patrickrhett

Hi. Testing my iPhone Wordpress app. Because I blog so much that I need to be able to do it from anywhere. And here’s a pic of Ilse that I took on my phone and then inserted into this post. It’s a pretty bad picture…

We went to Ilse’s on the 4th and grilled hamburgers. (grass fed beef is delicious) Sadie and Rosie hung out for the first time, and got along pretty well, until they didn’t. Sadie laid out a pee matrix in Ilse’s yard, so she would never be more than a foot from her own urine, and Rosie followed her around, checking her work. It was all going pretty well until The Lovely Wife tried to take Sadie’s harness off. This covered her head, made her feel vulnerable, and when Rosie came up to sniff her butt she freaked. What followed was 30 seconds of escalating dog war, and Sadie got bit on the face and leg. (To Rosie’s credit, she is a much bigger dog, and totally held back. She could have done some real damage, and didn’t.) Sadie seemed fine, but after a few minutes she started stumbling and her front legs would collapse under her when she tried to walk. We immediately scooped her up and took her to the Emergency Animal Hospital, where, an hour and $90 later, we found out she probably just had a huge surge of adrenaline that made her wobbly as it dissipated. Not a broken leg, or a broken back, or any of the terrible things we were afraid of. Which was great, except by that time my huge surge of adrenaline had worn off, and I was feeling kind of wobbly. So we went home, had a bit of medicinal whiskey, and went to bed.

Now that I am no longer freaked out about my dog’s health, this is what occurred to me as I wrote the paragraph above. I spent $10 on 2 pounds of ground, grass-fed beef and $10 on a six-pack of beer (well, 6 Hoegaarden and a single Sisyphus). We probably spent another $20 on various items too paltry to mention. When my dog appeared to be injured, we didn’t hesitate to drop another $90. We spent a total of $130 in one day on non-essentials (sorry, Sadie) without even thinking about it, and we are not wealthy people. We are solidly middle class.

This doesn’t exactly make me proud to be an American (I can’t really be proud about spending more on my dogs than half the world can spend on their kids), but it does make me extremely grateful for everything I have, and for the country that I was lucky enough to be born into.

Happy 4th of July.

Today is the 45th day of our diet. I started at 192 pounds and am, as of today, down to 176. I don’t really want to lose any more weight (just redistribute some of it) so we added the gym to our routine last week and have been 4 times in the last 8 days.

At some point the diet (a special course of food to which one restricts oneself to lose weight) became our diet (the kinds of food that a person habitually eats). It’s getting easier to make smarter choices, and we are learning to make better meals. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes have been replaced by grilled grass fed beef and ginger sauteed cabbage. That’s not a bad trade.

I have to give The Lovely Wife full credit for all of these changes. She came up with the diet, organized the menus, made shopping lists, cooked most of the food, got us to join the YMCA, dragged me to the gym for the first time in my life, and showed me how to use it. I have grilled what I was told to grill, eaten what I was told to eat, pedaled when I was told to pedal, and tried not to complain too much.

Once again, in a pattern that has been repeating itself for 10 years now, my wife has demonstrated that she is both smarter and way more ambitious than I am. God help me if she ever turns on me.

I created some random header images from my thousands of pictures and installed them above. If you don’t like the header image, hit refresh and something new should pop up. (Except that it’s random, which means the same picture could pop up a few times in a row. If only you could make things more random than random. By which I mean slightly less random. But that is much harder, so just hit refresh an extra couple of times if you have to. Something new will eventually appear.)

so tired
there is no sugar left in my body
it has all been replaced by lettuce
wherever it is that lettuce grows
i hate that place

Well, the food got better. Yesterday for lunch I got a salad, which is a perfectly serviceable lunch and something I would have eaten before. Granted, I would have had an ice cream bar when I was done, but still, it was an improvement over breakfast. For dinner we had grilled beef filet, sauteed mushrooms and garlic ginger cabbage. It was delicious, and I could eat that any day. Or every day. I would have normally had a beer or red wine with dinner, or a whisky after, but all in all it hardly felt like deprivation.

Then we come to this morning’s breakfast. It was a frittata, made with onion, sun-dried tomatoes, broccoli, and salmon. It was better than yesterday, and almost good, but I still seem to have a problem eating such a large meal so early in the morning. At least one that’s not full of bread and covered with cheese. I hear tomorrow we’re ditching the salmon for canadian bacon, so we’ll see how that goes.

Breakfast was a learning experience. Coffee without sugar is not so bad and I could totally get used to it. V8 tastes like a Bloody Mary, and who wouldn’t like that? The main course was lettuce wraps filled with no fat cream cheese, roasted red peppers, capers, cucumber and smoked salmon. This, in theory, sounds really tasty. However, when I imagine this dish, it is evening, I am having a glass of red wine, and the wrap is an hors d’oeuvre slightly smaller than a ping-pong ball. About half a bite. I had two wraps, each roughly the size of a burrito. It was way too rich for breakfast, and I could barely finish them. I think the aim is to turn you off of food for the rest of the day. The dogs, on the other hand, love, love, love salmon for breakfast.

Tomorrow we will try some kind of frittata.

Elaine has created a diet for us, and tomorrow we begin. I’m down with it, and it is totally necessary (I’m pushing 200), but, for the next two weeks I will have no starch, no sugar, and… no alcohol. Pray for me.

Here you go.

Isabella Rossellini acting out the mating rituals of bugs.

This is possibly one of the best things I have ever seen on the internet.

You’re welcome.

It’s at Flickr.

My last attempt to jump start this blog was derailed by illness, then killed by all the same factors that necessitated the jump start in the first place - that is, a combination of being too busy in life and too bored with my blog to generate the required activation energy.

I’m sure I’ll come back, but in the meantime, go check out my Flickr page. I’m still updating that.