Tuesday

Seems later in the week than that - not sure why, but it does.  I would like it to be Wednesday, as Elizabeth arrives for a short stay on Wednesday, but it's not - yet.

Yesterday's eating:

• scrambled eggs
• bacon
• tea with cream
• cheese snack
• mini meatloaf made with potato starch
• salad with blue cheese dressing
• ice tea
• chocolate covered fruit of various sorts
• walnuts
• pecans and cheese spread

Still 142.2 this morning, and a little unsettled in the digestive area.  I can't identify anything I've been eating recently that would cause upset, unless it was Saturday's corn-products "binge".  Seems a bit unlikely.

Our dogs love tomatoes - we know this because they beg while we are making salads.  We also know this because I caught one of them red-mouthed at the tomato plants in the back yard last night.  That might explain some rather scanty harvests over the past couple of years.  When that part of the yard was an overgrown butterfly garden and the tomatoes were rather hard to get to, we got lots.  Last year, we sodded the area over, and suddenly, the harvest dwindled.  I thought the practically brand-new garden mix soil had been depleted, but apparently the problem was of animal origin.  So now we know.  And have surrounded those plants with wire mesh.

Monday

Good weekend.  Very productive.  We started Saturday by spraying the driveway with weedkiller and cleaning out the screen porch (lotsa dog hair - that's where they spend their days).  Followed it by doing laundry and making fresh mayo for use in salad dressing (both blue cheese and thousand island), and cutting up the two tiny green peppers my plants have produced so far and drying them.  Pulled the netting off the raspberries and found some plantable containers to try to root strawberry runners in, so I can get them started in a new location, raspberry-free.  Repotted houseplants, mulched the last un-mulched garden bed in the yard (they'd run out).  Polished shoes and other leather goods. Vacuum-sealed steaks for the freezer.  Repaired a missing button on a shirt, and super-glued two others that looked to be on the verge of breaking in half.  Replaced our bedroom curtains - I found some thermal, room-darkening ones this time that make a huge different on the nighttime light levels (granted, they cover only about 2/3 of the window - that's on purpose - but they even seemed to help with the temperature).  I would have made pickles, but didn't think of it until it was starting to get warm in the house - did not want to add to that by boiling anything.

I had huge amounts of rather fidgety energy this weekend.  I'd blame the popcorn (we went to Captain America on Saturday and it was great - and I only had a small popcorn), but I know better.  Not really sure what it was - especially as one of the dogs is still a bit ill - enough to wake us up at 3 am Sunday with a giant cleaning job.  So sleep was not great.

Eating yesterday was just strange.  No breakfast (I wasn't hungry), lunch at 2 pm at the BBQ place - my usual half-pound of smoked turkey and a coleslaw.  Snacking for the rest of the day, mostly on cheese, with a few cashews and chocolate blueberries thrown in.  Dessert - ice cream and the last of the raspberries and blueberries.  Those tiny pots of Haagen-Dasz are the perfect size for us - just enough to be delicious, and not enough to get us in much trouble.  And not too sweet, which is starting to be important - if things are too sweet, you can't taste anything else.

142.2 this morning - given my consumption of garbage over the weekend (in addition to the popcorn, I had corn chips and salsa on Saturday), I think that's just peachy.

Friday

Hmm, what did I eat yesterday?  Something like this, I think:

• scrambled eggs
• bacon
• tea with cream
• beef jerky
• cheese
• chocolate cherries
• tea with cream
• naked cheese steak
• cottage cheese
• pickle spear
• ice tea
• more chocolate cherries

141.8 this morning.  I was hungry a lot yesterday, for some reason; before and after the jerky, and while waiting for dinner, which was extremely late (7 pm) since Lee was doing a golf tournament all afternoon.

My ability to function degraded throughout the day - I just got tireder and tireder - and it didn't help that I had a one-hour meeting as a standee in a standing-room-only situation.  I cannot stand.  Not sure if I can manage to contrive a standing desk situation here at work, but am seriously considering it, since standing for one stupid hour ought to be something any human can do without strain - and it nearly nailed me yesterday.  I ended up going to bed around 8:15 pm last night - didn't fall asleep until some time after 9, but my back was killing me.  It's fine today.

Weekend at home coming up - yeah!  About bloody time; first one in a month, I think.  I suspect I will be spending quality time spraying the driveway for weeds one of the mornings - ugh.  They're horrible, though, with all the rain we've been having, and it has to be done.

The potatoes from last night

Here is the ingredient list:

Potatoes, Milk, Soybean Oil, Bleached Wheat Flour, Water, Contains less than 2% of the following: Corn Flour, Cottonseed Oil, Dextrose, Guar Gum, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Modified Corn Starch, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Onion, Salt, Spices, Sugar, Yeast, Yeast Extract. Contains: Milk, Wheat and Soy.

That's about what I figured.  Nasty little buggers! 

No fire

I meant to mention that we never did find any fire or source of smoke either in our house or around the neighborhood anywhere.  Some lightning going on, but nowhere near.  Weird.  Hope the alarms don't start making a habit of this...

And,... We're back!

To 141.4 again, that is - the golden 50-lb loss number.  I'm still wobbly in places I'd rather not be, but I dearly love that milestone.  And at 5'11", 141.4 is a fine weight.  Lee is still talking about going to the gym (talk, but no action as yet); if and when we do go, I'll work on weights and see if I can't get the composition to shift a bit, but if it doesn't happen, I'm still quite pleased with life as a more-or-less paleo.

Case in point: last night was not exactly sleep conducive.  I drifted off around 10 pm, in a fairly dark room (ambient light mostly from stars, but the odd streetlight contributing).  At 10:13, our smoke alarm went off - took me a bit too long to figure out what it was, but we were both up wandering the house looking for fires or some cause of the noise for a while after that.  While I was awake, I got hungry and had a piece of cheese (and kicked off the install of Lion on my laptop), but was back asleep fairly quickly - and we didn't ever find any cause of the smoke alarms.  At 1:30ish, I started being aware that one of the dogs was ill-at-ease, and within a few minutes, that he was actually rather sick.  I was able to get up, get him outside, clean up his bedding enough for him to go back into his kennel, and go back to sleep again, although it probably took around 30 minutes to do that.  Consequently, when the real alarm went off this morning, I was kind of tired.  But!  I eat Paleo!  Scrambled eggs, bacon, and tea with cream in it for breakfast, and I am fully functional now.  Before we made the switch, that would NEVER have happened.

Here's yesterday's eating:

• scrambled eggs (in bacon grease - we're trying to use up our stash)
• bacon
• tea with cream
• NY strip steak
• "omaha steaks" brand potatoes au gratin - two "scoops"
• ice tea
• chocolate cherries and almonds
• gruyere
• walnuts
• cheddar

Good stuff - although I mean to do a web search for the ingredients in those potatoes - I think they involved bread crumbs somewhere.  And after dinner, I had the energy to deadhead the roses, clean out a bunch of weeds, and prune the raspberry canes back a bit.  Good stuff.

Wednesday

Yesterday's eating:

• tea with cream
• taco salad (grassfed beef, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, cheese, salsa)
• ice tea
• chocolate cherries and almonds
• cashews
• gruyere

Yes, I pulled an all-day IF.  I was pleasantly hungry by dinner time, and ate the salad pretty darn quick, but it mostly filled me up until later in the evening, when I had the cashews and cheese.  142.2 this morning, not too surprisingly.

I had a lot of energy after dinner last night - despite the fact that it had just rained (I got rather damp and a bit muddy), I pulled bolting lettuce out of the garden, put cucumber vines back into the supports (trying to keep them from a full-garden takeover by going vertical), picked a few of those and a few tomatoes, and harvested another pile of raspberries and a small handful of blueberries.  Then I made another batch of italian salad dressing from a recipe I found on food.com and altered (it had canola oil and Karo-style corn syrup in the original; I substituted light olive oil and a small quantity of actual sugar in my version - and I swapped in apple cider vinegar for the red wine vinegar in the original - to get a bit more zing).  My early taste test was promising; I'm letting it blend for 24 hours before trying it out for real.

Dinner tonight is strip steaks and salad of some sort, and I did have breakfast, so no fasting today.