I'm sure you all remember Morse as fondly as I do. But after an appropriate mourning period, I replaced him with a first-generation iPhone that a coworker's friend had lying around. And like any good soccer mom, I projected all my hopes and dreams into his name: Suerte.
It's been more than a month, and he's lived up to it so far. In celebration, here are some photos I snapped with his crappy built-in camera. It's probably a lot more information than you need about my life, but hey—you're already reading my blog, so you have time on your hands.
Inaugural photo: What happens when you take a dusty road trip and don't wash your car afterward. Then come the cats of the night.
This is my trusty Pentax (i.e., real camera). I think I took this shot to assuage my guilt at going digital for even a minute.
Least consumer-friendly company name ever, and it doesn't even have the excuse of being Japanese:
Cooly and I took a trip to the Vivarium in Berkeley. This cheeky fellow was flirting with us:
Big snake, little box:
Gecko bellies!
At Sola Lucy, I found this cute Diane von Furstenberg dress for $56—an insane deal, but I couldn't bring myself to spend that much on any one thing at a thrift store. I'm working on the mental block.
Every year since she turned 16, I've made my childhood friend Stephi a birthday mix. Here's what it looked like this year (plus a bonus disc):
On inauguration night, I noticed these two signs while leaving 111 Minna. It's funnier if you know what the Power Exchange is. (Impressionable relatives, don't Google it.)
All sorts of exciting books land on my desk at work. One must-have volume featured useful things you can knit for your pets, like this classic hamster yurt:
On Superbowl Sunday, certain people got smoochy. All you need to know about the chicken and dog hats is that I have awesome friends.
During the walk home from yoga one day, I got a big kick out of the window of Dog Eared Books. Double score!
Wait, what's that on the left? I can't see it in your crappy photo.
Last weekend, Mr. Finney brought me to a schmoozy party at Gershoni design. Their offices are under a supercool dome.
After a while, everyone whipped out their iPhones at once to decide where to go next. I almost passed out from the sheer urbanity of it all.
My righteous big brother sends flowers every Valentine's Day. He started when I was in college, and I don't plan to ever discourage the habit.
By the time my carpool got to Tahoe on V-Day night, the early arrivals had decorated the kitchen with balloons and candy. It inspired me to write this Sweethearts haiku. If you can read it, I'd like to trade eyes:
On the drive back from Tahoe, we stopped for pizza during a blizzard. These napkins made up for the fact that it took seven hours to get home.
During my new year's road trip, I spent time with some thoughtful and very well trained practitioners of bodywork and alternative medicine. In discussions of how to take better care of ourselves, a couple of them said—emphatically—that soy is not beneficial to health, contains minimal protein, and has been known to increase the risk of breast cancer.Since soy is a central part of my diet and (so I thought) one of my main protein sources, that freaked me out. I've been eating cereal with soy milk for breakfast every weekday for years, and I have tofu as a main dish at least a few times a week.
For most of January, I tried to avoid soy: I switched to rice milk in the morning, cut back on tofu, and even bought some dried TVP at Safeway (weirdly, Whole Foods doesn't have it). But I don't know how to cook the TVP and—for real, pinky swear—I love the taste and texture of tofu.
So although I take my friends' opinions seriously, I decided to do some research of my own before making any permanent diet changes. Here's what I learned.
Soy contains phytoestrogens, a type of chemical that can act like estrogen. Higher exposure to estrogen over a woman's lifetime has been strongly linked with increased breast cancer risk. However, "it is currently unclear whether phytoestrogens from soy foods affect breast cancer risk."
A handful of widely publicized studies have been done on the impact of soy on women's health, but nearly all were conducted in Asian countries where women consume diets that are much higher in soy than standard American diets, and all were conducted on small (200 subjects or fewer) groups of women, many of whom were postmenopausal. The results did not indicate that their lifetime soy intake had significantly affected their health.
Studies have also been done on breast cancer patients to see if soy actually has a beneficial impact on their illness. Other studies indicate that consuming soy during puberty may decrease a girl's risk of developing breast cancer later in life. But again, the results were mixed, inconclusive, and controversial.
All of the dozen or so scientific articles I read suggested that since we know very little about the long-term effects of soy on women's bodies, the best idea is to consume soy in moderation and not to worry about it—unless you're a postmenopausal woman who already has cancer, in which case you may want to limit your intake, just in case. When combined with healthy eating (fruits and vegetables, very little sugar, the usual stuff) and regular exercise, soy consumption has not been proven to increase the risk of breast cancer and may even help lower it.
As for the level of protein in soy, the FDA recommends 25 grams of soy protein per day as beneficial for heart health, and the agency reports that replacing animal protein with soy protein lowers fat intake while supplying your body with many of the same nutrients as lean meat. A four-ounce serving of firm tofu contains 13 grams of soy protein.
Whew. Now let's fry up some tofu. I'll bring the TVP if you can figure out what to do with it.
