what your wishes are.

Anyway, so those are the forms. Fill them out. In the forms, make sure to mark that you do NOT want to be put on permanent life support. You want to die. You do not want to be a carrot. Don't make your family suffer, or sink into unimaginable debt because you are too stupid to understand what being a potato really means. Technology will not come along in 25 years that will allow you to return to normal life. A divine miracle will not occur that will make every thing OK again. The two forms are setup for scenarios where you CAN NO LONGER FUNCTION. Under such circumstances, you won't have very much fun for the duration of your tenure on planet Earth, so just make things easier on everyone and die. Don't be so selfish that you make your family feel guilty forever for abandoning you while you spend your remaining years as a broccoli.

Do it.. NOW!

Back in July, I posted about reorganizing my 401k distribution and setting up a Roth IRA. In case you missed it, you can find it HERE. Since then, I have been funding my Roth and trying to locate a decent mutual fund to put my money into. A lot of people will tell you to diversify your portfolio, personally, I think those people are off. My investment strategy is TO MAKE MONEY. Lots of it, in a short period of time. I have found that the best way to do this is NOT to diversify your portfolio.

My research shows that mutual funds in international stocks is where the money is at. Countries around the world are joining modernized society, and as they do, investors appear to be on board. It seems to me that a good portion of the world is now catching up to the US technologically and otherwise, so they are sort of where we were at a while back when the market here was so awesome. This data, combined with fact that we are still at war, which makes investors here scared, makes international stocks an incredible value right now.

So I put all my money, every single penny of investment money I own, into an international mutual fund. The fund is the Thornburg International Value Fund (TGVAX). I have made so much money off of this fund that it is just ridiculous. The only catch when I converted to the Roth, is that the Thornburg requires a $2000 initial investment inside an IRA. Since I do not have that much in the Roth yet, I was forced to find another fund that was just as good, with a low buy-in.

After many long nights of searching, I came across the Pax World Growth Fund (PXWGX). The fund is very similar to the Thornburg in that it is an international fund, but the buy-in for an IRA is $0, and the minimum subsequent investment is also $0. Even outside of an IRA, the minimum is only $250, with a $50 subsequent. That is pretty damn good.

So there you have it. My two investments, both of which are in the same sector, and some of the exact same stocks. Once I hit the 2K with the PXWGX, I will transfer the balance into the TGVAX, just like all my 401k investment.

So, you may be asking, why is it so great to put all your eggs in one basket like that? Most people, seemingly on the advice of financial advisers, or otherwise, have always been told to just put the money in and basically ignore it, let it build, then you will be rich when you are old. This is fucking ridiculous. That would be like just paying your credit cards bills each month, without even looking at them (which I used to do!). If you invested a large some of money into a stock, you would check the stock price each and every day, so you could get out if you needed to, and minimize loss. Well, your 401k is basically the same thing.

So, I not only check the price of the funds each and every day, I also compare the daily results to other mutual funds, stocks, indexes, and whatnot. This keeps me one step ahead of the game at all times, and determine cutoff prices where I may need to move things around a bit. So far this has worked out marvelously. For example, during the most recent issues with housing mortgage problems, everyone suffered, but the international stocks bounced right back, and actually busted out quite a bit afterwards and went on a huge price spike, whereas some of the large US based stocks did not. Here is a perfect example of what I am talking about:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=TGVAX&t=6m&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=msft

If you look at this chart, you can see that after the housing trouble that plagued the market, Microsoft stock recovered from its -2.5%, and bounced back up to a little over 5%, which is fantastic, but in that same time period, TGVAX bounced from its low of around 5% (pretty good for a crisis time in our markets), up to around 22.5%!!!. Now, someone with a well diversified portfolio would not have benefited much in this scenario, but I did. If you dump all your money into anything, diversified or not, and don't pay attention, you pretty much deserve to lose all your money.

Ok, this is too long already, I could go on for hours and hours. Just do yourself a favor or two. Put your money into international stocks for now, and for shit's sake, UN-DIVERSIFY YOUR PORTFOLIO!

I lost about 200 bucks yesterday on the Packers game. Well, Technically, I did not lose anything, because I was playing with profit from prior weeks. I am still up well over 10X my initial investment. I suppose I could have taken the money out, so I guess I can only say I sorta lost 200 dollars. Hopefully I will win some of it back tonight. The bigger issue, is trying NOT to tilt, which is a gambling term used when someone tries to recover losses by playing irrationally. A few weeks ago I was on full tilt and was betting 450+ bucks on a single play during the game. My goal today is to bet small, but consistently to work my way back up slowly. I should do an article on the mentality of a gambler in tilt mode.

Anyway, so I went to the dentist the other day. Some people hate the dentist. I kind of like it. My dentist is always really proud of my healthy strong teeth, but like most people, I need to floss more. They have done this in the past, but this time again they took my blood pressure, and said it was high. I had my blood pressure taken back when I went to the ER with a busted chin from hockey, and they said it was fine. So is it possible that my blood pressure has spiked since then? I suppose. I asked her to take it again so she did and it was still pretty damn high. 160/94, which is really up there. I suppose it is possible that I could have had the condition known as "white coat hypertension", which is essentially artificially elevated blood pressure due to anxiety from being in a doctors office, or somewhere that may cause any sort of stress. She also stated that it could simply be that the cuff was to small for my large arm, or that her machine was not calibrated properly. I think I can rule out "white coat" because like I said, I actually enjoy going to the dentist.

I took it again at one of those free checks at the grocery store pharmacy, and although it was not nearly as high as it was at the dentist, it was still higher than it should be 141/86 or something real close to that. Could I have high blood pressure? I SERIOUSLY doubt it. I suppose if I do, it might be handy to know that, so I am in the market for a decent blood pressure monitoring device that has a USB connector, so that I can attach it to my computer and chart out the results. I will update on that later.

Back on track here, I cannot comprehend why people do not like the dentist. I suppose they are afraid of pain. "Anticipation of pain is usually worse than pain" is a general rule I try to live by. If you sit and dwell on something then you are suffering for no real reason, just get it over with, and most of the time, you will come out the other end thinking it was not nearly as bad as you thought it would be. Some people have a bad gag reflex, but 99% of the time, the dentists hands are not very far in your mouth, certainly not far enough to gag a person. The technology of dentistry has come a long way as well. A lot of the tools no longer look like scary death implements. Plus, most of the time, I actually do not see the tools at all. Some people don't want to go because they know they have bad teeth or some sort of particular problem. If you went in the first place, you probably would not be in this predicament.

All this leads me to believe that people who are afraid or even the smallest bit apprehensive about going to the dentist probably HAVE A BAD DENTIST!

As a side note here, I started chewing gum pretty much all the time a couple of years ago. I chew gum 4-6 hours a day. Sugarless, of course. Anyway, I noticed that after I started chewing gum a lot, that every time I went to the dentist, there was less buildup for them to scrape off, and they noticed that my teeth were a lot cleaner, and healthier. My theory here is that the gum pull all the nasty shit off of and out from between your teeth. I do not brush any more than I used to, so this appears to be the only explanation. So, forget about pain, chew gum, and GO TO THE DENTIST!!

Wow, I put off posting for a whole week. I sucks. I will get remotivated hopefully, because I vowed to blog for an entire year, and the year is still 3 months away from being completed.

We did win the hockey championship. Yaaay!

Anyway, I think things will be more or less back to normal after this weekend, so I should be back with some regularity. I have a few topics to cover, so I will make a note of them, so I will have plenty of blog ammo.

I can't really think of anything else interesting to put here, so you will just have to wait.