Friday 20 through Sunday 22 August 2010

I'm playing weekend catch-up today...

Friday 20 August

Pre-run 1/4 banana snack

Spackle (usual ingredients) + 2 mugs of the usual coffee.

Lunch: About 2.5 oz. leftover taco meat (from the freezer) and 1/2 package of Tuscan frozen veggie mix.  Handful of those smoked paprika pecans.

A few more of those pecans...

About 1.5 square of Valrhona dark chocolate (yum!) and a handful of walnuts.

Regarding dark chocolate, I love it!  I used to prefer milk chocolate, but dark chocolate is much friendlier carb-wise and more satisfying taste-wise.  Favorite brands for me are Green & Black's 70%, Valrhona (usually a good deal at Trader Joes), Trader Joes' 3-pack, and Guittard semisweet chocolate chips.  I also like the Sharffenberger cocoa nibby bars, but I was mad when they sold out to Hershey's and haven't bought them lately.  Anyhow, I like just about anything 60-75% dark, but these tend to be the ones I buy.

Mojito, tri-tip steak, and grilled veggies!  Yum!

Same mojito, with mac nuts...

...a little more mac nuts, and 1/2 of one of those 7-layer cookie bars from the picnic.

A few smoked almonds...

And some strawberries from our garden.  Darn snails like these and the tomatoes. :-P  Anyone have advice for keeping the snails off my plants? We do use the snail pellets, but who would eat that and not the fresh produce?  Apparently not the snails.  Mr. Handsome-and-Handy is thinking we should perhaps think about eating the snails.

I also had another mojito and some peanuts with our movie night.  We geeked out and watched Tron.

Saturday 21 August

Well, this day was easy to document! I loved being able to send all of my photos in one email!

Here's brunch!  Those are protein pancakes, made from the recipe in the Blood Sugar 101 book plus a scoop of flax seed meal.  One batch made 4 pancakes; I ate another one and saved the 4th for Sunday.  The yellow and red item is a scramble with tomatoes, eggs, and cheese.  I also had a couple more pieces of bacon than those shown, and another mug of the usual coffee.  Except it was full caff today; Mr. Handsome-and-Handy bought me some Kona Joe coffee; love it!  Turns out it was a good thing, because we ended up going to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and I drove!

Here's a sketch of the eats; mostly after the Boardwalk excursion, and I was hangry by then.  I hadn't had a Taco Bell chalupa in 2 years; they used to be my favorite.  Tasty, but it didn't make me want more.

The Boardwalk was so much fun!  A little overwhelming for us country mice, but Thing 2 loved the rides.  She rode her first roller coaster, the Sea Monster.  (It's small but fast, more of a curvy one than one with big hills.)  She was really anxious about it, and so was I.  I hadn't been on a roller coaster in...I think 14 or 15 years.  For many years, I avoided them because I was afraid I wouldn't fit in the seat with the restraint down, and I didn't like the idea of having to get off the ride if it didn't...or worse, have the ride take off with me not securely in it!  But I figured it was worth a try, and to my delight, we could both fit!  (It was a little scrunchy for long legs, though.)  Thing 1 was timid about trying the rides, but we finally found a Nascar-themed one, and he enjoyed it quite a lot.  He and I loved the bumper car speedway, too.  We all played a round of mini golf and enjoyed the arcade, too.  Nice cap to the summer!

Sunday 22 August

Whew!  Rocky night for everyone.  I think maybe the Boardwalk overstimulated everybody.  I bought a cup of caff'd coffee at the donut shop.  I had 2 donut holes: this one, and the one below.

I had one of my protein pancakes with peanut butter and sugar-free syrup, and an omlette with bacon, cheese, and tomato.  And a couple more cups of the usual decaf coffee.  Not shown: 3.5 strawberries from the garden.

Lunch was chili (this bowl + another half) and a couple of polish dogs.

Later, I had half of a piece of the 7-layer cookie bars.

And some boardwalk taffy: 3 regular, 4 sugar-free.  (They had sugar-free, and it was tasty!  Some different flavors than the regular.)

And a couple of these:

I wasn't too hungry for dinner.  Forgot to get a picture, though, so here's a sketch:

Later on, we had dessert.  I had a taste of the kids' mint chip.

And a little dish of Clemmy's sugar-free chocolate.  This stuff is really chocolatey, and very little sugar!  (It's very high fat, though, so a little bit goes a long way.)

Toasting with Thing 2!  (She even liked the Clemmy's, and she generally does not like sugar-free stuff.)

And a little dish of peanuts.

Cramming for School?

When I eat like I've been eating lately--cramming in stuff when I'm not hungry, that is--it seems to be a sign that something is eating me.  In this case, I know what's eating me:  back to school! (Cue horror movie music.)  Nowadays, kids have so much more homework in elementary school than we did back in the day, and the school they attend is known for being academically rigorous.  Which in many ways is a good thing, but it means ever-so-much more involvement from we parental units.  So in addition to the hectic get-out-the-door routine, none of us are looking forward to the homework/project stuff.  It's pretty much non-stop, even over holidays and weekends.  It's hard for us to get genuinely excited about it, and I'm sure that rubs off on The Things.  Ugh.  And I also will have a much less flexible schedule for fitting in the soon-to-be-seriously-ramping-up training for the half marathon.  Double-ugh.

So no answers, but I guess I need to just remain open and flexible and trust that we'll figure it out as we make the transition.  Maybe this year will go more smoothly, since we're not new to the school anymore, and Thing 1 even has the same teachers.  We'll see!  Maybe just writing all this out will help a bit.