bloating, tube fights, and more soda-related death

Today I learned that the reason I puffed up like a bag of chips at high altitude with the advent of monsoon season was apparently that my guts found digesting my food more of a challenge than normal. The cure for this problem, and I wish I'd known this in 1999 when I ended up having gut surgery, is to remember to take your betaine HCl with anything that's hard to digest. (And I have no idea why that site thinks betaine HCl is good for homocysteine levels, but whatever works. All I care about is no longer resembling a watermelon with legs.)

In other news, next month somewhere in Seattle there will be an epic battle between two groups of cardboard-tube wielding nuts, which sounds pretty entertaining, and, as usual, soda will kill you, except it might just be a marker for poor eating habits.

So back to high altitude, tomorrow we're driving over the mountains to California, so you probably won't hear from me until Wednesday. Then on Friday, we're going to disappear into the mountains for a week, so blogging will be thin for the next ten days. I promise to learn some things, though, so stay tuned.