Diet, Work, and Exercise

Its definitely been a while since I have posted anything. I want to spend some time to say a few things. One thing is having to do with my diet, which has been a lot of meat and fat as of late. I was using working out everyday as a reason to gorge myself 3 times a day with restaurant bought meal or home cooking, but I am starting to take a turn towards vegetarianism. I plan on going to a Krishna gathering on Sunday to learn something about their diet. I know it won't be easy, and I'll need some weening off of meat much like an infant going off of breast milk. Ill be OK.

Another thing is having to do with water fasting, which I started as of 1pm today. Not much time I know, but I have already experienced many hunger pangs and involuntary thoughts about what to eat. Its actually pretty amazing how much stress the thoughts of eating can be for me and how much time I can spend deciding about food. This is maybe a good sign that its time to quit food for a time. Its an addiction like anything else. However, its been easy to ignore these gathering thoughts and move on in life. I'll have more to report tomorrow night after 24 hours.

Speaking of fat, tomorrow morning I am giving a science presentation to a group of 17 fifth graders and we will be playing with soap, oil, and water and exploring the atoms and concepts which make soap work for us.  It should be fun, this will be my third time visiting some fifth graders to show them how soap works and make dry ice smokey bubbles.

I have been spending a lot of my time in the laboratory, but with less actual work getting done. Therefore, I am going to start logging my time efficiency in hopes of improving it. Also, I am going to cut down the time spent at work to 5 hours per day in order to force me to be more efficient, then increase this number slowly while keeping the efficiency the same. I made an excel spreadsheet to record my progress through this week. Although, my work is not really well-defined, there are certainly things I can and can't log. Firstly, setting up and working up chemical syntheses or collecting, interpreting and reporting data are the 2 most important work items. Secondly, reading literature, writing email, and doing problem sets from class constitute the rest. Anything else will be considered a waste of time! Stay tuned.

As a last point, I'd like to get involved with Berkeley rock climbing and ropes courses.