Ted's Blog

I was looking through Time magazine’s photo essay on Obama behind the scenes at the White House and saw this picture of the president with his aides.

He’s wearing the same socks as me! Several years ago I decided that instead of trying to match up socks, I would just buy a bunch of one kind of sock and that way I wouldn’t have to match them up or worry about losing one. So I have a whole drawer full of this kind of sock. You can’t tell it from the online picture, but from the picture in the magazine I was able to tell further that this is an earlier version of the sock that you can’t get anymore (so don’t bother trying, Jeb). I went to replenish my supply of socks recently and wound up with similar Nike footies, but they are not quite the same. Now I am back to two kinds of socks, but even so I only have to pull out three socks to ensure a match.

Also, I have to say that Obama made yet another great decision in picking this particular sock (though maybe Michelle picked them out; they’re not very expensive). Although Dad called any sock of that style “sissy socks,” they are comfortable and they have lasted a long time.

I had heard about Zenni Optical from Mom who heard about them from Clark Howard. He raves about how cheaply you can get mail order glasses from them. I wasn’t real happy with the clip-on sunglasses that came with my new glasses I got last year from Lenscrafters. They were connected by magnets, but not very securely and the extra weight made my nose hurt after wearing the glasses with sunglasses for a while.

I had looked at the Zenni Optical website before but I needed my pupil distance (distance between my two pupils) which was not part of my prescription. So that held me back, but when I was at Lenscrafters I asked for that measurement and wrote it down for use later (65 mm; it turns out it isn’t that hard to get someone to hold a ruler over your eyes and tell you what it is).

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I’ve been kind of obsessed with the level of Lake Lanier since the media made such a big deal about it last year or so and said it could run out of water completely, or that they might have to use dead zone water that was stored there since the beginning and completely out of oxygen. None of that ever happened and the lake is actually up 10 feet from last November. In fact, just this week it was announced that the drought is over.

Though the amount of water per inch of lake varies, an article from the AJC in January said that 1 foot of Lake Lanier is equal to 10 billion gallons of water and could supply Atlanta for 25 days. That article also said that Lake Lanier holds five times as much water as Lake Allatoona, which is now full.

Part of the problem with the water level was due to a bad gauge at the lake which led people at the dam to release billions of gallons of water, or about 2 feet.

There was a coupon in the paper recently for Trop50, a new orange juice from Tropicana with 50% less sugar. I bought a couple of half gallons of it and gave it a try this morning. It comes in a thinner taller package but otherwise looks just like Tropicana’s orange juice carton (it even has codes you can enter to save 10 square feet of rain forest like the regular juice has).

It tasted like orange juice with a diet aftertaste. I wondered how that worked and whether they were using oranges that weren’t as sweet or something. But when I (finally) looked at the label closely it was really simple: they used 58% less juice. The contents clearly say it is only 42% juice (I usually check this, but the carton threw me) and the first ingredient is water. They use PureVia Reb-A as the sweetener, which is based on Stevia. It may be natural, but it still tastes diet. The FDA banned it until this past December.

That’s the first and last time I will get Trop50.