Thursday, July 26

Breakfast: soaked oats, raspberries, vanilla yogurt (mocha)

I started the day with a Curves workout and weighed in at 142#. I got talking to the gal there about wishing I could get rid of my belly. Everything else is fairly proportionate except the abdominal region. She commented that is a woman's hardest place to lose (don't I know it!) and where we gain it when we are stressed out. I told her I didn't think I was particularly stressed: marriage is good, work is good.

We talked some more and the conversation turned to housecleaning and I told her about FlyLady and how my house had gone to seed this spring because of all the stress I'd been under because of my mother and how we'd rarely been home weekends for a few months. And yes, I heard that word *stress* come out of my mouth. Bingo! Indeed, I have been under stress--quite a bit of it--and not sleeping well isn't helping with that either. Huh. Not that it's an excuse, mind you, but it does help me to understand that I'm dealing with more complex issues.

A couple of weeks ago when I started trying to organize myself I also complained about finding focus to do my writing tasks at work. That's been going better too, partly because most of the customers are smart enough to stay away from the shop when it's this hot (we don't have ac). Nearly every work day I've started off with a half hour on my Palm Tungsten E2, writing my sotp novel, Connect the Dot. It is a very strange way for me to write but I badly needed to be creative again, and just finding time to get ready to start a story seriously was adding too much stress (there's that word again, I can't believe I thought I had none!). Last time I synched the file to the home computer I was at nearly 7k. And it amuses me. I've also been making regular progress on the crit and revision. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I came home for lunch because hubby was home on his split between day and night shifts. I made us a chef salad (lots of greens, cuke, hard-boiled egg, fresh bacon bits, ranch, and sunflower seeds). Snack: peas and chocolate.

FlyLady's zone this week is the master bedroom and I didn't feel like playing by the rules. I'd thought to wash my truck but our cistern was too low on water. The windows were really skuzzy and bug covered and the wipers and spray weren't cutting through, so I got a bucket of water with a good slosh of windex in it and scrubbed all the windows, then sprayed them off to rinse.

For supper I made a stir-fry with onions, mushrooms, zucchini, garlic, tomatoes, spinach and shrimp (lemon juice, parmesan). It was okay! I have that basic meal a lot with minor variations and though it doesn't totally excite me, it is really healthy, filling, and makes good use of what's currently in the garden.

Wednesday is FlyLady's Anti-Procrastination Day, so of course I had it on Thursday. It only seemed fitting. My biggest struggle area for being organized is menu planning, so I sat down to create a week of menus. This is HUGE work for me, and still we somehow manage to eat every day. I don't get why I have a mental block about it but I do. Anyway I've pushed through five days of planning, though I laid out ten (to see us through another camping trip--thought I'd start figuring it out as well!) I did plant some random meals in the second five days also. And now I'm exhausted. Which may have something to do with sleeping so poorly--instead of getting a solid night's sleep for the past few weeks I've been taking a series of naps at night. Better than nothing, I guess.

One of the meals I love that I haven't made lately is chicken taco salad, so I prepped up a batch in the evening and put some in the freezer. I'm going to try it without any chips at all in it. I also bought a small piece of barbecue smoked salmon for just over a dollar and mixed it into 500 grams of non-fat cream cheese.

I've been continuing the good FlyLady habits of swishing and swiping the bathroom and keeping the dishes done in the kitchen. Snack tonight was 4 graham crackers with cinnamon/splenda cream cheese and a bowl of raspberries with vanilla yogurt and a sprinkle of All-Bran. Now I'm off for a cool shower and to bed. Perchance to sleep.