100 Days toward a healthier life - Day 33

Breakfast:  Nothing
Lunch:  Tater Tots, chocolate
Dinner:  Bag of salad, kind of large tomato, salad dressing

The Tots were eaten over several hours, a whole plate, as in an actual plate, of them.  They are just as good cold as when piping hot from the oven, or at least pretty close.  When I finished them, I had some 86% cocoa mass chocolate, and some lemonade that I made from frozen lemon juice and Splenda.

I am trying to keep a decent perspective about this eating thing, but I really should be ashamed of how badly I eat some days.  Even I know that I have to create and follow a more balanced and reasonable way of eating, you know, like a decent diet, for crying out loud. 

You know, I go to the store and I look at all the food and try to buy stuff that I will actually eat and that will not, ultimately, get tossed into the garbage because I am too tired and tired out to cook the damn stuff.  There is still too much waste going on around here.  It is not like I have a ton of money and a complete lack of conscience that would facilitate not feeling so freaking guilty about all of this.

I need to buy food.  I need to eat it.  It is as simple as that.  And, yet, it is not.  It is supremely difficult and complicated to do.  I think that is why, heck, I know that it is why I am eating out several times each week.  I know that there is not any reasonably easy to cook food at home and so I go to a restaurant and have a nice, healthy meal and it satisfies me because I know that there will not be any waste.  If I stop at the market, there is an excellent chance that I will be too exhausted to actually cook what I have just bought by the time I get home and drag myself and everything else into the house.  This totally sucks.

I tried buying just frozen stuff, like meals and parts of meals, things that are already cooked and just need heating in the microwave.  I guess that is how the Tater Tots got into the freezer.

Unfortunately, there is not all that much in the realm of frozen foods that are as healthy as anyone, especially old and diabetic me, would prefer.  More than a month ago I bought a package of pre-formed beef patties.  All you have to do is to take one of the things out of the bag and cook it in a frying pan.  You do not even have to thaw them, just grab them frozen.  Seriously, that is all you have to do.  I think that you can also broil them or bake them in the oven, but those things are more steps than I can handle most days.

I have a pound of asparagus in the refrigerator right now.  I have, probably, two more days before I will have to trash it and all I have to do to eat them is to wash, snap the end, pop into a roasting pan, sprinkle and roll them around in a bit of olive oil, sprinkle with salt and bake them for a half hour.  As simple as that is, they are still likely to be tossed.  That is how little energy I have.  I can sit here and type.  I can rest and read.  But, that is all that I can manage most days here at home.  I am busy enough on my out-of-the-house days that I need the opportunity to rest and gather my strength.  Man, even to me that sounds so pathetic and excuse-laden.

I have to fix this.  I have to figure out a way to eat properly, not waste food and to spend as little as possible.  I just have to figure this out.  Even today was supposed to be a day of catching up and that seemed like it might happen after a neighbor cancelled our lunch plans.  But, it was just another day of feeling crappy, so I did very little and tried very hard to not take a nap.  Which, I did not.  Maybe I should go back to my doctor and throw myself on her mercy and ask for happy drugs or, hell, I do not know how to properly explain how tired I am all the time, much less figure out how to ask for help.

So, there is nothing left except Guilty Pleasure.  Shell Game.  I like the colors.

100 Days toward a healthier life - Day 22

Breakfast: 2 small peaches, eggs two hours later
Lunch:  Scallops, grilled vegetables, spiced apple ring, baked potato (butter, sour cream), roll, mint ice cream, decaf coffee
Dinner:  Steak, cherries

Wow, when I look back over this diary, I am kind of amazed at the kinds of foods that I am eating.  They are, almost to a one, of higher quality than what I was putting in my body three weeks ago.  I mean, good seafood and a steak, not bad.  It is taking funds away from my big travel plans, but I am happy to stay home and eat great food in the business of becoming healthier.  A fine trade-off and plan, all around. 

My previous diet was heavy on carbohydrates, brown rice, whole wheat pasta and bread, oatmeal, beans, lentils, popcorn, with only the occasional meat.  Lots of soups and slow cooker meals, still mostly carbs.  It was cheap and filling.  It was also terrible for someone who has diabetes, and that someone would be me.  I have been having problems with dairy for a long time.  Milk, ice cream and cheese nearly always gave me serious gastrointestinal distress.

Factor in all of the drive-through meals, taken and eaten on the run because it really is difficult to plan ahead for carry along meals based on my old, regular diet, and it is a wonder I had just the one heart thing.  You know, eventually I will find a way to say and write the real word for what happened, but for now it is the heart thing.  I should be troubled by an inability to move beyond being so vague and indirect and avoiding about it, but I am not.  Troubled, that is, not in the least.  I am curious about why that is, but not enough to actually get any forward movement going there.  This attitude is likely to come and bite me in the ass, but not today.

Even though I am not keeping track, anyone could see that there were simply and plainly too many calories eaten today.  The portions were good, but there was a serious glut of butter, and there really is not any excuse for the ice cream.  Lunch was at 2 and dinner at 9.  Both late and both times I was hungry.  I will have to return to some kind of snacking when meals are going to be late like this.  Carrying around a zipper bag of raw almonds should help there.

So, I finally figured out that writing here and saving as a draft is, oh, I do not know, like saving as a draft.  There have been a couple of times when something caught in my craw and because I am dedicated to writing in this diary at the end of the day, most of those things or issues are long forgotten by the time I stumble in here to spew.  Granted, most of them are best left forgotten, but there is the occasional something or other that is worth reminding myself.

Anyway, I called my chatty, story-telling friend yesterday (one of the ss women) to ask her to lunch.  I had decided that keeping our outings short, as in less than the usual 10-12 hours would go a long way to reducing the problems.  Now, this part seems awfully manipulative, and that is probably because it is.  But, if I limit the time I spend taking her places to a reasonable length, then there will not be sufficient time for her to feel the need to fill the time with the same stories, and the same demands that I chime in with opinions.  I estimate that 3 hours is long enough for lunch or dinner and a stop at the market so that she can get some groceries.  The market could be replaced by the pharmacy, it is totally her choice.

We are trying that this afternoon.  She was not sure that she could make it today, so we spoke again this morning.  She really want to do this on Thursday, but that means another very long day.  I am going to stand firm on not doing that anymore.  All right, maybe I will cave and do that with her once a month or something.  But, not every week and certainly not twice in a week.  Today I told her that I had 3 hours for lunch and/or shopping and that she could choose what we did and where I took her.

It should have worked, but I underestimated her dedication to staying out and about as long as possible and her ability to stretch events to their fullest.  We did not have the 3 hours.  It was 4 1/4 from the time I picked her up until I dropped her off.  It would have been longer, but I finally walked away from all of the last minute things she needed to share with me.

O.K., there were two times today when I felt like a jerk, a heel, a selfish bitch, a terrible person.  The first was after two hours at the restaurant when I mentioned that there was still grocery shopping to be done.  The second was during the shopping when my protesting joints would not leave me alone and I checked out my crap and waited at the front of the store for her to finish.  Now, in my defense, I did not tell her about the pain and I did tell her that she should and could take as much time as she liked to finish.  She was another 30 minutes and I sat and read a magazine.  She wants to do this again on Thursday and Saturday.  I just cannot.  They will be longer days and I just do not have the energy and time now.  Yeah, the selfish bitch rears her terrible, jerky head again.  Too bad.  I cannot keep doing this.

What else...I guess that is all.  Oh, I heard the best linked stories program today on NPR. Had I been wearing socks, it would have totally knocked them off.  I am trying, right now, to download the mp3 version so that I can listen to it over and over.  There was so much information that I could not grasp all of it.

WPR
To the best of our knowledge
The Examined Life
Examined Life - James Miller
Growing Up Jung - Micah Toub
Bipolar Memories - Aubrey Ralph
Science of Self - David Eagleman
Life of Montaigne - Sarah Bakewell

Then, tonight I watched the screen adaption of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.  Holey-moley, what an amazing film.  Certainly, not exactly the book, but that movie did not a single thing to disgrace the original version.

Those two experiences, in the same day, were, still are, amazing.  Got to pay better attention to the stuff coming into my life.  I can be a better person if I just pay attention, listen, learn, take it all in and manifest it back out again.  I am also feeling marginally better, but that is preferable to moving backwards.  Fersure.

GP, yesterday's bran muffin.

Hardly anything in a simple-focal life is simple

It just is not.

Long and boring story about my cats.  Nope.  Just the results.  Yep.

So, anyway, I noticed that C is walking less comfortably and that his arthritis is not being kind to him.  L had really bad breath.  Strange as it seems, both of those issues are connected to the fact that someone who is not me feeds them those tiny cans of wet cat food all day long.  As a bonus, both are gaining weight.

So, off to the vet clinic we go yesterday for a check up and some pre-surgical blood work.  C has great teeth and was scheduled for a cleaning today.  L has horrible, really crappy teeth and even brushing them with this nice tasting liquid and gauze does not really help much, so she was scheduled for surgery as well, as it looked like she needed a tooth extracted.

They went in today and the surgeries went well...one extraction for C, totally unexpected by all of us...four extractions for L, two of which required jaw surgery as well.   Well.

Someone there suspected that more than poor dental hygiene was a factor for L, and expressed some of the blood that was drawn yesterday to one of the state labs, so that we would have results today.

I am still stunned all of these hours later, but both of them seem to have feline stomatitis, an autoimmune disease.  I mean, that does not even seem possible, that both of them have it.  FS is usually accompanied by FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) and FeLV (feline leukemia virus), neither of which either of them have.  I mean, stunned really, hardly expresses what I am feeling.

So, in the next week or so we will be discussing some new methods of keeping their mouths cleaner, but, honestly, I am so not looking forward to that.  Having to perform regular, like weekly, dental cleanings on them is not going to improve the quality of our relationships.  Simply pilling a cat every day messes up your relationship to a certain extent.  I am going to have to hold each of them down and do some serious rubbing around in their mouths.  I feel sick about it and we have not actually decided to do anything.  Heaven forbid that I should waste worrying on certainty. 

So, I was supposed to fetch them at 2 p.m., then 3, then 4:30 and finally brought them home at 6.  They were having difficulty recovering from the anesthesia, which is always a possibility with kitties.  They are, however, just fine and only a little groggy, three hours later.  At least they are home.  We have antibiotics for ten days and pain meds, syringes, until Friday.  If they are still uncomfortable then, I can get more.

The good news is that all is well for now.  The other good news is that I had already saved some money for my next trip and the $1400.00 in costs for all of the services is easy to pay.

I was thinking a bit earlier that getting a very, very part-time job might not be such a bad idea.  I was offered several for the holiday season, so it would not be difficult to do and since I am taking a break from all of my family for a while, well, I have the time.  Maybe when I am helping clients tomorrow I can take a few minutes to make a call and help myself, although I have to be honest and say that I am not looking forward to working in the belly of the beast again.  Translated, that means the mall.

All is well that ends well.
And, you can never tell
If working in a store will
Be the final pill
That pushes you over the edge.

I cannot know until I try.
Eventually, however, wondering why
I thought it would be fine
To take a bit of time
To earn some vet clinic fees cash.

Close enough.