A while back I mentioned having some vague plans about going gluten-free for a short period of time in the near future.
Well, the future is now.
Starting today, I am going to try and avoid gluten for at least a week, probably two.

I’m still somewhat confused about oatmeal and I’m not sure the foods that don’t, according to the ingredient lists, contain anything gluten-y, are truly free of gluten (feel free to educate me), but for my purposes this isn’t hugely important as I’m trying to avoid most of it, with avoiding all traces being a nice bonus.
Just so you know that any food eaten during this experiment might not actually be truly gluten-free and therefore suitable for coeliacs.

So far most of the information I have came from Frugal Abundance and Gluten-Free Vegan, which is making me think it’s really not as tricky as it seems. Apart from that, I very much intent to try the stretchy bean thing. In fact, I already have some soaked chickpeas that are just waiting to be cooked and turned into hummus.

It’s all making me want to make yummy foods and I’m quite curious if avoiding gluten will make any noticeable difference to my general well-being.

I’m not sure what I’ll do about posting, but I’ll probably at least try a daily food log. No guarantees I’ll stick with it, though.

For some non-foodie stuff, two things.

One, I made me a nifty custom header to replace the spacey one.
I loved the spacey one, and I’m all in favour of outer space photography in general (Nasa has a whole bunch of them available online, if you, too, are into that sort of thing), but it wasn’t particularly vegan-related.
So I thought I’d make my own. I like the GIMP, and I’d taken some pictures of a pretty lilac shrub in a nearby park and didn’t think putting the two together to produce something acceptable would be too difficult.
Now I know lilacs aren’t commonly eaten and don’t generally tend to make a person think of veganism, but they’re among my favourite trees. We had one in the garden of the house where we lived when I was younger, and I always loved that one.
Besides, it has twigs. That makes it sort of related to my blog, right?

A quick Google search told me that the flowers are actually edible, so I really want to find something fun to do with them now and properly associate them with vegan food. Or do something with other edible flowers. Not sure it’s advisable to eat ones from a public park, though.
The lilac is related to the olive tree, apparently. I’d never have guessed that.

Two, I have some more Nutrition Data-love.
After having some nice info about vegetarianism around Earth Day, Nutrition Data recently put up a profile of Troy Loferski, a vegan body builder, showing all the world, or at least the part of the world that reads the Nutrition Data blog, that it’s perfectly possible to be a muscle-loving athlete while being vegan.
Yay!

I already knew this, of course, but the rest of the world doesn’t seem particularly aware of all the joys of veganism, so posts like this on omni (or at least not specifically vegan) blogs make me happy.

More sidebar ramblings.

After making me a tag page I got rid of the tag cloud widget, giving me some more vertical pace on my lovely sidebar.

Now all I have to do is make sure I keep the tag page current…

As much as I love this theme, the sidebar is a little on the long side. This is mostly due to the category widget, though I did create a links post, now visible on top, to at least do away with the widget for that.

Maybe I’ll just sort out the whole tags/categories thing and make it a bit neater. A few very broad categories and a ton of tags.

ETA: I just realised that there’s no need for a “recent posts” thing, seeing as all recent posts are on the front page. And if I cut the top posts from 10 to 5, I’ll save some more vertical space. Whoo!

ETA2: Of course, a tag cloud takes up some space…
Drat!
Can’t I put those on a page, or something?

Another (mostly) foodless post here.

Bonnie tagged me for that five things meme that seems to be going around and Lelly considered everyone who read her meme post tagged, so there’s no escaping it. I’ll have to tell you five completely random, utterly irrelevant things about me you did not yet know.
Not that I mind, really. I can do the omphaloskeptic thing. No physical navel needed. ;)

Here goes:

1. I used to watch a lot of television, but have stopped doing so recently. I still watch TV shows, but virtually all of them online (uitzendinggemist ftw!) where I don’t deal with commercials much. If, during the last few weeks, I ended up watching some regular telly anyway, I got a lot more annoyed and confused at commercials than I used to and have found them even more pointless than before.

2. I love drinking tea and, depending on my choice of tea, can really get my geek on with that (Earl Grey, for example, works very well for this). But I’m also generally too lazy to make it. If I do make me some, I usually drink it either late at night, which leads to me having to get up regularly after having gone to bed, or I drink it during dinner, which, because I usually ignore my body’s warnings, often leads to my stomach being entirely too full and me being uncomfortable for a while.

3. Most of the time I need a haircut. Most of the time I don’t get one. It’s not uncommon for my mum to end up making an appointment for me when I’m back home on a suitable day.

4. Certain things that seem to go pretty much automatically and immediately for most people can take a few seconds longer, like figuring out whether a certain direction is left or right, which involves me looking at my hands while moving them around, or rembering what age I am exactly, which often involves thinking back to my last birthday (tricky, since I avoid celebrating them) and trying to figure out what year we live in and how that compares to the year in which I was born.

5. At the moment I really suck at going to bed on time. Even though I get tired at around midnight-ish, I stay up until way past (does this post have a time stamp?). It’s a pretty recent thing, from the last week or so, but it’s getting annoying. Must be more diciplined about this sort of thing.

As for tagging others, I’m not sure I know any vegan bloggers out there who’ve not yet done this thing. Vegan bloggers that now me, at least. Natalie, have you done it yet?

After playing around with templates some more because I wanted my comments to show up differently from everyone else’s, I decided to just post the thumbnails of pictures for now. At least the ones that don’t show up properly.
If I figure out how to make things look okay again, I might change it back, but for now it’s thumbnails.

I’m considering moving my Blogspot vegan food blog here. Once I have a little more time and can transfer everything. Just my luck that my only post so far is rather photo-heavy.

ETA: seems to have worked just fine, with all the pictures. Nice!