Posted on January 8, 2011 - by Ashley Jackson

The Saturday Night Scarefest

Now that I’ve blown through all the episodes of The Tudors on Netflix’s Watch Instantly (and cried because Sir Thomas More died) and finally seen Inception (Chris Nolan, you are a genius!), I’m watching episodes of Paranormal State. I saw part of the first season back in 2007 when I not only had cable but had Time Warner (*spit* *hiss*) On Demand, but I can’t remember which ones I’ve seen, so I just started over. Things were cool when it was still light outside, but now it’s dark and a latte mug just fell off my counter and broke and I’m slightly freaked out…

Other things that freak me out: people shooting at members of Congress and Federal judges. No word on the motive yet, but this is the United States, not Gotham City; we don’t kill civil servants (or anyone else!) to make our points, however much we may disagree with each other. Not cool. I hope Congresswoman Giffords pulls through, and I’m sure you’ll all join me in sending prayers and good thoughts towards her family and the families of the others that were killed, including Judge Rolls. This is not the first serious incident directed at a public servant in recent days…

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I’ve been really tired this week and have taken advantage of easy meals. I pulled a chicken and mushroom frittata out of my freezer on Monday for dinner.

It was good, but the texture in the middle was strange–not sure if I didn’t heat it up enough or if it just went wonky from being in the freezer. I’ve got three more servings with which to test my hypotheses…

Wednesday night was another freezer meal–black bean and salsa chicken. This is the only freezer meal I put together that went into the freezer raw–I just put together bags with four ounces of chicken, three-quarters of a cup of black beans, and a few tablespoons of peach salsa.

It thaws out nicely in the fridge, and then all I have to do is dump it into some foil, throw it in the oven on 400 for 45 minutes, and it’s done. And if I have some extra calories to burn for the day, I add some sour cream. This also makes awesome soup.

Something I’ve been having as a filler meal lately is avocado, bacon, tomato, and lettuce sandwiches, just because I happen to have the ingredients on hand (or if I’m out of, say, avocados and tomatoes, I can just walk over to the store and pick some up). I’ve been trying lately to do a better job of not letting things go to waste in my fridge, so I’ve been trying to make sure my lettuce and my bacon get used up before they go bad.

That’s also the last of my sweet cherries–they’re back up to $6/lb at the store, so won’t be having them again for a while…fortunately, while I was getting avocados and a tomato, I also grabbed some yummy green grapes. Grapes are so hit and miss sometimes, but I had a whole cup of them today with another ABLT and they were delicious.

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I had an appointment on Thursday afternoon to get orthotics made, and now I have custom-fitted ones that smell like glue. (I like the smell of glue, so that’s cool.) While I was there, the nurse and I discussed how the guy at the sleep study center mistakenly told my doctor’s office that he’d talked to me about my sleep study being inconclusive and that I’d agreed to come back for another one when in reality no one had told me what was going on, and after I told her it took them three week for them to call me last time to set up and appointment and that they hadn’t called me yet this time, she said she was going to call them. I don’t know if she got a chance, but on Friday I got a message from them requesting that I call them to schedule a sleep study. Yay. I’m having study number two done tomorrow night, and this time I’ve got Ambien, so I’ll fall asleep for a couple of hours at least.

Also, my blood pressure was 116 over 80-something at the doctor’s office on Thursday. Probably because I was so tired the night before that I went to bed early and managed to fit in 8-ish hours of sleep before dragging myself off to work.

I’ve been keeping track of my exercise all week on the big whiteboard in my den. Monday night and Wednesday night I was too tired to do anything, but I’ve managed to get in some pretty awesome numbers on my exercise bike otherwise, and am pretty confident that I’ve got an awesome number for our calorie challenge this week. The scale wasn’t moving much for the past week or so, but it looks like I’m down to 150.8 lbs…again…so maybe in a week or so I’ll be back under 150. How many times have I gotten to 150 lbs and said that it was the last time I was going to see that number? I think I’m on a roll now, though…