Say that Again?

Here's a picture of our fruit bowl, just after getting back from the grocery store and putting things away. (We have strawberries in the fridge, as well as some frozen blackberries and raspberries.)

In our fruit bowl are three bananas, (one ripe and 2 a little less than ripe) one avocado, three mirabelle plums, 2 red "delicious" apples (which I think aren't very, and Thomas likes quite a lot. I'm more into the granny smith or Macintosh varieties.) and three Grāpples.

Well, what the heck is a grāpple, you might ask.

Good question. Apparently it's an apple that's been soaked on grape flavoring. Not even real grape juice, just artificial grape flavoring.

(As a note, it's pronounced Grape - el, not grapple as in to "wrestle or grasp".)

I'd seen them in the store a few times, but we've always passed them up. They're sold in little plastic cartons of four grapples apiece. For $5.99. That's right... that's $1.50 per grapple. Most of the rest of the apples at our grocery store range from ~$.62 each to $1.01 each... and they're cheaper if you buy them in a bag, or on sale. ( Generally speaking, at least one brand of apple is on sale every week. )

This time, Thomas noticed them. He picked up the little sealed package and turned it over several times, trying to figure out what it was... Finally, he sighed and said "Well, interesting idea, but they're pretty spendy." I countered with, "If you want to try it, we can... one of the bits of advice I'm constantly being given for sticking on plan is to try new things. You never know when you'll find something you like." (I used this particular advice on the mirabelle plums, which are, by the way, fantastic! If a bit wet and sticky.)

I had one this morning, as part of my morning snack. A grāpple is about 90 calories, with 3 grams of fiber, so standard for an apple. They do smell very much like grapes. Concord grapes, as a further matter of fact, which are my favorite kind of grape. The skin is yellow and red, giving the grāpple a not-quite-ripe look, and as it was enclosed in the little plastic package, hard to get a good look at in-store. There were numerous little nicks and blackmarks over the skin (I tried to take a picture of these, but my camera is not so good with the close-up shots.) and I might not have selected these in the store if I could have seen the marks, but they didn't penetrate the skin, so the fruit underneath wasn't bruised or bad. (Or bruised in the middle, which seems to be a horribly weird side effect to force-growing fruits, and I don't like it one bit. I don't want my apple to look perfect on the outside and sort of brown and fibrous in the middle.)

The grape smell was a lot stronger than the grape taste. (In fact, the smell is so strong that it's clinging to my hands over an hour later. I'm not sure I care for that too much.) Mostly, it tasted like an apple. Same crunch, same apple-taste.

I wasn't all that impressed, and at $1.50 each, I probably will not be buying them again, unless they prove a bigger hit with Darcy and Thomas.

Thomas's boss's boss, Shreyas, kept him over two and a half hours late on Wednesday for a meeting to address the issue of people quitting left, right and center from EFC. ("Wait, wait, let me get this straight... Shreyas kept everyone two and a half hours PAST quitting time to discuss WHY people were quitting?? Did anyone point out the obvious to him? Or like your two and a half percent raise that still doesn't bring you up to the MINIMUM of the pay range they were originally offering for the position?") which has screwed our week up royally. Wednesday is our normal grocery shopping day, but by the time Thomas got home, it was past dinner time, and if we'd gone to the store first, we wouldn't have eaten until at least 8:30... and then Thursday is one of our walking nights...

Thinking we might not get our walk in last night, I decided to do some free weights yesterday... I did 20 each of 7 different free weight exercises and 10 crunches and 10 pushups. It took me about 15 minutes to do them, and while it was only a 3 pound weight (in each hand), I was shaking by the end of some of the reps. Gotta work on that, I expect. Of course, Thomas came home early (not much early, like maybe 20 minutes) and we went for our walk promptly. Being in a bit of a hurry, since we needed to do the grocery shopping, I walked at his pace instead of him walking at mine, which meant we did the whole 2.2 miles in a little less than 27 minutes. Which is a good deal faster than I like to walk. (That's a 12 and a half minute mile... sheesh, no wonder I was out of breath and a little footsore last night. Literally, when I went to bed, the heel of each foot was painful to the touch.) He did the whole walk pulling Darcy behind him in her wagon (she was walking with us for a while, but ended up with such bad blisters on the back of her heels that I'm letting her ride for a while until they heal up.) so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

But then we got home and turned around and went right back out to do the grocery shopping, so I didn't get much rest, either.

On the other hand, Thomas brought me these yesterday... aren't they nice?

You Deserve the Limelight

A few months ago, I discovered something about myself. I'm a fan of limes.

You'd think it wouldn't take til I was nearly 36 years old to figure this out, wouldn't you? Heh.

Several years ago, my friend Carol got addicted to those Hint of Lime tortilla chips, but I couldn't stand them. From that, I decided that I must not like lime much (It's not like lime stuff had come up in my life much before that... lemons, yes. Oranges, yes - I hate oranges, but it had at least come up. Grapefruits, yes - ditto on grapefruits! YUCK!)

That's all beside the point, I suspect. Didn't know limes were my thing. Until one night, we were eating out at Don Pablo's and I got the Carnitas meal, which is an assemble it yourself taco with pulled pork, avocado, tomato, onion, and lime wedges. I always have liked the assemble it yourself stuff, it's fun to play with my food at the table. And I was in the mood to try something new. And I love avocados, and pulled pork, so I thought I would try it.

It was amazingly good. (Not entirely healthy, but I can still eat it, if I allot for it in my daily points... Don Pablo's does have available Nutrition Information, thus they get a nice linky...) And one of the things I noticed about eating it is that I was immediately in a much better mood than could easily be explained by simply having dinner out with a friend (especially as the friend I was going out with was Toby, and Toby has a distressing habit of chewing with his mouth open and slurping his soup, which makes me seriously sick to my stomach - one of the reasons we tend to do Don Pablo's with him is that it's almost always too noisy in there for me to be able to hear him slurping and smacking and otherwise carrying on as if he'd never been told that was rude.)

I noticed the same effect the next day, when I opened my box of leftovers and the lime smell filled the room.

Now, admittedly, I class aromatherapy in with the same group of crystal twinkie faux mysticism naturopathic medicine that has a great commercial following here in the US. Which is to say, my inner cynic likes to make fun of it.

That being said, if a thing works, why knock it? Even if it is completely in my head that the smell and taste of limes makes me feel better, isn't my mood entirely in my head anyway?

I started seeking out lime-flavored things, especially as I started this lifestyle change. My particular favorites are Diet Coke Lime (Diet Pepsi makes a lime, too, but I think the Diet Coke's version smells and tastes better), Dentyne Blast, Cool Lime chewing gum, Truelime flavor packets for my water, and Weight Watcher's Key Lime pie dessert.

Two weigh ins ago, I made my 10 pound marker, and I bought myself a little reward. (I thought about not using it until I'm back to 10 pounds after this week's gain, but that's sort of silly, don't you think? I did lose those 10 pounds, and if TOM snuck a little bit of it back on me, it should go away next week...)

Anyway, here it is... lime-scented, glitter lip gloss.

I do have to say that one thing I've always found attractive about myself is my mouth. I have full, pouty lips (well, maybe not as full as Angelina Joline, but personally, I think she looks like a bee stung her on her lip, ok?) and this lip gloss both smells and tastes good.

Thomas... is not so keen on it, but that's because I keep getting glitter on his mouth.

HYC (Or Scales in 4 part Harmony)

Hi everyone...

Well, I had a small gain this week... .4 pounds, to be exact... Surprisingly enough, I'm not completely freaking out about it, either.

If you look at my pattern, it goes this way: loss, small loss, big loss, maintain or gain, small loss, small loss, big loss, maintain or gain.

I'll probably get my period today, or at the latest tomorrow (it was kind enough to be slightly late this time, and not bother me on my vacation, for which I am profoundly grateful).

So, I'm thinking that this is just my pattern, and a gain or maintain is to be expected this week....

It's probably a little too early to be tracking trends, but statistics are the other form of math that I really enjoy. (I once saved the company I worked for over $150,000 because I like tracking trends, and I discovered that a certain company's transmission systems were failing at or around the 60,000 mile marker... Of course, after that they decided I ought to be able to find them $150,000 every YEAR in warranty... some people have no sense...)

Also, I did my measurements again last night (two weeks since I did them) and arms and waist were the same, but hips were down 1/2 inch and thighs were down 1 inch! Wow! And I'm back in my size 18 jeans for the first time in almost 2 years...

So, all in all, I would have liked the scale to actually have some reflection on what I'm doing during the week, but I'm not in a bad mental place about it...