My water intake is WAY up, soda way down. I’m pretty much done with soda altogether except for an occasional bottle. Dairy and protein and veggies up too, carbs way down. Its working!

Today so far
2 miles at gym track
Lean pocket
Pepsi Next (1/2 bottle)
Bottle water

I have one string cheese, one yogurt, and one applesauce to pick from as snacks. Also more water.

I’m going to have a Lean pocket for lunch, and plain tuna and veggies w no butter for dinner.

NO FOOD after 7PM. Only water or plain tea. I just pretend that gnawing hunger pain is my body attacking my fat.

Pro-ana websites can be gross but I have gotten some valuable weight loss tips from them, ridiculous water consumption being the best one so far. It does fill you up.

Got up. Took kids to school. Had a coke. Watchin Sopranos. Maybe Christmas shopping later. Decidedly non-wacky.

But I refuse to let it affect my Christmas spirit. I have my lack of funds to do that. If I could just afford to do all my shopping at Urban Outfitters I could really make Christmas awesome…but maybe Target is gonna have to suffice. We don’t even have an H&M here so that’s out. Ugh. Why can’t they have mail order.

The hair….the glorious hair. Once at the Great Escape (then Storytown USA) in the late 70s, I was in line behind a guy who looked just like him. He had on a wife beater, a gold chain, and tight jeans and had loads of glorious, black glossy curls tumbling over his shoulders. The 9 year old me could not tear my eyes away from him. He had to have been about 30, right on target for me agewise (haha, but true)…then and there I decided I would one day snag a man that looked just like him. I distinctly remember flipping my Farrah hair around in an attempt to lure his attention…to no avail. And really, how creepy if it had actually worked! I still listen to Gino and still wish I was his wife so I could feel his hairy chest every day.

Every other minute I reflect on what an awesome childhood I had and how unfortunate it is that my kids will never know the coolness of that era. Yeah they got internet…but look what they didn’t get:
-bike riding w no helmet
-bike riding off to God knows where til dinnertime, eating, then going back to God knows where til dark. No parents seemed to mind this and it gave us plenty of time and scope for elaborate spy rings, clubs, secret neighborhood passageways, and games of tag.
-Summertime night games of kick the can, etc. Everyone met at a designated yard for nightime hijinks, sanctioned by parents of course.
-walkie-talkies. Most exciting thing in the world was to have 2 (good) or 4 (even better) working walkie-talkies w fresh batteries. No end of fun when you could spend the day splitting up and rendezvousing again and again at point agreed upon by radio transmission.
-JARTS. Lawn darts with dangerous, lightning-attracting metal spikes that you could fling at a loop on the ground. Could they kill you? Probably. But I never personally witnessed any JART violence tho I’m sure there was some.
-POOPATROOPERS…sold in the cheapo little plastic jars up by the registers at the Kay-Bee toy and hobby. Right next to the SuperBalls and the huff-worthy bubble goo in a tube w straw, these things were the most fun to collect and trade (if you didn’t mess up the chute strings, which of course I always did)
-Star Wars…nuff said
-KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park…best movie ever thought the 8yr old me.
-BARBIE still looked relatively normal and Ken still looked sorta straight.

One thing I don’t miss about the 70s? The Jerry Lewis telethon…a never ending bore-fest of musical numbers by people you didn’t care about seeing sandwiched between Jerry’s appeals for donations. He looked like a mob capo in the rings and shades. When you only have three channels and bowling and baseball are on the other two, you may have had a mom who insisisted that the telethon stay on all day. If it was raining out and you were trapped indoors, this made for a most unpleasant day.

I LOVE spying on the neighborhood. Tonite was perfect for it…clear night, single gunshot, mysterious headlights and then bobbing flashlight beam.. then the getaway. I’m pretty sure I just witnessed a deer jacking over in the Ganienkeh field…and its not the first time. Oooooh I LOVE when this stuff happens!! The minute I heard the shot I turned every light off, then grabbed the trusty binoculars. I saw the beam of light but it was a bit before they moved on…probably gutting the deer. Operation late-night excitement!!!

The two Bob-Whites who see the least amount of action? Ex-street thug and nephew of Regan, Dan Mangan and the pretty, slightly scatterbrained Di Lynch. I always feel bad for them. Well mostly for Dan, because Di has on more than one occasion been a real nastypants to Trix.
Poor Dan never gets to join the rest of the gang on travel adventures because of his job helping old Mr. Maypenny patrol the Wheeler’s game preserve. First of all, nobody hunts the preserve except for Maypenny himself who has permission, and Mr. Wheeler. It’s patrolled by horseback every darn day by the old man or Dan. Is it hunting season all year round in Sleepyside and surrounding area? Can’t old man Maypenny manage by himself for one or two days? There can’t be that much to do.
And Di…well even for someone who is new money she manages to get uppity real quick, especially with Trixie. She gets shipped around in a limo and her horse Sunny the palomino doesn’t even have to be schooled for the turf show, because there are apparently only three or four palominos in the area and they are only judged on looks, not performance…much like Di herself. I will give her credit where credit is due tho. In one book trixie has insomnia and is restless and thrashing around in bed, and Di gets up and applies cool compresses to her head until she can relax and sleep…that’s pretty decent of her. Plus in the Cobbetts Island mystery, she calls a manger a “food box” and sings “away in a manger, Noelle ate her hay”. I always thought that was adorable. But Di is pretty much bipolar, she can wig out on poor Trix at any moment with little provocation.
But, being the older sister to two sets of twins (apparently Mrs. Lynch was on fertility drugs) means Di sometimes misses out on sleuthing due to her built-in babysitter role. Or sometimes they explain her absence by saying she had gone off w her parents for 2 weeks. That may be a good thing seeing as she’s moody as hell.

Not really. I am listening to a random assortment of folk music on NPR. Earlier was a very entertaining Prairie Home Companion where they had a Bill Monroe tribute, they played Uncle Penn which is one of my favorites.
Anyhoo, I just noticed after re-reading all of the Trixie Belden mystery books recently, that the word “hootenanny” appears more than once. The Bob-White’s really seem to dig acoustic guitar duos and old Hudson River ditties that talk about Rip Van Winkle and the Catskills. These kids are a study in contrasts…folk music and chowin’ down at the communal vegetarian hippie restaurant in the Mystery at Meads Mountain, yet they seem to be eternally suspicious of long-haired folk like the activist in the Mystery at Maypenny’s. They also look down on makeup, power boats, and leather jackets. They’re also pretty exclusive…and they NEVER mingle with “town kids”. Heck, they won’t even talk to anybody else on their bus route. Spider Webster and brother Tad remind them of how elitist they are and how they never give outsiders a chance, and this lesson sinks in for….oh one book. Then its back to their separatist, exclusionary ways.

Formed a tentative but unsatisfying truce with F. Christopher Giruzzi yesterday. Although he blames his actions on his post-divorce wierdness, I don’t really buy it. If only I could be absolved of my past deeds so easily. Yet I buy into it because I love him, even though he is full of sh*t. He thinks that by “owning” his shoddiness he makes it ok. So initially elated by his happy birthday message, I quickly realized he is unrepentant and has no soul. I still love him, of course.

Its hypocritical of me of all people to expect fidelity. But you don’t throw the “soulmate” word around lightly. You also threw 24+ years of friendship out the window???? Really? May everything you touch turn to sh*t. I can’t think of anything bad enough to compare this to analogy-wise….that you can so easily dismiss someone who you said you would do anything for shows the depth of your sincerity. Oh and don’t worry, you will screw up your current relationship at some point because you are a cold person. Cold and dismissive and selfish. Yeah I’m selfish too. But the difference between us is that I never in a million years could have done to you what you did to me. And to Chelle, who believed she was the “soulmate”. Just how many of us were there? You dismissed her in an impressive paragraph meant to make the reader feel unbelievably insignificant….it was cutting to be sure. Why you chose to go on the offensive when you were the one who dealt the blow to begin with is beyond me…it was uncalled for. That I think of you daily even after all this is a testament to the image you built that stood for so long, indestructable and towering over everything else. Now its gone and I’ve had to learn to live with its absence but will I ever get over it? No. May the negativity you generated visit you a hundredfold.