Juice made from Fruit

Fruit Juice is a commonly available supermarket product that, regardless of which kind of fruit is claims to be made from, is largely composed of high fructose corn syrup, white grape juice, water, and preservatives.  Typically, it tastes too sugary and leaves that corn syrupy aftertaste in your mouth but without the deliciousness or the caffeine hit of a nice cold Mountain Dew.  I have recently become aware of another, similarly named substance.  I am calling this substance Juice from Fruit.  When spoken, its pronounced "juice from actual fruit."  After watching some documentary and spending hundreds of dollars on a ridiculously expensive juicer and some organic fruit that didn't have to be organic but was because kale is only available in that kind of store...guess what.  I don't regret this one at all.  First, I did 3 carrots, 1apple, 2 celery and 5 leaves of kale.  It was ok.  Then I did 8 carrots and 2 oranges.  Remember, carrots are that vegetable that I regularly choke down because I know that given the rest of my diet, I desperately need the vitamins, minerals, fiber, and, hell, whatever else you don't get from bacon and ice cream.  So I don't really like carrots at all.  I'm telling you this so that when I say that 8 carrots and 2 oranges was fucking delicious, you'll understand how suprised I was.  I don't get it at all.  Carrots suck, and oranges are moderately tasty--I typically ignore them because they are a pain in the ass to eat.  Don't be something where I have to both peel you and get my hands sticky;  I'm not going to bother.  But, by their powers combined...these two foods make a juice that is inexplicably good.  Also, I basically ingested 8 full carrots in one shot, instead of the 4 or 5 baby carrots I usually force myself to eat.  Actually it was 16, because I immediately made another one of those.

Anyway.

Next up was 2 apples, 1/2 a cucumber and 1" of ginger.  Except it was my first time with ginger, and I thought it would be no big deal if I just eyeballed it and basically put 3.5" of ginger in there.  That was a poor choice.  Ginger is not to be used lightly.  Cleared my sinuses out though.  Anyway, the last one was 2 apples, 2 oranges and 2 cups of strawberries.  That was also delicious, but given the ingredients, I mean, thats a no brainer.  Anyway.  There are some people out there with this plan that involves not eating for a week or month and only drinking juice made from actual fruit (and veggies).  I'm not doing that.  I am going to make a ton more of this shit.  Its not just delicious enough to rival Mountain Dew....I'm craving it.  Like, actually craving it.  The way I crave soda after not having caffeine for 16 hours.  I've heard that pregnant women get cravings and its because their subconcious knows they need the nutrients from whatever food it is.  I also heard that vampire legends may have gotten started because some people were low on iron and craved blood.  By extrapolating these two facts of questionable origin, I can assume that maybe I am craving juice made from fruit so much because I am in such desperate need of actual food.  Or it could just be that delicious.  Seriously, I might actually choose 8 carrots + 2 oranges over a bottle of mountain dew.  Would I choose it over an aluminum can of mountain dew?  Maybe not, but it would be close.  I like this shit so much I don't even mind cleaning the juicer, and let me tell you, cleaning that thing is a bitch.  It basically comes apart into like 5 different pieces, and you have to clean all of them.  My strategy moving forward is basically to buy $50 worth of fruit, convert all of that into juice in one sitting, and then clean the damn thing once.  If you turn the juicer on and just pour water down in there, it kind of cleans it out enough to switch recipes.  Also, in case you are unaware, a juicer is completely different from a blender, and costs about 3 times as much.

I'm going to call this activity juicing.  I ran out of it tonight, and I want to juice so bad...but its after 1 am and the damn juicer has a decible level similar to a chainsaw, so I have to wait until tomorrow.  Oh, and another thing:  I have been way more alert, and did not fall asleep at work.  And I don't get all tired after standing for like 5 minutes.  Seriously this stuff is the best.

Also, and I proabably should have mentioned this first, it was previously impractical for me to buy fruits and vegetables.  Fruit went bad too fast (or in the case of strawberries, was both not ripe yet and rotting) and vegetables were both gross and required cooking.  When you are converting this stuff into juice, none of that really matters.  The fruit can be not quite ripe, or a little too ripe, and the bruises don't matter, and you don't have to cook it, and you can just put the juice in a little container in the fridge, and you don't have to reheat it because you drink it cold anyway!  I poured my gross ass ginger-heavy concoction into a wine glass and just sipped it like that tonight.  Then I ate half a pound of ham.


150 KPH is the speed I was going at on my sportbike going over the bridge.  I don't know how to read...oh hello google.  Oh 93.  Ok.  That's not bad.  Anyway.  Warming up.  I've given up on the ski season, again.  We are switching to bike mode, and tonight I rode for the first time in possibly six months.  Still taking it easy.   My bike is performing like a champ.  Ten hours of riding and I will feel confident enough to take a passenger.


But Tonight We Dance is the song that I stole a chord progression from in order to improv with the group of friends that I am going to start calling "my band" even though we are not a band, simply because it is easier to say than "this group of guys that I play with."  We are getting good.  We need another singer.


Jess is the name of a girl back home that just wants to be friends.  I want to be anything but.  Yes, I stole that line from House.  She was my date to my sister's wedding.  It took roughly 2 seconds of seeing her walking in, looking incredibly beautiful, for me to realize I should date her, and then the rest of the night for me to stop feeling guilting that it only took 2 seconds to be all into her again.  Unfortunately she's not interested.  I thought about asking why (Libby?  Friend zone timer?  Something else?), but that's pretty gay, so I have no idea why, and she is officially the one that got away.  And I don't like to dwell in the past, so I'm going to say this once:  if I had a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, I would go back to high school and kick myself in the balls.  And now that chapter of my life is closed.  Now there is officially nothing standing between me and an audition tape for some TV show called "The Bachelor" except for...

My girlfriend is the girl that almost none of you knew about, and whom I'm about to break up with, because I just realized I'm never going to love her and I shouldn't lead her on.  Fun fact:  I've actually never had to unilaterally end anything before.  Every other time, it was mutual, or she dumped me because I didn't like her dog enough, or I did something (or a series of things) that made her dislike me so much she never wanted to see me again.  This thing where I'm the one ending it, and we are also far enough in that I can't just stop calling her...this is new.  If my life was a tv show, this would be the episode where J.D. mopes around the hospital whining to everyone that he doesn't know how to break up with someone.  Except even J.D. isn't that pathetic.  Also, remind me to tell you about the...just remind me to tell you about March the next time we are in person.

My idiot teammate is the new name for...my idiot co-worker friend at work.  You may know him as the guy who interupted me so many times that I left the office and bought a couch.  Today, since we are in the process of moving to another part of the building, all but two of the people on my team decided to move this afternoon.  I elected not to move, because I had a lot of stuff going on, and I was in the middle of getting a lot of work done.  I needed to be especially productive, because I had given myself more work in the past few days in an attempt to accomplish something really cool.  Then my idiot coworker came by and asked if it would be a big deal if he fucked up my internet connection while attempting to disconnect all his shit from the desk next to me.  I flipped out, moderately, and he very carefully unplugged whatever it was without screwing up my work.  Relieved, I continued to work as he left to make another trip to our new team area.    ...then he came back and unplugged the power to all three of my computers at once, with no warning, while I was using them.  I had about a hundred Firefox tabs and two or three screen sessions open, editing close to 50 files across 4 or 5 projects.  All gone.

I began cursing, and left the room to avoid cursing more.  Fortunately, I was in a sort of state of shock that prevented me from immediately feeling the full wave of frustrating anger.  After about 10 minutes of walking around the office in an area where I was unlikely to encounter my idiot coworker friend, I had calmed down and realized that since all my work was fucked up, I might as well begin moving my stuff right then, since my computers were already off.

Unfortunately, I had long ago decided that the next time I move to a new space at work, I want to try that thing where you have a really tall desk and stand all day.  Apparently there are a bunch of health problems caused by sitting all day.  The only one I'm sure of is this gut that I am developing.  I no longer look incredible naked.  So we're trying the tall desk thing.  Unfortunately, requesting a tall desk takes forever, because I guess these guys come to you and do an "ergonomic study" or some bullshit.  I'm not waiting for that.  This shit needs to be setup by tomorrow so I can start working again.  So...I drove to home depot, bought some 4x4s and $60 worth of metal brackets, some word screws, and a Japenese Piece Lilly.  Then I drove to another store for a super tall stool/chair thing.  The piece lilly is just for decoration.  I began raising my desk tonight, but my cordless power drill ran out of power.  As is turns out, recharging your drill for only a few minutes after every time you use it for a year tends to completely run the battery down.  So I will be disturbing everyone in earshot tomorrow with my power drill.  This will be fun.


My Penny-Arcade Lego Mosaic is finally done.  The total cost is probably very well near $500 thanks to the trip to home depot that was required.  This piece was...sort of a disaster.  It looks good now, but damn I made a lot of stupid decisions.  And I actually don't know if the one hook I attached it enough to hold it up.  The thing weighs like 10 pounds.  Anyway, here are some pics:

I was planning to contact PA and license their characters so I could sell these.  I will still probably attempt to do that, however my hopes of mass producing these are done.  The availability of the Lego plates I need is too hit and miss, and after the two part Home Depot adventure that included nearly setting my apartment on fire because I'd never used a dremel to cut metal before...making more of these will still be more of an art than a science.

For my next project I am thinking of attempting to do portraits of Castle Crashers.  More content I'd have to license, and I haven't found any good source images, but they would be pretty cool.  If you have any ideas, or even better, know someone who has too much money and not enough artwork constructed out of tiny plastic toys, let me know.