YAY!!! IT'S WORKING!!

There's a photo of my niece and The Newbie. The Newbie will turn one year old next week, which makes me want to throw my own decrepit self down a well practically. Where does all the goddamn time go? I turn around and it's Christmas and I turn around again and it's the 4th of July and then I turn around again and I'm a crazy old spinster who collects cats and yells at kids to get off my lawn. Or something. Something?

So that's my niece and her daughter, The Newbie.

Today, I got to spend three hours with my niece over a cup of coffee and a take-home chemistry practice exam.

My niece greeted me with the news that one of the women in her chemistry lab started asking her for help. My niece said, “Auntie, she doesn’t even know how to balance equations! I tried to help her and then I told her, ‘You need to go to a tutor—and it takes a lot of practice. You have to do all of your homework.’”

I wanted to jump up and down with joy at that. I was, like, YAY!!! IT’S WORKING!!

Sometimes I feel like it’s overkill when I stress again and again to my niece that she MUST DO HER HOMEWORK. I also say over and over and over that it’s not enough that she can do the homework problems because on a test? You have to be able to work those same kind of problems FAST FAST FAST. You have to be accurate and FAST. The only way to get to that point is to practice over and over and over.

The other thing that my niece said to me today that thrilled me was, “Double replacement reactions are my favorite kind of reactions.”

And I was, like, YOU NOW HAVE A FAVORITE KIND OF CHEMICAL REACTION!

YAY!!! IT’S WORKING!!

So: Yay. It’s working.

She has another test on Wednesday, so we'll see if it's really working. If she doesn’t get better than a D this time, I’m going to kick her ass. Our twice weekly study session will be increased to at least thrice weekly and probably more often than that. She’s going to make it through this class.

Free Day

Once every month or so, I get what I call a Free Day. On my Free Day, I take the day off from the gym and I don't pay but the slightest bit of attention to what goes in my mouth. All bets are off when it comes to diet and exercise, I mean. And yesterday? Was a Free Day.

You'd think I'd go crazy on my Free Day, but mostly I just have a little bit extra of something I love, like blueberries or other kinds of fruit. (I really try to limit how much fruit I eat because fruit sets off some crazy sugar cravings that take me a day or two to wrestle into submission.) Or I have some treat that I don't budget calories for very often, like a chocolate brownie Clif Bar.

So most Free Days are pretty sensible anyway. But yesterday I did go a little bit nuts. I had my blueberries and my Clif Bar, yes, but I also had a hunk of goat cheese for lunch. (I try to avoid most cheese because eating cheese is like eating a hunk of butter--and I hate low-fat or fat-free cheese--but I love goat cheese so for lunch I had a couple of ounces of it with an apple.) And I shared a bag of Kettle Corn with Dave. So those things alone were not so bad, but then there was dinner.

For dinner, Dave and I went over to Kelly First and Kevin's house. Kelly's been making this variation of scallion pancakes from a recipe that she found in The New York Times and so she made some of those with a ton of veggies (spinach, broccoli, asparagus, and, yes, scallions) in them. She served the pancakes with a thick, green sauce made with cilantro and poblano chile and cumin that was so good that I'm going to start making it and drinking it like a smoothie. We also had a pile of edamame and a big green salad that we served with another "salad" that I made out of manchego cheese and grated tomatoes. (Sounds strange, yes, but it's actually pretty good. The recipe is from Spain, home of manchego cheese, so I guess they know what they're doing.) After, we had chocolate sorbet and some kind of blackberry sorbet with handfuls of fresh raspberries on top. (I could pretty much eat my way out of a chocolate sorbet factory.)

I waddled away from the dinner table.

But ever faithful, we (Kelly First, Kevin, and I) were at the gym at 8:45 this morning, sweating off our sins on the StairMaster. (Even I know that there's no such thing as a Free Day.)