Ugh, Tuesday!

Ugh, today.

I got up last night around 1:00 a.m. and instead of going back to bed around 5:30, I stayed up to give my mom a ride to a doctor's appointment. (Yes, she's perfectly capable of taking herself, but the parking situation near the doctor's office is atrocious. It's easier to drop her off and then go sit in a nearby park for awhile and pick her up again.) Today, instead of going to sit in the park, I went to Satellite Coffee and got what was one of the worst iced coffees I've ever had. It was like they served me the rinse water from the caustic cleanser they use on the urns, poured over ice. I suppose there's a reason this place went Chapter 11 a couple of months ago. So much for supporting local coffeshops.

But, the terrible coffee was my ticket to sit at a table and read some of my book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I have to say that in the past I've done what she advocates (basically getting rid of everything) and it's great! Until you slide right back into your old cluttered existence. It's like dieting. You drop a bunch and then it comes right back. Same old, same old. It's an endless fight against the accumulation of baggage in every form, I think.  Although I do like her idea of expressing gratitude to one's possessions. I like that idea very much. So when I accidentally dropped my post-it notes on the floor this morning, I apologized to them.

Anyway, following the Kondo method, I tossed about 90% of my coffee in the garbage when my mom texted me to come pick her up.

I got back home a little before 10:00 a.m. Something I had eaten or drunk was causing an allergic reaction and my face was turning red and puffy. The inside of my nose was beginning to swell up and I could feel it moving into the back of my throat. I took some Benadryl, jumped in a cool shower to wash off any pollen that was stuck to me, and called Dave. He came home from work for awhile to make sure things didn't get out of hand. I don't know what prompted the allergic reaction, but I suspect it's a pollen allergy that ramps up my immune system to the point where I react to things that would normally not prompt a reaction. Thank god for antihistamines.

Dave went back to work around noon and I went back to bed for a few hours. I got up again around 3:30 and took a quarter dose of Benadryl as my face was still a bit red and itchy. I had some cheese toast with tomato as a late lunch and finished up another load of laundry.

In the afternoon, I took another quick run through a cool shower (my hair was crazy from having slept on it while it was wet) and texted to ask Dave if he was going to want dinner before our pilates class. He didn't, so I made myself a cup of coffee.

Around that time, the wind kicked up and big, dark clouds started rolling in from the west. I checked online and saw that the 20% chance of rain had risen to 40% and was headed up to 60%. All this and it isn't even monsoon season yet!

Pilates was interesting tonight. Judi is out of town, so it was just David and me. The instructor was very, very chatty tonight. We talked mainly about cheating spouses, which she says is very Argentinian; she had several examples from her own extended family. When she's chatty, it usually goes one of two ways: She either loses count in the middle of an exercise and lets us go on with the exercise forever or she stops us to chat and chat without going on to the next exercise. Tonight was the former. Both Dave and I walked out on shaky legs with taxed abdominal muscles. I know I'm getting stronger with each class--but, man, I am earning it!

We stopped at Walgreens on the way home to buy batteries and I ended up in the "As Seen on TV" section of the store. I love all those fakarkte tchotchkes, useful and not, and tonight my will power was nil so I came home with a Veggetti. As soon as we got home, Dave took it out of the package and immediately started to try it. He veggettied (is that a word even?) a carrot and then a bit of cucumber. He tried to veggetti some red pepper, but that didn't work out. While he was doing all this, I was making the main part of our dinner.

Tonight for dinner we had Quorn vegetarian "meatball" sandwiches (well, Dave had a sandwich, I had meatballs in sauce) and salad.  When we finished dinner, I was still hungry, so I checked my food journal and realized that I was something like 500 calories under my day's allotment. Yikes! So I had a bowl of Greek yogurt with some Kashi 7 Grain cereal and a few raisins thrown in. I'm still a little under, but the dark chocolate in the kitchen is calling my name.