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The unimaginable happened

I keep usable plastic containers and plastic bags of all shapes and sizes in a large bottom drawer in my kitchen. I could not in any truthful way say that there is a particular sense of organization to the contents of the drawer and honestly I would not like anyone with whom I am personally acquainted to ever open it and get a glimpse of what amounts to a trash heap of plastic detritus. A clean trash heap but trash nonetheless. Actually that’s not true, people who know me might not be so surprised but a stranger might wildly run out of the house and get hit by a car believing that that would be preferable to spending any time with the lunatic in charge of this chaotic nightmare.

So anyway, Some goddam thing got loose and fell behind the drawer in what I can only imagine is a space like Hades. I could not close the drawer. My normal response in a situation like this is to drop to my knees and sob, or fling myself onto the couch with a bag of Cheetos, the TV remote and promise that’ll deal with it later and by dealing with it I mean be careful to walk around it in the future.

The unimaginable thing is that I figured out how to get the drawer out. There are little dealios on the under side of the drawer that make this remarkably easy but were a complete surprise to me. More remarkable still was that I took the time to clean and organize it. Throwing some things away. Now that is really unimaginable.

I need a nap. I’d say a drink but it’s the Month of Pain.

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MOP check-in

So it’s mid month-of-pain. While I have been mostly not drinking there were some notable diversions. My company Christmas party was in January and I drink…and ate pizza. And then the packers games. I mean, really? You just gotta drink. I’m afraid they’d lose if I didn’t. I know it’s just voodoo but if they lost and I wasn’t drinking I’d blame myself.

The other issue is that I’ve been pretty much sick since last December 7th. A never ending cold and a bulging disk in my lower back so I have not been to the gym and have not weighed myself. I feel that it cannot truly be month of pain without some strict weight watching. 

I made this last night. Chicken and vegetables. Chinese-ish. It was delicious. 



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Breakfast

I don’t know why I bother. This is what I have for diet breakfast. Protein powder in cashew milk. It’s sort of like just having milk only slightly thicker.

In the middle of an unscheduled Month of Pain in advance of my trip to Germany. I am down 5 pounds. 

Thank you very much.

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Another Month of Pain

I have to be honest. I didn’t do all that well this past January. Oh sure I lost some weight but not that much. I was pretty casual about what I ate and by the middle of the month when I took the break from not drinking, I pretty much just fell right off the wagon then. My pants have suggested I might want to move away from the buffet table, as it were.

So now I am going to Germany, the new residence of the Royal Indian Mounted Food Control Police (the Germans think they’ve cornered the market on following rules and ducks-in-a-row…wait’ll they catch his action) and I need to drop some elbows before I go. Not just so I don’t look like a stuffed sausage when I arrive, but so that I can, with impunity, stuff some sausages down my yap when I get there and not worry too much.

I have a month. I figure I can lose 5 pounds a week so I’m planning a 20 pound weight loss in April. Just kidding, I’d be fine with 5 in a month and that seems doable.

So I made this handy dandy chart for myself. This is a week’s worth of diet. The big box is for my daily weight. The little ones are so I can check the boxes when I’ve accomplished the mission. So if for breakfast, for instance, I have 1/4 cup of cottage cheese I check the box, but if I have bacon and pancakes, then I do not. There is ZERO chance I will be having pancakes for breakfast so that one is safe. My bigger issue is the gray box, forbidden food. When I get home from work I am ravenous. I have a bag of chips there right now and I can see that while it is not opened and this makes it safer for me, it’s just not good to have that sort of thing in the house. Ditto for cookies or pretzels or, Jesus, any goddam thing that isn’t a carrot or celery.

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Slop, merciless and unrelenting

Yes, slop. Spaghetti sauce plain and simple. Perhaps not plain or so simple, it was chicken. I ground it myself. But I used jarred sauce. The Sauce King’s sauce (meh). It was made with more care than I usually take but in the end, it’s just still slop. It was OK, maybe even good. But it’s a diet meal(s) and it just tastes like that to me.

The Month(s) of Pain drags on, continuing its inexorable and lethargic crawl to just where I do not know.




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Eating at the bar back when I was fat and happy

An old unpublished post. Dinner at the bar at Lake Park Bistro in August.  A). Currently I am starving. This looks beyond fabulously delicious to me. B). I was dining with Carol and what could be better? And C). I mean seriously, those frites!!!

My Month of Pain has extended, unfortunately, into February. I have plateaued and while my pants are no longer implements of torture, the reports from my local scale have been less than boundless good news. I’m considering removing a limb.

But those frites…ah well, slop for dinner, again.


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MOP round up

The month of pain did not start off well in the pain-from-hunger sense. The first work day of January (and hence the first day of the Month of Pain) my tooth cracked. So in the shrieking-pain-from-hell sense it was a better than decent kick off. And while it was the beginning of the Month of Pain certainly I was not going to add to the abject misery of the cracked and then pulled tooth by abjuring food and beverage this was not the MOP, in the sense God intended. (I had to look up abjure to make sure this was an appropriate use of the word.)

So the beginning of the month was a little rocky. The tooth was pulled, there were several days of, you know, sorta misery but not ABJECT misery, and I ate and drank my way through that, then there were the FREAKING PACKER games and I was careful there but not pure as the new driven snow but eventually I fell into line, and now, past the end of the month, I have lost 8 pounds and my pants are not aggressively strangling me. There is still room for improvement and I have to say, not drinking is not at all a problem. So the Month of Pain continues, perhaps less painfully until I lose another five. 

This would seem easy enough but this morning I weighed 2 pounds MORE!! than I did yesterday. Shoot me in the head.

Below is a selected, shall we say curated, gallery of MOP slop.




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This beef did not die in vain

This may just be theoretical, and I may be rationalizing but it seems to me that when MetroMarket has prime cuts of meat nearly its departure date, they make it into this ground meat. It doesn’t look like their regular ground beef/sirloin/chuck. It’s some other weird thing and there are vast quantities of it. My thinking is that it’s near the end of its viability and it’s going to get thrown away (This does not trouble me any more than the insanity of the good until dates on cans of things. OK, maybe slightly more) I figure, I don’t want all of this meat to be wasted so I bought a pack. It was cheap. I know it’s not organic. But I think not wasting meat is more important than being righteous about eating it.

Anyway, I decided to make chili to have for Month of Pain lunches (no carbs). For extra flavor I threw in the bone from New Year’s Eve prime rib. Whether or not this made any difference I don’t know. But it seemed like a good idea although I strained the fat off it and probably all of its flavor went too.

The chili is, meh, fine. But I have a lot of it. I’ll be eating it for weeks.



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Jalapeños helped

I had the bright idea to make chili with butternut squash. It seemed like it might be a good idea if I roasted it first it might be more “meaty” and intensify the flavor. Whatever I mean by that. It was not a good idea. I ate it, mostly because the jalapeños made it tolerable. The remains of it are still in my refrigerator uneaten. The only thing that going to eat it is my garbage disposal. 

It was slop. It’s ok, it’s the Month of Pain.