Vegetarian

A coworker is trying to switch to a vegetarian lifestyle, and since I am the only vegetarian most of my coworkers know, they referred her to me for advice. This wasn't a bad idea, if you base it on the principle that sometimes one's purpose in life is to serve as a warning for others. I'm happy to pass on what I've learned through my mistakes.
When I made the decision to stop eating meat, it was not done cold turkey (ha ha). I was fed up with bad experiences attempting to eat chicken (underdone, mostly, but the last straw was when I bit into what should have been a morsel of sweet and sour chicken that was instead fried bone), so chicken was the first meat cut from my diet. This triggered a domino effect that led me to eliminating red meat, later pork, and finally fish. As the years passed, I became less tolerant of any animal products, and stopped eating meat broths and gelatin as well. However, being of the lazy persuasion, I didn't exactly do a lot of research. I didn't read labels like any meat-avoider worth her salt should.
The eye-opening moment for me was lurking in my bag of McDonald's french fries.
"Honey," Husband began, "I almost didn't tell you this, but I knew you'd want to know..." pregnant pause, "McDonald's fries have beef tallow in them."
"What?! Why??" Not that I cared why. He had let the cow fat out of the bag. It was in the fries, and I couldn't change that. I had been eating them for years, blissfully ignorant of their evil ways. And because my love of french fries is somewhere between my love of bubble baths and my love for my first born child, I was shaken to my very core. Would I never be able to eat the most delicious of all potato preparations again? That's when the ingredient checking began. Fortunately for me, McDonald's is pretty much the only fast food restaurant that hates me; there is no beef tallow in other franchises' fries. Unfortunately, plenty of meat is sneaked into plenty of other food products:
Yogurt  - gelatin (discovered, devastatingly, after I fell in love with Dannon Whips and had already eaten several containers, and almost all brands have it)
Broccoli-cheese soup - chicken broth base
Chip dip - gelatin
Queso dip - beef broth
Spinach-artichoke dip - chicken broth
Wendy's Caesar salad - bacon
biscuits - lard
Cracker Barrel corn muffins - fried in bacon grease, and there is some form of meat product or another in damn near every other menu offering at this place
Zio's tomato and alfredo sauces - beef broth
95% of the time, your wait staff will not have a clue which menu items are vegetarian, and you can double that figure* if you're trying to ask the kid behind the fast food counter.
If by asking my advice my coworker is hoping to glean advice from a professional vegetarian, she should consult someone else. However, at the very least I can pass on the most priceless gem of wisdom in the sea of attempted meatlessness: Always, always check the ingredients.

*I'm pretty sure this figure of double 95% is accurate.

Book Reviewer

I love to read; always have. I don't have much time to read these days, with TV and the web and not making reading a priority getting in the way. Still, if a book grabs my attention, I will make time to actually read it. My interest level is purely based on the first few pages. If I haven't holed myself up in my room, blanket wrapped around me, blocking out the cries for Mommy's attention (my spoiled kids expect to eat every few hours, can you imagine?) by the second chapter, the cause is hopeless.
This is the case no matter what genre, which author, whose recommendation led me to, the glowing reviews of, or accolades awarded to the book. I love horror novels, but I had to claw my way through to finish reading The Shining, the Stanley Kubrick movie version of which terrifies me. I have tried to read books from Oprah's book club that I just couldn't be invested in enough to finish (We Were the Mulvaneys, The Poisonwood Bible). I have tried to read books with wonderful reviews that I just knew I'd love if I stuck with it (Wicked; which I did finish, but most decidedly did not love). My husband bought me Lord of the Rings years ago, and even being the geek I am, I haven't finished it, though I've tried several times. I never finished Gone With the Wind, a Pulitzer Prize winner. And normally, I devour books by Toni Morrison (my favorite), but could not finish Paradise.
As much as I wish I could say I only read novels that whisk me on an emotional journey to challenge my understanding of the world around me, I am a sucker for the shallow, gimmicky page-turner. The DaVinci Code: So predictable, so cliched, so adhered to my hands once I opened the cover. Red Dragon/Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal Rising: Graphic, horrific violence, as seen from the mind of the killer himself, and the worse it gets, the more you are compelled to get through the book so you can witness the good guy win.  The Sookie Stackhouse novels: Purely a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure indeed. Even when all that's happened on the page is the description of Sookie's outfit, I have never been tempted to put these books down.
I can't even list criteria here that makes a book entertaining for me, because I haven't found a pattern. I'm not able to say, "I like blank type of books that have blank happening and make me feel blank." I don't know what made me anxious to read every word of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister yet had to trudge through Wicked.  I don't know why I have so much fun delving into the alternate universe of the Sookie Stackhouse series but couldn't make it past the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It's not a subject, genre, or author that keeps me turning pages. A book reviewer would probably at least be able to tell you that the book wasn't worthy because "the material was ill researched and the writing was amateur," or that "the book comes alive with its vivid characters and gripping details." My entire book review, on the other hand, would either read "Finished it," or "Couldn't finish it," however unprofessional that writeup may be.

Sleep Analyst

After being so proud of myself a few weeks ago, I missed an update last week. I had a busy week: I had a root canal, my son started day care, I bought a new car, and overslept twice, making myself late to pick my daughter up from school. It's because I work nights that I am so sleep deprived. After three years of only napping for a couple of hours here and there a day, we put our son in day care so I could get a full day's sleep. The first week didn't work out so well, with all the errands factored in. And once I did get to sleep, it was hard to wake up, hence the oversleeping. Especially Saturday - I slept for about 13 hours. After I had spent the rest of the week on the go, without a chance to write, I thought Saturday would allow me plenty of time to make up for it. Not so. I had severely underestimated my level of exhaustion, which had apparently reached 11. This amount of sleep is rare, especially during the day. I'm accustomed to about 5 hours a day, at most. And although I've worked nights for 7 years now, on my off days I sleep at night, like the rest of the world. Getting several hours of sleep in a row is much more refreshing than 2 2-and-a-half hour naps a day; thirteen hours of sleep is the kind you get to compensate for those naps getting disrupted. Wonder what a professional sleep analyst would say about it? I myself would have no idea.

Photographer

When I'm not neglecting to take photographs altogether - like Halloween 2008, which I greatly regret - my photography skills are sorely lacking. My equipment, until I won a camera in a drawing, was limited to the technology of the camera on my cell phone. With the exception of the occasional disposable model, the camera is a device I would not have purchased on my own. There are certain truths I know about myself: I will one day OD on coffee. I am unable to resist bubble wrap. I do not take pictures. The thought rarely occurs to me. I'm too busy enjoying the goings on to remember to document them.

I have used my camera, though. Mostly for larger occasions like birthdays and Christmas, but a little bit here and there as well. It's supposed to produce higher quality pictures, but in the wrong hands, the advancements of the equipment in use make little difference. For example:

Phone

New Camera

Can you spot the remarkable difference? Nothing like blurred images in high resolution.

Whenever my grandmother would send us pictures she'd taken, there was always one picture she had accidentally taken. Always. It's like a special talent she has of snapping the shutter at the most random moment. We've seen pictures of her finger over the lens, a blurry sideways picture of my uncle on the couch, and many pictures throughout the years that were almost identical to the ones above that I took. Apparently, I inherited the gift.

This may be a subconscious reason for my forgetfulness when it comes to photography. Luckily, someone else always wants to take pictures. For a long time, I was worried that there were no pictures of my daughter's first birthday, because I know I didn't take any. I was quite relieved to find out my mom had taken the pictures. She always gets duplicates for whoever wants them, and for ten years she just hadn't ever given me my copies.

At least she had them developed. With digital photography, my pictures stay on whatever media they're captured by. My favorite Mother's Day gift was a photo album filled with two years' worth of the pictures from my cell phone. Shots of my pregnant belly, my son's newborn shots, shots of my daughter making goofy faces. It was absolutely wonderful. Some of the pictures may have looked a lot like the ones above, but hey - I doubt professional photographers get their own photos given to them as gifts.