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Sunday, November 16, 2003

diving into the Christmas chocolate already

mmm, oh yum, bliss. I was a really good girl today diet wise (and I'm down to 171 lb! lowest weight since 1995!), and then right after the kids went to bed I got a huge, HUGE, H*U*G*E chocolate craving. I commented to T that I was contemplating driving to the little convenience store downtown (yes, our teeny town has a convenience store, and it's actually open until eleven p.m. No traffic lights or big grocery chains, but there is one convenience store) to satisfy it. T instantly got this mysterious, scheming sort of look on his face and said that he could provide me with chocolate if I were truly desperate. wink wink. So he raided the stocking-stuffer candy he'd bought yesterday (while we were completing all but three people's worth of our Christmas shopping, did I mention that? Jeesh, the nightmares I had last night about our house burning to the ground with all that stuff in it and no renter's insurance...) and produced a few Hershey's miniatures for me. Bless him, praise him, he is perfect. Those four miniatures have satisfied me wholly without giving me a huge load of guilt to carry around about having ruined my good diet day.


Also in the Feeling Good About My Accomplishments category today is the fact that the four of us pitched in and cleaned off our porch (note: I am glad I proofread. For some bizarre reason, this sentence had read "cleaned off our couch" until I caught it. Perhaps it's some Freudian thing; our couch is a 7-foot expanse of stacks of folded laundry right now and has been since last night). You know that Jeff Foxworthy bit, the redneck one, and one of the things he says is that you might be a redneck if people think you're having a yard sale all the time and you're not? That's us. Well, we say "that's us" about a lot of those redneck jokes, but this one -- we were really bad. We have a huge porch and there was a whole pile of stuff over in the corner, mostly T's stuff that I'd gotten tired of moving from one place to another in the house and so I'd put it outside waiting for him to take it to the basement. Someday our basement will just explode, we cram it so full of stuff that has no other resting place. Hmm, maybe I'd better check out that rental insurance tonight. Anyway. Our lovely large porch is now fully respectable-looking, and I'm having porch swing fantasies again. Our porch would be perfect for a porch swing. Maybe in the spring.


Tomorrow is C's first ballet lesson. We decided to let her start now instead of waiting for Christmas. Tomorrow is actually the "trial" day -- she'll go and watch, maybe participate a little, and make sure it's something she really wants to do. If not (ha! not likely) she'll have some darling ballet clothes for dress-up, I suppose. The teacher she'll have is the same one who taught my ballet lessons when I was in elementary school twenty years ago*. We're not expecting the next Isadora Duncan to come from our family -- neither C nor I are built along dancer's lines, and we're slightly more graceful than, say, a pair of 18-wheelers, but only slightly -- but it'll be fun for her and she'll learn some body control and make new friends as well. It does mean that this was a really bad night for me to wait until 10:30 p.m. to think of the fact that T needs clean uniforms tomorrow, since I now have to be up till 12:30 to get his uniforms out and hung so they don't wrinkle, and the kids and I have to be dressed and ready to leave by 9 tomorrow. oops. I am a girl who likes my nine hours, even interrupted as they usually are by a young ballerina-to-be wanting drinks of water. oh well.

*There's small-town life for you, that kind of thing happens all the time. One of our high-school secretaries called me by my mom's name all the time when I was there (and still does, when we run into each other around town) because she, like a number of the other staff at the school, had also been there when my mom was there, and Mom and I look similar.

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Saturday, November 15, 2003

look at me, being all smug

Only three more. Three little presents to buy and then I will be able to go around feeling all superior while everyone has the annual Holiday Panic, because our Christmas shopping will be all done. It is amazing how many people were shopping today. And you'd have thought it was Christmas Eve or something, the way T and I were going around in a near-panic because we couldn't find just the right thing -- as if there were no time at ALL to look around online or in other cities or whatever. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a frilly nightgown for a little girl that doesn't have Barbie on the front? Never did find one today; that makes four presents yet to buy, I guess)

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Friday, November 14, 2003

yum-o-rama

I was being so good on my diet. Then we went out to dinner tonight, at my favorite restaurant. This is the kind of restaurant where they serve really, really wonderfully good food, the kind of food you think you should be able to cook at home except it's way, way better than anything homemade. It doesn't seem fancy, but it tastes fancy. And they serve it on these huge plates. Plates the size of turkey platters. Plates with their own ZIP codes. Plates the size of minor unpronounceable Hawaiian islands. Plates loaded down with enough amazing food to make up for three or four days (at least) of eating exactly according to plan. But oh, so worth it. mmmm. I was determined to only eat one deck-of-cards-size serving of my steak, and take the rest home, but I arrived home, mysteriously enough, devoid of a takeout package, having consumed a serving more the size of a trade paperback novel than a deck of cards. In other words, the whole wonderful delicious mouth-watering steak, complete with mushrooms and sherry gravy. My excuse was that we'll be out all day tomorrow so the poor steak would feel all lonely and rejected in the fridge. Much better to put it out of its misery in the restaurant, n'est-ce pas?

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Tuesday, November 11, 2003

emergency room, ho hum

T was grinding this afternoon. He had been, as was his intention, grinding the metal on a truck rear end. Then, for a change of pace, he ground his arm. Um, ouch. Big gaping scary-looking (but not very bloody, good thing) wound on the outside of his wrist. So off we went on our third ER visit in the last twelve months. It was not as bad as when we brought LT in, last February, for a split scalp -- we were only there about 2 1/2 hours, as opposed to 4. He has to go back on Thursday to get his wound stitched; they cut away some of the dirty flesh and irrigated it, but decided to leave it open but bandaged for a couple of days to reduce the risk of infection, since the grinder wasn't exactly sanitary when it bounced off his bone. Yeah, ouch.



Surprisingly enough, this doesn't feel like a cruddy day. I smiled a lot. The kids were well-behaved during the long, tedious ER wait. I had to drive and pick up some tools for T (this was before the grinding thing; in fact I was picking up the grinder, come to think of it), and I listened to Tchaikovsky's "Marche Slave" at full volume on the trip there and back. Didn't get a lot of cleaning done -- I was just gearing up and getting started on that when we had our little ER detour.

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Saturday, November 08, 2003

the nanowrimo storm has passed

I am at peace, floating on calm seas. The NaNoWriMo storm has passed. I thought it all out last night. It's the whole conflict/beginning/middle/end/climax/resolution/believable dialogue thing. It just isn't going to happen. I like some of what I write in here -- although not all of it -- some of it makes me laugh or smile when I go back and read it later. But an online diary doesn't have to have any of the above elements, and a novel does. So, having reasoned all this out, I am now free to move on to obsessing over other things. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Friday, November 07, 2003

will... not... submit... will... not...

It's sucking me in. I'm trying to resist, I really am. But do you know what I was doing as I was mixing biscuits tonight? I was thinking about an idea for a story. Now, I have not had an idea for a story since I was in, say, eleventh grade. And this is A Good Thing, it really is, because, well, my ideas for stories had always historically been quite hokey, except before eleventh grade I didn't know any better and would actually write the stories, which generally, well, sucked, in the usual way that stories written by pretentious adolescents suck. But tragically, we never manage to find that out until we've written these things, shown them around proudly, and grown up -- only to look back in horror and embarrassment at the trash written under the influence of that haze called teenagerhood. In my personal case, I went from writing horse stories about girls named Katrina with Appaloosas who entered horse shows (age 12), to writing thinly-veiled future-fantasy stories about myself, my boyfriend or crush at the time, and our children (age 15), to writing angst-ridden self-important "deep" stories about girls who fell in love with boys only to find that the boys could never love them back because of some serious problem (like AILT) (age 16). And of course there were others along the way, frequently with characters all coincidentally bearing the middle names of my friends and me, rocking out and styling and learning to drive and having cool no-parents parties and getting boyfriends and all that stuff. These are just some of the more memorable actual examples, stuff that I would write and then promptly envision as the featured piece in Redbook, with the subheading "Riveting Fiction by Youthful California Prodigy" or something like that. Even the imagined subheadings were cheesy, see? Anyway. As you can tell, it was the by the providence of a benevolent God that I stopped inflicting this stuff on the people around me, right? So why, WHY, do I feel compelled to start afresh, years later, when really, I know better?


OK, I've talked myself out of it again. If I keep this up, I'll be safe, because NaNoWriMo only runs through November (November being, of course the Mo in NaNoWriMo), and then the pressure will wear off.

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peer pressure

I will not. I will NOT do it! There is no novel inside me waiting to get out, I can't even think of a story to tell; I am NOT going to go (belatedly) join NaNoWriMo no matter how many other journalers do it, or how much fun they make it appear to be.


I think.

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Wednesday, November 05, 2003

starting my diet back at day 1

I haven't gained back the weight I'd lost, but after about a month of eating at a "maintain" level instead of a losing level, today is hell. I'm going back to my strict 1300-1400 calories/day plan, and OUCH, I am starving. It doesn't help that the kitchen is full of candy and chips, from the aforementioned heap-o-treats brought home by T. I keep seeing that box, with the Starbursts and Cheez-its on top, and it's taking every ounce of my willpower to avoid having "just one" -- or "just one at a time," which is more realistic. I am persevering, though. I'm trying to remember how great it felt to lose those 20 pounds, one day at a time, and also how it got to where it felt totally normal to eat more healthily. I have got to get those other 24 pounds off. I hope that by Christmas I'll have a good start on them.


Meanwhile I feel like I'm hollow inside. must not munch. must not munch.

* * * * * * *

update:

well, sigh, I sort of caved. C wanted some White Cheddar Cheez-its, and I opened them for her. I looked at the back of the package and saw that the whole package only had 220 calories, so I ate a small handful -- probably not even a fourth of the package. Gotta just move on and put that one behind me... and forget how blissful and salty and crunchy those darn things tasted...

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Friday, October 31, 2003

happy day :)

Today has been happy. Here's why. :)

• Yummy homemade meatloaf for lunch. (I didn't say that today had been a good day for my diet. Which I really need to work on, I have basically just gone back to eating the way I used to eat, over the course of the last few days. Anyone notice the irony that this started happening the very day after I was going on and on in my diary about how easy it was to eat less?)
  
• Pleasant and productive shopping trip -- we needed a few wintery clothes and today was a perfect day to go to the valley and buy them.
  
• Rain!
  
• That splendid post-rain smell.
  
• Rain!
  
• A nice snapping fire in the woodstove
  
• T called and said that it's also raining where he is, which will help hugely with the effort to get the fire out and GET HIM HOME. hurrah!
  
• Rain!
  
• My plans for the rest of the evening: Put LT to bed (C fell asleep on the way home in the car), shut down the computer, put on some nice relaxing music, and snuggle on the couch near the fire with a blanket and a good book. I forgot to buy Pickwick Papers today, but I have plenty of wonderful rainy-day books on my shelf. I'm not going to start Jane Eyre because the weather is supposed to clear up tomorrow, and then I'll be left reading it on crisp sunny days, and a reading of Jane Eyre needs gray, wet days throughout to be fully satisfactory. Maybe David Copperfield.
  
• Did I mention rain?
  

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Wednesday, October 29, 2003

weird phone problems, and sneezes

I got more done today than I have in quite a while, for the simple reason that our phone lines got all messed up and I couldn't connect to the Internet till 3 p.m. *ahem*. We have two phone lines, one for the Internet, and for some reason during the night some wiring got messed up in one of the jacks in the house, so that whenever you pick up a phone (or open the modem connection), both lines would be picked up at once. Suffice to say, this made calling people a bizarre experience, and it heartily confused the poor modem. Very weird. And of course we don't pay for inside-the-house line insurance; T is a telecommunications technician so he can handle that kind of thing just fine. Except that right now T is 300 miles away. So I had them disconnect our extra line for the time being, and we're back in the dark ages, not able to stay connected too long lest someone try to call. Sheesh, and I don't even have Callwave anymore. We'll probably sign up for LTL when T gets back -- I'd do it now, since we've been meaning to anyway, except I don't touch things Inside The Box of our computer -- that's solely his domain, so he'll have to be the one to install the card thingamabob (you can see how technically inclined I am, just based on that one word, can't you).

On a totally unrelated note, does anyone know why some people have to yell in order to sneeze? Has there been any research done on this? There are so many different kinds of sneezes, really. Now me, I sneeze like a normal human being. ;-) But then there are my husband and my son (who just blasted my eardrums, which was what brought about this train of thought, in case you were wondering), who sneeze like they're trying to scare away an intruder or possibly a wild animal, or at least make me startled enough to wet myself. ("YAH-CHOOO!!" doesn't even begin to cover it). And then -- well, there was this girl in high school, God love her, but she sneezed these tiny little a-heem sneezes, without even seeming to expel any air, and it seems like that just wouldn't have done her any good at all. But who am I to say.

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the round of life Archives | Page 25 of 29

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