It's not a workday - I'm so happy

I woke up about 6:30 this morning and knew that it was going to be a good day, I could feel it in my bones. It didn't matter that it was chilly and overcast. It didn't matter rain might come our way and wash out The Taste of Turlock (more about that coming up). I just knew that things would get done.

By the time I left the house I had thrown out more of the paper build up that plagues our house. Where does this junk paper come from????????? I did two loads of my laundry, watered and cleaned the garden of debris, noted that the tree roots were starting to wreck the brickwork that we had put in just two years ago (sigh), and mailed The Reluctant Fundamentalist to Toni and one of Q's subscription journals to him. Q - change the address!


Last month we purchased tickets ($15 each) to Taste of Turlock, a food sampling tour of the downtown restaurants. Of course that was a month before I joined Jenny Craig. That was five weeks before I went for my first weight-in since joining (that would be this morning) and when Don reminded me of the event, I knew I had a problem. Unwilling to give up my afternoon out with Don, I decided to talk about the problem with my Jenny Craig counselor. The good news is that I lost 5.6 lbs. this week. I expect to lose 3-4 lb by next week but then it will slow down. In the meantime, I had today to deal with.

After much discussion I realized what was really important to me was not losing this afternoon date with Don. The food was secondary, maybe not even secondary. So understanding that the food wasn't terribly important and the lose of 5.6 lbs was, I confidently went to Taste of Turlock and sampled very tiny morsels of the samples offered.

Little went wrong this afternoon. Even the little shower didn't put a damper on the stroll but I wasn't happy when I discovered that the batteries had gone dead in my camera. This was not a good thing. I would have no visual memory of my triumph over food temptation.

Not being one to stop at Plan A, I immediately devised a Plan B. Most of the tables and restaurants had brochures and business cards so I started collecting. The two pictures here are the results of the collecting - my Plan B. The cute little napkins are from Mistletoe and Roses Tea Room. I also had one of my countless notebooks with me and so at various stops I got to work recording a word memory of the tiny morsels I ate or avoided.


My biggest "sin" of the day had to be the normal slice of brie I allowed myself to enjoy but I skipped the crackers. Mustard Seed Catering also had artichoke hearts covered with an artichoke/cream cheese mixture. One bite and I slid the artichoke over to Don. It was good but I was being virtuous. I had determined that one fully savored taste of a tiny morsel of a sample was just as good as consuming the whole thing. And so the day went:

1/2 scone, fruit, spiced pear hot tea;
Two tiny slices of mini-quiche (which equaled about 1/3 of an snack sized quiche);
A tablespoon of lowfat Carmel praline ice cream;
A taste of Don's peanut butter tart;
One bite of chicken Alfredo;
Skipped the ravioli and cheese sauce at Bistro;
Skipped the strawberry dipped in white chocolate (that was painful);
but enjoyed one sweet undipped strawberry elsewhere;
Two spice shrimps (not fried) from Mi Casa;
1/3 of a classic dog with mustard - one nibble of the bun and tossed the remainder;
1/4 C of minestrone soup (as opposed to the 1 C they were handing out) and a bite of skirt steak;
Latifs had to die for peach cobbler. I'm a crust girl. I skipped the crust, enjoyed the peaches;
Our favorite Henry's Restaurant served up a 2T serving of chicken/rice soup, terriaki chicken and chicken Parmesan. Skipped most of the rice and spaghetti.
We closed out our eating tour at Cafe Insomnia and enjoyed about a 1/4C of banana smoothie.

It was sprinkling by the time we started to the car but a little rain didn't matter. We had a very fun afternoon. It's evening now. No one is hungry and I'm going to tackle (yet again) my battle with teaching myself how to start a granny square and successful starting the second round - but more about that on another post.