Chris works for an local attraction, so his job skews his weekends so that his ‘weekend’ is actually Sunday-Monday instead of Saturday-Sunday like the rest of the world.  All the better to keep the place staffed over the weekend, when they do the most business.  When I worked there, I went through a period where I worked ALL weekend.  That sucked.

But anyway, Sundays are therefore our only mutual day off, and we usually try to make the most of it.  Unfortunately, most family holidays also fall on Sundays, as was the case this weekend.   So sometimes we have to dance around family obligations and just be good about it.  And fortunately, Chris is good about it.  He understands my parents’ feelings about the divorce, and we both concede that for all intents and purposes it was still very recent.  So he’s respectful, allows there to be a distance between him and the rest of my family.  Ideally down the line they’ll relax, but in the meantime I don’t want to stir the pot by doing what Andy did.  He started bringing his girlfriend to church and the kids’ extracurricular activities knowing my family would all be there.  He told my father, “She is in my life now, and you’re just going to have to accept that.”

Considering how they embraced Andy and supported him, the fact that he would take on a girlfriend before we were even divorced and then shove her into their faces like that REALLY did not make him popular with my family.  But Andy is Andy.  He doesn’t really care.

Okay, I didn’t mean to make this about that.  I guess I’m still defensive about dating.  Anyway.

The point is, last week I asked my parents if we had any plans in place for Father’s Day.  There were apparently sketchy plans to have a meal.  Fair enough.  They wanted to know if the kids would be able to come, and I had to regretfully say no, they would naturally be with their own Dad on Father’s Day.   I asked if it would be okay if we came over midweek to swim; we could give Dad his Father’s Day Gifts then.  This was deemed acceptable, so it’s what we planned to do.  Mom asked if I would then not come on Sunday, and I hedged; frankly, if I could get off the hook for that, I’d have rather spent the day at Six Flags with Chris… but I didn’t want to say so, obviously.

Then I guess it was learned that my sister and her husband had planned to go camping all weekend.  I don’t know if this was John’s personal desire or just Kate trying to ingratiate herself with the new pastor and his family, as I understand they were camping together.  Either way, it meant Kate’s family wouldn’t be at my Dad’s Father’s Day meal.  Mom reported to me that Dad was ‘feeling hurt’ that his meal seemed to be such a low priority for everyone and asked again whether I planned to come to the meal myself.  I said, “Then I’ll come.  I don’t want Dad to be hurt.”   It would be just me and my other sister’s family and my parents.  That’s not the end of the world.   No Six Flags, but it WAS Father’s Day and Dad should be a priority given that, right?

So our weeknight swim and visit with my Dad was shared with Kate and her family.  Kate, of course, did me one better by bringing not only gifts but also two pies.

Have I mentioned that getting away from Kate is a big reason why I cannot wait to move away from here?  Yeesh.

Then Saturday I call Mom to ask when the meal is to be and what I can bring for it.  She gets all dodgy and then explains that apparently my other sister’s husband was grumbling that even though he is an ‘active’ father right now, he’s still forced to spend HIS Father’s Day with my parents.  I don’t think he intended for Anna to pass this along to my Mom, but she did… so Mom immediately excused THEM from the meal with my Dad.  That made Anna’s husband feel bad, and they immediately turned around and invited Mom and Dad to eat at THEIR house. This put Mom in a bind, apparently, because they had made a production of guilting me to come over, and I guess maybe Anna and Jason didn’t want me at their meal or something.  I don’t know.   Anna was apparently very hurt that she and Jason were not invited to the midweek party we apparently held without her. >_<  Oh, brother.

Anyway, it would have been a simple matter to let me off the hook and let that be that, but instead Mom tried to ‘make it up to me’ by inviting me to go bowling with them before the meal at Anna and Jason’s.   I agreed, largely because it seemed important to them that I do so, and it was an okay time.  I wish Mom had just left it alone, though, but she slipped me five dollars and pointed out that I could get a pretty good meal at McDonald’s off of the Dollar Menu with that.  I don’t think I actually felt rejected until I realized she was trying to assuage her own guilt for not including me in the evening meal.

So suffice it to say: my family situation is not as bad as it was, but I’m not sure this is better.   :/   Anyway, I’m just sort of venting and this has nothing to do with ADF, so I’m going to close it here.

Of course, it was an Up Day, so there was that.  I can’t say I was super good, but I wasn’t super bad either.  My neices came over for their weekly science lesson, which was about Seeds.  They’re homeschooled, but my sister hates teaching science.  While I cannot fathom this, it gives me an opportunity to trade services with her.  She watches L on Wednesdays when my Mom can’t, and I pay her back by handling the science curriculum for her daughters.

Anyway, the subject was seeds, and I usually try to serve them a theme-related snack at some point in the morning.  Today we had popcorn and mixed nuts.  The peanuts are great for talking about ‘seed embryos’, because you can just pop them apart and see the little proto leaves and radicle pretty clearly.

So I did snack some on mixed nuts.  And sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds.  And this brought to mind the fact that even vegetarian diets can be pretty calorie and fat heavy if you’re indulging in a lot of nuts and seeds.   In fact, I was reading a few weeks ago about vegans who not only refuse to eat any animal products, they also refuse to eat any plant parts besides fruits and nuts.  The idea, I guess, is to do no harm to any living thing, so they only eat what the plant produces and discards on its own.  I want to know why seeds are okay to eat in that case, but eggs are not? Also, do they dine on deciduous leaves in the fall?  I’m not asking to be a smartass, I’m just genuinely curious.

Because really, when it comes to ‘emotional vegetarianism’, that approach is the only one that makes much sense to me.  I don’t understand why someone who believes all animal life is sacred would be able to say that plant life is not.  At least this approach makes more sense in that regard; we’re only eating things that we can eat without causing injury or death to the plant.  I can get behind that.

Which isn’t to say I plan to DO it.   I’m still too attached to bacon to go strictly vegetarian anyway, and too attached to eggs to go vegan, so…

Anyway, after that, I mowed the lawn (I am mean to plants all over, apparently) and then I met a relator I know to look at some houses in Manchester.  They are by far the most comfortable houses I’ve seen so far, but that’s probably because they are the most suburban houses I’ve seen so far.  They aren’t what I’d call interesting, but they are a good size and in safe, quiet neighborhoods.   They’re not as close to the Garden as I might like, but living there would cut my commute by half or more.  The rent is about $250/mo less than my mortgage, too.   I applied for both, so we’ll see.

But nonetheless, here we are.   And it does give me some time to spend with Chris, which I obviously don’t mind.  But the trouble with Fridays — or these Fridays, anyway — is that they come after two weeks of heavy kid attendance and there’s sort of a sense of ‘it’s our time now, let’s do something fun’.  And ‘something fun’ usually involves food.

Tonight, we went out for Chinese.  I had been good all day, and I didn’t really blow it.  Chris is a vegetarian, and so when we go out for Chinese we usually split a vegetarian dish.   The sauce is probably not the best choice, and certainly the rice is calorie-heavy, but overall I doubt I ‘spent’ more than the six or so points I usually allot myself on Down Days.

Afterwards we went to one of our two favorite coffee houses.  I was good and forewent my usual Vanilla Chai Latte in favor of straight-up Chai tea.  So I was good.  We even walked some after that, so there was extra exercise too.

The realtor for that house in the African American neighborhood has apparently fallen completely off the map.  She was supposed to call me back on Tuesday ‘at the latest’ to let me know what the homeowner said about my application to rent.  She didn’t call at all on Tuesday, and yesterday I left a message and E-mailed her, received no responses from either.  Moreover, a ‘back to the drawing board’ check of Realtor.com revealed that the house is no longer available for rent.  O_O  It’s still up there for purchase, but the rental ad is gone.

I have no idea what all of that means, but it annoys me on so many levels I don’t know where to begin.   Maybe the owner decided not to rent, but why wouldn’t the realtor just call me and say so?  Maybe she was out yesterday.  I don’t know.  All I know is, ever since losing the Cambridge lease because of my hesitation to push forward without a plan to keep the current mortgage current, I have felt increasingly hopeless about finding a decent place for us to live.  There are a lot of rentals out there, but in most cases the rent is higher than my mortgage.  The houses that are affordable are so ridiculously tiny that I cannot FATHOM how they can advertise ’4 BR’ in a house that in the next breath admits to being only 986 square feet.  This probably suggests how spoiled I am, given that I’m used to my suburban house, which is by contrast a mansion, apparently.

Everytime I think about it, my neck aches, my head hurts, and I just feel run down.  There is a gnawing sense of having painted myself into a corner here, even though aside from the divorce I don’t think any of this was avoidable.  We were sinking financially anyway; it was only a matter of time before we arrived here.  As it is, I’m actually doing better than we were before the divorce, but the kids need some kind of savings for their futures, and it worries me that that’s not happening.  Z is 11 now.  There are only seven years left before he’ll need college money, and I’ll have nothing to offer him.

*sigh*  With all of that on my head right now, seeking momentary pleasure in indulging in something that tastes good — and then seeking it again a moment later and a moment later and a moment later, just to keep some kind of lift going — is way too tempting and too easy to do on an Up Day when I’m supposed to ‘eat whatever I want’.  All told, I’m not doing as good a job with this as I could be, but dwelling on that just gives me another source of guilt to think about and it spirals from there.

The last time I was doing ADF, I quit doing it for exactly this reason.   The guilt of failing was compounding the stress I was already under, so it seemed somehow logical to stop.  Of course, without a regimen in place, I ate too much and felt guilty about that, too….so it didn’t really help anything.    I don’t really know what the answer is.

But that’s what the weekend gave me, really, so I’ll just keep plugging away at this and see where we go.

Work is turning out to be a good thing, though.  My job has me working between two buildings.  My cubicle is in one place, the classrooms in which I teach are in another.  The classroom building has offices too, but there isn’t room for me there unless we make someone share.  Most of us are okay with that, but if there are clear cubicles at CBEC, why not take advantage?

The thing is, the classroom building people meet for lunch in a designated lunchroom and the lunch period is a decidedly social affair.  At CBEC, there is no designated eating room and few people make it a practice to eat together.  Occasionally people eat together just as a consequence of happening to wind up eating at the same time and in the same room, but it’s not expected by any means.

So as long as I stay in CBEC during the Down Day lunch period, there is no social pressure to eat, no need to make excuses for myself, etc.  As long as I take advantage of that, I’m probably going to be able to keep this up.

Plus, since I didn’t start walking until Tuesday of last week, I gave myself today to finish up errant walking miles for the Marathon Challenge.  So I nailed that one, too. 

I am hard at thought about something completely unrelated to all of this… So even though it’s off-topic, I’m still going to write about it here.

The terms of our divorce state that within three years of the divorce date, the house we own together must either be refinanced into my name or sold outright.   The house is a good house, but it has crap siding and the back deck is literally falling apart.  Moreover, my exhusband had tried to resolve his financial SNAFUs by rolling a large chunk of debt into a the mortgage when we refinanced (as he explained it to ME) to ‘get a better interest rate and get out from under our PMI’.  As a result, there’s no way we’ll sell the house for what we owe on it.

Between that and the fact that my new job is some 30 miles away from where I live, the prudent course of action seems to be to attempt to sell.  I would then rent a house closer to work.  We’ve worked out a plan that is satisfactory to us both, and so now we’re in the process of cleaning, painting, packing and hauling to prepare to put the house on the market.  He will move back in around August and I’ll move to a rental, provided I can find one.

I’ve found a couple of really promising possibilities.  One of them nigh on broke my heart to let go, but taking it when it was available would have made it really difficult to keep the mortgage current while we sell the house.  I’m still not entirely convinced I shouldn’t have taken it anyway, because it was an amazing house for an amazingly affordable rental price, but I just keep telling myself that there must have been something wrong with that situation such that letting it go was better for me.

I have since found another option.  It’s located in a nice, safe neighborhood, less than 10 miles from my job.  Moreover, the route between my job and this house will take me right past the schools the kids will be attending next year, so dropping them off at school will be convenient and quick.  As if that’s not enough, the rent is over $500 less than I’m paying on my mortgage.  The overall savings, between gas and housing costs, that living in this house would afford me is almost $1,000 PER MONTH.

That’s pretty amazing.  And it gets higher when my youngest no longer needs to be in preschool.  The city also has publicly supported preschools and there are a couple of Lutheran preschools nearby too.  AND, one of my BH friends lives a few streets away, and she’s a SAHM.  She’s already said that if I need someone to grab my youngest after school, she’ll be happy to do it.

There are two downsides.  One is that it’s small compared to the house we have now.  Of course, the house we have now is a 2100-square-foot, 4 BR, 3BA house in the suburbs.  This one is a 1500-square-foot, 3BR, 2BA house in the city.   It’d be an adjustment down for us, but it’s still a whole lot larger than most of the other houses I’m finding in my price range.   My kids would have to share rooms, but they’re okay with that… and with that rent, I could put away serious savings toward buying a bigger house in just a few years.  So that’s not so bad, really.   It has a small yard, a two-car garage, and a full basement.  It could be a LOT worse.

The other is… harder for me, somehow.  If we moved there, we’d be the only caucasian family on the block.   Every other family that I’ve seen there is African American.  I would find this less worrisome if the neighborhood were more diverse, but as it is I’m a little uncomfortable.  This isn’t so much a racist concern as it is a social one.  I worry enough about being socially acceptable as it is; putting myself into a situation where I’m an obvious sore thumb from the word go is going to feel awkward.  The subdivision is safe and the people there upon whom I’ve laid eyes look like very nice people.  I just worry because I know there’s already considerable mistrust among strangers, and I’d be stranger than most there.  And so would my kids.  I don’t know.

My friend who lives thereabouts says her street is getting more culturally diverse.  Young couples are moving in because the housing is so affordable, so she’s seeing hispanic couples, multiracial couples, etc. walking together down the street these days.

I just don’t know.  Thoughts for/against?

All of the “You’ll Screw Up Your Metabolism” naysayers will undoubtedly love that, but the truth is that the weight gain has a fairly simple explanation:  I had the kids at home, I was eager to get out and have fun with them, and as a result I celebrated the weekend in grand style.  

You would have thought I was on a cruise or something, given what we ate.  We visited a pizza buffet, a chinese buffet (my biggest downfall), and went out for frozen custard.  There were also cookies in there, bagels with cream cheese, fried eggs and various concoctions involving cheese.  On the whole, I earned this weight gain fair and square.

I’m not really sure what I was thinking, but boy..am I paying for it today.  It’s a Down Day, so my body has nothing to do but grumble about what I put it through, and it is NOT HAPPY.  I’ll spare details, but suffice it to say I am curious to see how much I’ll weigh when I get home, given…you know..stuff.   At least today isn’t my official ‘weigh-in’ day, so we’ll see where I’m at by Wednesday.

In any case, I won’t be doing that again.  I didn’t make food journaling a hard and fast rule for myself this time, but I think I’ll go back to it anyway.  It’s annoying, but it’s a suitable consequence for my terrible behavior.

But I am anyway.  So let’s talk about it.

Coffee.

Coffee is a part of my life that is new since the last runs with ADF.   I started with social coffee drinking — lattes at Panera or Starbucks, Chai Tea, etc. — and now have progressed to drinking real, actual coffee at work.  Admittedly, I am not yet hardcore enough to drink it black, nor do I usually have more than one cup a day.   I do find I sometimes can tell when I haven’t ‘had my coffee yet’, and drinking a cup will inevitably allow me to focus better on whatever it is I’m trying to do.

Fortunately, this isn’t a daily occurrance and I usually go through entire weekends and occasional workdays without indulging at all.  I have never, to my knowledge, had a caffiene withdrawal headache, so I don’t think I’m too badly off yet.  But I do wonder about it in terms of my diet.

I remember from Weight Watchers that black coffee is ‘free’ — that is, it does not provide you with enough calories to really bother with as you’re counting up Points ™.  Adding cream and sugar obviously changes this, but even given the Coffee Wuss that I am, I don’t generally add so much of either that I ingest more than 50 calories or so per cup.

So it’s an okay thing to drink on my Down Days, right?  It provides a welcome flavor alternative to ice water (not that I’m abadoning my favorite drink, don’t worry) and is nicer to drink on cooler days…  The question is how it impacts my performance, really.

I’ve gone through one or two bad cases of the shakes this past week.  One happened on Wednesday, the first big Down Day I put myself through.  The next happened Thursday, ostensibly as the result of a nutrition lull.  Both days, I was drinking coffee, which led me to wonder something.  Does drinking caffienated beverages on an empty stomach have the same effect that drinking alcohol on an empty stomach tends to have?  That is: are the effects enhanced because there’s nothing in your system to act as any sort of buffer?

I only ask because I am still very much a big baby when it comes to caffiene.  My mother was diagnosed with Fibrocystic disease (not to be confused with Cystic Fibrosis, which is something else entirely) when I was in junior high, and she was told that caffiene was believed to be a contributing factor.  As a result, we were not allowed to drink cola, Mountain Dew, tea, or anything else that contained caffiene for the rest of my childhood.  I didn’t especially mind, as even at the time I pretty much preferred cold water to anything else, and since then my caffiene consumption has been comparatively low relative to my peers.  I still don’t care for soda (pop, whatever), don’t drink much tea and until recently, eschewed coffee. 

Which means I’m a little prone to caffiene shakes, even now.  It doesn’t happen a lot, but I did wonder if the shakes I had last week were related.   I haven’t had any since then, so it was probably just my body adjusting to the new world order, but I still wonder.

Walking at work is, I’ve decided, a very good thing.  Taking myself out into the Garden to walk during the hard Mid-Morning Push Time turned out to be a good thing in many ways.  I got work done (I was writing up tour information for our volunteers, and it gave me a chance to look at the Garden from the viewpoint of looking for specific examples of things, and that was good), and there’s the obvious benefits that any exercise affords…  But there’s also something I hadn’t thought about before.

People watching is an interesting motivator.  And it doesn’t matter whether the people I’m watching are heavier or thinner than I am.  They motivate me no matter what.  It’s probably ungracious of me to think, “Well, I’m glad I’m not as heavy as SHE is…”, but I admit I do think it.  I probably think it more because I do remember when I WAS pretty big, and it reminds me of what I must have looked like and how glad I am that I haven’t let it get that bad again.   I may be overweight — and I am — but I am not grossly obese and that’s worth celebrating.

Thin people are good to watch too, though.  Working where I do, I am surrounded by a lot of the REI set.  They are mostly younger, single or married-but-childless people who spend their weekends hiking, rock-climbing, cycling.  I hear them chatting on Monday morning, comparing notes about how their trek at Castlewood State Park went on Saturday, and how the upcoming weekend’s plans at Meramec might shape up.   I feel a pang when I hear this, because I have the sense that if I’d been more on my game at that point in my life, I would have been right in there with them… hiking the trails, climbing rocks just because they’re there, and maybe even doing field work in the process.

But I was too insecure.  I spent that part of my life just trying to get through the days and be acceptable.  Anyway, it’s not like I can’t do those things now.  It’s just a little more complicated and must be worked in around childcare and financial concerns.   When Chris and I went to Johnson’s Shut-Ins and hiked, I scrambled up and over every rock I could, including the Devil’s Tollgate.  That’s how I like to enjoy my Nature; plunging in full-bore, looking at every side of it I can.  That’s why I love my job, I think; I can look at stuff up close and over and over again for a long time, and it’s what I’m getting PAID to do.  It’s not as Wild Nature as being out in the woods would be, but it’s still better than teaching in a classroom.

So being out and observing these people in their weathered khaki shorts, hiking sandals and sun-beaten athletic thin-ness is good too.  If I’m not actively trying to lose weight and exercise, they become a source of envy and shame… but as it is, I go down that road a couple of steps and then stop and say, “Well, no..wait.. I am working on it.  I’ll get there.” and then feel really good about what I’m doing.  Walking a treadmill and walking the Garden is not hiking and climbing, but it does address the fundamentals, and that’s what matters.  I’m moving, I’m sweating, I’m eating right.  That’s the bottom line.

Anyway, I didn’t give into temptation to EWC discarded snacks.  I was very good.  And on top of that, I’m on track to finish the Marathon goal, too, so hey…  Full snaps all around.

I had forgotten a lot, apparently.  Yesterday I got up, walked, and ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast.  By 10:00 a.m., the nutrition lull smacked me full-on and I was shaking too hard to write properly.  Such a quirky thing that the effects of not eating really don’t manifest for real until the day AFTER you fast, but there you go.  This is all just part of Hell Week, as I recall, so I’m not too worried.  I went out for lunch as planned and was fine after that.

Over the past year or so, I’ve backslid into some unfortunate habits.  Such is the nature of any addiction, I guess; the minute you let yourself engage in whatever behavior you tried to train yourself out of, it’s a fast slide right back into whatever you were doing before.  I can’t say I was as bad as I had been, since I was still walking and making a token effort to watch what I ate, but I was  back at letting myself eat for emotional reasons as opposed to hunger, back to snacking, back to all of it.  And even though I’ve been genuinely concerned about my weight and *tried* to control myself, I was fairly easily undone most times I tried.

The hardest part of day, I’ve discovered, is midday.  Actually, mid-MORNING.   That’s a common time for munchies to hit me, and at that point I haven’t invested much into the dieting effort yet.  Therefore, it’s unfortunately very easy for me to talk myself into deciding that that day isn’t going to work as a Diet Day and just trying again tomorrow instead.  Then I indulge and all bets are off for the rest of the day.

However, if I can push through that time of day, the noon/afternoon period is fine, and the  next bad time is when I get home from work.  If I’ve indulged already, I’ll eat too much and eat frantically, like I’m starving.  If I haven’t, there’s a sense that, “I made it this far.  I don’t want to blow it now.  Tomorrow’s just an evening and a sleep away!”, and I behave myself.

So… today, I will focus on NOT eating mid-morning/lunch.  This might be harder today than it was on Tuesday, unfortunately.  Earthways had some kind of event yesterday, and they have put all the leftovers in the STRC to be shared by the rest of us.  Yesterday I had a bowl of ice cream and some barbecue chips, so it’s not like I haven’t had a chance to have some, but with snacky/yummy food just sitting there, with a real, actual sign on them that says, ‘Please eat me!’, it’s going to be tough to behave myself.

I do have one more lesson plan to work on today, and I’d like to finish it before Sharon gets back.  I may just plan to spend 10:00-12:00 in the Garden, making notes for Food Chains.

If I recall correctly, the after-effects of a Down Day do lessen considerably after Hell Week, so hopefully I’ll just suffer on Saturday and be okay next week.  We’ll see.

Oh, I am up to 15 miles and counting right now.  I didn’t get to walk as long this morning as I normally do, but I got a mile and change in.  I’ll do the rest tonight.