I won’t say much about Tuesday, as it was much like Wednesday (cereal bars for breakfast, a light home-packed lunch of a big apple and some pretzels and peanut-butter crackers and another cereal bar) except to say that the boneless spare ribs at Jumbo Palace are surprisingly lean, and I ordered the steamed rice instead of the fried rice. Probably shouldn’t have gotten the egg roll, but this is progress.
I would have made it without the cookies. You see (maybe you don’t) we had our big New Jersey AT conference on Friday, and there was all kinds of food there, and I didn’t do so well with it, and then we brought some back, only the cookies (which didn’t go in my car) didn’t make it back in the office until Monday afternoon, after a weekend filled with all sorts of sugary goodness, and even though I had my lunch packed (a major step) and a relatively innocuous dinner planned, I had me some cookies. Don’t judge me.
Breakfast – when the baby spits up on you, you get to have a nice breakfast. Grabbed a cranberry juice and a hunk of cake from the sub shop.
Lunch – I had talked myself into Five Guys. I really wanted to go. Really. And if I had, I probably would have gone whole hog – double cheeseburger with bacon, Cajun fries, peanuts, and a real Coke with some lemonade or orange soda mixed in. And a refill or two. But I didn’t. I figured I could get a burger somewhere else, and while it wouldn’t be a Five Guys burger, it would be OK. So I walked uphill to State Street to the food court in whatever state office building that is, and got a single cheeeseburger with a small order of fries and an iced tea that tasted like it had mop water in it. And then I walked back to my office (it is uphill both ways).
Dinner – those sweet chicken nuggets, but with peas and mushrooms as a side instead of something starchy, and not very much of either. And no dessert.
Here’s the thing. I’ve been reading this book that talks about morality being a necessary precursor for happiness – that one can’t be truly happy if one is acting in an immoral way. And I know that the happiness that one gets from going to Five Guys (oh, Five Guys, how I love you, how your fat-laden hamburgers fill me, how your Cajun fries excite me, how those free peanuts and free refills stir my soul) is fleeting. Intense! Joyful! But fleeting, and ultimately self-destructive, etc.
Did I mention that Five Guys has free peanuts?
Anyway. Five Guys makes me happy. Losing weight does not. I have lost fifty-five pounds since I started doing Weight Watchers in 2008. This is a good thing. My clothes fit better (the XXXXL Eddie Bauer polo that I am wearing fits me like Gadhafi’s tent). But I am still fat, still woefully out of shape, and (if I am going to be honest about it) I am still ashamed of who I am, fat-wise. That’s not going to change, even if I lose fifty more pounds, even if I get down under three bills. The amount of weight loss it will take to make me happy simply isn’t attainable today, or this week, or this year, or probably next year. And Five Guys is just up the road in Ewing.
Breakfast – Actually had time to make breakfast, and a healthy one at that – Kashi granola cereal and milk, no juice.
Lunch – waited too long to grab lunch, so I ended up getting some junk from the convenience store – sweet tea, and pretzels, and peanut butter cookies (for the protein). Not a good strategy.
Dinner – made a casserole out of leftover chili, with more ground beef, and cheese, and fat-free refried beans. Didn’t eat too much of it, though, so there’s that.
that means you have a liberal bias.
Mr. Marcus said the editors took pains to exclude ideologues on the right and the left, although a liberal perspective can be detected in several essays, including one about Ronald Reagan’s speech “A Time for Choosing” on behalf of Barry Goldwater.
Although a handful of negative references to George W. Bush remain, including one in Mr. Sollors and Mr. Marcus’s joint essay on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Marcus said he deleted others that were not an integral part of an argument.
Well, that’s nice. But then there’s this:
President Obama’s election came near the tail end of the process. The editors wanted to note it, but felt, as Mr. Sollors said, that “absolutely the wrong way to do this was some essay on what it all means.”
They “thought and thought,” Mr. Marcus continued, and contacted Kara Walker, an artist and a recipient of a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. “We didn’t know what she would make,” he said.
She created not an essay but a series of nine collages that feature her characteristic hand-cut black-paper silhouettes. Four of them feature a scrawl of text, one has a few sentences from President Obama’s autobiography “Dreams From My Father” pasted around the edges, and the rest, which make up the coda to this new literary history, have no words at all.
Because no human words can possibly do justice to the greatness that is the Blessed Redeemer, don’t you know.
Breakfast – Went to Costco over the weekend on a formula run, and picked up a big Costco-sized box of Fiber One bars (which are basically candy bars, but only have two points) and had one of those for breakfast. Big mistake. Because…
Lunch – when you only have a little morsel for breakfast, that makes you super-hungry for lunch (especially if said little morsel is packed with sugar). Sweet & sour pork with sweet iced tea for lunch. (Got the white rice instead of the fried rice, and only ate half of it, but still.)
Dinner – Brisket and cornbread, which wouldn’t have been too bad, except that because I had all that sugar earlier, I sort of needed a handful (or two, let’s be honest) of Oreos when I got home. I don’t even want to talk about it.
Thursday – I don’t even remember Thursday, how do you like that. I know it happened but that’s about it. I think I had pizza at one point. Oh, wait. I recorded points – let’s see, way over. Oh, yeah. I remember now. We were going to the ball game, but one of the babies came down with a fever, so we stayed at home and ate whatever came to hand, which was frozen bourbon-glazed chicken nuggets, and those little things are trouble. But it was the first day over that week.
Friday. We had a day off, but we had a sick baby that we had to lug around. (She was fine, just a touch of fever, but enough to keep her out of day care.) We both wanted to go to the Hillsborough Star Diner for breakfast, but the schedule and the need to keep points down interfered, so we went to the Bagelicious in the Shop-Rite center. Sesame bagel with peanut butter, not bad. Had to get a very quick lunch, and that meant fast food – I tried to be good and get the grilled chicken at KFC. Never doing THAT again, never had a worse meal at any KFC ever. Just nasty-tasting greasy miniature bites of chicken. Ew. Double ew. Were able to go to the ballgame (Somerset Patriots) and got a dog and a Coke Zero, and then broke down and got some ballpark nachos. A bit over again.
Saturday: No breakfast that I can remember. We schlepped to the mall and I got nachos again, this time from the BBQ place in the food court. We ended up having a baby-related meltdown in the furniture store we went to in Green Brook, and we needed to stop somewhere and feed them, so we ended up going to a Dunkin’ Donuts. (I was good and only got a couple donut holes and a chocolate milk.) Got home a little late to grill anything, so ended up with baked potatoes and ribeyes cooked under the broiler, not too bad.
Sunday: I had pretty much given up by this time on keeping track of points and whatnot. Cooked hash browns for brunch (and stirred in the last of the horseradish cheese, extra-special-good). Didn’t have anything after that until dinner, which was pork ribs lovingly cooked in the smoker, served with fresh pineapple. Probably came in under points, but just barely.
Verdict: Down two pounds (this largely from spending Sunday doing a variety of chores, not to mention lots of walking in the mall, etc.) Still adjusting from junk-food to diet, obviously, and the even more obvious self-discipline issues.
Breakfast – skipped, no points.
Lunch – basically, made lunch instead of breakfast. PBJ and two small bags of pretzels. Wasn’t enough, so I got a small bag of M&Ms later (peanut M&Ms, for the protein). 17 points.
Pre-dinner – was waiting for cornbread to cook, which took forever, and had a few cookies and some pistachios. Five points.
Dinner – homemade cornbread, with a little chili and cheese and sour cream on top. Larrupin’. 15 points or so.
Dessert – WW mint chip cone, 2 points. 40 points overall, came in well under. Should have had more chili.
First there were the college football rankings. Okay, fine.
Then there were the pre-season college football rankings. Interesting but ultimately useless.
Then some fool decided to rank the NFL teams in a similar manner. Complete waste of time; the NFL decides its rankings out on the field.
Then there were pre-season and off-season NFL rankings. Utter waste of time.
Now ESPN has statistical analysis of how different NFL writers vote for their rankings. Enough. Stop it.