Northbound

Hey, it was there in the kitchen of my office.  And it was ice cream day (one scoop mint chocolate chip with syrup).

What was funny about it was that it was grocery store ice cream, from an outfit called “Turkey Hill”, nothing special.  And I overheard somebody in my office say, “That’s the best ice cream in the world.”  I didn’t laugh out loud, but durn if I didn’t come close.

Pork chops went very nicely on the grill last night; got an extra one in my lunchpail today as a sandwich item.  (That’s two days in a row that I brought my lunch, pretty sweet, eh?)  As far as exercise goes, pulling great big huge heavy boxes out of our storage space and taking the books out of them and putting them on the new bookcases - not exactly treadmill-quality exercise, but it beats nothing.  Gotta mow tonight or tomorrow night on top of that.

Oh, and got a big — huge — laugh out of Thomas Frank discovering in the WSJ that — gasp! — there is a university department out there that is just dripping with politics.  Imagine that!  A part of a university where politics plays a huge role!  Of course, it’s the University of Chicago economics department, which means that it’s conservative politics, so it naturally Must Be Stopped.  (Even worse, it has conservative donors!  Yikes!)

I am going to have to figure out a way to get the people who run the vending machine downstairs to put in some diet Mountain Dew.

1. I like going to the vending machine in the late afternoon, it kind of breaks up the monotony of sitting at one’s desk.
2. I like my caffeine cold, especially in August.
3. The only diet drink in the vending machine is diet Pepsi.  I hate and despise diet Pepsi.  It is awful and grotesque.  I don’t generally like diet drinks to begin with (although I have been drinking them all my life, since the saccharine-laden horror of Diet Dr Pepper came along).  I don’t like any of the old-school diet drinks anymore.  And I don’t much like regular Pepsi anyway; it is nothing than a sicklier, sweeter version of Coke.  There is nothing good about diet Pepsi, and I don’t like not having choices.
4. But I do like Mountain Dew, I do.  It is stronger and more robust than Sprite or its imitators.  It has caffeine to burn.  And the diet version is actually quite tasty (it has about ten calories or so, because it has orange juice in it).
5. So I end up drinking regular Mountain Dew instead of diet Mountain Dew, which is a bad choice.  I don’t like being forced into bad choices.  But nobody around walking distance of my office sells the diet stuff, and the only other option is walking to Kreuzer’s and getting a Coke Zero, and that’s a bit too far to walk in August.
6. I could buy 20 oz bottles of the diet, and stash them in my office, but that wouldn’t get them to be ice cold when I get them out of the vending machine.  (It would be cheaper, yeah, but I’m paying for the coldness as much as for the caffeine.)

So, therefore, poop.  Peanut butter and pretzels for lunch (only doing that one more time this week, or I hope so.).  Putting pork chops on the grill tonight.

UPDATE:  Sent a quick, nice e-mail to the vending machine company; they are going to check out and see what they can do.  Probably nothing will happen, but hey.  I tried.

We got the grill put together over the weekend, and I managed to slip into the local co-op before they closed to get the propane bottle refilled, so of course we had to try it out, and that meant Bubba Burgers, because you can cook them frozen.  Very tasty indeed.  Just had a few chips with them, and low-calorie toppings (mustard and bread-and-butter pickles).   Fortunately, I was able to count some activity by walking (uphill, i the August heat) to my bank in Trenton, so it all balanced out (well, mostly) in terms of points.  I can say this only because I walked past the candy and nut shop in downtown Trenton and didn’t get any toffee-covered peanuts.  I hope you realize how difficult that was.

It started in Baltimore, just a cough, just a sneeze.  I felt lousy all day Sunday and that was pretty much it.  Then Wednesday, I guess it was, I got home early and decided to edge the sidewalk and driveway with my Weed-Whacker.  I think I was OK until I decided to whack the area around the sewer access plate, which was dense with some sort of purplish weed, which I had to destroy.  I got a couple of big lungfuls of dust, and that did it.  (UPDATE:  Actually, it looks like we may have a ton of ragweed in our flower beds, if this picture from the county agent is accurate.)  I dragged through Thursday, called in sick on Friday, and slept the whole entire day, which sounds wonderful but isn’t when you feel as rotten as I did.

Of course, being sick, in and of itself, isn’t an excuse for doing the stuff you have to do, so I dragged my way through the weekend, running errands.  Felt well enough to go to a ball game Saturday night, even, and am feeling relatively human today.  But I didn’t eat any special way — had next to nothing on Friday, as bad as I felt, and mostly had a big huge breakfast on Saturday (the Hillsborough Star Diner, French toast and their big juicy sausages) and that was really about it.  Nothing really memorable from the diet department, other than I didn’t have anything really sugary except for the syrup on the French toast.

And I lost fifteen pounds.

You’re surprised?  Think how I feel.  Down to 423, which is great — heroic, epic — but I gotta think that it’s an outlier, something that is in some way deeply wrong.  You shouldn’t lose fifteen pounds in a week, that can’t be good.  (I was not aggressively dieting or doing anything aggressively other than sneezing.)

Anyway, I expect to bounce back up the scales this week - I just don’t want to do anything much to help myself.  Diet-blogging back to normal as of today.  (Oatmeal squares with WW orange juice for breakfast, and schlepping over to downtown Trenton to get a six-inch meatball sandwich and baked chips and Coke Zero at Subway for lunch.)

Breakfast - Nature Valley Organic granola - organic, so it must be good for you.  It’s got stuff in it that looks thoroughly like Rice Krispies, which are about as organic as your iPod.  And the Weight Watchers orange juice, which is just as good as regular orange juice if you don’t think about things like taste and flavor and stuff.

Lunch - leftover pork chop on a hamburger bun with honey mustard and bread-and-butter pickles, and some pretzel rods.

Dinner - thawing out some ground meat as we speak; I’m thinking sloppy joes.

I don’t remember everything, mind you, but this is kind of a roundup.  It’s here mostly to make me feel better about what I did.

Friday - I don’t think I had breakfast, can’t remember.  Had lunch though, at our local deli in Hillsborough.  Got the grilled ham and cheese (very greasy, yum) and a bag of Cape Cod chips and a cream soda.  In hindsight, probably should have done without the cream soda, although I did get two bottles of Sprite Zero for the road ahead.  Didn’t get anything at the big service area in Delaware (is there more to Delaware than the I-95 service area?  Must find out sometime).  Dinner at Camden Yards, a big Esskay hot dog (nice and plump, highly recommended) and a regular Coke.  No peanuts, no beer, but did get the aforementioned Edy’s Dutch chocolate, which I probably should not have finished.  Verdict:  Could have done much, much better, especially leaving out the sodas.

Saturday - No breakfast.  Went out to an On the Border near our hotel, and I was very very good, really I was, you have no idea.  Got one of the lunch specials, a bowl of chicken tortilla soup and about a quarter of an empanada, and a little bit of queso off my wife’s plate.  And that was it, and went swimming afterwards, and swam laps.  (Also went and got a case of Shiner Bock, which you can’t get in Jersey, and which will make the occasional appearance here.)  Dinner at J. Paul’s in the Inner Harbor, which isn’t Phillips’s, but isn’t bad.  Soft pretzels for an appetizer, and three jumbo fried shrimp, a piece of fried cod, and a crabcake.  Not abstemious by any means, but not bad, and no dessert.  Had a regular Coke at Camden Yards, watched the Rangers lose yet again - their fourth straight, and had some of my wife’s ice cream (the little bon-bons with ice cream inside, whatever they’re called.)  Lots of walking, too, in downtown Baltimore, so there’s that.

Sunday - Breakfast at La Madeleine, which was a surprise because I didn’t know La Madeleine had penetrated that far north.  Didn’t get to actually sit and eat as we were running late, but got a couple of chocolate croissaints and some orange juice, and I don’t feel sorry, not one little bit.  Delicious.  We had a wedding reception to go to (the purpose for the trip, don’t you know) and it was out in the country, and there was something out there that was wreaking absolute havoc on my sinuses.  So I took an antihistimane, and that always makes me thirsty, so I had half a mimosa and about four Cokes, and that was probably not a good idea.  And the lunch was a buffet (two crepes with fruit, some chicken with linguine alfredo-pesto sauce, and two slices of roast beef with lots of horseradish, the better to open my sinuses).  We had to leave to beat the traffic (which we didn’t) so no cake.  Battled traffic all the way through Delaware, finally got to Jersey late in the evening.  Stopped at P.F. Chang’s in West Windsor, mostly because I wanted Chinese and wanted something a bit lighter than what you’d get from our local takeout places - got the honey chicken with the fried rice and lathered it with mustard (the thing with the sinuses again).  No dessert.

Monday - Skipped breakfast due to contractor-related issues, drinking some orange juice and that’s pretty much it.  Pretzels and peanut butter for lunch.

We’ve had computer issues here, and a long weekend in Baltimore without Internet access, so posting has not been as consistent as one would like - and neither has dining.  Big regular Coke at the Orioles-Rangers game at Camden Yards, followed up by a big scoop of Edy’s Dutch chocolate.  Crabcake with fried shrimp and fried cod the next night, and then a wedding reception on Sunday with a crepe station.

So - haven’t weighed yet, but there’s probably going to be a gain, which is bad.  (Even though there was a lot of walking and a good bit of swimming and a whole heap of self-denial.)  You have setbacks and you have to deal with them and move on.

UPDATE:  438, erasing the loss from last week.

NYT articles about the insane competition for preschool slots are always a reliable source of humor, but geez:

Ms. Rowe said she began planning an elementary school five years ago to allow families to continue their education at Mandell, which emphasizes a progressive curriculum of academics, citizenship and community involvement.

Yeah.  At a preschool.  I actually went to something of an ”elite” private preschool in Dallas — my mom taught there and we got free tuition — but all I got was a progressive curriculum of Speed Racer and dinosaur-related coloring books, with an emphasis on learning to tie my shoes.  You’d have to be pretty stupid to think that your child’s preschool curriculum is “progressive” to any meaningful degree — stupid enough to spend $28k a year on kindergarten, which I guess is kinda the point.

Cowlishaw:

Cowboys wide receiver Patrick Crayton likes the fact that the team’s camp has been virtually free of controversy. And then he couldn’t help himself.

“Green Bay, that’s a soap opera,” he said, referring to the ongoing Brett Favre saga. “It’s shaking Aaron Rodgers, I don’t care what they’re saying.”

Then Crayton went on to urge the Packers to start Rodgers, not Favre, against Dallas on Sept. 21. When he was reminded that Rodgers played fairly well against the Cowboys when Favre was injured, Crayton said, “Did anyone have any film on him?

“Their defense had film on him for last week’s scrimmage. How’d that go?”

The NFC divisional playoff game against the Giants, Patrick, how’d that go?  Huh?  You do well in that game?  You catch the game-winning touchdown or anything?  No?  Then shut up.