Day 106

According to my painstaking record-keeping efforts in the food journal, Day 106 was today. I notice as time goes on and I get sicker and sicker of writing down everydamnthing I eat and its nutritional content, my writing gets sloppier and sloppier in the food journal. I can't wait to set it on fire and dance wildly around it with reckless abandon.

There are many handy websites where I get my nutritional info for the food journal; most major restaurant chains have nutrition information for their food online, and there are all kinds of nifty sites, like nutritiondata.com, where you can look up the nutritional content of just about anything--fruit, whatever. I had to laugh--tonight we had sloppy Joes, and I had to take apart the ingredients and log them all. When I looked up ground beef, the number of choices was insane. Knowing the lean percentage of the meat was far from enough--was the cow grass-fed? (Did its stall in the barn have north-south exposure? Did it poop rainbows?)

My ankle is giving me a really bad time. It now pops when I move it at all, hurts all the time, and if I do something as simple as walk around a grocery store, I basically have to ice and elevate it afterward. I'm taking more ibuprofen than I would like. I'm probably going to have to bite the bullet and go have it X-rayed, but I've been waiting for this surgery to happen to see if weight loss would help it. We really cannot afford any additional medical bills. In terms of working out, I have been sticking to strength training and tai chi--better than nothing, I reckon.

Mr. Salted was on vacation the past two weeks--"use it or lose it"--so we've mostly been hanging out at home after our little bed and breakfast stay. We went and saw "Adventureland", which we both loved, especially me, I think. It was set in 1987, so it was our era, and the soundtrack was FANTASTIC. I downloaded it on Itunes and had most of the missing songs in my collection already. It made me wax nostalgic for my college-radio DJing days--my personal life wasn't at its peak back then, but the music was great! I (amazingly) avoided working for a carnival, but I had almost every other crappy job known to man. McDonalds, Godfather's Pizza, music store, pet store, convenience stores, movie theater, nanny, you name it. My favorite jobs were always work-study jobs in college; I got to work in several libraries, which I loved. I also enjoyed bookstore jobs and had a couple of those over the years. If the economy continues in this vein after I've had and recovered from this surgery, I may end up back in retail--God forbid. A bookstore is about the only retail job I can see myself doing.

I'm still looking into the whole Tech Writing Certificate thing, though I'm definitely more productive when Mr. Salted isn't home all day with me. I'd love to be in a room all day pushing paper, researching, writing, or what have you. I'd love to be writing. Writing writing writing. I'd love to be able to say: I write full-time; I'm a novelist; I'm a writer--and have it be true.

Tomorrow is Monday, so I need to get on my support group stuff, since it meets Tuesdays. The last round of exercises was extremely overwhelming for me, and I haven't wanted to look at it again since.

I also tried a few days without sugar, just using artificial sweeteners (sugar-free Jello, Crystal Light, etc.). It was not the most fun I've ever had, and I was jonesing the whole time. I finally broke down and had a few Ghirardelli squares. We are trying to finish up the food that is going to be eradicated--a lot of white pasta and the like. Mr. Salted has agreed not to have cookies in the house.