Like a bird on new-found wings

2004-01-16 - 3:09 p.m.

This morning I slept in until nine because I stayed up late last night. I stayed up late because I was finishing reading Cloud of Sparrows and I just couldn't ever bring myself to put it down. I haven't written a review of it yet, but I can say it was good and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

Last night was also my first volleyball game of the season. It didn't start until 9pm. What is the significance of that, you wonder? Well, I'll never wear glasses to a volleyball game if I can help it, so that meant I was wearing my contacts until after 10pm. I had them in yesterday for 14 hours and it wasn't too bad. Anyway, I sucked, but we won the game anyway. Only four teams signed up this season so we're not going to have playoffs. We're just going to play and whatever team has the best record at the end wins. That makes regular season games that much more important, not that winning wasn't always my goal anyway. Last night we played the team that had the ox on it. I think I've talked about him before. I can't stand that guy. My usual way of dealing with him is pretending he doesn't exist. It works for me. Last night I found out his name. He has such a girlie name. Sometimes I'm very grateful that I rarely say things without thinking about them first. The first thing that came to mind when I heard his name was, "No wonder you're such a jerk!"

But anyway, this morning instead of jogging I went for a bike ride. I rode down to the post office again and then I took a longer way home to make sure that I was riding for a full 30 minutes. Afterwards, since I'm pretty sure I won't be around this afternoon to walk with my parents, I went for a 2-mile walk by myself. So I didn't jog, but I think I still got a fair amount of exercise.

My mom came home early today because it's Friday. We decided to go to our usual Friday lunch of Chipotle. Chipotle, by the way, is not exactly waistline friendly. But I had done a bit of research into Chipotle and found out that their crunchy tacos cost the least Weight Watchers points. You get four of them at a time so that meant between us my Mom and I each got two, which is plenty. The only thing that went wrong was that the girl making them put sour cream on them when I asked her not to. I guess I could've made her start over, but I didn't. So those two tacos cost me 9.5 points. But I didn't eat anything at all for breakfast so I think I should still be ok.

And I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing because I've been planning. There's a quote on someone's Weight Watcher website that says, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail," and I've found that to be true. So I've planned the rest of my night, in which I'm meeting a friend for dinner at the Spaghetti Factory. I've planned exactly what I'm going to order (and eat half of) that will allow me to eat the icecream dessert, one slice of french bread, half the salad dressing, and still come in 0.5 points under my target. Plus if I feel like I need a snack or something later tonight, I still have the activity points I earned today plus flex points if I get really desperate. So really, this Weight Watchers thing isn't so bad. I just have to make intelligent choices.

Tomorrow I'm going to Yosemite. Planning for that has been tougher. Mostly because everything I eat has to be basically what my parents want to eat. This is ok, but while my mom made some effort to just bring healthy stuff, she's still bringing some high-points stuff. I can eat all of it, just less. When everyone else is oinking on the chips, I'll just stop when I reach my 6-chip limit. And I won't have seconds of the brie. But on the other hand, the plan is to be walking around most of the day, so I'll have some activity points to burn, too, if I need it, and of course flex points, since I haven't used any yet this week. Anyway, I'm feeling good because I've planned. This is totally something I can do.