turning over a new leaf – or the same leaf again

Can the scale really be showing that number? Can my clothes really be this tight? All the extra ice cream and adult beverages have taken their toll. I’m sure the potato chips were blameless.

So it’s that time again – getting on the righteous eating train.

I bought a huge amount of fresh fruit and vegetables. I verified that I have a stockpile of black beans and kidney beans. Sunday night I cooked up a big pot of edamame and another big pot of quinoa. This morning I hunkered down with my wholesome foods.

My resolve lasted exactly 12 hours. John and I rambled around downtown for a few hours late this afternoon, taking in some of the sights of “Marine Week.” Then John suggested dinner at Sen, our favorite neighborhood Thai restaurant. I was a goner. However, I managed to maintain some of my food discipline – I did not have Thai Iced Coffee or the wonderful Corn Tod Mun.

Like Scarlett says, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Rainy Friday, no coffee?!?

The weather forecast was for rain this morning. The weather forecast was accurate. It’s raining buckets. I’m a little miffed, because now I don’t want to take my morning walk. The walk is a serious walk, not a stroll. I take Exerstrider Nordic Walking poles.  I am elevating my heart rate. I don’t want to wear a hat and/or a jacket with a hood. But I wear glasses – I don’t want the rain just falling down on my face. Argh. Supposedly, after lunch the rain will stop and I can have a dry walk then. Or dry-ish. But this throws off my morning routine.

There’s no coffee. The coffee ingredients are probably still nestled in the cupboard, but John did not set up the coffeemaker to make a pot this morning. Drinking morning coffee is a new/renewed routine for me, so I feel ill-equipped to make coffee. Of course I can have a nice cup of tea. But this throws off my morning routine.

But wait – there’s a loveliness to the morning after all. I remembered to turn on NPR in time to hear StoryCorps. I LOVE StoryCorps, but I completely forgot about it last Friday. My first jobless Friday threw me off my usual Friday morning routine – I didn’t have NPR on. Today I remembered. Ah, this restores a well-loved part of my Friday morning routine.

Coffee

I’ve started having a cup of coffee in the morning. This is a re-introduction of coffee, after at least 5 years of tea drinking. I haven’t completely abandoned tea. I’m just ramping up the caffeine in the morning.

When I was a teenager, coffee seemed like such an adult drink. After my junior year in high school, when I was working a summer job in an office,  I decided to learn to drink coffee. But I was full of bluster and didn’t want anyone to know I was just learning. I observed how other folks were preparing their coffee, and took my clues from that. The first way I drank coffee was black with sugar. Without sugar, I thought coffee was nasty! There was a shiny, fancy coffee-maker in the office, so I’m reasonably sure the coffee was not actually nasty. I persevered in my mission to practice the coffee-drinking routine.

In college, after I met my friend Dave Boyce, I spent many afternoons drinking coffee with him in his dorm room and then in his off-campus apartment. It was instant coffee sometimes and percolator coffee sometimes. I still liked sugar in my coffee, but I was sufficiently experienced to recognize that the Dave Boyce coffee was BAD coffee. But oh the bliss of the caffeine! I’m so fond of the alertness and artificial perkiness of an afternoon awash in caffeine.

I drank a lot of coffee following my college years and somehow I cut out the sugar. For a while I liked coffee plain black – just a solid slap of caffeine. Then I switched to a coffee preference of cream, or at least whole milk. It had to be the actual dairy product from a cow, not a manufactured coffee creamer product.

Now my morning coffee is black. Right now.