Birthday party

Saturday:

Jasmine's 12th birthday today! My little baby girl, so grown up. As usual we started the day with presents in the big bed. Her main present was an iPad, which I wouldn't have considered giving a 12 year old except she needed it for school. She said that she was one of only three people in her school who didn't have one already! (Not sure how she knew that.) Oh well, that is the world today I guess. Or the danger of moving into a fairly affluent area? A beautiful house has gone up for sale around the corner, five bedrooms and a pool! I wish. No I don't, who wants to clean all those extra rooms? You'd need a maid. Be nice to have a pool though. Maybe one day.

This morning I weighed 80.5 kg. Which means I've lost a total of 4 kgs (8.8 lbs) in just under 5 weeks. Not bad! And with a wonderful NSV (non-scale victory), when I put my new weight into my Plant Nanny app it said I have to drink one less glass of water per day than I did before! It bases it on your weight, so I've gone down a level. Awesome.

The continuing weight loss made me feel very conflicted about eating treats today. In theory, I am very much in favour of the occasional treat and celebration meal. But I am doing so well right now I didn't want to break this winning streak. Well, the plan was to eat a bit extra, not too much.

For breakfast I made the others French toast with raspberries, while I had yoghurt with raspberries. I thought this would be a bit of a struggle, but it wasn't at all, not even a tiny bit. The thought of navigating the choices for the rest of the day made me even more inclined to start the day with something light and healthy. I felt like if I had huge slabs of sourdough bread fried in sweet eggyness, then I would feel stodgy for the rest of the day. Didn't appeal.

For lunch we went out to a café.

I had the Thai beef salad. I'm not sure where the "Thai" part was supposed to come in. Mainly mixed lettuce and beef slices with a sweetish dressing, but it was ok.

Then I had a dessert, a mini lime meringue pie. It was very yummy.

But shortly after that I started to feel headachy, and tired, and heavy. My body was not enjoying the change from clean foods. I had a half hour nap. For afternoon tea had half a mango and one chocolate biscuit and felt ok.

I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing lasagne, Jasmine's favourite, for fifteen people. About an hour before they were due to arrive, another violent storm rolled in. I'd pretty much decided no one was going to be able to come! But half an hour later all was clear again, and people started arriving. Ping said her workplace had a complete blackout, which would have been scary as she is deep within a shopping centre, and she also had to drive home with the traffic lights not working in that area. Daniel showed me a photo of his street flooded. The storm was short but dramatic! But everyone managed to get here for Jasmine's birthday.

Here is Jasmine showing off her new iPad to Uncle Matt.

I had a few nibbles before dinner, a couple of crackers with cheese, not much. Then at dinner I only had half my lasagne (as usual too busy and not hungry when hosting). I forgot to take a picture. I also made a garden salad, coleslaw (actually that was bought from the supermarket), and some steamed vegetables.

The birthday cake was Jasmine's favourite ice cream cake, in lurid green, yellow and pink. I didn't have any.

But I did have half of this little piece of s'mores brownie that Veronica brought. It was rich and sticky, very nice but a couple of bites was enough.

Here is our table fully extended! Looks like the last supper.

We finished the night with a game of Imaginiff, which Jas was given as a present. The cards say things like: Imagine if (Jasmine) was a dog, which breed would she be, and gives options and you have to vote. It was fun. I had one Fererro Rocher chocolate and an alcoholic apple cider.

I definitely ate more than usual over the day, but more importantly it wasn't "clean" food and my body let me know how it feels about that! (Update, in the morning the scales showed I had put on 200 grams, which is nothing, but how I feel physically is a better indication of why I should limit sugary foods.)

I didn't like any photos of me but here is one anyway. Tim is looking weirdly protective.

Chipmunks

Thursday:

Woke up to a world that was not raining! Cloudy and windy with the occasional hint of sun. Lovely.

My weight was slightly UP this morning! Aaaaaahhhhh! How can 1204 calories yesterday do that? Now I am pinning all my hopes on my monthly cycle. Sorry for TMI but I am hoping that is having an effect and I will suddenly lose weight when that is over. Might help with the attraction to chocolate too!

Yoghurt sprinkled with nutty muesli for breakfast. I took the kids to the new Chipmunks movie, I am at the age now where I empathise with the adults not the chipmunks but it wasn't too annoying. We had lunch at a café, I chose carefully and had some lemon pepper calamari with a bit of salad and a few hot chips. Had to guesstimate calories but shouldn't be too bad. We ate quite early but were still lucky to get a table, the café had a queue to get in the whole time we were there. Sign of a good eatery! We were certainly happy with our food. Chicken and vegetable stir fry for dinner (the rest of the family had chicken with pasta). And in the movie instead of the usual treat foods I had a couple of peppermint Tic Tacs - 2 calories each.

But in the evening I had more chocolate.

I'm experiencing a couple of benefits that probably stem from all this (mostly) healthy eating. I'm sleeping so much better! I sleep to a normal hour and don't need an afternoon nap most days. And secondly my ankles aren't swollen in the morning. That only started a month or so ago, but persisted until about the time I started this diet plan. It improved after a couple of bad days when wearing shoes was uncomfortable, but still troubled me for weeks. That has completely gone. So even if the weight loss is slow, there are improvements in other areas.

The big down side is trying to fit in all the bathroom breaks around normal life - like seeing a movie! I won't make my water goal today, I didn't dare drink much while out and about. And I refuse to scull another four glasses just before bed!

Writing

Thursday:

I spent the whole morning writing at the Arboretum café.

I love the view there, and I had a great writing session. I've been really stuck for a couple of weeks on this final climactic scene and I finally decided to just write something, anything, and fix it later. I made some good headway.

 

I tend to write well when I get out of the house and away from distractions, but there are disadvantages too. One is cost. Pay parking is everywhere in Canberra, and the Arboretum is particularly expensive at $2 per hour. Then there is my tea, I feel obliged to buy something while I take up one of their tables for a couple of hours, and a pot of tea there is $4.50. It adds up if I want to go frequently!

 

Then there is the fact that I am there alone so if I need to go to the bathroom I have to pack everything up, and probably lose my table with a prime view. Drinking a pot of tea doesn't help this problem! Generally I call it a day when I need to make a second bathroom trip.

 

Some days, when I have other things to do as well, I struggle to fit in both exercise and writing (giving up something like evening TV to do so is a whole other topic). A lot of people argue for doing something every day to build up consistency. Today I decided if I don't have time for a good session of both, I'll just do one. I do better with a longer period of time on one thing instead of dabbling in too many things. So today was writing, tomorrow is exercise - I have a lap of the lake and another look around Floriade planned.

Hiking around this wide brown land

Tuesday:

I spent the morning at the Arboretum café writing, then went out onto the hillsides for a walk. There are "trails" that are literally just signposts on the grass between the baby trees.

Which makes it kind of fun. And I was wearing my new hiking boots. I walked from the café on one hill up a bigger hill with this statue thing on top:

This is a quote from Australia's most famous poem:

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,

Of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons, I love her jewelled sea,

Her beauty and her terror, this wide brown land for me.

It was written by an Englishwoman, Dorothy McKeller, and there is a second verse about how England is pretty nice too, but no one knows that one.

And when you turn around, you get this lovely view:

Not sure about the weird spiky trees.

Climbing up the hill was fine but going down down down into that valley was a bit hard on the knees. My boots made me feel very secure though, no slipping! Then back up an extremely steep slope to the café again, I don't think that bit was supposed to be climbed. There actually turned out to be a little fence at the top that I had to step over. I had to keep my arms out wile climbing to balance. Any steeper and I would have been crawling. So I felt pretty good about powering up it. I may hate many forms of exercise, like jumping or bending, but I do like walking and climbing.

In all, 45 mins of hiking around the hills.

And I have had what is possibly my biggest win of the year so far. I bought a family size packet of chips yesterday to share tonight at D&D. And I haven't eaten them yet! I don't even know why I dared buy them, so many times before they haven't lasted an hour. These have lasted two days - an exciting new flavour I haven't tried before. Still unopened. If you have a trigger food that you usually can't resist if it is in the house, that you will eat until you are feeling sick and then put aside only long enough to feel a bit less sick then finish them, you'll know how big a deal this is to me.

Chemistry

Thursday:

This afternoon I went in to uni and put in my application for a Bachelor of Human Nutrition. I should hear within a week whether I got in (I can't see any reason why I wouldn't). I'm still pretty unsure about the whole thing. I love study, but it sounds like a huge investment of time and hard work too, for uncertain benefit. I didn't even like Chemistry in High School (although I believe that was due to a terrible teacher) and it's the first subject I have to do. What if I don't shine? The school year starts at the beginning of Feb, and I have a few weeks after that to withdraw without paying any fees so I don't really have to decide, now that I've got my application in.

Cost is another factor. We have a deferred payment scheme here for uni, you don't have to pay anything until you start to earn a certain amout of money per annum, but it's still thousands of dollars in the end. And in the meantime there are other costs like textbooks. We can afford it, but I would hate to feel like I have wasted a lot of time and money if it doesn't lead anywhere.

My husband and I both agreed that I would stay home and look after the children when they were little, he earned a lot more than me and my RSI was starting to get really bad at that stage so it was a good time for me to quit my job. But now the kids are older (9 and 7) and I feel like I should start contributing some money to the household. I'm feeling guilty about that, and worried about the continuing problems of my RSI, and just generally uncertain. But Tim says he's happy for me to go and do more study.

It was another day that I thought would be relaxed but turned out to be quite busy (but both more productive and more enjoyable than yesterday). In the morning a friend/work contact called (she got me the public service job earlier this year) and asked me to come to a nearby café for a chat. The last two times she called I wasn't able to, so it was important I went today or she might think I was avoiding her. Tim had the car so I walked to the café. I was quite hungry but didn't want something sweet (they have beautiful looking cakes at this café but I never seem to be there at a good time to have one!) and she suggested we share a breakfast. I thought this a slightly odd suggestion for non-family but agreed to it and we got bacon & poached eggs and divided it onto two plates. It was very nice and a great idea to share - I didn't even quite finish my half!

We talked for an hour then I walked home again - she offered me a lift both ways but I walked to get a little exercise in - and it was starting to get really hot. I did a bit of reading for the comp I'm judging and had lunch then my husband brought the car home for me (he'd been at a different work location than usual) and rode his bike in to his normal office. I had to go into uni in person because their system wouldn't let me apply online - I was caught between "you've been to this uni before so you have to use your old details" and "you are not currently a student so you can't use your old details". It was one of the more frustrating things yesterday that I spent a lot of time on both online and over the phone.

I was at this uni in 2009 for my Grad Cert, but since then they have changed the whole parking system and I could no longer get in to the first two parking areas I went to. I ended up parking on the street and walking some distance. Then I couldn't find the Student Centre and wandered around a bit. After putting in my application I went over to look at the buildings I would be in, at the opposite end of the uni to where I was last time because that was Arts and this is Science. I had thought of having a chat to someone about career prospects if there was anyone around, but then I had a drink from a bubbler and got water all down my front so I was feeling rather less inclined to seek out a future teacher. Walked all the way back to the car which was now an oven and picked up kids from school, feeling a bit wiped out from the heat. Really stinky hot day.

I need to work out how I am going to keep writing during school holidays. Aiden likes me to pay attention to him when he is home so I struggle to concentrate on writing when he is not at school. And the kids deserve my attention, of course. But don't want to put the novel aside for six weeks over summer! And there have been quite a few days like yesterday and today when I haven't got any writing done before they get home. I need something to distract them with.

Doing a runner

Monday:

This morning I went to my new favourite café to write in, with lovely views of the lake. Last time I was there I paid at the counter when placing my order, today I didn't and only thought about it once the waitress had brought my cup of tea. But I just decided to pay as I left. Did an hour an a half of writing. Packed up, pleasant exchange with waitress as she cleared my detritus, left. Half an hour later, while doing the grocery shopping, realised I had never paid.

Now it was only $3 or so, no big deal, but it really worried me. I want to go to that café about twice a week and sit there for a long time writing without spending much money -- I need to be on good terms with them! And I am an extremely lawful person, it just rubbed me up the wrong way and I couldn't leave it until next time I went in. So after the shopping I went back and paid and the waitress was very nice about it and the barista next to her said I could have just paid next time. And I felt much more comfortable.

Came home and had lunch and did half an hour of exercise before school pick-up. Gravity was so heavy today! Either because my muscles were tired from yesterday's exertions, or because I'd just eaten lunch and my stomach was still busy digesting.

I rang my doctor's office to find out if my blood test results had come in, I didn't want to wait until Wednesday's appointment to find out. The test was back but the receptionist wouldn't tell me the results or let me pick them up, she said the doctor wants to discuss them with me first. They've given me test results before. So we know what that means. Pretty much confirmation I have diabetes. Not a surprise. I'd still like to see the actual numbers and get final confirmation. And the discount on the stuff I need to buy. Also a bit miffed I'm not allowed to know without the doctor's permission -- this is MY body, not hers! But I think they are required to give bad news in person in case the patient takes it badly.

Still, surely it is my right to know.

Ate a bit too much today; nothing bad but just a little too much of everything. Need to watch portion size. Like the big steak for dinner. Still pretty happy with my choices. And proud of myself for fitting everything into my day. From school pick-up I was ferrying the kids back and forth to gymnastics and dance then home for late dinner, so I had to get it all done in school hours. Writing, shopping and exercise!