Blessed by the Potato

As you all know, I’m going prematurely bald. As many of you know, I’ve been taking rogaine (or store brand minoxidil) for about 2 years now to slow the loss. I haven’t regrown any hair, and in fact it hasn’t completely stopped my hairloss — just slowed it down.

Every time I’m due for a new bottle, I read the box it comes in (perhaps because I’ve got a touch of the OCD), and every time this figure completely stumps me:

“If your degree of hair loss is more than shown, this product may not work”

Yet there are three degrees of hair loss shown in the photos. It just confuses me all to hell. I think the image is trying to say that it will help with a greater degree of hair loss if the hair loss is further down towards the back of your head, but will only help hair loss further up if only a small amount is taking place… but I had to actually measure the distance those circles (squres here — they’re circles on the box, and to be fair, on the box they’re arranged vertically, so seeing the different levels of the boxes is even harder) were from the top of the guy’s head to see that there was a difference there. To my eye, it just looked like three different degrees of hair loss. I really think that figure needs to be redone… it also makes me wonder if I should stop using the stuff. I started out using it with loss somewhere around the middle figure (but possibly as bad as the 3rd), but I think my loss is even further up towards the front of my head than the first figure — and now I’m pretty sure I’m worse than all 3 (though my loss is more side-to-side than these sketches seem to be).

While I do believe it’s helped me not lose any more hair, I certainly haven’t grown any back. Complicating that fact, though, is that I’ve only been taking half the dose. This is something that I do almost all the time with medication: it usually affects me pretty strongly (and I did get enlarged hands and unexpected weight gain), so I’m the guy buying regular-strength versions of everything when everyone else is buying “extra strength value packs” and popping two just to be sure. Even when I had my kidney stone I was breaking my morphine in half. But… perhaps that doesn’t automatically apply to Rogaine. So, I’m going to give it 4 more months, and I’m going to use it at the full recommended strength. If there’s no regrowth then, it’ll be hello Lex Luthor look!

But if Rogaine asks, tell them I stopped using it because of that figure.

So, as I think most everyone knows by now, Wayfare was recently diagnosed with Celiac disease and can’t eat any more foods with gluten… which is a lot. Well, the story’s a bit more complicated than that — first we need to get an appointment with a GI specialist, and a bunch of other steps that I’ll let her talk about. The main thing is that we’re preparing for a gluten-free lifestyle, while at the same time having a gorging good time on all the bread and pizza she can eat as a farewell.

Just to give a bit of background, celiac disease is, from what the internet tells me, an autoimmune attack against the small intestine triggered by gluten proteins found in wheat, rye, and barely. The only treatment is a life-long gluten-free diet (I’m still trying to find out how much, if any, gluten contamination is allowed; I’ve found one source that says less than 200 ppm, which is “separate spoons” low). This is actually kind of difficult, since so many foods have wheat or gluten in them.

Gluten is the protein in flour that gives dough its elasticity or chewiness — it’s also what helps form the structures in dough that hold carbon dioxide released by yeast to give the final product its airy, bubbly texture. Because of this, it’s used pretty widely, both in the form of flour (often added to things where at first thought you might not expect it, such as sauces, dressings, and drink mixes) and as an additive or binder for medications, preservatives, candies, etc.

The ubiquity of wheat flour (and gluten contamination) will of course make eating out hard, but the sheer usefulness of gluten in cooking is also going to be a pain for making homemade alternatives. If you consider flour, there are a number of different types at the grocery store: bread flour, all purpose, and cake flour, just to name the standard “white” flours. The main difference between them is the relative gluten content: breads and pizza dough need a lot of gluten for the elasticity, and thus bread flour has the most gluten. Cakes and pastries often need a flour that has less gluten so that they come out flakier. All purpose is in the middle. Just using the wrong type of wheat flour can often make a loaf of bread or batch of biscuits come out a little off, so trying to do without gluten entirely is pretty challenging, above and beyond the issue of the alternative flours (corn, rice, potato, sorghum, quinoa, etc.) each having different, arguably inferior flavours to wheat.

Right now, I’m trying to create gluten-free alternative recipes for use at home, preferably only using the 3 most commonly available alterative flours (rice, potato, and corn flour). I’m starting with recipes that don’t rely on the glutenous properties of flour, and in fact my thinking is that any recipe that has a caution not to over-mix, or to let the batter rest so as not to activate the gluten, has a good chance of working well. Indeed, I think the things that make “batters” rather than “doughs” will have the best chance of surviving the translation. So far, I’ve managed to make some decent belgian waffles, and will try a batch of biscuits next. I’ll post these to the recipes section as soon as I find a variation that’s edible (though check back, as I may change the recipes as I experiment).

I know that there are a lot of recipes and products available on the market already, but I’m a little leery of them after the first few I saw. Many of the recipes were trying to do too much at once — making something low fat and gluten free (we’ll worry about making things low fat once we can make them gluten free and edible), or invoving combinations of dozens of ingredients (mixtures of a half dozen flours plus additives to replace the flour). We went out to a gluten free bakery in town and the grocery store, and tried some of the products on offer. The bread was, in the words of the proprietor of the gluten free bakery “not bread. It’s toast. You have to toast it to eat it.” She also sells a “surprisingly good” loaf that’s fairly expensive, but it actually wasn’t too bad. (I think it was a little too soft to make a good sandwich, but then the piece I had was freshy microwaved to make it warm & soft). They had some brownies and pretzels that were quite good (and brownies was one of the things I figured would be easy to do). Then we tried some cookies that started off tasting pretty good with a decent texture… and they turned to ash in our mouths. They left behind this nasty, gritty texture and aftertaste that even a whole can of coke couldn’t get rid of. I’m hoping I can do a better approximation of a cookie than that. FYI: Avoid “Enjoy Life” brand health/alt food products.

Well, I just got back from the dentist after having a crown put on the tooth I broke on a TicTac about a month ago. My dentist was fairly concerned because the crown is so thin in the centre that the porcelain didn’t coat the metal underneath, so you can see the shiny spot. Of course, a shiny spot in the centre is nothing new for me; I’ve had metal fillings before (and still do in the top), and of course, the top-centre of my head is pretty shiny, too. It’s funny though, since I had a pit that was well on its way to becoming a cavity in that tooth, and they reproduced the pit in the porcelain crown. Now I guess I’m stuck with it. Oh, and my dental insurance doesn’t cover crowns. It raises the question of course of what it does cover: AFAIK, insurance is supposed to be there to cover unexpected, expensive events. It doesn’t get much more unexpected or expensive than breaking a tooth and needing a crown. By contrast, paying for half of one-third of my cleaning/checkups (I go every 4 months now since my teeth are so bad, but they only cover one per year) and half my fillings is more of a subsidy than insurance: I know I’ll have a checkup every X months and can budget for that, and with my mouth I can even tell you that roughly, I’ll have a cavity that needs filling in March, and then another one approximately 18 months after that. Then every 18 months thereafter until all my teeth are prosthetic. These are not only relatively known events, they’re also about as cheap as they come in the dental playbook (of course, that is only speaking relatively).

On a sadder note, I realized that over the past few weeks, I’ve actually seen my dentist more than my friends. Granted, the weather’s been terrible, I’ve been hella busy, people are busy planning weddings or babies, and Baum got a girlfriend, but it’s still really, really sad. Hopefully that’ll change though, as spring is coming, and I’ve got a new place that’s still waiting for a housewarming party, and I should be able to come back for more Friday/Saturday nights as work (hopefully) tapers off a bit, and I don’t have any more Monday dentist appointments.

Back on the topic of shiny spots on the top of my head, my mom was talking with my dad’s doctor about thinning hair, and how it was ironic that my dad was the one recovering from chemo, but I’m the one with the seriously thinning hair. She said the doctor said that that “stuff you just pick up at the drug store to put on your head doesn’t work” and gave her a bottle of this plant extract stuff to give me. I was a little taken aback, I mean, this isn’t just some stuff I picked up, it’s Rogaine, FDA/Health Canada-approved with ~60% success rate (for me, not so much — it’s definitely slowed the loss, but not fully stopped it, let alone lead to regrowth). Heck, it even had a Simpson’s episode! (“I love you too, Karl”). So instead she gives me this even more expensive plant extract stuff that’s “really supposed to work” and ugh, it reeks. I think I’d rather go bald. So then my mom says that even that won’t really work, and that the only cure for baldness is to get a hair transplant, then says I should go out and get one since it’s not seemly for a man my age to be so very bald. She then starts explaining the process, and I’m just like “yes Mom, I’m a night owl, I’ve seen the infomercials…”

Anyway, I’ve seen a ton of reports lately about the benefits of microwaving your sponges to keep them bacteria free. Speaking as a bioelectromagnetics scientist, I just wanted to clarify that yes, it does work, but it’s not related to anything magical about the microwave (well, not for sure, anyway). Those reports also recommend that you do this with the sponge wet, so basically you’re just using the microwave to boil the water and heat-sterilize the sponge. You can do this with a kettle or on the stovetop too (drop the sponge in a large mug and pour in some boiling water from the kettle, or bring a pot of sponges + water to a boil on the stove). The microwave does seem to be a bit faster (~2 minutes), perhaps because water tends to superheat in microwaves and steam hangs around a bit longer, so you’re getting more heat. The method I like to use is to take a microwave-safe plastic or glass cup, put the sponge in it and fill ~3/4 full with water, then turn it on high and wait for about half the water to boil off.

My hearing, which was never very good to begin with, has really been going downhill lately. My car stereo used to never see the double-digits on the volume (I believe it goes to twenty, but never felt the need to crank it) but now it lives comfortably at 12, going up through 15 for some songs/news reports. Of course, that’s partly because the car is getting louder, too. For the most part, I’m having the most difficultly distinguishing one person talking from another, or a sound from background noise. This leads to much hilarity:

[At a party tonight] “Have you ever seen the A-Team?”

[I misheard] “Eighteen? Is that like 24 but where he gets to take a nap?”

Of course, even more hilarious than my continued slide into senescence is how completely inept scientists can be about certain things. Mailing lists especially. Right now I’ve got four emails that came in today from people sending a message to the whole group asking to be removed after the monthly reminder email came out (this group actually sees more traffic from the montly reminder/unsubscribe message than it does from discussions), plus one email from someone asking to be added to the group! (You can only post if you’re already a member). Another group that sees much more traffic has had nearly half of its traffic lately devoted to morons trying to trade attachments. The mail server strips any non-text attachments, so when the message comes through without an attachment (and with the [attachment removed] notice); they, of course, try again. We’ve tried telling them to put it on a web host and add a link, but if we go more than 3 days without suggesting that, these people can’t seem to figure it out (the same person sometimes!) so then they offer the helpful suggestion that “if anyone wants this just email me and I’ll send you the attachment by private email.” And every time without fail at least 6 people respond to the entire list with their email address and a request for the file.

I won’t even get into engineers putting forks in the microwave because “one’s ok and you need two to close the circuit” because as hilarious as that story is, it’s been told before…

My neck has gotten a bit better over the weekend, but now my shoulders are all achy from holding my head at strange angles for two days. It looks like this is the result of some sort of strange bug, because Wayfare, my mom, and my sister all came down with severely sore necks in the last few days. I didn’t feel feverish, but I am running a slight temperature at the moment. I only checked after my mom mentioned that it might be some sort of illness, but it was a strange one because it didn’t have any other symptoms…