Day 363

Well, folks (assuming anyone is reading this but me which very well might be a rather large assumption), I’m still fighting a cold, and now my wife is too. I’m pretty sure we both picked it up on the plane home from the Midwest. I really hate commercial airplanes and the recycled air, especially when you spend a lot of additional time on runways waiting. Might have caught it on the way up a few days before Christmas – I can’t remember the incubation time for colds, but that would seem about right to me.

I have to stop writing and try to log onto the Internet over and over and it’s really aggravating. Because we are semi-remote (meaning we have neighbors, some fairly close, but we are all on acreage and fifteen miles or so form the “big” city) we are stuck with using WildBlue, which is a satellite system and even though we had it at our last home in the Houston area, I was never happy with it there either. It’s been really inconsistent for us and my signal strength in my little office, with the modem, etc. in the actual dedicated space business office nearby, varies from 1-3 bars, hovering in the 1 bar range way too much of the time. The speed, while moderately better than dialup isn’t all that hot either. With this issue at the moment, I might not be able to upload this until tomorrow or whenever its assorted electrons decide it’s aggravated me enough.

We did lunch out at the local (okay, the most local) Chinese restaurant, a pretty good place in a town where you’d never expect good Chinese food to be. I’m a tad particular about Chicken (meaning dark or light), so I get the sweet-and-sour, but without the sauce that normally comes with it. I get them to do me General Tso instead, and that has to save a calorie or two, at least. And lunch is always smaller portions, which helps too. Because I’m still not feeling that great I did screw up this morning and didn’t have any breakfast – something I am trying to learn not to do. We did have a really light dinner though. My wife is looking over the I-hope-it’s-the-last version of my manuscript for the first in the historical saga trilogy, so TVs off and it’s a little spooky quiet. I was working on another writing project (the previously mentioned middle reader series) when the dog got sort of twitchy (she‘s a twenty pound cock-a-poo rescue who sometimes thinks she’s a rottweiler). When I went to the door to see what she was barking at (remember, this is a little house, so from my desk to the door is something like ten steps), an eight-point whitetail buck was standing about ten feet in front of me. He stared, I waved, and he disappeared. I think it’s the same one I scared the daylights out of last week.

I mentioned family yesterday, and wanted to expand a bit on that. As the last survivor of my original four-person one, I have been extremely lucky to be accepted into a gigantic Italian family. And I mean that in all the ways possible. Now my folks are all of Scottish heritage, at least as far back as 1057 when a direct ancestor was told to get the heck out of Scotland and not return, on pain of death (and probably worse). You really have to do something pretty substantial (in my younger years I’d have said “cool”) to get kicked out of a whole country. A bar, yeah. A neighborhood? Maybe. A city, not likely. But a whole country? There’s no other way to say it - cool. But I digress.

Scots tend to be solitary in nature, not too prone to staying gathered up in groups (other than clans, and we are all about that, believe me). I’m the second Scot this family has allowed in, and that’s most likely all there will be. I appreciate the first one not messing it up so they would accept me, and he apparently has done okay with them too as both he and his heir (who is Scottish-Italian and looks remarkably like a better-looking Robert Mitchum) are considered “favored sons.”

What I was trying to get around to was the traditional Italian Christmas food, at least with this group. I knew I wanted to do something about my weight right after the holidays, so I deliberately passed on some exceptional things to eat that are traditions with my wife’s family. Traditional Italian is everywhere – pastas, pizza, lamb, tons of bread (this years bread bill for the part was nearly $150), and red wine – enough to float a boat. A really big one, like the catamaran I keep dreaming about (another blog note, later). I tasted a little of this, ate a little of that, but skipped most of what would have been “traditional” for me. Again, I think my metabolism is partially messed up and normally I would have had a good plate as it is the dinner meal.

So, even though it might not look like I am “dieting” – which I decidedly am not – I am watching, paying attention, and learning as I go to eat better, less, more consciously and carefully, and to eat some of the things I might not have last year (or last week). This, for lack of more appropriate vernacular, “ain’t easy." But it should be doable. One day at a time. One.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and the cold will have dropped me a couple of pounds (I wish!). See you tomorrow.

Average Joe
Somewhere, USA