Today is my last day of work until NEXT Wednesday. We pick my sis up at the airport tonight (she’s flying in from N.C.) and on Friday, we’ll be heading down to Newport to hang out with our decrepit old relatives (which is fitting, considering that we are decrepit and old as well). We were born & raised in Little Compton, R.I., which is right around the corner from Newport, so all along that part of the coast is our old stomping grounds so to speak. When she was up last year in September, we did the “forty steps” above, and plan on doing them again this weekend. When you can no longer do the “forty steps”, you KNOW you’re done for.

Anyway, I stayed home from work yesterday and cleaned my house from top to bottom. Scrubbed in places that I don’t think I’ve ever even scrubbed before (we’ve been here for a year and five months), and ended the day with a trip to the laundromat to wash and dry the comforter for the guest bedroom, which is too big & fluffy for our heavy-duty washing machine. Got home from there at @ 8:00, gobbled down the rotisseried chicken that DH had picked up on his way home from work, took a long, soothing bath and washed and dried my hair. No NEED for any exercise of the “fitness” variety. Today, those muscles that I stretched and pushed all day yesterday are just whining and crying and carrying on like the bunch of wimps they are. Tsk.  I’m keeping them subdued by gulping down a coupla Ibuprophens every three or four hours. My house is just sparkling, though…and should make a wonderful first impression, which is all I care about. Once she arrives and sees how neat and clean everything is, that’ll be it. I’m certainly not going to even attempt to keep it up!

I have not weighed myself for a couple of weeks, now. It’s avoidance, for sure. It’s not that I’ve been exactly “off my diet” so to speak, but I haven’t been keeping as close a track as I had been, and that’s the truth. And then we had the big “do” for my daughter’s (DD3’s) birthday last Saturday night (took her shopping all day, walked my legs off, but found her some great stuff - great clothes, that is - for fall & winter). Her MIL went with us and we had a really nice day together. Her MIL bought her clothes for her birthday, too, and it was just MUCH nicer than buying her something she wouldn’t like, wouldn’t look good in, or wouldn’t fit right….OR a gift card, which is fine, but a little impersonal. My DD3 had gained about 25 pounds over the past few years, and then went on WW’s a few months back and took it all off. The last time we were shopping together (pre-diet) it was pretty awful…pretty depressing. She couldn’t find a thing she looked really good in, and ended up grabbing a couple of things that neither one of us much liked. But on Saturday, everything looked great on her, and we could easily have bought everything in sight. As it was, I think between MIL and I, she pretty much has a whole new wardrobe. But hey - it’s her 30th birthday, after all. That only comes around once, and it IS a milestone event, right? The party that night was great, too - DD2 had come to my house during the week, and we went through all the old photo albums as well as all the family photos we had stored on the computer, and DH scanned all the old photos and put everything on a disk for DD2 - she then made them into a movie of DD3 from the time we brought her home from the hospital in her little pink blankie to now. It was SO awesome! Everybody was laughing and crying simultaneously. We had all sorts of fussy little finger foods being passed around before the sit-down dinner…one of which was stuffed mushrooms. I do not have mushrooms in the house - ever - because DH is allergic to them. But I LOVE them, and every time they came my way, I grabbed two or three and practically swallowed them whole. Ohhhhh, they were soooooo good! Must’ve eaten eight - maybe ten - of ‘em. Awful, I know, but I just couldn’t help myself. My only consolation is that they weren’t chocolate. If they’d been chocolate, I’d STILL be bingeing…trust me.

But those mushrooms made themselves known all day Sunday. I won’t go into any further detail…it’s far too ugly. Still was feeling slight reverberations yesterday, which is why I stayed home from work, although I DID have all that cleaning to do, so it worked out pretty well, actually. I’m at work today, and frankly have no CLUE why I didn’t take today off as well.

But as I was saying, I haven’t been weighing and/or measuring, nor have I been weighing or measuring my food as I had been doing. I have a pretty decent eye for serving size at this point, and pretty much know how many WW points are in my normal meals, but there have been a FEW slips, I have to admit. My sister is DYING for fried clams at the ocean. Woe is me. I’m really going to have to WORK at not GAINING, never mind doing any additional losing while she’s visiting.

Alright. I have some correspondence to catch up on, and then this fat old chickie is heading home.

Love you madly…and take good care, every last one of you! (Ruby-Jean, I always buy Perdue chickens! I am SO not a chicken snob! Soclose, hope all is well in your world, and if you’re back, Annie-girl, I am DYING to hear about your Asian vacation! Lyn, you keep up the great job you’ve been doing with the diet & exercise! I swear, I get inspired just reading what you’ve been up to!)

E! (aka Z)