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A tax return is what you send to the government by April 15th of each year. What they send back to you, if you were dumb enough to let them hold your money all year without paying you any interest on it, is called a tax refund. I can’t believe how often I hear the term tax return used to indicate the speaker’s enthusiasm for a fat check they are supposed to get in the mail. I’ve even seen advertisements this year promising to educate you on ways to increase the size of your tax return. Of course, the only way to increase the size of what you send to the government is fill out more forms than you are required to and mail them all to the IRS, which will just increase how much you have to pay to send it. Duh.

Jonathan woke up Wednesday morning saying his right foot hurt. He had played outside with some friends the night before so we assumed a twisted ankle or a sore muscle and sent him off to school normally. He came out of school that afternoon still limping. When I got him home he crashed on the couch and slept for two hours, which is very unusual for him. That night I had to come into the office for some UPS work and I brought the kids with me. He was still limping and complaining when Erica came to pick them up at 7:45 so she took him to the local InstaCare facility. They diagnosed a bacterial infection in his heel and gave him a shot of uber-antibiotics. They also prescribed a 10 day cycle of oral antibiotics that Erica took to the all night pharmacy to have filled. I picked it up about an hour later and paid $129 for it after insurance had covered a measly $26. The instacare place wanted to see him again after 24 hours so I took him back yesterday afternoon and paid another copay only to have the doctor take a look at his foot and say “It’s getting better. Let’s give him another shot and see him again tomorrow.” We were in and out in about 15 minutes… that’s well over a dollar a minute. Oh well. I guess it can be fairly serious to have an infection in that area of your body. It can easily make its way from the inner layers of the skin and fibrous tissue of the bottom of the foot to tendons and bone, which would require a long hospital stay and IV antibiotics. He’s had to stay off it now for about 48 hours and I’m fully expecting them to increase that time after his followup visit today. Aside from that he will have had to endure 3 injections in 3 days, which for a 6 year old must be something like making the journey to hell.
We assume he must have acquired this particular little friend by playing in a large puddle that has been near the playground at school for the past few days. I hope no other kids have had to deal with similar issues. It’s no fun and it is certainly not cheap! Jonathan is a trooper, though, and he is being as tough as he can. We’ve purchased a couple new books, movies and toys to help keep him from going stir-crazy having to sit on the couch but if it goes more than a couple more days we’re gonna have a real problem.

February 7th 2006 was the first day I recorded my daily weight. I started by keeping track of it using software written for the Palm OS by John Walker, author of The Hacker’s Diet, which I highly recommend to anyone considering dieting or wanting to learn more about how to lose weight. After a few months of entering my weight in my Palm every day I switched to a website that was inspired by The Hacker’s Diet: www.physicsdiet.com. The site generates prettier graphs that can be easily linked from other web pages and also tracks and calculates a few more stats than the Palm software.

In the year since I started I’ve managed to lose 32 pounds, which is a bit short of some of the goals I’ve set for myself, but something to be proud of nonetheless. Here’s a chart of my weight for that year period:

When I switched to the physics diet site from the Palm based software I only brought over weekly weights, so the first part of the graph is a little bit herky-jerky. As you can see I had a little trouble July-August and around the holidays, but other than that I have managed to keep a pretty good downward trend. My current goal is to get down to about 200 pounds by the time we go on vacation on the 21st of March, and I know I can acheive that goal if I stay consistent. I haven’t been on any special diet in the past year, I’ve just been more conscious of what I eat and I have been actively working to eat less each day. I think just charting my weight has been enough motivation to stick to my diet. Being able to see almost realtime how what I ate yesterday reflects on my physical state gives excellent feedback. At first I was averse to counting calories, but over the past few months I have started (almost unconsciously) to keep track of how many calories I am taking in. In some ways I think this has been a bad move, because I sort of rationalize things, i.e. “I only had 700 calories while I was at work today, so I can eat this big dinner even though I don’t know how many calories it is and it may very well be a couple thousand by itself.” I started out last February being very strict in what I ate every day, sticking to the same exact routine instead of trying to meet a particular calorie budget but being flexible in how I got there. I think the routine was a better way to go. It gave me more consistent results.

I’ve also recently begun slowly integrating more physical activity into my weightloss plan, making it more of a full fitness plan. The Hacker’s Diet exercise plan is pretty good, and I used that for several months, but recently I’ve been using the Xbox version of Yourself Fitness to plan my workouts, and so far I am pretty impressed with it. I’ve got a long way to go before I can consider myself “in shape” in terms of my weight or my physical ability, but I am slowly getting there and it has been enjoyable in many ways that I didn’t anticipate. After probably ten years of telling myself I needed to lose weight and get in shape, it feels really good to have made so much progress.

We ate dinner Saturday night at what is probably Utah’s newest pizzeria. Settebello Pizzeria Napoletana is located at 260 S 200 W in Salt Lake City and attempts to bring the old world taste of Neapolitan Pizza to America through authentic recipes, ingredients and techniques. It’s run by two men who served in the same mission I did, so they had first hand experience of how delicious (and how different from American) real pizza is. I got to speak with one of the owners for a few minutes after we ate and he said they are still working out a few bugs but things are going really well. This is their second location. The first is in Henderson, Nevada.

I had known about their soon to be open establishment for a few weeks and I had really been looking forward to it. We ordered a Caprese salad to start with, which was excellent. I forgot to ask the owner if they had imported real Buffalo mozzarella, because it certainly tasted like they did. I had a Margherita (mozzarella, basil and olive oil over crushed fresh tomatoes) and my wife had a Diavola (margherita with peppered salame and roasted red peppers). After my first bite I leaned back in my chair with a giant smile on my face. I couldn’t help it. It was so good I was pretty instantly transported back to Italy. It was the first time in more than 12 years that I had tasted pizza like that. The crust is slow-raised and cooked quickly in a wood fired, extremely hot oven (most pizzaiolos in Italy keep their ovens between 800 and 1000 degrees) so it stays thin and slightly chewy, with little scorched areas. The flavor of the dough itself is one of the most important aspects of the pizza for me… it’s not just something to hold toppings, like American pizza is. The San Marzano tomatoes are crushed fresh, not cooked into a sauce, so they have a lot of flavor… very tart and sweet. They use fresh mozzarella cheese, which is much softer and more moist than American mozzarella, so it melts and spreads out on the pizza and ends up gooey and delicious. They then drizzle the whole thing with a little olive oil and spread shreds of fresh basil across it. The combination is heaven. The other pizzas on the menu build on the Margherita, and depart from it in a couple instances. They all feature artisan quality ingredients either imported from Italy or made by specialty producers in America.

We bought a gift certificate for my brother in law, who served in Italy, but probably didn’t ever get to taste napoli style pizza. He served in the north, where pizza is a very different beast… still good, but not the same.

If you are in the area, or willing to make a trip, I highly recommend Settebello. Be prepared for a different pizza experience, especially if you’ve never had napoli pizza before. You’ll like it. I already want to go back.