Got up early this morning to finish the reading for my Astronomy class - what we know about the Milky Way. I remain boggled. We're still waiting for some grad student to think of a way to see through the center to the other side. Who knows what's over there?

I'm beginning the negotiations with DW about what size turkey to buy for Thanksgiving. My eyes are bigger than our roasting pan.

Good Morning! Back from the wedding and also from a look-around the following day at what will probably become our retirement city. I enjoyed the wedding and, with catered food, not a lot of chances to overeat.

We had junk food the rest of the time but it was only 2 lunches and an afternoon snack so I'm not too stressed or guilty about it. I am cutting back for the next couple of days so things should even out.

I also plan to cut back in the evenings and have one yogurt cup and one piece of fruit as snacks. I'll see what that does to my weight for the pre-Christmas season.

Good week all!

Dagmar

Hello. Back from my travels for the time being. I hope to return to a dreary routine for a while.

Busy weekend for us. Saturday was golf, lunch, shopping errands and a visit to our local jewelers who were having a grand opening of their store which had recently relocated. It was an expensive trip! DH bought me a bracelet for Christmas. We also bought a new mattress. They say (on ads, anyway) that you should replace your mattress every 8 years. Ours is going on 13. I remember as a child sleeping on a mattress that had been owned by my great aunt. I can't imagine how old it was but I do remember having my dad cut off a measure of link that had poked through and kept poking me as I slept. When we were clearing out the house after my dad died, the daybed with that mattress was still there. Yeah, I'm 52 and it was owned by my great aunt. It was probably 100 years old!

The new mattress is a hybrid--four inches of memory foam over six inches of coil. It is so comfortable! I can't wait to get it, but they didn't have in in stock so it'll come next Saturday--sometime after DH and I get up early and drive to our local Porsche dealer for Coffee and Cars with the local Porsche club (our first outing with the club as we forgot to RSVP for the wine tasting and lunch which they did a couple weekends ago).

DH woke me at 5:20 this morning. Apparently I didn't hear my "alarm clock" go off at 4:50, so I'm running a tad bit behind today.

I'm going to work on my Thanksgiving menu this week. MIL wants to know if she can bring something. I guess I should allow her to do something other than rolls and olives and pickles.

Bill-- you sound like my dh with the turkey and everything else. How many people are you feeding? We will just have the four of us but we always cook as if 20 are coming. It's pretty insane.

Sounds like a nice weekend, Dagmar. Good plan with getting back on track.

Allison-- what kind of bracelet did you get? Love jewelry!! And a Porsche club-- so fancy!! Enjoy your mattress. I bet you'll sleep much better-- You'll probably never want to get up early to exercise!!

I started a "new" eating plan yesterday and am abandoning carb cycling at least briefly. I mentioned that my dd is eating the evol meals and is loving it so I'm joining her in solidarity (and because I want to track my calories for a bit to see what I'm really eating). It means a whole new morning routine for me. I never realize how much of a routine person I am until I change something. For the past several years, I get up at 5:00 to let the dogs out and feed them. Then I make my oatmeal and coffee. Eat that and putter till 6:00. Get ready for work till 6:20 or so, walk the dogs and I'm out the door around 6:45. Because I know the breakfasts I'll be eating are lower calorie and I anticipate being HUNGRY, I decided to switch things up-- crazy I know! I had my morning coffee, got ready for work and then had my breakfast. I kept forgetting to do things because I was doing things all out of order. I only ate the evol meals for part of the day yesterday and was down over a pound today, which is a heck of a lot better than last Monday when I was up 3 pounds. It should be easy to stick to until dh comes home Thursday. Then he is done traveling for the year. And he has his knee surgery in two weeks so I'll be the one cooking-- he usually cooks when he's home.... should be interesting. We are trying to figure out if I need to take a couple days off from work to care for him or if he can be alone....

My one (big) food challenge this week is the annual Thanksgiving feast at school. It's the only food event I partake in at work all year. We have some amazing cooks and bakers and I will definitely indulge but will try to control myself somewhat!!

Fighting horrible allergies at the moment. We had a cold front come in with wind and rain. Rain stopped but super chilly and windy. Yuck!!

Michele~the bracelet is links of small round gold alternating with links of diamonds. Each round is about the size of a dime, so it's really open links. Hard to explain. Once I get it I'll take a photo of it and post it. They were sending it back to the manufacturer to add two links because it was too small for my huge wrist.

I forgot to mention that I did a little bird watching Saturday while golfing. On the second hole, as we were walking down the fairway, a small very red bird flew by. It landed in a tree and we all enjoyed looking at it but had no idea what it might be. But I remember I had downloaded an app on my phone from Cornell Lab called Merlin bird identifier. I plugged in the info to the app and determined we had seen a vermillion flycatcher.

Alinnell -- Wow, a vermilion flycatcher. Nice!

My favorite golf story is vicarious. My dad was killing time between meetings by watching the golfers on the course next door to the conference center. He saw a ball hit the middle of a fairway, then was amused to see a fox trot out, grab the ball in its teeth, and stroll away with it back into the bushes. Pretty soon the second ball arrived, and a different fox came trotting out of the bushes to retrieve it and take it back home. My dad, being the nice fellow that he is, waited until the players came down from the T to find their shots, and told them what he had seen. The players just sighed and said, "again?" I wonder how many golf balls the foxes accumulated in their den. Maybe they sold the extras to the raccoon ...

I'm also struggling with the "how big of a turkey" question, because DH, The Boy, and I will be alone this T-Day for the first time in nearly 15 years. In the past we'd get an insanely large turkey and gnaw on it for most of FIL's 10-day visit, mostly so that I didn't have to cook or plan meals after T-day. But, FIL is too ill to travel, and with just the three of us a 20+ pounder seems a wee bit overkill. (And, truth be told, even with 4 people we'd get awfully sick of turkey before it finally disappeared.)

Taking a rest day today. I took the long way on my walk to work, though, so I should at least get a couple of miles in.

//kaw

This is a report on the fasting and silent retreat I attended over the weekend at our Buddhist sangha.

They are not strict about the fasting. The instruction is to treat food as medicine, and if you need to have it to avoid getting sick, you should have it.

My partner and I don't do well with strict fasting, and we brought nutrition bars to eat in this way.

What I learned about food through this practice:

I'm planning to stay with small meals--not that small! But not as I was doing before. I think there's a possibility here of a different way of life.

Jayell Interesting re the retreat and fasting/small meals. I can't do that during the week due to the large amount of energy my job takes. Particularly in the winter. But for someone inside and more sedentary it would probably work well.

It would also depend on what a "meal" is to different people.

I would like to try about 6 really small meals per day one weekend in the summer. Nice to experiment and change things up.

Dagmar

I try to eat when I'm hungry, however many times a day that might be. Being engaged in an interesting, non-stressful activity is a lot more conducive to not feeling hungry. There are times when I'm active outside and don't realize how hungry I've become until I actually feel a little sick and weak. Then there's other times sitting in my office when every little crisis feels impossible to deal with until I have something to eat. But my "meals" are always small. Feeling full is not a good feeling to me any more, although it once was.

Interesting how different we all are! But I certainly agree with JayEll that the standard three meals a day with snacks is not necessary, or even desirable.

Today will be one of those days that I overeat... I know it. I'm putting it out there. I can try to come up with strategies to not overeat, but I'm realistic. It is our annual Thanksgiving feast at work and it is the only day of the year that I participate in the food orgy that happens. We have a large staff and everyone goes all out preparing amazing meals, side dishes and desserts. I made a veggie casserole to bring.... My only promises to myself are not to eat the bread and to only take small portions of what looks absolutely amazing. I probably won't eat the meat as it's usually dry and not as good as we make at home, but I won't promise that as I haven't seen it yet. I ate a small breakfast and I will have a small dinner and will try not to berate myself too much the rest of the week when my weight is way up. I was 125.6 Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday....really, scale? Couldn't move even a little?? imagine I'll be up several pounds tomorrow. But I will get to the gym this afternoon to try to offset the damages.

Hey, it's just one day, Michele. You probably won't overeat by more than 700 or 800 calories for the day, and that's not even .25 pound of fat. The scale will go up but it will go back down. Don't sweat it!

Alice-- you mean you don't think I overate over 10,000 calories needed to gain the 3 pounds overnight that I did?!

I was soooooo full yesterday even at night. I'm never like that. I drug myself to the gym and did an hour on the elliptical. After that, I took a bath and did other chores hoping to lessen my fullness as I figured I needed to eat something for dinner or I'd wake up starving. I finally had a very small dinner.

The difference today between me and my colleagues is that I am DONE with the feasting. There are leftovers galore and I will NOT be participating one iota.

Dh comes home today for the rest of the year-- hooray!!! Can't wait! I know my pups will be excited to see him too! Now to not overeat his delicious dinners he is famous for cooking...

It's been yet another week of putting out fires at work and just grinding forward day by day. As much as we gripe in my industry about the 6 weeks of vacation that our European counterparts take, usually in one big chunk, next week begins that subtle "screw it til next year" attitude as people rush to take remaining vacation. We make (I think) a mistake by completing performance reviews in October.

We are hosting Thanksgiving at our house this year, and foregoing the turkey for a fresh ham. I've found a farmer who adores her pigs and gets her joy from letting them revel in their pigginess right up to the end. Problem is, Anthony Bourdain has noticed too, and demand has gone straight through the roof as a result.

I have an opposite problem at work. I've noticed that it isn't us that has the attitude of slacking, but the contractors for whom we work have an attitude of "why should we pay this invoice?" We actually bust butt in November and December because many of the homeowners want to move in for the holidays. I understand that and we work a lot of overtime this time of year. But then we send in invoices for the work and the contractors typically don't pay until January or even February. That makes cash really tight at a time of year when we want to give bonuses to our employees. We met with our CPA yesterday and he's lined out a bunch of things to do to help with our taxes (bonuses, profit sharing, etc.) but it's hard to do that when our A/R is so high. And we still have to pay regular wages. I've seen this trend for at least the last three years and I'm not sure how to get them to pay on time. It's quite frustrating and the one thing that is quite stressful to me.