A Couple Great Weekends

I promise that I am trying to get back into the habit of weekly posting. But I'm also trying to up my presence on Twitter, finish the book, get the yard in good shape, keep the house from falling down, monitor the Young Prince, and avoid getting fired.  This adds up to a lot of plates spinning. 

And on the weekends, we have, again, been more in the mode of Doing than Recording.  For the anniversary of V-E Day, we blew off the kid's swim lesson and went to the Smithsonian's "Fly In to Victory Day,"  watched a movie about D-Day that the kid liked but probably didn't retain much of, then went out and looked at airplanes.  Photos can be seen here. (Unlabeled, as usual. I aim to make it a retirement project to give them all names and descriptions. Sort of like I meant to blog every week this year.) 

Unfortunately, in blowing off the swim lesson, we also missed a memo that the following Saturday would be a meet of some kind in Woodbridge. So he missed that since we didn't know, but I think he and his dad had a lovely time anyway.  I spent the day at a symposium about Reconstruction and After the War, where I met some lovely people and got a couple good insights for the book.  When that was over, I met the lads for dinner and then the YP and I went to see the Avengers at a "real" Imax theater, which he enjoyed immensely. 

He's been doing so well, lately.  Part of the deal of going to the movie on Saturday involved him having to finish 2 books and write five pages of his novel.  He met all deadlines with grace and very little complaint. I'm not sure how his actual classwork is going, but what I do know about seems to be moving smoothly.  We will face a challenge to that on June 16—I won (or lost, depending on your outlook) the chaperone lottery for the sixth-grade trip to Gettysburg.  This entails getting up at 5:30 a.m. to be at school by 6. I hope I am rested enough not to be cranky.  The good news is I do not get carsick, so this will be a good chance for me to either chat with a seat mate or retreat into the Outlander series and put a great big dent in that. 

Before that rolls around, however, we have Memorial Day. The outing for Saturday is a trip to the Brentsville Jail, where they are giving a tour of the reconstruction, then the usual errands and obligations (and an apology to the swim team). Sunday we are going to a baseball game. The plan for the holiday is to sit in bed and do nothing, but I imagine some yard work will creep in. We are close to getting the flower bed completely graveled and it looks much better this way.  The weeds still pop up like mad, but I am now equipped with weed killer and went to town on it yesterday. I forgot to look at it this morning to see how it turned out. Perhaps pictures of that will follow at some point. 

The only downside to a holiday is the dent it puts in my diet.  My fitness app thingie tells me I've lost 8 lbs since January. This is nice. It is also somewhat interesting to me, in that Exercise has played very little role, and I don't think Eating Less has been as significant as What I Eat. The new elliptical has been put into use (though not enough)  and while those stints have been good for my general sense of well-being and feeling accomplished,  the needle on the scale does not seem to be terribly affected by it. 

What has made a significant (and—believe me —utterly surprising) difference is subscribing to Blue Apron.  Three meals a week, Not Your Average Blogger and I joyfully bicker as we wash lettuce and pick tarragon leaves off stems and prepare what we have received. This means our plates are seeing a lot more things like beets and spinach and red onions and a lot less protein and starch. I’m not ready to proselytize for them, but I was a little shocked to eat a 700-calorie dinner after dark one night and not PAY FOR IT WITH GRIEF the next morning, you know?

 

I was talking to my weight loss pal about it  last week, and she was not surprised—said she’s done well on things like NutriSystem and Jenny Craig, but the problem is you don’t view that as a lifestyle change so much as a temporary means to an end.  Once you go back to the “real” world, you lose the parameters/serving sizes/discipline and the weight comes back. I guess Blue Apron is a kind of halfway house to those?  But since I didn’t go into it as a weight loss plan so much as a “WTF kind of food is THAT? Let’s try it!” plan, it feels less like brainwashing.  :)  So I'm not sure what we'll be eating for the three-day weekend aside from ballpark hot dogs, but there will have to be some effort to counterbalance that. 

 

Have a good holiday, everyone!