For many years I've been having orange juice with my breakfast cereal. For a while I was even using the juice on my cereal. I haven't been a milk drinker for many, many years. Now I use soy milk on my cereal.
For many years I've been telling myself that orange juice from concentrate isn't much more than orange-flavored sugar water that is fortified with vitamin C.
I've been saying we should get a juicer so we can make wholesome juices that have more than just sugar and flavor in them.
A couple of months ago I was down to one can of orange juice concentrate when we went to Costco. We came home with a new six pack of OJ.
A week later we went to Costco again. I don't remember why we needed to make a return trip in such a short time. We came home with Jack LaLanne's Power Juicer Deluxe. Impulse shopping at Costco is so easy (and fun!).
We have a new gadget! We've used it every day since then!
Here is this morning's juice. One glass has been made and one has its raw ingredients still to be processed.
Here are its insides after everything has gone through.
The spinning blade grates the vegetables and fruit into very tiny shreds and the juice is spun through the filter. The pulp works its way to the top of the filter and is flung toward the collection bin. A lot gets stuck in the chute along the way.
The recipe book suggests that we collect the pulp and make tasty treats like muffins. We just compost it. Even if the muffins were good for us there is no way that we could eat enough to use much of the pulp.
Since we've started using the juicer I haven't mixed up a can of orange juice.
Yesterday, after we walked through Kit Carson Park, Jerry suggested another hike.
We went home to swap our flip-flops for shoes and headed to the south side of the Westfield North County mall (Kit Carson Park is just to the north of the mall).
We took a walk on part of the North Shore Lake Hodges segment of the Trails of the San Dieguito River Park. This is a park that eventually will go from the ocean at Del Mar to Julian.
We had started out just to walk across the David Kreitzer Bridge over Lake Hodges. This is the longest stressed ribbon bridge in the world. When I drive to work each morning I see a patch of green in the lake near the bridge. I wanted to see what is flourishing in the middle of the lake.
The David Kreitzer bridge from the south side of Lake Hodges.
The stressed ribbon design gives us a bridge with only two supports, long spans, and a very low profile. This minimizes the bridge's effect on the lake.
Here's a view of the bridge from the bridge.
Here's the patch of green I see from my car. It's a little island!
We saw what we came for!
But wait, there's more to the trail. Why don't we walk a little more?
We passed a sign that should make Colleen happy to see.
*sniffle*
The required panorama made from six shots stitched together.
There were flowers.
Here's a Google Map of our little walk.
View Lake Hodges Hike in a larger map
(Zoom out or click on the link to see the whole trip.)
We just had to keep seeing what is around the next bend. Apparently it was almost four miles out and nearly that back. We drank a lot of water when we got back home. It was a nice day in the parks.
You know those pieces of unsolicited commercial emails you get that tell you that you, too, can lose more than twenty pounds using Oprah's method? This is accomplished, they say, by buying some concoction that flushes all that sludge from your intestines.
Well, it ain't gonna work. Save your money.
Yesterday (and through the night), I flushed (flushed, and flushed again) every bit of sludge from my intestines. This morning I was 2.4 pounds lighter than the previous morning. I'm guessing that most of that was from dehydration.
This morning I had my first full-length colonoscopy.
Five years ago, I had a doctor who said that a flexible sigmoidoscopy every five years and annual fecal occult blood tests statistically have the same chances of detecting colon cancer as colonoscopies done every ten years. The sigmoidoscopy requires no anesthesia and has fewer risks of damage since it doesn't go as far into the colon. Since I studied statistics in college (I have a degree in math!), I went for the less intrusive tests. (I didn't look into his claim about the statistics but had to believe what he said. He is a doctor, after all.)
That doctor left the group to open a franchise in a cosmetic medicine chain and my new doctor doesn't believe in sigmoidoscopies. (As far as I can tell, my old doctor's laser skin care shop didn't work out. The chain's web site shows only one location in operation.) Five years later it was time to start getting this test.
Yesterday I got to drink water, clear juices, and a couple of liters of prepared MoviPrep. That's nasty stuff. I had a long stare-down with the last glass (the eighth) of the stuff. It was hard to summon the courage to swallow it.
We went in for my 8:30 appointment, filled in the little bit of paperwork and was taken right in. The nurse strapped on the blood pressure cuff and poked in the IV needle. She thanked me for bringing big veins. She told me some of what to expect and said that I wouldn't remember anything after they tell me to "roll onto your left side." She wheeled me into the examination room.
The doctor came in and told me a bit about the procedure and that it would take about half an hour. The nurse put the drug into the IV and told me to roll onto my left side.
Jerry took me home before 10:00 and fixed me a toasted sesame bagel and orange juice. He told me that I savored every bite and that I told him that "I'm savoring every bite." This was my first solid food in about 36 hours, after all. I then gently beeped his nose and went to sleep. He told me that I got up from my nap and read the report of my procedure then went back to my nap. I don't remember any of this.
I finally woke up at 2:00 and resumed making lasting memories. Then I napped a lot more.
I didn't get any pictures or videos of the procedure. Instead, you can watch Katie Couric get hers.
I'm glad that's over. The procedure and its weird aftermath weren't unpleasant. The preparation for it was.
