I just received an email by a reader who doesn’t understand why I write all the personal things I write on my blog. Let me tell you something: I have no secrets. Whatever thought comes into my head, I share it. I am just not a secretive person and I believe that only good can come from sharing. Besides, I don’t write everything on my blog, for example you won’t find anything about my sex life. Although the reason I don’t write about it it’s because of respect for my husband’s privacy rather than because I give a shit if people know all the details or not. I am just an open person and I like it this way.

At all points in my life I had less hair on my head than other women. But the last few weeks I am losing hair in droves. So I went to a dermatologist a few days ago and had a blood test done. Today, the dermatologist told me that in all the years he has been practicing he never seen a female patient with such high levels of the DHEAS hormone. Women are not supposed to have much of that (predominantly male) hormone, but my numbers are off the scale, even compared to men. The doctor asked me twice “seriously, are you sure you are not getting… steroids“?

Now I am supposed to see a gynecologist or an endocrinologist about it and fix it. Or, I will die out of a heart attack (DHEAS creates arrhythmias) or in the best case I will lose most of my hair (lupus-related effect).

God, it sucks to be unhealthy.

Update: Usually, ovary or adrenal cancer is the underlying cause for elevated DHEAS. I will know if I have cancer or not in about a months time or so.

A few weeks ago this weird box shown below was installed all around my town, here in the Bay Area. I don’t know what it is, but ever since my WiFi-capable cellphone is picking up an SSID called “Free Internet Access”. I can’t seem to successfully connect to it though, so maybe they are not activated yet, or something. Would be cool to have free WiFi access no matter where you are.

UPDATE: Mystery solved! This is MetroFi’s free WiFi service that only exists in 4 towns in the Bay Area so far. I am just lucky to live in one of the 4!

UPDATE 2: Apparently it doesn’t work just yet. It let’s you connect to their network and get the right IP addresses via DHCP, but it won’t serve any web pages (or ads for that matter).

On other news, OSNews now has a .mobi URL: osnews.mobi. This page now loads our WAP version of the site. In the future we might redirect it to our cHTML version of the site which is more full-featured.

My 4GB iPod Nano is here, it has 2 GB of free indie alternative rock music in it so far. The most popular group in it is “The Postal Service” to give you an idea of how “underground” that Nano is.

We are big meat-eaters, but I decided to put new food rules at our home (starting Monday). Partly because I want to punish ourselves for losing the Green Card, and partly because it would be good for our health. It’s a “take a bad thing and turn it into a good thing” effort. Essentially, we will be cutting down on meat and animal products a lot and follow a much healthier and balanced diet. We won’t become vegetarians (I don’t want us to be), but we will come pretty close considering to what we usually eat now: out of the 365 days in the year, 350 days have meat in them.

No more.

Meat or fish now will be served only twice a week (ideally, once fish and once meat). Natural yoghurt twice a week. Cheese almost daily (besides, I am married to a French man), but in smaller quantities. A cup of low-fat milk every day, if one desires to (yoghurt must be mandatory if we don’t drink milk). Eggs once a week. Green or tomato salad almost every day, fruits & bread every day. No frying as a cooking method. Butter usage very rare. Here’s the programme I put together:

(Main dishes mentioned only)
Monday dinner:
Beans

Tuesday dinner:
A vegetarian dish
Yoghurt for dessert

Wednesday dinner:
Meat or fish

Thursday dinner:
Eggs
A vegetarian dish

Friday dinner:
Beans with/or veggies

Saturday lunch:
A vegetarian dish
Yoghurt for dessert

Saturday dinner:
A vegetarian dish
(or veggie pizza with cheese)
(or dinner out)

Sunday lunch:
Meat or fish

Sunday dinner:
A vegetarian dish
(or big salad)

I can live with such a diet (and I am not on a low-calorie diet anymore). It’s not the first time that I cut down on meat anyways. My weekday lunches will be vegetarian. JBQ eats lunch at work on weekdays though so I can’t control what he eats there (neither I should). But in our kitchen during dinner, I am the boss from now on.