Blessed by the Potato

As you all know, I’m going prematurely bald. As many of you know, I’ve been taking rogaine (or store brand minoxidil) for about 2 years now to slow the loss. I haven’t regrown any hair, and in fact it hasn’t completely stopped my hairloss — just slowed it down.

Every time I’m due for a new bottle, I read the box it comes in (perhaps because I’ve got a touch of the OCD), and every time this figure completely stumps me:

“If your degree of hair loss is more than shown, this product may not work”

Yet there are three degrees of hair loss shown in the photos. It just confuses me all to hell. I think the image is trying to say that it will help with a greater degree of hair loss if the hair loss is further down towards the back of your head, but will only help hair loss further up if only a small amount is taking place… but I had to actually measure the distance those circles (squres here — they’re circles on the box, and to be fair, on the box they’re arranged vertically, so seeing the different levels of the boxes is even harder) were from the top of the guy’s head to see that there was a difference there. To my eye, it just looked like three different degrees of hair loss. I really think that figure needs to be redone… it also makes me wonder if I should stop using the stuff. I started out using it with loss somewhere around the middle figure (but possibly as bad as the 3rd), but I think my loss is even further up towards the front of my head than the first figure — and now I’m pretty sure I’m worse than all 3 (though my loss is more side-to-side than these sketches seem to be).

While I do believe it’s helped me not lose any more hair, I certainly haven’t grown any back. Complicating that fact, though, is that I’ve only been taking half the dose. This is something that I do almost all the time with medication: it usually affects me pretty strongly (and I did get enlarged hands and unexpected weight gain), so I’m the guy buying regular-strength versions of everything when everyone else is buying “extra strength value packs” and popping two just to be sure. Even when I had my kidney stone I was breaking my morphine in half. But… perhaps that doesn’t automatically apply to Rogaine. So, I’m going to give it 4 more months, and I’m going to use it at the full recommended strength. If there’s no regrowth then, it’ll be hello Lex Luthor look!

But if Rogaine asks, tell them I stopped using it because of that figure.

So, as I think most everyone knows by now, Wayfare was recently diagnosed with Celiac disease and can’t eat any more foods with gluten… which is a lot. Well, the story’s a bit more complicated than that — first we need to get an appointment with a GI specialist, and a bunch of other steps that I’ll let her talk about. The main thing is that we’re preparing for a gluten-free lifestyle, while at the same time having a gorging good time on all the bread and pizza she can eat as a farewell.

Just to give a bit of background, celiac disease is, from what the internet tells me, an autoimmune attack against the small intestine triggered by gluten proteins found in wheat, rye, and barely. The only treatment is a life-long gluten-free diet (I’m still trying to find out how much, if any, gluten contamination is allowed; I’ve found one source that says less than 200 ppm, which is “separate spoons” low). This is actually kind of difficult, since so many foods have wheat or gluten in them.

Gluten is the protein in flour that gives dough its elasticity or chewiness — it’s also what helps form the structures in dough that hold carbon dioxide released by yeast to give the final product its airy, bubbly texture. Because of this, it’s used pretty widely, both in the form of flour (often added to things where at first thought you might not expect it, such as sauces, dressings, and drink mixes) and as an additive or binder for medications, preservatives, candies, etc.

The ubiquity of wheat flour (and gluten contamination) will of course make eating out hard, but the sheer usefulness of gluten in cooking is also going to be a pain for making homemade alternatives. If you consider flour, there are a number of different types at the grocery store: bread flour, all purpose, and cake flour, just to name the standard “white” flours. The main difference between them is the relative gluten content: breads and pizza dough need a lot of gluten for the elasticity, and thus bread flour has the most gluten. Cakes and pastries often need a flour that has less gluten so that they come out flakier. All purpose is in the middle. Just using the wrong type of wheat flour can often make a loaf of bread or batch of biscuits come out a little off, so trying to do without gluten entirely is pretty challenging, above and beyond the issue of the alternative flours (corn, rice, potato, sorghum, quinoa, etc.) each having different, arguably inferior flavours to wheat.

Right now, I’m trying to create gluten-free alternative recipes for use at home, preferably only using the 3 most commonly available alterative flours (rice, potato, and corn flour). I’m starting with recipes that don’t rely on the glutenous properties of flour, and in fact my thinking is that any recipe that has a caution not to over-mix, or to let the batter rest so as not to activate the gluten, has a good chance of working well. Indeed, I think the things that make “batters” rather than “doughs” will have the best chance of surviving the translation. So far, I’ve managed to make some decent belgian waffles, and will try a batch of biscuits next. I’ll post these to the recipes section as soon as I find a variation that’s edible (though check back, as I may change the recipes as I experiment).

I know that there are a lot of recipes and products available on the market already, but I’m a little leery of them after the first few I saw. Many of the recipes were trying to do too much at once — making something low fat and gluten free (we’ll worry about making things low fat once we can make them gluten free and edible), or invoving combinations of dozens of ingredients (mixtures of a half dozen flours plus additives to replace the flour). We went out to a gluten free bakery in town and the grocery store, and tried some of the products on offer. The bread was, in the words of the proprietor of the gluten free bakery “not bread. It’s toast. You have to toast it to eat it.” She also sells a “surprisingly good” loaf that’s fairly expensive, but it actually wasn’t too bad. (I think it was a little too soft to make a good sandwich, but then the piece I had was freshy microwaved to make it warm & soft). They had some brownies and pretzels that were quite good (and brownies was one of the things I figured would be easy to do). Then we tried some cookies that started off tasting pretty good with a decent texture… and they turned to ash in our mouths. They left behind this nasty, gritty texture and aftertaste that even a whole can of coke couldn’t get rid of. I’m hoping I can do a better approximation of a cookie than that. FYI: Avoid “Enjoy Life” brand health/alt food products.

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for a while now, and it does pretty much everything I could want an email client to do, and does it pretty well at that.

One thing I’ve really wanted is the ability to redo the subject lines of emails other people send me. Is there any email client out there that will let me do that, or an add-on to Thunderbird? I know it’s open source, but I’d hate to have to try to figure out the programming on that myself. Plus, it is a little unkosher to edit emails other people send you, but I have several very good reasons:

1. Our email server appends a {Spam X.X} score to suspected spam, we can then set a threshold for sorting… but that tag still stays there. I’d kind of prefer to remove it on one or two important emails to make them easier to find (my eyes are trained to skip over messages with spam at the beginning).
2. I have about 50 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “to do”.
3. I have about 100 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “fyi”.
4. I have about 300 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “sdarticle.pdf” or “fulltext.pdf” or “Entrez Pubmed”.

I’ve always liked Neville Chamberlain references, myself, as they tend to skirt the issues of Nazis and the holocaust just enough to make a point without completely destroying the discussion — that is, without falling prey to Godwin’s Law. That doesn’t seem to be the case lately, as a reference by Elizabeth May has sparked some crazy, out-of-proportion controversy over the whole thing. Admittedly, I’m a little biased: I like Elizabeth May, and there are very few subjects that I consider too sacred to be the used as figures of speech or hyperbole. In fact, I find the insane over-reaction by other groups far worse (“deplorable comment” — come on, it may have been slightly out of context or exaggerated, but deplorable or horrific?).

So, I really liked the twin articles that appeared in Maclean’s about how people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I’m not too surprised that some people blew it out of proportion and got all enraged over the comparison — in particular the Cons, since they were the target of the remarks, and also because they’re just generally angry people who get enraged at pretty much anything that isn’t a broken promise or pollution (they seem surprisingly comfortable with broken promises and pollution). I am surprised at how quickly other people jumped on the bandwagon to condemn her. This is something that really troubles me in politics. I mean, Jack Layton and Stephan Dion probably aren’t actually outraged and horrified by the comparison, and if you had asked them right after she made her speech, they probably wouldn’t have noticed. But because someone else is outraged, they suddenly became outraged too — again, not likely because now it was pointed out to them and they became horrified after perceiving it, but simply because they didn’t want to risk offending someone by not being outraged. It troubles me because they’re up there pretending to care about this — and I’m pretty sure most of us know this is all an act and they’re not really all that outraged by her choice of words (though if they are so sensitive to word choice, that’s a whole other area of concern). But they’ll scream and yell for her to take it back all the same — and I’m pretty sure the people that do care and were upset probably still see through their act and aren’t moved by the sympathy.

So when they pretend to care about everything, can we really trust them to care about anything?

One of the things I really loved about the apartment was that there were no bugs. Okay, next to no bugs, since there were the tiny, slow crawly ones near the cat food, and in the summer the little tiny flying ones that liked to die in the lamps, but never as many bugs as in a house.

Now that we’re coming into the first spring of the new house, we’re dealing with a lot of bugs. In the basement, of course, are potato bugs. Dead ones for the most part… it seems to be some sort of holy resting place for them. They just come out of the cracks and die in the middle of the floor. Or, they could be chased out of the cracks by something altogether more sinister that we haven’t seen yet, but I don’t like to think about that possibility. Either way, I don’t really mind potato bugs. They’re slow, they tend to stick to the less-travelled parts of the basement, they’re easy to spot, and they don’t appear to have any kind of propensity to actually climb up or touch an unsuspecting human.

Earwigs, I hate. I hate earwigs as much as the hated undead. I strongly suspect that earwigs are in league with the undead, should it come to that sort of conspiracy. Fortunately, I haven’t seen any earwigs yet, and hope I never have to again.

We do, however, have an ant problem. I also dislike ants, for many of the same reasons I dislike earwigs. They can be pretty quick and mobile when they want to be. They climb up walls and ceilings at least as often as they like to be on the floor. They hide in cracks and cupboard doors, pouncing on the human flesh that disturbed them, showing no hesitation to climb on — or given the opportunity, burrow into — a human. They appear in waves, and numbers beyond counting at times… then go into remission for a spell, but only ever long enough to lull you into complacency then attack again. But perhaps most of all, I hate ants because they’re big and black and when you just see a glimpse of them, they look like earwigs.

Anyhow, our ant problem began as soon as the weather turned warm. We had a few large black ants appear in the kitchen, and we immediately took steps to get rid of them. We bought this “perimeter defense” spray that repels and/or kills them as soon as they pass through a crack sprayed with the stuff, and deployed a few of the poison bait type ant traps. It seemed to work, because after about 10 days of ants showing up and scouting out the kitchen, they vanished. It also seemed that they were attracted to the empty coke cans I had stacked up by the sink, since each one appeared to have at least 3 ants inside, delighting in the concentrated syrup residue at the bottom. After getting into the habit of rinsing my cans right away, the problem seemed to get better immediately. We had nearly a week of peace there… but it could have been that they were simply frolicking outside in the pleasant weather, because today dozens of them were back. I don’t know what, exactly, drew them back inside. I had nothing stacked up beside the sink, no food was left out — the only thing inside the sink that they seemed interested in was my cereal bowl, which had a partial ring of sweetened milk on it (I had dumped the left over milk and gave it a quick rinse, but obviously didn’t get fresh water all the way around the rim). Yet today they went crazy, swarming around the one cupboard that’s never had food in it. We couldn’t quite understand it…

Understanding was not required. After slaughtering over 20 of them, the invasion receded, and I haven’t seen a single one since this morning. We’re debating at the moment what to do. If we search hard, we may be able to find all the crevaces they use for entry, and seal them with caulking, or poison them with the perimeter defense spray. The ant traps don’t seem to be working: these ants either don’t care or are too big for the small holes in it. We’ve never seen one go in or come out. Someone at work recommended getting poisoned sugar: basically the same stuff as in the “take it back to kill the queen” trap we have now, except sweeter, and in a form we can place anywhere, not confined to a trap (for example, we could put it inside an empty coke can…) With the exception of leaving very sweet things near the sink, cleanliness doesn’t appear to be a factor. Several times we’ve left crumbs near the stove (much to Wayfare’s chagrin… though I’m not the only one who leaves a trail of crumbs when cutting bread ;), but the ants never seem interested in breadcrumbs. Likewise, the cat has a bowl of food out constantly, and in fact she’s such a messy eater that chunks of her food are on the floor and up the wall around her food dish, and the ants don’t care (only those tiny bugs from the apartment seemed to like cat food — we’ve never had bugs bother with it in my parents’ place either).

Speaking of the cat, she’s been absolutely useless in our time of ant crisis. She was born on PEI, and there she used to hunt and eat flies. After coming back to Ontario with us though, she seems to have completely lost her killer instinct, and if we point out an ant to her, she runs up to look at our finger, totally ignoring the naturally wiggling cat toy. One time, I pointed out a group of ants to her, and said “eat the ants!” and she went up, sniffed them, then rolled in them to show me her pretty tummy.

Stupid cat.