Wound up
Let's see... Weight 129 pounds (drat). Temperature 97.8F.

Eaten: 1293 calories, 130g protein, 126g carbs (41g fibre), 31g fat, 1512mg sodium.

Which was:
one, oat pancakes with tofu cream, apricot sugar-free jam or syrup, remaining cup egg sub scrambled with That Sauce. Green tea.

two, pumpkin oatcake, pumpkin/sugar-free pudding goo. Cafe noir.

three, Subway chicken salad, balsamic vinegar, fish oil.

four, shiratake noodles, seven ounces broccoli, some water chestnuts, three ounces chicken, Bragg's, garlic, ginger juice, Udo's oil. Diet Pepsi.

five, scoop protein powder, more sugar-free pudding, some soymilk, lemon Jello, a bit of the red cabbage. Green tea.

Sigh. I'm pretty bored of my food right now.

A. and I went for a longish run/walk this morning, forty-five minutes. It was bloody cold -- wintry, indeed. And there has been a new addition to our gym -- I mean house. A. found himself a used Concept Two rowing machine, the which he has desired for years, used and cheap, and bought it. It is now taking up a lot too much of the computer room... What I have learned about it: do not use the Concept Two barefoot. I got on it for fifteen minutes, and only realised as I peeled my sweaty self off the thing that (ow!) the straps had chafed the skin off both my little toes. Er, yes. I'll have that "loser" sign, thanks.

I rented The Butterfly Effect, and have just now finished watching it. My head is... somewhat furry. Distressing movie, that. Reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven -- never one of my favourites of hers, because it was so depressing. Only Butterfly Effect is more so. Much more so.

I must say, the kid playing Young Evan (John Patrick Amedori, I see from the website) has quite the presence, for a kid. Impressive.

Solitary tea
I'm drinking it. Bengal Spice. A.'s gone to visit his mother. I'm going to update this, put away the latest batch of pumpkin oatcakes, and go to bed.

Total calories: 1377. 134g protein, 117g carbohydrate (28g fibre), 30g fat, 1016mg sodium.

I ended up coming home and going to bed for a nap. Then I had a salad for supper (pretty much the same as yesterday: Romaine, 3 oz chicken, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, Asian teriyaki stuff, rice vinegar and fish oil), and did a sort of patched-together Arms and Legs workout. Then I had the originally-projected oatcake with pumpkin/Jello pudding topping glop.

Arms, Legs
First day of third Power cycle. Tempo 313, rest about 2 minutes.

CG EZ Bench
WU 35.5lbs x6
Work 60.5lbs x6, 6, 6
Notes: This was a five-pound boost from the last round, and apart from the difficulties in getting the bar in position without help, went up pretty easily. I should've tried adding another 5.

Bench Dip
WU b/w x6
Work 45lb DB in lap x6, 6, 6
Notes: Again, I should have boosted the weight, but didn't.

Zottman Curls
WU 10lb DB x6
Work 17.5lb DB x6, 20lb DB x6
Notes: The last rep with the 20s was rather a struggle to go up.

Drag Curl, EZ bar
WU 25.5lbs x6
Work 35.5lbs x6, 6, 40.5lbs x5

Ski Squats
Work b/w (minutes) 2:45, 3:00, 2:05
Notes: I alternated these with the deads below. Time was getting on.

SL Deadlift, short Oly (straps)
WU 79.5lbs x6
Work 134.5lbs x6, 6, 6
Notes: I should probably start increasing the weight on these at last.

Total workout time: an hour.

I feel very low today for some reason.

Bless you!
It's warmer today, and damper, and as a result, I'm allergic to everything. Achoo!

Today's weight: 129 pounds. Temperature: 97.2?F.

We went running this morning in the cemetery, three times round in about 25 minutes. The dog got bored halfway through the second time, and started trying to herd me... bashing me in the leg. He was running into my bad leg, annoying me mightily. I don't much like going round and round the cemetery; I get bored, and lose my oomph much faster than I do on my usual out-in circle runs.

"But the cemetery is a measured distance," A. protested.

"We have Mapper!" I keep telling him. This little piece of ware, for a mere few dollars, lets you pull in a map image (from any of the many map sites around the net, or one you scan) and draw out your route(s) -- then you simply enter in a scale for that map, and there you are. Distance automatically calculated. It's a magic little toy, and I like it -- but A. actually got in the car and drove around the cemetery to get his distance with the odometer...

He also pointed out that in the cemetery we can let the dog run free. However, since he wants to boost his run-time up to 40-45 minutes, and the dog is growing bored and tired at twenty (he -- the dog -- is a sprinter for sure, not an endurance athlete) that's not going to be such a big deal.

And, most important, it is just more interesting to get out there and do big runs with changing scenery, lovely though an old cemetery is. (I remember when I was still contemplating ultras, there was one held round here in a -- relatively -- small park. Fifty or a hundred kilometres, run on a five-kilometre loop of trail. I would go mad.)

Starving. I've been taking occasional doses of Lean System 7, a "fatburner", primarily for a bit of energy in the morning while I do (ugh!) fasted cardio. And, unlike ephedrine-containing products, this one appears to make me ravenously hungry, all the time. Who knows if it is doing any fatburning? I'm just in it for the guarana. I suppose I could simply pop a couple of caffeine tabs instead.

Eaten, or doomed to be eaten, thus far today:
Meal one, 1/4 cup 8-grain cereal, mixed with some almond sugar-free syrup and a couple tablespoons sugar-free apricot preserve; omelette of a half-cup egg sub, a 75g can smoked tuna, and some Pindjur. Green tea.

Meal two, spaghetti squash and flaxseed smokey frittata with tofu cream and sugar-free syrup. (While at Sobey's, I also went to the customary shelf of the Mori-Nu tofu. And there it was, as usual. Clearly, A. was in his occasional "I see nothing" mode, and whoever the staff person was who told him they didn't stock it anymore was stupid, on crack, or both.)

Meal three, red cabbage braise, 3 oz chicken, and a new kind of hot sauce (roasted hot peppers!); aduki bean/vanilla mush with some tofu cream.

Meal four, which should be post-workout, should be a pumpkin oatcake with probably pumpkin-y frosting.

Fishy, fishy, fishy -- OOO!
I had the best bit o' salmon for supper tonight. We went to Sobey's this morning so I could pick up some contact lens protein remover tablets (my left lens being very gunky as a result of whatever's going on with my eye, and I was out). I cruised past the fresssh fisssh cooler, and spotted one single, tempting-looking fillet of wild Atlantic salmon, which I couldn't resist.

I cooked it using an adaptation of a Cooking Light recipe: baked it at 425F for ten minutes, then brushed it with a glaze composed of a teaspoon of hot mustard powder, a dash of Braggs, a dash of rice vinegar, and some English Caramel sugar-free syrup, and broiled it for another three minutes. Oh! So good! With it, I had seven ounces steamed broccoli with more Braggs and a little gomasio, and a dessert of the rest of the Jello and more tofu cream. I'm still starving (always happens after high-carb day) but boy, that was some yummy salmon.

Meal four was an oatcake with tofu cream/Jello pudding powder glop on top.

No further exercise was had. I'm just... tired. Blargh.

Total calories: 1154. 117g protein, 94g carbs (24g fibre), 29g fat, 1244mg sodium.

On a related food-ish note, I am vaguely irritated by this article in the Globe and Mail. So if you are very very good, and also not obese, the Powers will allow you a little dessert, will they?

This seems wrong to me in many, many ways, just fostering the increasingly disordered thinking about food currently being drilled into our collective brains.

A splendid day
Yes, it is cold enough for early October; yes, one of Edvard Munch's four versions of The Scream was stolen from an Oslo museum (for the second time!) by armed bandits; yes, Canada's prairie canola crop looks likely to fail due to unseasonable frost; and yes, I appear to have some sort of infection in my left eye, and it is itchy and crusty... but still, it is a lovely day.

A.and I went out this morning to the ski hill, where I ran up the slope three times and the dog rolled luxuriantly in the dew-wet grass. Then, after breakfast, I met a friend for coffee, and we sat outside at the sidewalk tables and talked at random for an hour or so. Now, I'm lounging about. I should do some leg stuff, but what with the slope running, I wouldn't feel too terrible if I blew it all off.

Today's weight: 128.5 pounds (which stuns me). Forgot to take temperature.

Eaten thus far: 1/3 cup dry measure barley with almond extract and a dash of soymilk; 1 cup egg substitute, scrambled, with a couple tablespoons Pindjur on top of it. Green tea.

Large cup of dark-roast coffee with sugar-free hazelnut syrup. Free sample of teeny espresso cup full of chai.

Heap of Romaine lettuce with some raw bean sprouts and canned waterchestnuts, 3 oz chicken, teriyaki marinade, teaspoon fish oil, splash of rice vinegar. Sugar-free raspberry Jello with some tofu cream.

Cold fizzy drink made of a spoonful of instant coffee, some sugar-free chocolate syrup, dash of cinnamon extract and sparkling mineral water.

Pumpkin oatcake with tofu cream/Jello pudding powder icing; small plate of red cabbage braise.

I've been labouring my way through Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which has a wonderfully seductive cover, skilfully rendered eighteenth-century prose style, and a lot of rather dense pages. I like it, rather in the way that I sometimes like pushing my way through dense wilderness undergrowth, but it is not a breezy read. Although sometimes it hooks me, and pulls me along.

In between, I'm picking up and putting down Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, which by contrast is very breezy, particularly since I've read it several times before. The sum of this book is very much greater than either author's parts; Pratchett is like a budget Douglas Adams on his own, and Gaiman (at least back then) seemed to be not entirely confident about carrying an entire work of fiction without attendant pretty pictures.

High-carb cheatin'
The portmanteau edition...

Today's weight: 128 pounds. Temperature: 97.5F.

Eaten today: 2199 calories, 200g protein, 264g carbs (41g fibre), 30g fat, 1741mg sodium.

Meal one was Ezekiel bread, cup egg sub, tofu hollandaise and a split roasted red pepper. Very tasty...

Meal two consisted of... hm, what did it consist of? How it fades in the memory! Oh, yes: oatcake again, only I added some canned pumpkin to the batter, so Moistness was Achieved. And a frosting of more pumpkin mixed with Jello pudding and water, which looks rude but tastes pretty good.

Meal three, more red cabbage, a can of tuna, and aduki-bean/vanilla syrup puree with still more Jello pudding powder mixed with some soymilk on top.

Meal four, a salad with three ounces chicken and teriyaki sauce and rice vinegar, plus Kashi Crunch and a dash of soymilk.

Meal five, Kashi Crunch and a protein shake.

Meal six... a bit of a meltdown on Meal Six, for I succumbed to the lure of some toasted-coconut meringue cookies ("Just 22 calories per cookie!") and pickled beets. And went dancing, so was weary and hungry and weak. So first there was another oatcake with more pumpkin moosh on top, then (I suppose that was Meal Seven) too many little cookies and some beets (hence the shocking sodium).

Oh, yes, and around about Meal Three, A. was eating leftover ravioli with pesto, so I cheated a little bit there and ate one. Then, later, putting it into NutriBase -- one measly ravioli, 66 calories! Yow.

But there was cardio... an hour and a bit of hearty bopping. And we went to the pub birthday party of a friend of ours, and got to see all her pictures from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. (Where, it seems, she had a good but cold and rainy time.) I loved Michfest. I think next year I'll apply to go to Workerville.

Caramel porn
I didn't get a chance to update last night. Our friend the massage therapist is off on holiday in Prince Edward Island, where she plans to lie around on the beach all day with a big pile of books (nicked from our Table of Discarded Books, indeed). She needed a ride to the airport, and I thus brought her home with me, where she and A. had a lovely dinner. Then she spent the night on the library hide-a-bed, and A. took her in to Toronto at some ghastly hour this morning.

We stopped, she and I, at the grocery store to pick up some juice and sparkly water (the customary "company drink" round here). She asked if there was anything else she could contribute, and we settled on dessert... and headed to the bakery, where the half cakes live in frozen glory. There were cheesecakes, and lemon meringue pie, and there also was Caramel Crunch, a confection of which both A. and I are most particularly fond.

It's crisp layers of a nutty dacquoise, stacked up with generous and gooey amounts of thick caramel, and deep, fluffy beds of whipped cream. On top, it is prettily decorated with more squiggles of the caramel. I suggested it, and she agreed it looked most luscious.

So while I sat there, sipping my plain soda water, my empty salad bowl before me, she and A. ate a whole half of my favourite cake between them. And the dog licked out the plastic snap-dish it came in. I thought he was going to lick the styrofoam base the cake was on the whole length of the front hall and back, but he finally figured out how to plant his paw on the thing.

They also had fresh cheese ravioli with pesto that A. made just last week from the basil other friends of ours grow in great abundance.

I had a salad with tomato, onion, Romaine, 2.5 ounces chicken, 1/4 cup edamame, creamy tofu dressing and a teaspoon of fish oil.

My other meal consisted of a protein shake, made with a small amount of soymilk, some fresh ginger juice, and matcha green tea powder (it looked rather alien, but tasted really good) poured over 1/3 cup barley flakes, cooked. And a small scoop of red cabbage, since I suspected it would be some time till my next meal (and I was right). That was post-workout. Yesterday's workout was Chest and Shoulders. Last day of Shock Week, tempo 313/101, minimal rest.

Superset:
Incline Flye
WU 10lb x6
Work 25lb PB x11, 12
Pushup
WU b/w x6
Work b/w x12, 10
Notes: The "11" on the first set of Incline Flyes marks a sudden and catastrophic fail. I don't know if I just got careless and lost focus, or if it was what our friend the RMT informed me is called the "piano reflex", a failure of the Golgi tendon bodies. Anyway, my shoulder rolled, the weights fell out of my hands (straining both wrists in the process) and the whole experience, coming as it did in the first set of the first exercise, was exceedingly demoralising. I hadn't raised the weight, either; I was trying for more reps than last time instead.

Superset:
Cable Cross
WU 2.5lb x6
Work 10lb x10, 10
Incline DB Press
WU 10lb x6
Work 30lb DB x10, 10

DB Bench Press Dropset
35lb DBs x7
25lb DBs x8+3
15lb DBs x13
Notes: not bad. Tried to offset the over-large weight drops in my modular dumbbells by increasing the reps as I went down.

Superset:
Side Laterals
Work 15lb DBs x10, 9
DB Press
Work 15lb DBs x10, 7+2
Notes: ow.

Superset:
Bent-over Lateral
Work: 10lb DBs x10, 10
Upright Row
Work: 17.5lb DBs x10, 10

Front Raise Dropset
15lb DBs x8
10lb DBs x7
5lb DBs x8

No cardio yesterday.

Total eaten (without cake! And they didn't even leave me a slice to slip into the freezer!) 1335 calories, 125g protein, 131g carbs (30g fibre), 30g fat, 671mg sodium.

Not quite awake
Today's weight: 128 pounds again. Temperature: 97.5?F.

I forgot to set my alarm clock last night. So I didn't get up until after six -- ugh. No cardio this morning, which sucks. I've got an osteopathy/massage appointment this afternoon, so I have to rush through my lifting, and won't have time for cardio then, either.

And I feel as though I'm still asleep.

Food so far:
Cup egg sub with salsa and extra hot sauce; oatmeal pancakes (1/3 cup ground oatmeal, baking powder, vanilla, a bit of the egg sub, 1/4 cup soymilk) with sugar free jam or syrup.

Cup egg sub made into Italian-style frittata with spinach, roasted pepper, garlic and tablespoon flax.

Couple scoops of red cabbage braise with 2.75 oz chicken, extra hot sauce; 1/3 cup (dry measure) barley, cooked, with caramel sugar-free syrup and butter sprinkles.

Yeah, I bought another cabbage. Heck, they were under a dollar, which is less than Romaine lettuce. Braised it up last night, but I don't think it turned out as well as the last. (And it was somewhat larger, so there is a lot more of this batch.) Sigh. I see myself falling into the Rut. Eat the same things every day, it's easy... which is good in some ways, makes it simple to get the ratios. Dear knows, that's what everyone else precontest does.

However, I know that at some unspecified point in the future I will rebel. I won't be able to swallow a single morsel of braised cabbage, or spaghetti squash frittata -- and I'll be so mired in my patterns I'll be unable to think at all of what else there is to eat. What do other people eat? I don't know! What can I eat? I don't know! I'm gonna staaaaarve!

Then, it's a crisis.

Right now, though, it's a timesaver.

The Lion does cardio
Double cardio today: forty-five minutes going up and down and up and down and sometimes round when I got bored, on my Reebok Step whilst watching The Lion in Winter.

A bit of an uneven rendition; Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close very vivid for the most part (though Glenn took it a bit over the top at times), but the supporting cast sometimes behaved as though they were reading lines they'd never before seen in their lives off a teleprompter. Nice set and costumes, though.

Not particularly uplifting. "Think of the worst holiday with relatives you've ever had. Hm. What would be the worst holiday -- oo! What about when Eleanor of Aquitaine would come for Christmas with Henry and the kids?"

Eaten: 1466 calories, 161g protein, 112g carbs (33g fibre), 37g fat, 739mg sodium.

Consisting of (in addition to foods already noted), first, a salad with 3 ounces chicken and tofu/balsamic dressing and a quarter cup of edamame, followed by flax fibre/sugarfree syrup pseudodessert, and second, a large pile of broccoli with teriyaki stuff, another three ounces chicken oven-fried with nutritional yeast, more tofu mayo for dipping, and another pseudodessert of Jello pudding powder, a tablespoon peanut butter (bad me, it should've been a teaspoon but I was hungry) mixed with soymilk.

Oh, and Kool-Aid. I remember Kool-Aid. When we were children, it was "juice", and we each had our own cup, Tupperware in different colours. I was going to buy Crystal Light, but it is $2.35 a package. I am currently too poor to afford Crystal Light. Kool-Aid, on the other hand, is a mere 35 cents, and I can put a little scoop of it in a glass with some stevia powder and water, and presto! instant kid drink.

I started with the Grape. My favourite!

The Chariot

"In readings, the Chariot often appears when hard control is or could be in evidence. At its best, hard control is not brutal, but firm and direct. It is backed up by a strong will and great confidence. The Chariot can mean self-control or control of the environment. This card also represents victory. There are many types of wins; the Chariot's is of the win-lose type. Your success comes from beating the competition to become number one. Such moments are glorious in the right circumstances."
--Joan Bunning