Jen - you look fantastic! You have made such progress, it is inspiring to see.
Megan - vent away about work all you want. I'm not in the happiest work place right now, so I am likely to start venting about mine any minute. LOL
Ishbel - congrats to VIP!
That is a great recognition for a wonderful thing he's doing.
Steph - I hope that they are able to offer you what you need. Do you have a low limit that would be acceptable if they can't get to what you are asking for? And yes, the chips were AWESOME.
I love hot sauce on anything anyway.
Dagmar - I would much prefer your pizza as well. Sounds like you are stocked and ready!
Jessica - great coat find! You can rock the animal print for a few months. All the kids are doing it. LOL
Saef - I have asked myself that same question more than once. Can I keep this up forever? What am I giving up to do this thing? I turned down social events because I had an exercise plan, I didn't join a bookclub I looked at because I had to work out and they might have finger food, etc. I did become obsessive and quite single focused, and the answer for me was that I couldn't sustain it. I crashed pretty hard this summer and am working on coming back with things I can manage again. I've found crock pot meals I can put together in the morning and have dinner waiting after I run. I just ordered a small deep freeze actually, so I can prep lots of meals at the start of the month and freeze them so I can just pull a bag and go on busier days. I'm finding workout routines that are shorter with more impact so I can limit exercise time and still feel good about the workout. I've become somewhat dissatisfied with my career choice lately and have considered going back to school or looking for something different, but my job has flexibility that allows me to control diet and exercise and work from home and exercise on lunch. A new job wouldn't do that, and school would take that time. I've avoided those two things out of fear, but I might not be able to do that anymore. Reading your post actually made me take a hard look at myself as I was thinking of my response to you - I say to you take the job, write for yourself, take the risks. If they are what you want. Like Jessica said, you can adapt to the new situation and still take care of yourself. If you don't do those things out of fear of what might happen you walk closer to closing yourself off completely and giving over to the obsession of maintaining that image. You have to trust yourself to continue to take care of things, so you don't crash. And you can take care of things, you're awesome.
I spent more time with my friend today - we drove down to where we went to college - neither one of has been back since 1995 when he graduated. Everything looked so small. Our residence hall is gone, they razed it and the one next door and built a four building residential complex connected by a central area with offices and meeting rooms. The path to get to our building is still there, and leads to the new one. We stood at the student center and looked down that path and remembered how long it used to seem, how much we complained about that walk. We crossed over to the building, walked through it and across the parking lot and up the hill to the science building. I remember that hill being so steep and such a long walk every day that I changed a major over it. We passed by and continued to the dining hall, which we never went to, again because of the long walk. Kept walking, crossed up past some other buildings and circled back down to where we started. All we could talk about was how we used to fuss so much about that, and drive and park illegally and get tickets, or not do a thing over it when it was so close. I can't believe the perception now compared to then. I'm running a freaking half marathon in three weeks and I couldn't walk what I know now was about 1/4 mile if that much from my residence hall to the student center? I was that lazy, really? Yes. Obviously. And all the buildings looked small. The library we used to think was huge looked small, and kind of sad. And they've changed the mascot, so even the signs didn't look right. It was good to go back and look around and remember things that we loved about it, but I'm not going to picture what I saw today in my memory. I'll still see my residence hall and the huge library and the long path to the science building and my mascot is an indian brave not a bright blue timber wolf.
ETA: I forgot I had on my BodyMedia Fit today - I just checked the pedometer. In the hour and a half roughly that we were walking we went 4012 steps, so roughly 2 miles. And that was a circle of all of the places we never wanted to walk to, and across campus to classroom buildings. A walk to any of those on a regualar day back then would have been significantly shorter. Wow.