Well, here I am - back at work yet one more time. I try - oh, how I try - to tell myself how fortunate I am to have a decent job when so many others are out of work in this country, but frankly, it’s difficult to muster up much enthusiasm at 5:30 on Monday morning. In fact, I’d be hard put to come up with much enthusiasm until, oh, roundabout Wednesday afternoon, I’d say. And then, the enthusiasm is about having made it half-way through the week, not about how much I love my job for gawd’s sake! ANYWAY, it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood and immediately after eating my Healthy Choice chicken and something-or-other panini for 300 calories, I’m going outside to soak up a few rays. Oh, I just can’t get enough sun, you know? We went to a street art festival yesterday at @ noontime, stayed there walking from booth to booth for a couple of hours, and then stopped by Home Depot for a new plant pot for my spider-baby which is now at least a foot tall, and outgrowing it’s eensy little pot. I was disgusted, to be perfectly honest. An 8′ diameter pot was $24.99. Maybe you-all are used to paying such exhorbitant prices, but please keep in mind that I came of age in the late sixties and raised my kids in the late seventies, through the eighties and nineties. (They were spaced pretty far apart). But I mean, sometimes the prices of simple damned things that you know have about ten cents worth of actual material in them - not to mention that they were most likely made in some foreign sweatshop where workers are given twenty-five cents a day and their pay is docked to cover the cost of their broken-down dormitory rooms - and here’s Home Depot (or WalMart, or Target, or wherever) making 99.9% profit or more - well, I mean, it’s just not to be tolerated or supported. It makes no sense. So, needless to say, I refused to buy a new pot, and am now tring to figure out what to put my spider in before it gets potbound. But, all of that aside, we left Home Depot (with me feeling foul and doing a bit of ranting and raving, I’m afraid) and stopped at the market to pick up a few last-minute things for my DD’s cook-out. I parboiled a great batch of chicken wings on Saturday evening and had the things marinating in buffalo wing sauce all night long. But, I also committed to making a big tossed salad because everyone loves my salads since DH and I became so much more healthy with our eating and all - now I add all sorts of lovely ingredients, and my salads are phenomenal! Enough of blowing my own horn, though - we did our grocery stop and then headed home for the wings and to make the salad. The cook-out was really nice; very laid-back - just my two local DD’s and their husbands and one child apiece. DD30 IS working on having another one as I think I mentioned previously in this here blog, but so far, no progress on that front. We really had a long discussion, though - about the usual, of course. Politics, religion, family relationships, current events (family, country, world) - and Dh and I didn’t manage to get home to bed until nearly 10:00, which wasn’t optimum for me getting up at 5:30. Of course he always gets up about ten minutes before me to make the coffee and feed the cats, so it’s not like he gets to sleep in. (I betcha he took a nap this morning, though!) Now I was planning to just have a Boca burger with FF cheese on a whole wheat bun and a huge big plate of salad at the cook-out, but the burgers that DD made just got the best of me, and I ended up having one, along with three chicken wings AND and an  ice cream cone-thing that I was thoroughly amazed to discover had only 150 calories to the 140 calories in our WW ice cream sandwiches! But, eating that stupid burger - and the ice cream, I suppose - ended up making me hungry LATER, so I had a WW ice cream when we got home. I don’t think I went anywhere near over my calorie count for the day, but it sure felt like it.

Now I’m yawning like crazy. Guess I’ll go heat up my panini and catch a little sun.

TTFN,

Hugs,

Z