Barclay's and Travelers' Cheques

Warning to Americans traveling abroad....

When you purchase travelers' cheques, one of the steps you are advised to take is to keep your receipt separate from the cheques, even to the step of leaving the originals at home and taking a photocopy of the receipts in case you need to recover the cheques.

This is what we did - we left the original receipts at home and brought a photocopy, just in case.
We had a problem when we tried to exchange the travelers' cheques for Kenyan Shillings in Nairobi.

It is Barclays' policy to require the original receipt when cashing travelers' cheques. We were scared, as most of our money was in this form. Luckily, there are other exchange bureaus that do a phone verification of the travelers' cheques and therefore, do not require the original receipts.

Just a warning, if you plan to deal with Barclay's, bring the original travelers' cheque receipt.

Spend more to save more?

Here’s a story from the NY Times.

People concerned about the high price of gasoline are keeping their big cars and SUVs and adding a third small car like a Prius or a Yaris or a Civic so that they can save money on gasoline.

Pierre Tremblay, 67, of Howell, Mich., bought a Toyota Prius this month because driving his Dodge Ram pickup 40 miles round-trip to work was costing so much. So far the Prius is getting 55 miles per gallon, compared with 13 for the truck.

“I can go to work now, back and forth, on less than a gallon,” said Mr. Tremblay, a maintenance manager for a cement company. “Before it was at least three.”

With regular unleaded gas averaging $3.53 a gallon in Michigan this week, according to AAA, that is a savings of over $8 every workday.

But Mr. Tremblay was not ready to get rid of his pickup, which he uses to haul a camping trailer.

Americans have spent $20 billion more on gasoline so far this year compared with 2006, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. That works out to about $146 a person, a fraction of what a new car costs.

We're in Nairobi!

We arrived on Friday, 25 May 2007. After spending one night in a hotel, we moved into the apartment on Karuna Road, near Sarit Centre in the Westlands of Nairobi.

Some History on Nairobi for you...

Nairobi has the rare boast of owing its existence to a railway line. The city was conceived at the turn of the century when the Mombasa to Lake Victoria railway reached a swampy stretch of land known to the Maasai as Nyrobi or 'place of cool waters.' Here a scruffy shanty town rose up and today, a century later, Nairobi is the largest city between Cairo and Johannesburg with a population of 1.5million. Although it cannot be compared with the sprawl of the world's capitals (it will take you 20 minutes to walk across the central business district), Nairobi is a lively and cosmopolitan place.

Like many other African cities, Nairobi has its share of bustling markets, skyscrapers, alarming matatu (taxibus) drivers, dusty shanties and leafy suburbs with sweeping gardens. It's a good place to tap back into the world in between safaris and catch up on international news, get your films developed, wander through book shops and send off your post cards to envious neighbours. There are plenty of places to eat, but Nairobi's most famous restaurant is The Carnivore, where you can taste anything from zebra to crocodile. It may sound like a vegetarian's nightmare, but the vegetarian meals are apparently very good too. Pop in to the Thorn Tree Cafe at the Stanley Hotel. It is named after the huge thorn tree planted in 1961, whose trunk serves as a notice board for travellers.

More details later....

Happy Hoopy Towel Day

Once again, it's time to be sure that -- at least for one day -- you know where your towel is.

It's Towel Day this Friday, May 25th.

You sass that hoopy Douglas Adams? Now there's a frood who knew where his towel was. You are invited to join your fellow hitch hikers in mourning the loss of the late great one. Join in on towel day to show your appreciation for the humor and insight that Douglas Adams brought to all our lives.

It seems fitting that we are traveling... hopping continents on Towel Day.
Thank you Douglas for the humor needed to survive travel in today's crazy world.
We miss you.

... and they're off!

In case you have forgotten, We are leaving on Thursday, 24 May for our trip to Nairobi, Kenya. We will be in Kenya for 5 months, returning on 24 October.

During our visit in Kenya, our sons (Forest and River) will be conducting a service project, sponsored by their school, called Caring Across Continents. They have collected money over the past 3 weeks and will be contacting and meeting students at a school in one of the slums around Nairobi. They will find out what it is that the students need the most and purchase it using the collected money and deliver it to the students. With just over $1500 collected, they will be able to help a couple of schools or one for a long time.
Also, while in Kenya, the boys will attend a Kenyan school and participate in cultural exchange in the way of pictures and stories, while learning as the Kenyans do. Updates to and more info about this project can be found at the project's web site -- http://www.caringacrosscontinents.org.

I wanted to share all this news with you.
You can eMail me, Skype Me, or leave me a voicemail (we will have internet access in our apartment in Nairobi) and also check my web site for updates -- http://www.freelancegeek.us. 

Food Diary

Feeling the need to do something about my high Triglycerides, I decided to speak with someone. Last Monday, I spoke with a friend and neighbor of ours who is a Nutritionist.

Beginning on this past Wednesday and through Friday, I kept a diary of everything I ate and drank. On Sunday, Margaret came over and read over the diary.

She said that with exception of the "Organic Granola Bars" I had that were mostly sugar and very little granola (fiber), I ate a very good diet as long as I keep away from a lot of sugar and exercise everyday.

My diet will change drastically over the next week and for the next 5 months, so exercise everyday and eat as healthy as possible is the best I can do.

Oppose the Anti-Wind Energy Section of H.R. 2337

Urge your Representative to oppose the Anti-Wind Energy Section of H.R. 2337
This Anti-Wind Bill Would Strangle Clean Wind Energy Jobs and Rural Development.

Take Action!

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) has just introduced a bill (H.R. 2337) that would place enormous, wrong-headed restrictions on America’s growing wind energy efforts. If enacted, the bill would severely hurt farmers, ranchers and other landowners who have – or want to have – clean, income-producing, wind energy turbines on their property. Anti-Wind Energy Section of H.R. 2337, establishes onerous standards for siting, construction, monitoring, and adaptive management that must be satisfied by all wind projects to avoid, minimize, and mitigate adverse impacts on migratory birds and bats despite the fact that wind turbines cause less than 0.003% of human-cause bird mortality.

The bill would impose:

• Imprisonment and a $50,000 fine for placing a wind turbine on private property without first gaining approval from bureaucrats including the head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

• Impose a heavy-handed “solution” where there is no significant problem:
- The bill claims to protect birds by placing onerous new regulations on wind turbines.
- Meanwhile, vastly more birds – on a scale of 10,000 to less than one – are killed by house cats and plate glass windows than by a single wind turbine.
- The bill completely ignores the most serious effects of continued reliance on traditional fossil fuels, human-induced global warming, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has associated with mass extinctions of species.

Please email or call your Representative to request that he or she oppose the Subtitle D Anti-Wind Energy Section of H.R. 2337.

Take Action!

Change ExxonMobil from the Inside

ExxonMobil's annual shareholder meeting is May 30, 2007. If you own Exxon shares, you have a special opportunity to make a difference. Below are three resolutions on this year's ballot that address global warming and renewable energy which you should know about.

• ITEM 5 - BOARD CHAIRMAN AND CEO
  Shareholders urge the Board of Directors to take the necessary steps to amend the by-laws to require that, whenever possible and subject to any presently existing contractual obligations of the Company, an independent director shall serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors, and that the Chairman of the Board of Directors shall not concurrently serve as the Chief Executive Officer. Read the rationale.
• ITEM 15 - GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS GOALS
  Shareholders request that the Board of Directors adopt quantitative goals, based on current technologies, for reducing total greenhouse gas emissions from the Company's products and operations; and that the Company report to shareholders by September 30, 2007, on its plans to achieve these goals. Such a report will omit proprietary information and be prepared at reasonable cost. Read the rationale.
• ITEM 17 - RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT LEVELS
  Shareholders request that ExxonMobil's Board adopt a policy of significantly increasing renewable energy sourcing globally, with recommended goals in the range of between 15%-25% of its energy sourcing by between 2015-2025. Read the rationale.

If you would like to know what happens at the meeting in Dallas, TX but cannot attend, you can appoint a person to go in your place. You will still be solely responsible for voting.

Click here to sign up to appoint someone to represent you at the ExxonMobil shareholder meeting

New Blog Location - Blogger

Hello my friends.

As you know, my family is traveling to Nairobi, Kenya this Summer for my wife to do her dissertation research. We are also collecting money for Caring Across Continents ( www.caringacrosscontinents.org ) so we can help a school in a slum around Nairobi.

I host my blog (FreelanceGeek) on my server from my home office. During our 5-month absence from home, I will be powering down the server and redirecting my blog to freelancegeek.blogspot.com

I wanted to give you a little advance warning of the change - it should take effect over the next week, so I can be sure everything is running and we can keep in touch while I am away.

Thank you for visiting and I hope you will continue to follow our adventures from now thru Halloween.

(Your RSS feed will also change, but I will post that as soon as I make sure what it will be so you can add the new feed to your aggregator)

-- UPDATE --
The new RSS feed link is http://freelancegeek.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emmissions up

U.S. and Russian greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2005, more than canceling out a dip in the European Union’s emissions despite growing calls to limit global warming, official data shows. Combined emissions by the United States, Russia and the EU, accounting for about half the world total, rose by 0.4 percent to 14.55 billion tons in 2005 from 2004, according to data compiled by Reuters from the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.

“Emissions trends are continuing upwards, which contradicts political rhetoric globally,” Bill Hare, a Greenpeace adviser who also works at German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said during 166-nation U.N. climate talks in Bonn.

U.S. data submitted to the Secretariat show emissions rose by 0.7 percent in 2005 to a record 7.24 billion tons and were 16.3 percent above 1990 levels.

Russia’s report shows that emissions, which plunged with the collapse of Soviet-era smokestack industries in the 1990s, rose by 2.2 percent in 2005 to 2.13 billion tons. But they were still 28.7 percent below 1990 levels.

Emissions by 27 EU members dipped by 0.8 percent to 5.18 billion tons and were 8.0 percent below 1990 levels, with big 2005 cuts by Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

“The figures could still be adjusted slightly,” said Andreas Barkman of the European Environment Agency.

The United States, the EU and Russia are the main emitters among industrialized societies. Nations including Japan and Canada have not sent in data for 2005.

The European Union and Russia are signatories of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, which seeks to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 35 industrialized nations by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 in a first small step to slow warming.

President George W. Bush opposes Kyoto-style caps on emissions, saying they would cost jobs, but is trying to cut the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per dollar of economic output by 18 percent in the decade to 2012.

Washington says it is on track to reach that goal. Some U.S. states, such as California, and some cities are embracing Kyoto-style caps.

Money is no Object(ion) to going Green

from Treehugger

I hear it sometimes and I have said it myself,
“If I had more money, I could do more for the environment.”

While that might possibly be true, it is also accurate to suggest that a lack of money can indeed also look after the environment. Access to wealth can lead to purchases of often unnecessary ‘luxury’ items that bring their own eco-burden. The most environmentally conscious acts are often the cheapest. Like putting on a sweater rather than turning on, or up, the heating. Compact fluoro lighting saves money in the longer term. Owning and using a bicycle for city travel instead of a car. Catching public transit instead of paying a car's loan, insurance, maintenance, fuel, registration, etc. Buying secondhand, preloved goods, in lieu of new resource-intensive stryofoam wrapped or blister pack clad goods. Taking holidays locally rather than flying off to seemingly exotic locales. Placing a brick or weighted bottle into your toilet cistern, so it flushes less drinking water down the drain. Buying direct from farmers markets before visiting the supermarket. Reducing meat consumption, in favor of vegetables, fruit, grains and legumes. Not buying wasteful ‘packaged’ water, but refilling your own bottle with (the often more pure) tap water. Volunteering for your local conservation or environment group. Making your own heartfelt birthday cards instead of buying anonymously written Hallmark style ones. Wrapping presents in salvaged gift paper or even newspaper. Sharing books, lawnmowers, sporting equipment and any items that you don’t use regularly, and likewise borrowing too. None of these actions, and hundreds like them, require a bigger budget than the one each of us already has, but cumulatively they make a significant difference. Indeed, some believe the less money we have the more responsible citizens we are likely to be.

Diet for lowering Triglycerides

Recently, I went to the doctor and though my cholesterol was good, my triglycerides were high.
I had, honestly, not thought much about triglycerides, but since then I have been reading and will share what I have gleaned.

A diet to lower triglycerides omits alcohol and sugar - as they stimulate triglyceride production. Therefore, you should:

ELIMINATE or LIMIT ALL sugars such as, concentrated sweets, sugar, honey, molasses, jams, jellies, candies, pies, cakes, cookies, candy, doughnuts, ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sweetened gelatin.

Eliminate or limit as much as you can acohol, such as beer, wine, hard liquor, liqueurs as well as other foods, like sweetened cereals, flavored yogurts, and sports or energy bars.

Cut down on red meat, especially fried, changing it to broiled or roasted poultry (turkey, chicken), preferably free-range. Add more dark green leafy vegetables.

Why Sugar and Alcohol is not part of a diet to lower triglycerides?

Both sugar and alcohol (fermented sugar!) are a source of excess calories which are being turned into fat - usually, triglycerides, so the fat levels in your blood go up.

When alcohol (ethanol) is present in the blood, the liver prioritizes removing alcohol from the blood over other metabolic processes.

The liver can detoxify about one ounce of alcohol per hour (equivalent to 12 ounces of beer or 4 ounces of wine). In the meantime, however, glucose tends to be further processed into triglycerides which raises their blood levels.

Please note that after your triglyceride level goes back to normal, you will have to follow a modified sugar and alcohol diet for the rest of your life.

A triglyceride lowering diet.

There are some food types to favor, which help in a diet to lower triglycerides.

A diet to lower triglycerides - One - Beverages.

Fresh fruit juice (limit to 4 oz. Per day) ; black coffee, plain or herbal teas; soft drinks with sugar substitutes; club soda, preferably salt free; cocoa made with skim mild or non fat dried milk and water (sugar substitute added if desired); clear broth. However, it's best that you drink mainly water.

A diet to lower triglycerides - Two - Meat & Fish.

Among meats, fish is best, especially "safe," or less contaminated, fish such as summer flounder, wild (not: farm-raised!) Pacific salmon, croaker, sardines, haddock, and tilapia.

Choose lean meats (chicken, turkey, veal and nonfatty cuts of beef with excess fat trimmed ; one serving - 3 oz. of cooked meat) Also, fresh or frozen fish, canned shrimp, oysters).

No more than one serving of one of these per week. Shellfish are high in cholesterol but low in saturated fat and should be used sparingly. Meats and fish should be broiled (pan or oven) or baked on a rack.

A diet to lower triglycerides - Three - Vegetables.

Most vegetables are not limited. One dark-green (string beans, escarole) or one deep yellow (squash) vegetable is recommended daily.

Cauliflower, broccoli, and celery, as well as potato skins are recommended for their fiber content. (Fiber is associated with cholesterol reduction).

It is preferable to steam vegetable, but they may be boiled, strained, or braised with unsaturated vegetable oil.

A diet to lower triglycerides - Four - Fruits.

Eat three servings of fresh fruit every day (1 serving - 1/2 cup). Be sure to have at least one citrus fruit daily. Frozen of canned fruit with no sugar or syrup may be taken.

A diet to lower triglycerides - Five - Limit Breads & Grains.

One roll or one slice of whole grain or enriched bread may be taken, or three soda crackers or four pieces of melba toast as a substitute. Spaghetti, rice, or noodles (1/2 cup ) or 1/2 large ear of corn may be taken as a bread substitute.

In preparing these foods do not use butter shortening, use soft margarine. Also use egg and sugar substitutes. Choose high-fiber grains, such as oats and whole wheat.

A diet to lower triglycerides - Six - Eliminate most Fats & Oils.

Use soft magarine: vegetable oils that are high in unsaturated fats (such as sunflower, soybeen, corn and cottonseed). Always refrigerate meat drippings to harden the fat and remove it before preparing gravies.

A diet to lower triglycerides - Seven - Desserts & Snacks in limited moderation.

Limit to two serving every day; substitute each serving for a bread/cereal serving; ice milk, water sherbet (1/4 cup) : unflavored gelatin or gelatin flavored with sugar substitute (1/2 cup); pudding prepared with skim milk (1/2 cup) ; egg white souffle ; unbuttered popcorn (1.1/2 cups).

A diet to lower triglycerides - Eight - Others.

For eggs limit egg yolks to two per week. However, use freely egg substitutes and egg white. You can use dried peas or beans (1 serving - 1/2 cup) as a bread substitute.

Eat nuts such as almonds, walnuts, and peanuts sparingly (1 serving - 1 tablespoon).

Use 1/2 cup of hot cereal or 3/4 cup of cold cereal per day. Add a sugar substitute if desired with fat-free or skim milk.

Always use 99% fat-free or skim milk, dairy products such as low fat cheese (farmer's, uncreamed diet cottage), low fat yogurt, and powdered skim milk.

You may use the following freely; vinegar, spices, herbs, non fat bouilion, mustard, worchestershire sauce, soy sauce, flavoring essences.

Please remember that moderation is the order of the day. All foods should be taken in moderation.

Trip to the Doctor

Last week, I went to the doctor for a checkup - and to get a prescription for Malaria meds.

I got a report on my blood work today....
cholesterol: 187
HDL: 26
LDL: 87

All of which is good, even my blood pressure was not too far out of whack - 140 / 80

However, my Triglycerides were 358 (ack!)

I am scheduled to see a dietitian in a week... This should be interesting as I have been a Vegetarian for 3 years.

Wish me luck.