Not a joke, shockingly: the NY State Gov’t has a bill in progress to outlaw the use of salt during food preparation at a restaurant.
Lest you think I’m kidding or somehow misreading things, here’s the actual and complete text of the bill, including the justification behind it.
PROHIBITION ON SALT; RESTAURANTS. 1. NO OWNER OR OPERATOR OF A RESTAURANT IN THIS STATE SHALL USE SALT IN ANY FORM IN THE PREPARATION OF ANY FOOD FOR CONSUMPTION BY CUSTOMERS OF SUCH RESTAURANT, INCLUDING FOOD PREPARED TO BE CONSUMED ON THE PREMISES OF SUCH RESTAURANT OR OFF OF SUCH PREMISES.
Section 2 of the bill goes on to lay out the penalty (not more than $1000 per use of salt).
The justification is as follows:
JUSTIFICATION: This legislation will give customers the option to add salt after the meal has been prepared for them. In this way, consumers have more control over the amount of sodium they intake, and are given the option to exercise healthier diets and healthier lifestyles.
Basically, they want to make people healthy by way of having them eat food that tastes lousy. Salting your meal after it’s been cooked isn’t going to do a whole lot for the taste. I really wonder if Markey (who wrote this bill as well as another one that bans Vespas in the State of NY) has ever actually cooked anything for herself.
I just got back from my meeting to discuss last weekend’s MRI results.
First, the good news: minus the bone fragments all over the place, my ankle hard structures are actually fine. No polio-victim brace necessary.
Now the bad news: Of the 5 or so tendons that hold the ankle together, three are damaged and one’s more or less gone. That’s going to be… unpleasant and time-consuming. 6 weeks off the foot post-surgery, another 6 weeks of getting range-of-motion back…
With a wedding coming up, that’s going to be massively inconvenient for my life. That particular surgery may just have to wait for a year.
One week into the engagement and the planning engine has been thrown into gear. We’re looking at late August/early September, but that’s going to depend both on venue availability and people availability.
Certain people (and I will refrain from naming names) would be advised that telling us that some dates would actually be a major problem for them is a perfectly fine thing to do. I’d really rather not have anybody’s potential job-loss hanging over my head because of the date we picked. Honestly, that would be a much bigger issue for us than having to move the wedding a few weeks one way or another.
Aaaaanyway – We have an appointment to see our first potential venue, Lia’s (probably) found her dress and I got on the ball with getting the ring insured today and got a dedicated bank account set up for wedding-related expenses (being engaged to an accountant is exciting!).
You’d think that would be obvious to everyone, but you’d be wrong.
A campus gun ban will do absolutely nothing to prevent any sort of school shooting unless the campus PD plans to frisk everybody as they cross the campus border. I’m really disappointed with people who don’t seem to grasp the whole “criminals, by definition, are people who don’t obey the law” idea. Sure – now you can charge somebody who’s just shot up a classroom with an extra “you can’t have a gun on campus” charge, but that’s really kind of pointless as far as the Big Picture goes.
I’m engaged.
Yes I am.
As of Saturday 11:30p.
Update: Story below the break.
Bad news: I crashed my car in Estes Park last weekend
Good news: Nobody was hurt, no other cars were involved.
Bad news: I had to limp a very broken car home down a canyon. In the snow. With a donut-spare up front. And a badly hurt control arm.
Good news: I survived, got the car into the shop before they closed and a couple fingers of bourbon finally got my butt unpuckered a few hours later.
Bad news: I hurt it pretty badly – $1300 in new parts plus another $400 in labor.
Good news: …which is only about $600 in used parts.
Bad news: …which still means I have to drop $1000 on it.
Good news: …but because I didn’t listen to Dave Ramsey, I still have a credit card with about $450 worth of rewards that I can use to pay for car repairs, so it’s gonna cost me about half of what it really costs.
Ultimately, I do not recommend for anyone to try driving a car with a bent control arm, damaged steering knuckle and a donut spare on snow-covered black ice down a mountain canyon with perilous lack of guard rails in a snow-storm. This is really not a recipe for success. Your traction control system will refuse to function, your ABS system will be confused, you will probably die. Do not do this.
I think tonight might be the last night I’ve got to tape those protective plates over my eyes! That’d be exciting – I dislike having to scrape the left-over adhesive off of my skin in the mornings.
I went for X-rays at the Orthopedic Center yesterday to try an figure out what was wrong with my foot – my suspicion was a stress-fracture from skiing a few weekends back. Reality was a little worse.
Back in ‘97 I had an “incident” with a trampoline that resulted in me having a foot the size of the boot it should have fit in for a couple of weeks. The doctor who met me at the ER (to check me out before-hand in case I didn’t need to get admitted to the ER) wiggled it around and pronounced it “probably badly sprained”. I bought an air-cast and a crutch and limped around for a while.
The X-rays, sadly, showed that it was actually a pretty major break in one of the bones in my ankle and a decent chunk taken off of another. The break never really healed and the chunk is now chips floating around the joint (hence a lot of the recent pains – one or more of them must have worked into a place more obtrusive than it had been). I’ll need an MRI to really figure out how bad things are and then (general ballpark case:) a brace around my calf for something like six months to keep the weight off of the joint so the bone can heal and arthroscopic surgery to remove all the little bits and pieces floating around in there.
That’s gonna be a lot of fun.
Edit 3p: I found a picture that closely resembles what they’d like to put me in. It’s called an “unweighting AFO” (ankle foot orthosis).
From www.fastafo.com - the FUA-20
As reported on Saturday, my vision is presently 20/15 which is pretty darn good. My night vision is probably about 90-95% of what it was with glasses and should improve somewhat in the weeks to come.
Here’s the summary of how the whole thing went down.
- T -1:00:00 : Took one pill of Xanax (a drug commonly prescribed for anxiety issues).
- T -0:30:00 : Arrived at the eye doctor’s office for the surgery. Current vision: ~20/400 (-4/-4.25 in contacts the last time I had them).
- T-0:15:00 : Golly that Xanax is good stuff. I’m completely (so far as I could tell) in control of my faculties, but things have ceased to bother me. I caught two mistakes in my paperwork that they had to correct (had me signed up for the wrong procedure (a change I’d discussed with the doctor didn’t make it into the system) at the wrong price) but I wasn’t nearly as bent out of shape as that sort of thing would usually make me. I really want a pill of this stuff the next time I have to go buy a car. Immediate +5 to my negotiating skill because I simply cannot be perturbed.
- T -0:00:00 : Into the prep room. I get booties and a hair cap and my eyes get betadine swabbed all over. The first round of a couple of eye drops (an anti-inflammatory and an anti-bacterial) go in. I believe a numbing agent also went in.
- T +0:10:00 : Into the surgical suite. Eyes checked a final time and registration marks made on the surface.
- T +0:12:00 : Onto the laser bed. Each eye, in turn, is suction-cupped in place and run through the laser cornea cutter. I feel a pretty serious pressure from the suction-immobilizer, but nothing else. It took them a few tries to hook the left eye up correctly, so some blood vessels burst – I look like I got in a bar fight. Time per eye for the laser cut is about 25 seconds (a nurse did a count-down).
- T +0:15:ish : The non-business eye is taped shut. The other has its lid pried open and the last thing I see clearly is what looks like a dental pick coming in and lifting a flap of my eye up. The world goes pretty blurry at this point. I am asked to hold my vision on a blinking (blurry) light and the LASIK laser kicks in – “pop/snap” noises and an impression of bright flashes. This lasts about 20 seconds per eye. The flap is replaced and the eye is taped shut. Repeat for the other eye.
- T +0:25:?? : Done. I can “see”, but it’s like staring at a very foggy landscape through a window that desperately needs some ice scraped off of it. I can see well enough to navigate the office. Back to a prep room where some clear plastic discs are taped over my eyes and I’m given my own bottle of anti-inflammatory drops, a pile of artificial tears and a roll of adhesive tape (for the discs). Lia takes note of exactly what I need to be doing for the next day.
- T +1:00:00 : back at home for a nap. The plastic discs ensure that I don’t rub/bump/touch/lick/poke my eyes in my sleep because they feel like I’ve been up about twelve hours too long. I get to wear these all day the first day and then every night for the next week to give the corneal flap a chance to re-attach itself.
- T +4:00:00 : I can see well enough to help Lia make my dinner (surprisingly well, actually – I will teach her proper knife technique), but am pretty light sensitive. I have some LED Christmas lights strung up on the kitchen counter – each light has a “halo” around it about the size of a dinner plate. We eat dinner; Lia watches Zombieland while I listen to it from the comfort of her lap (part of my instructions are to not watch TV, use computers, etc).
- T +14:00:00 : I wake up for my post-op appointment and can see. This is wild. At the appointment my vision is tested to 20/15 in each eye.
- T + 28:00:00 : Night vision is still compromised – headlights are pretty halo-y, but the halos around the Christmas lights are down to about the size of a quarter.
- T +3 days : Daylight vision is perfect; Night vision is nearly perfect (not much worse than with glasses, and my night vision’s never been the best anyway).
I’m on a 4x/day regimen for eye drops for a week and then I get to ditch two of them and just use the fake tears periodically for a few weeks. The biggest complaint is that one of the eye drops tastes absolutely horrible – my tear ducts drain into my sinuses which drain down the back of my throat, so about 5 minutes after putting in the drops, my mouth tastes awful for the next hour or so.
The only other side-effect of note is that my left eye is nearly entirely bloody from the suction device. I wish I had some meetings this week so I could stare people into submission.
Am I satisfied with the results? Heck yeah!
Money well-spent? Certainly.
Do I find it odd that my feet are now in focus as I walk? Yes.
I took an unsupervised sunglasses shopping trip today and found a couple pairs that _I_ think look good on me.
First up: the Smith Optics “Parallel Max“. Interchangeable lenses; polarized; comes with two additional sets of lenses.
Next: Wiley-X “Airrage“. ANSI-rated for high-velocity impact (rock to the face on the motorcycle); removable foam gasket (wind block); light-sensitive lenses.
Recent Comments