Monthly Archives: April 2011

Apr17

Burn Notice Fans Visit South Beach

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Burn Notice Fans Visit South Beach
Burn Notice Fans Visit South Beach

As fans of Burn Notice, we visited South Beach and Key Biscayne to see the locations. Click on the image of Fiona to see the trailer for the Fall of Sam Axe episode. Using my little waterproof Olympus, I shot a few seconds of video of Howard at the fountain on Lincoln Rd., a gorgeous pedestrian mall of shops and restaurants in South Beach. We were not able to find parking so we have no images of the beach itself, but we got a nice panorama shot from the Village of Key Biscayne with the city of Miami in the distance.

We were returning to the Ft. Lauderdale airport from Miami where we stayed at the Hotel Urbano. I was surprised to learn that the airport was only about an hour from Miami using the fast toll road. We took the slow road and drove North along the beach communities, seeing Bal Harbour and the Trump towers. Wretched excess. I loved it! We were so busy talking, we forgot to put gasoline in the rental car and got dinged $60 for gas when we turned it in.

Here is an iPad video of the panorama of the luxurious Village of Key Biscayne. It is not as sharp as I thought it would be, and it is wobbly because it is hard to hold the iPad steady.

Apr15

Where the Dopamine Flows Your Energy Goes

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Where the Dopamine Flows Your Energy Goes
Where the Dopamine Flows Your Energy Goes

Today’s NYTimes asks, “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?” Only 2.4% of Americans over age 60 move around for at least 30 minutes per day.  Our bodies are designed to be farmers, or hunter-gatherers, not desk-bound knowledge workers. In a study of people who were forced to overeat and prevented from exercising, some gained weight and some didn’t. Why?

“The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.

We know that dopamine controls movement and mood. People often eat to feel better. Sometimes they go for a walk/jog/run to feel better. Dance or make love or other pleasurable vigorous activity. We know that exercise elevates mode.

Did you know that obese people have lethargic dopamine receptors? The top left image shows the brain scan of a normal person eating. Next to it is the cooler, bluer scan of the obese person eating. Not as much excitement. See article.

The two hot images below them show that, overall, normal weight and obese people have similar brain metabolic activity. The big difference is whether eating lights up their pleasure center (dopamine receptors).

The bottom chart shows Body Mass Index (BMI) from low (skinny) on the left to high (fat) on the right. The number of dopamine receptors that are lit up by food PLUNGES the fatter you get. In terms of getting a dopamine boost, the more you eat, the less you get. Does fat lower dopamine receptors or the other way around? Could this be nature’s way of taking the fun out of eating? See this article from about a year ago.

The results support the notion that type 2 dopamine receptors (D2DR) — brain receptors that have been shown to play a key role in addiction — also play a key role in the rats’ heightened response to food. In fact, as the rats became obese, the levels of D2DR in the brain’s reward circuit decreased. This drop in D2DR is similar to that previously seen in humans addicted to drugs like cocaine or heroin.

We know that movement and non-verbal play lifts mood (increases dopamine). Isn’t it interesting to learn that using food to lift mood becomes a dull weapon the more we use it? This is the paradox that to get more energy, you need to spend more energy.
Nature can be harsh.

Apr15

Ghost Orchid Fakahatchee Strand

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Ghost Orchid Fakahatchee Strand
Ghost Orchid Fakahatchee Strand

I’ll never look at orchids the same way after hunting for the elusive Ghost Orchid with John Kalafarski, a brilliant botanist and all around genius. Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park is a strip of land between Alligator Alley (Interstate 75) at the North and the Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41) to the South. It encompasses much of Florida’s most spectacular swamp. More native orchid species grow in this 75,000 acre wilderness than in any other place on the continent. There is an 11 mile park road, but the park is a wilderness and the goal is to preserve its natural character. We hiked the “mud tram” which is a rickety wooden boardwalk made of two boards precariously balanced on 4×4’s driven into the black swamp muck underfoot.

Fakahatchee ghost orchidWe were seeking the elusive Ghost Orchid which blooms at the start of the summer rainy season. After a long dry winter, this leafless orchid appears briefly in just a few rare locations where the conditions are just right. John, our guide, visits this area often and has a botanist’s eye for the details that lead to the tiny but dramatic wild orchids that flower in the Fakahatchee. John was hoping that we would find the Ghost Orchid on our hike in the middle of April. There had been a brief rain a few days before and the ground was damp, but conditions were not yet perfect and we did not see one despite the Photshoped photo to the left. John wanted to stake out where the orchid was going to bloom so that he could return in a few days’ time to see the bloom, but because the Ghost Orchid does not have any leaves, there is no indicator where it will appear. Botanists have to haunt the territory looking for the blooms. The lucky ones are hiking in tropical rain, swatting mosquitoes as big as the orchids themselves.

The most exciting part was hearing the rumble of an alligator as a jet plane went overhead. John explained that alligators are not afraid of humans, but they don’t understand the sound of the jets overhead and it agitates them. A few steps further and we could smell the alligator who had created a Gator Hole in the black swamp muck. The muck itself was actually clean smelling, just decaying leaves mostly, John dug up a handful for us to sniff. It looked muddy but was actually rather crumbly. We circled around the gator hole so we upwind of the gator and Howard got a pretty good photo.

John explained that the early Spanish visitors called this critter a lizard “legato” so The Lizard is El Legato. Ellygato. Corrupted to ellygotta, then alligator.


 

 

 

 


Anet’s 27 second walk through Everglades ferns. iframe embed plays in iPad2


Howard’s Video as Anet and John discuss finding time to read and the classic Twilight Zone episode that ends with Burgess Meredith’s glasses being broken.

Apr14

Everglades Area Tours

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Everglades Area Tours

The Everglades are beautiful.  We kayaked in a mangrove tunnel with a bird guide and watched a little gator flee.  The next day, an ex-Marine power boated us out to the 10,000 islands so we could kayak in salt water to see manatees and turtles and to visit a small island with a sandy beach, hardwoods at the center and a portapotty.  While we were on the island, some canoe campers landed, planning to spend the night. They were touring and camping in the islands (that looks like a fun trip!).  The following day we spent several hours in the Fakahatchee strip, a botanists paradise, with a Ph.D. naturalist looking for Ghost orchids.  Didn’t find any, but heard, smelled and saw a gator at his hole.   Very gushy hike.

It is fun and absorbing to be in an environment so different from home.  Their rainy season is the summer.  The Glades come alive when the water arrives.  They told us if we could tolerate the heat, humidity and mosquitoes, the Glades were at their best in the summer.

Apr9

What Makes You Feel Nurtured?

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What Makes You Feel Nurtured?

Karen Clark is a business dynamo who guides people to succeed in online businesses. She is also a wife, mother, motivational speaker and school volunteer. She does much more than this, with great enthusiasm and generosity. I have been impressed and grateful for the upbeat, helpful MeetUp meetings she sponsors for small business owners in her community.

One of the problems with high output is burnout. Motivated, energetic people have so much they want to do, and they know that ideas are easy, execution is hard. But it is all about execution. Trouble is, sometimes you execute yourself.

Karen recently asked her Facebook friends “What makes you feel nurtured?” Her friends posted lots of jokes along with useful answers like, “Fires. Rain. Reading for pleasure. Shopping really good music. Eating a little expensive fine food or wine. Travel. Baths with aroma therapy. I bet one of yours is walking.”

Fires and rain could be expanded to spending time in nature. Summer in California lends itself to walking along natural creeks and in county parks. But is this simply generating more things for the To Do List? What is the underlying question?

I, too, have been wrestling with this because I have spent the past seven years building my online business. It is a business school axiom that if you survive seven years, your business will be a success. I guess that means that, technically, I am over the hump and now it is time to throttle back, step back for a moment and take a deep breath.

I have been working so hard that my sense of humor has disappeared and my creativity needs refurbishing. What did I do? Travel to someplace that feeds my soul. What I really wanted was sunshine and warm ocean water, but I am too frugal to spend much so I snapped up a $149 flight to Ft. Lauderdale. Staying in the funky TropiRock where I have to ask at the front desk for shampoo (conditioner not available). I have to sign out a beach towel. This is economy!

Yet I sit on the beach at daybreak and wait for the sun to rise. Minor scratches from gardening in California are healing at twice the normal rate thanks to the sunshine and warm sea. Am I relaxing?

Well, the book I read during the first two days was “Drive,” a management book contending that what people really want is autonomy, mastery and purpose. Karen Clark has plenty of purpose. She has already created, made successful and sold a business. She is currently deeply involved with at least two businesses of her own. I can speak to her mastery of the technical side of what she does, her knowledge is impressive and she is a gifted teacher.

For me, the most valuable information in the book “Drive” was the experiment to see what it took to create symptoms of “generalized anxiety disorder” as defined by the DSM as three of the following symptoms.

  • Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
  • Being easily fatigued
  • Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
  • Irritability
  • Muscle tension
  • Sleep disturbance

Study participants were instructed to scrub their lives of noninstrumental activities. That is, small activities they undertook not out of obligation or to achieve a particular objective, but because they enjoyed them.

Researcher Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “After just two days of deprivation… the general deterioration in mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment would have been inadvisable.”

That’s how I had eroded my creativity and energy — by disciplining myself to focus on productive work and to eliminate “noninstrumental activity.” I scrubbed the flow out of my life. And I became exhausted.

So this is the long answer to Karen’s short question. It is not specifically fires or rain or long walks. It is intentionally letting play into your life. Non-verbal play, best of all. Leverage that autonomy to choose play as a restorative. Nurture yourself with noninstrumental activity.

Like reading a fashion magazine, just for fun. No need to commit to a novel. Just break the focus, the intensity, for a few minutes to do something pleasurable. Rub your feet on that silly platform of spools that someone gave you. Accept the cat’s offer to play Mousie. Walk outside for a moment for no reason except that it is a beautiful day. Now that I’ve had a few days off, I see that nurturing myself does not have to be a big production. It is something that is created by a zillion small decisions.

Kinda like beauty or fitness or radiance. You actively choose to nurture yourself with beauty or stretching or music or dance. In the moment, and just for a minute or two. But enough to lift your heart and restore your spirit.

Apr1

iPad2 Safari Gray Screen Freeze

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iPad2 Safari Gray Screen Freeze

Safari froze on my new iPad2. Screen grayed out, nothing worked. Turns out, this is a common problem. Glad I found this article on the Apple website! Learned how to force close and how to reboot the iPad2. So glad I don’t have to drive to the Apple store to get it fixed!

Solution: to force quit the app, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on top of iPad for a few seconds until a red slider appears, then press and hold the Home button until the application quits. This gets you back to home screen with all the icons.

Then restart (reboot) your iPad. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider to turn off iPad. To turn iPad back on, press and hold the Sleep/Wake until the Apple logo appears. It will take a minute or 2 to reboot.

Then clean out Safari. In the Home screen tap Settings / Safari. Clear the History, Cookies, and the Cache. Now try Safari.