Rain! And coooold rain, at that! Yep. I wore no panty hose and did wear open toed shoes. You’d think I’d be old enough to know better, eh? Desperate for spring, you say? Oh, I am. I AM! I find this so depressing and hardly want to set foot out of doors although I have very little choice in the matter unless I want to camp out in my office for the night. Nuh-uh. I’ll slosh on home, thanks. Well, it wasn’t raining when I left for work this morning, and it hadn’t started when I got here, but there’s a downpour out there now, for sure.

Lousy sleeping night last night for some reason. I was plenty tired, but kept waking up - 1:00, 3:00, 4:30…I almost said to heck with it and got up at 4:30, but didn’t - fell back asleep and was downright annoyed when the alarm went off at 5:30. DH had my coffee waiting, and I sipped at that while my bathtub filled, and then took a bath scented with peppermint in the hope that it would make me a little more alert. It did - sorta. Due to the difficulty in sleeping, I listened to the Jon Gabriel CD probably three or so times. I got a good, solid dose of it, that’s for sure. I had my whey/soy/fruit drink this morning, which isn’t anything that he neccessarily recommends, but it’s filling and nutritious, and has a calorie count that I can live with, so I’m going to keep on with it for a while. I AM noticing - what with using the visualizations and listening to the CD over and over again - that my appetite has decreased considerably. I brought a frozen “steamer” meal - 240 calories - for my lunch today, which isn’t the *live* food that the Gabriel Method recommends, but I’m trying to get as much live food as possible into my diet, and won’t feel guilty about it if I can’t, you know? The steamers are good, actually. The one I had today was “bourbon” or “whiskey” or some such - beef with some big chunks of vegetables, and it was very good, although the sodium count was probably high, as all those frozen dinners are. Filled me right up, though, and I have to say that in the past, a portioned frozen entree would never leave me feeling full. Tonight we’ll have the leftover roast beef from yesterday and the roasted white and sweet potatoes - I think there’s some salad left as well. So, it’s a bit of a beefy day for me, but the calorie count will be relatively low and the protein high, so I’m good with it. I like the CD’s imagery of the fat melting away…it seemed very real in my half-awake, half-asleep state during the night. And, theoretically, that’s all you need - is for it to “feel” real in order to have your body believe that it IS real and start behaving itself like it wants to be thin as opposed to fat. The other thing that’s been kind of fun for both DH and I has been this idea of “tricking” our bodies into thinking that they need to be thin in order to survive (as opposed to believing that they need to be fat in order to be safe) by purposely doing something to cause a brief adrenalin rush - like when we’re walking, sprinting for thirty seconds as if something was chasing us. Just thirty seconds - enough to feel a little jolt of adrenalin. Not so much fun at the end of a walk as it is during the first half hour, though.

That’s right, Feathers. We don’t bring up political or religious subjects here. Oh, you know, when you get to be as old as I am, the way people feel that whatever it is that THEY, personally, believe is THE right thing to believe and all the others are fake and false and tricks of the devil or whatever….it just occurs to me that if we all just believed whatever we chose and let everybody else do the same, we’d be living in a lot pleasanter world. Why do people keep having religious wars, for gawd’s sake? (Or their OWN sake, actually). Of course that doesn’t solve the economic questions, but that would lead to a political rant the likes of which would get me thrown off this here hallowed blogground, so I’m actually going to refrain this time around. That’s not to say there hasn’t already been some ranting and won’t be more ranting in the future on the subject.  

Just recently there was an article in our local newspaper about an elderly woman - well into her nineties, if I recall correctly - who had been aboard the Titanic with her parents and siblings when it sank. She and her mother survived, but her father and brothers went down with the ship. According to the article, she never married, lived a rather reclusive life, and never wanted to speak about the Titanic at all. Refused to, in fact. When she died, she left most all she had - including the little house she lived her whole life in - to some distant relatives in England. In the process of going through the house and her belongings, they found a shoebox full of Titanic memorabilia which they subsequently sold at auction for something over $200,000. There was some outcry from people who felt that selling the stuff was a very crass thing to do, and that it “dishonored her memory and her wishes”. I say pish tush to that. One of the people who complained was her old family retainer - a lawyer who said he represented her affairs while she was alive and knew her to be a very private person who would be quite unhappy at “all this publicity”. I say, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The woman is DEAD, for goodness’ sake! What does she care NOW about some old bits of programs and menus and such? Besides which, if she DID care and wanted them disposed of in some particular way, then she should’ve had this old family retainer include those desires in her will. Nope, I say, let the relatives use the money to buy themselves some gas, or rice - or maybe to send their kids to school now that the college loans are becoming so hard to come by or, if need be, let them put it toward their own housing costs so that they don’t join the growing number of people losing their homes to goreclosure in this country. I get such a kick out of people always knowing what somebody else SHOULD be DOING. Half the time I don’t even know what I should be doing, let alone giving anybody else directions. We humans are such a snoopy bunch, you know?

Here’s to a skinny summer, eh? I think my goal in life is now to be a skinny, elegant old dame. Of COURSE that sounds sexist. Dame, indeed! But kewl, don’t you think? I have a vision of myself being very bony and having my clothes hang on me in wonderful dips and swirls. Except my jeans. The kids always complain that I wear my jeans too loose. I have to wear more fitted jeans, but I plan to have everything else flowing and swirling. I want to be an elderly little wood nymph this summer…

Hugs,

Z