Posted on February 21, 2010 - by Ashley Jackson

Three Alarm Curry

Yesterday evening I heard a car alarm go off and peeked outside to discover that the lights were flashing on a car parked outside my building and some confused person was trying desperately to turn it off. Then at 4:55AM, I heard a loud noise and another car alarm–I got up after a few seconds and the alarm on an SUV was going off. Nothing looked out of sorts, so I got back into bed, and later in the morning, another car alarm went off (it might’ve been the same SUV).

I’ve lived here for over two years and heard more alarms going off last night than I have in all the time I’ve lived here before that! Strange, strange times…

My brother and his wife invited me and my parents to lunch at their house today. They were making pork chops and macaroni and cheese, and since I don’t eat pork if I can help it (except sausage from the farmers market, and bacon. of course.), I grilled myself a piece of chicken to take with me.

I ate most of my chicken breast, a whole piece of bread (went back for another half-piece because it was good!), a scoop of macaroni, and a bunch of grapes.

My mom made a peanut butter pie with a chocolate crust…

So I had a piece, drizzled with chocolate syrup.

I kinda regret eating that huge piece. But I kinda don’t regret it, too.

When we left, I followed my parents to the thrift store in Fuquay and my dad helped me unload the boxes of post-yard-sale donations that have been in the back of my car since September. Then as soon as I got home I threw away all the big trash and took everything that had gathered inside my car into my apartment. The only thing still in there that doesn’t really belong in the car is the dog crate that Heath’s outgrown, which I will bring in tomorrow and store in my closet for future dog happenings.

I need to go through and pick up all the little pieces of trash (straw paper, candy wrappers, stray leaves…) and find some place where I can vacuum all the dog hair out of the front (at least), but for the most part…the HoarderMobile is no more. For now…

Shortly after arriving home, I threw on some workout clothes and busted out Level 1 of the 30 Day Shred again. There have always been two exercises in Level 1 with which I have trouble, and they’re both in the strength section. One is the push-ups–I’ve always had to do the push-up sections from my knees instead of from my toes, and right now I’m having trouble getting through all the push-ups in each segment. I remember this happening last time and getting better after a few days, though, so I should improve soon. The other exercise is those damned anterior raises in the last strength section–when I was doing the Shred last year, I had to go get bottles of water to use as weights because I could not do it with my 3-lb weights. Mind you, at this point I was doing chest flies and some of the other exercises with my 10-lb weights. Anterior raises? Could barely do them with the 1-lb water bottles. Things are a little better this time, but I’m still having to modify the exercise by raising only one arm at a time so the other arm has a chance to rest briefly.

I so put a sticker on my fitness chore chart as soon as I was done.

And then I made dinner!

Easy way to measure out a portion of carrots and hummus: put bowl on food scale. Tare food scale. Add carrots until you’ve reached desired serving of carrots. Tare food scale. Add hummus until you’ve reached desired serving of hummus. Ta-da!

I made chicken curry for dinner. It had giant chunks of onion in it. Mmm…

I made twice this much and plopped the rest in a container to take to work tomorrow for lunch. Then I sat down to work out how many calories were in a serving of my chicken curry. And my jaw dropped. The pot of curry I made tonight had 960 calories–and I didn’t even add as much rice or chicken as the recipe suggested! That means each serving had about 480 calories in it, which wasn’t too bad considering I only had two meals today and no snacks, but seriously–I’m going to be more careful with this stuff from now on. The recipe I’m riffing off of calls for a half cup of yogurt and a half cup of mayonnaise for the curry sauce and I’ve been using Greek yogurt in place of regular yogurt–I wonder what would happen if I just use straight Greek  yogurt, which is 120 calories for a full cup, instead of half yogurt and half mayonnaise, which is 280 calories for half a cup…I’m going to try it next time!

After dinner I set to work cleaning up my living room, and then rode my exercise bike for 30 minutes as a break. (And yes, then I ran and put a sticker on my fitness chore chart. ) Now I am contemplating some sort of small snack…perhaps a couple of chocolate-covered almonds? I also need to finish packing my “lunch” bag for tomorrow–it’s more like a breakfast-lunch-and-two-snacks bag…