Posted on February 28, 2010 - by Ashley Jackson

Going MIA

I’m here, I’m here…and sitting in a mostly clean apartment! I’ve spent a good majority of this weekend working on cleaning and decluttering, and I’m happy to say that not only are my living room and dining room still clean, but now my kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom are as well. Whoo-hoo! Well worth staying mostly away from the Internet all week. Now to keep it up…constant cleaning takes up so much of my time that I’m curious about what I’ll have time for when I only have to clean for a few minute a day! I’ve already added some new blogs to my GoogleReader and picked out a couple of books to read…

Friday was only a partial day at work. I got there (not early like I’d planned, but on time!) and broke out my breakfast while reading e-mail. I mentioned earlier this week that since I started counting calories on workdays, I’ve been getting really, really hungry, but that I thought it was more related to how I was loading those calories, not to how many I was getting. So instead of eating a Liberte yogurt for breakfast and then having a snack later in the morning, I went ahead and had my yogurt along with a Pure cherry cashew bar.

And what do you know…it worked! I didn’t start getting hungry until around 11AM, when I was heading out to meet Jamie for a lunchtime walk.

My lunch was a giant salad topped with cheddar cheese and another piece of albacore topped with sour cream and seasoning. Oh, and cranberry-walnut-gorgonzola dressing.

I’m sure I must’ve grabbed something between lunch and taking Heath to the vet, or gotten something shortly thereafter, but I didn’t take a picture and I don’t have my food log with me (it’s such a long walk to the living room)…oh well.

Heath’s trip to the vet ended in him being muzzled while a tech held him down for his shots and so that the vet could look in his ear. I don’t know what’s with him, but the last couple of times  he’s gone to the vet he’s been very tense. I think he remembers the time I took him there to get his nails clipped, when he spazzed out big time. It’s so weird, because he’s so friendly to strangers normally. He wasn’t being aggressive, just cowardly.  The vet squatted down in the floor for five minutes and tried all manner of tricks to coax him over to her, and the most she could do was look in his eyes and pat his coat. And even that took some cajoling. He did lick her a couple of times, but she was trying to tell him that she was just going to look in his ears and it wasn’t going to hurt, and he was sitting sideways refusing to look at her, and I said, “Um, I think he doesn’t believe you.” And he didn’t.

Oh well. He’s on medicated eardrops twice a day for the next two weeks for his now-chronic ear-gunk situation. I had to buy more treats at the store to appease him…

Heath and I took a nap shortly after arriving home on Friday and didn’t get up ’til late…just in time to see Team USA win a medal in the short track relay. I reheated some of my soup from earlier this week, then watched My Sister’s Keeper, then went back to bed…

…then got back up, got on my exercise bike for 30 minutes, did some cleaning, wrote out a grocery list, ate more soup, and went to the store. Then I came back from the store and took Heath on a 30 minute jog, then rested for about 5 minutes after I got back and went immediately into the 30 Day Shred, since I hadn’t done it Friday night. Whew!

My reward for all this? Nachos…

MMMMMM.

Did some more cleaning afterward, and admired this week’s flowers–Asiatic lilies!

All the bouquets at Harris Teeter were $4 this week, so I decided to go for the lilies. Almost got the sunflowers, but there were only three  to a bunch and I figured hey, why not get the most bang for my buck…

I went to sleep early again, then woke up midmorning and tried to watch Twilight. Unfortunately, the DVD was so scratched that it wouldn’t play (something that rarely happens with my Netflix choices, but does happen on occasion), so I decided to check out what was available on Netflix’s instant services. And that’s how I wound up staying up until 5:30AM watching Supersize Me.

I went back to bed after that, slept in, then decided to make the tasty-sounding soup my mom linked me to yesterday. She was very clear that if I enjoyed this soup, I had to give her credit on the blog for pointing it out to me, so…here you go, mom.

Sorry for the poor picture–it doesn’t do the soup justice, but it’s hard to get a good picture when there’s steam rolling off your food. This is sausage, spinach, and lentil soup–crazy easy to make and crazy tasty, too. Just cook up a pound of Italian pork sausage, then add six cups of water, 16 oz of salsa, a whole chopped up onion, a bag of spinach, and a cup and a quarter of dried lentils, cook for about 30 minutes until the lentils are done, and you have awesome soup. So awesome that my first act upon finishing my bowl was to scoop some into a jar to take with me for lunch tomorrow.

After that, I set about cleaning some more. I remembered something I heard on Hoarders about there not being a point in keeping sentimental things if they’re buried where you can’t even find them, so I decided to stick every picture I found on the wall in my hallway. It needed some color, anyway.

Most of them are of dogs, mostly of Heath…I need to order some more prints off Snapfish so I have more recent photos!

I also found this picture of me at my highest weight from the summer of 2004. We went on a cruise and I was being menaced by a pirate at the dinner table!

I’m not sure how much I weighed in this picture, but it was around 170 or 175. Around this time I was wearing size 16 jeans and was determined not to go any higher than that…and I didn’t, but I didn’t go any lower for another year or two, either. Since I had an empty nail in the wall in my kitchen, I decided to hang this up there as a reminder of how far I’ve come!

This is me today, getting ready to take Heath for an afternoon walk.

151 lbs and trending downward…whoo-hoo!

Before we went for our walk, I decided to make some chocolate peanut butter cups! I made full-sized ones this time. They’re crazy simple to make…

…even simpler if you forget to put the brown sugar in like I did. Didn’t affect the taste much at all, though–I’ll probably leave it out in the future.

After we got back from our walk I had to taste test one.

I tried to spread out the chocolate on the tops before I put them in the fridge, but to no avail. I was worried they’d be too peanut buttery because it looked like there was very little chocolate…

…and then I discovered that the chocolate had just sunk down into the middle. Awesome.

A while later it was dinner time, so I served myself up a plate of various goodies on my nice clean bar!

Steamed salmon and asparagus, a plum, some co-jack cheese, and carrots and tomatoes with Greek yogurt dip.

Pretty and nommy. And I ate it on my nice clean dining room table, while the US/Canada hockey game played.

Now Heath and I are both winding down for the evening…

Unfortunately, my downstairs neighbor (who is hardly ever home when I’m home) has been here all day, and I won’t do my exercise DVD when I know that someone is in the apartment below me. So I’m skipping that for this evening and will try to fit it in tomorrow along with my run. For now, I’m going to go finish putting together my breakfast, lunch, and snacks for tomorrow, and then I think that I will do something relaxing, like read a book while enjoying the present cleanliness of my apartment…