More Sinned Against Than Sinning

Little Starlet and I went up to the city today to the Sundance Kabuki Theatre see the National Theatre live broadcast of the Donmar Warehouse production "King Lear" with Derek Jacobi. He was outstanding. In fact the whole play was fabulous, there wasn't a block of wood attempting to act on the stage at all. A fine avoidance of teapot Shakespeare. Little Starlet more or less followed the play - I had forgotten, and so didn't explain, the Gloucester/Edgar/Edmund sub-plot - though she thought that Derek Jacobi had been replaced by another actor in the final scene. Quite why, I have no idea. There you are, the mind of a 9 year old.

The relevance of all this to this blog is that it meant I had a rather odd eating day. I began with a bowl of granola. We headed out at 9am. The play/broadcast started at 12:30pm and ended at 4pm, which meant that lunch would not be happening. So we stopped at the Fillmore Street Cafe for a breakfast bagel at 10:30am. I had a latte and the 49ers, consisting of ham, egg, and cheddar cheese on a plain bagel. Little Starlet had the Fillmore Special, with sausage, egg and cheese. Very hot and tasty.

We then headed up to the Japantown shopping area. It was freezing cold, icy wind blasting poor Little Starlet's uncovered legs (she never will listen when I tell her to put more clothes on), so we went inside to look at the stores. After walking though the Japanese language bookstore and admiring the plastic dolls with penises, we found ourselves at the Anderson Bakery. Little Starlet had a slice of chocolate ganache cake, while I toyed with a light, fluffy, delicious slice of coffee creme cake. As I always say to the girls, if you MUST eat food that's bad for you, at least make sure it is high quality. This certainly was worth every calorie.

We went into the theatre food-free, but once the intermission came along, it was clear that Little Starlet required yet more sustenance. So we went to the Peet's Coffee concession in the theatre and bought bags of popcorn (and yet another latte for me).

Hubby and Deep Thought have spent the week in Bear Valley. They got back this afternoon just before Little Starlet and I returned from the city. We were all exhausted and lacking imagination, so we tucked into Whole Foods' frozen pizza for dinner: pepperoni, hawaiian, and chicken quesadilla (note, three pizzas between four of us, so a small concession to thinness there).

All in all, a very fun day, but a bit peculiar on the dietary front.

Mmmm, Bacon's Up.

It's Wednesday, and that means cleaners at our house. They take over the entire house and clean every room simultaneously for a total of four hours. That might make it seem like we live in some kind of mansion, but we don't. We do have a nice house, but the main factor is their obsessive need to clean every surface, move every piece of furniture, and even tidy up inside drawers and cupboards. My usual strategy is to go out for lunch as it is impossible to eat while other people are working so hard.

Generally on a Wednesday, the diner at Stanford - the Palo Alto Creamery, Fountain and Grill, to give it its proper name - calls to me. And Ruby. We typically go for lunch, or brunch, or whatever you want to call it, and Ruby enjoys a little under-the-table treat, before we head off for a walk. The wait staff often bring her out a bowl of water and a dog biscuit, which she never eats as she doesn't like "milk bones" as they are called. Today lunch was two poached eggs, hash browns, four slices of crisply cooked bacon, and a slice of cracked wheat toast with raspberry jam, plus decaf coffee. This comes to a princely 14 Weightwatchers points, and worth every one of them. Ruby enjoyed her morsels of bacon and potato. In the past I have bought a side of bacon just for her, but I think we need to watch her weight too... and having an extra side of bacon on the table is no inducement to good behavior for Dr Mom!!

We rounded off our lunch with a 50 minute walk at the Palo Alto Baylands (worth 3 points).

Keep on Snacking

I haven't eaten anything very extravagent this week, so I am hopeful that there will be a small loss on Wednesday. We did have "smorgasbord" lunch yesterday at a friend's house - involving bagels (sharp intake of breath), salami (ouch) and various other bits and bobs - but this followed a 90 minute walk at Fremont Older, with a lot of uphill.

Anyway, today I wanted to share with you a tale of two chewy bars.


First exhibit, the "Pure Fit" bar, granola crunch flavor. 210 calories. Vegan, gluten free, blah blah. Verdict? Looks like dog poo, tastes like dog poo, smells like dog poo...
Need I say more than that I nibbled the end and then threw it away. Bleugh. I didn't bother to work out the points, as I'll never eat one.






Second exhibit, the KIND fruit and nut bar in apricot and almond flavor. Now that's more like it. Crunchy, chewy, sweet and salty all at once. Alas, it costs 5 weightwatchers points. FIVE. That is the same as two boiled eggs and a slice of toast.

These snack bars are a killer.

Layang Layang, Eating Eating

Today has been troublesome. First of all, smallest daughter is running a bake sale at school tomorrow, in support of Pennies for Peace; which meant that I had to spend the whole day baking fairy cakes and cookies. In the afternoon, Little Starlet brought her three co-conspirators home, and they continued the process by making gallons of lemonade (they squeezed 126 lemons), making another set of cookies, and icing the cakes. The house smelt delectable, but I didn't eat any of them.

It was just as well, really, because at lunchtime I went out with five friends to a Malaysian restaurant in Saratoga/San Jose borders called Layang Layang. It wasn't a very beautiful place, but the food was decent enough - a kind of cross between Thai and Indian, fairy spicey but with a curry overtone. We ordered far, far too much and ate far, far too much of it. I ordered three items: Mouse Tail Noodles (just for the name!), Sarang Mango Chicken (which turned out to have a punch, though billed as not spicey), and vegetarian steamed spring rolls. We ate family style. I brought home two boxes of noodles for Hubby to eat for lunch tomorrow. You can tell how naughty we were, lunch took two hours.

We completed the meal with two desserts, a deep fried ice cream with fried bananas, which was just okay; and a sticky rice with coconut milk and something that could in all honesty have been blackberry jam. It wasn't, I think, but we didn't really go for it.

I didn't have too much meat, and I eschewed the fried foods, but I imagine I ate every point available and for most of the rest of the week! This evening Hubby and I were out at a nonprofit event - a panel discussion on new media and high school education - which provided a finger buffet. We managed to eat just small plates of nothing very much. Virtue seemed obligatory.

I Like Weightwatchers' Recipes

Weekends are definitely harder. I've only managed 30 minutes out with the dog today, because this morning I had to supervise Little Starlet and two friends organizing themselves for a bake sale (the torture - I have to bake cake for it) on Friday in support of Pennies for Peace (www.penniesforpeace,org), so Hubby took Ruby and himself out without me.

Then Deep Thought arrived back from her soccer practice bearing chocolate chip cookies from Peet's Coffee. She had, for the very first time, taken herself off to Peet's after practice to buy a hot chocolate - how the babies grow - and her altruistic impulses insisted that she not return empty handed. Cookies were duly stowed for dessert after lunch.

For lunch we had tilapia with boiled potatoes, asparagus (which the children pretty much refused to eat) and home made hollandaise sauce, courtesy of the Weightwatchers website. I have always avoided making hollandaise sauce, despite it being a critical ingredient of Eggs Benedict, which is one of my favorite meals, as the story goes that it is very hard to make. Poppycock, I say, it turned out to be very easy. The Weightwatchers recipe was: 1/3 cup butter, 2 egg yolks, 2 tbsp water, dash of salt, lemon juice to taste. Whisk the egg and water together till frothy. Then put over a double burner and continue whisking. As the mixture begins to firm up, pour in the butter (already melted in the microwave) and whisk some more. Remove from the heat and whisk in the lemon juice and salt to taste. It worked really well and was worth only one point.

Then we had half a cookie each, which was five points. Yikes.

I think the main thing about the points system is the way it makes you size up your food choices. Will I get as much satisfaction from the 4oz pot of yoghurt for four points or the seven crisps (yes, I mean individual crisps)? For five points I can have two boiled eggs and a slice of toast - or half a cookie. Of course, you don't always want to be eating egg etc, and sometimes the craving for sweet is almost overwhelming. Tonight's experiment in snack food is going to be cottage cheese with strawberries, in a 100 calorie pot courtesy of Kraft.

Now all I have to decide is what's for dinner: cottage pie or baked potatoes?

Return of the Settled Insides

Not quite so vegetarian today, though still not a fully fledged meat eater. Today's food:

Breakfast - rice chex and milk.
Lunch - 2 egg omelette with a bit of cheddar cheese, and a side of baked beans. Fat free yoghurt.
Afternoon - Starbucks latte with fat free milk. Resisted cake.
Dinner - Angel hair pasta with a small piece of tilapia (a flat white fish), in lemon juice and capers.

Today I am feeling pretty hungry, but the insides have settled down considerably. You will notice that there is not so much as one lettuce leaf on the food list for today. Lemon juice can be risky, as acid can play havoc with my innards, but so far so good since dinner. (I keep mistyping "good" as "food" which I presume is deeply Freudian in some way.)

I walked Ruby Dog for an hour this morning and consequently have five points saved up for a little something in front of the telly after the kids have gone to bed. Mm, could it be a quarter cup of trail mix? And, yes, that is as small a quantity as it sounds.

Life and Death Adventures

I went off to my San Jose meeting this morning sustained by nothing more than a bowl of rice chex and a cup of chamomile tea. By leaving the house ten minutes later than I intended, I prevented myself from stopping off at the Starbucks next to my meeting place. Of such confluences of unintended actions are diets made, methinks.

After that meeting I headed back to Palo Alto for my lunch meeting at Lavanda, on University Avenue. My host was already there, so we got straight into business and ordering. After he chose a club sandwich, I felt compelled to order from that part of the menu too - and my eye alighted on the croque monsieur. I am very partial to croque monsieur, and I was awfully hungry. It was tasty too. (For those who do not know, a croque monsieur is a grilled sandwich with ham in the middle and cheese melted on the top. A croque madam is the same, but with the addition of a soft-yolked fried egg on top. Extra yummy.) My concession to health was to reject the side of French fries in favor of mixed salad leaves. I drank fizzy water and a filter coffee sweetened with Splenda (bleugh).

Alas, Weightwatchers thinks that the average croque monsieur comes in at a hefty 12 points, so maybe it wasn't the best choice. Cheese rarely is. But it was worth it!

After lunch, I was almost run over. For real. I waited at the lights at the crossing. The lights changed, and I had the walk signal. i stepped out into the road - at the same moment that a large mom-mobile hurtled towards me, screeching its brakes, and ending up in the middle of the intersection with cars coming at it along the road that was on green. I just stood there, somewhat surprised. It literally missed me by a foot or so. If I had been walking slightly faster, I'd have been in hospital now. It turns out that a woman I know was actually in one of the other cars at the intersection, and when I saw her later in the day she commented on how impressed she was by my cool reaction: No banging on the offending car, swearing or anything. Well, it's that famous British stiff upper lip, isn't it?

Soooo Hunnnnggggrrrryyyyy

Yesterday I ate 43 points on Weightwatchers, largely due to the homemade chocolate chip cookies that Little Starlet insisted we make in the afternoon. Each cookie turned out to be worth 7 points. (Seven!!) Today, so far, I've eaten 22 points, and the food diary is thus:
Breakfast - rice chex and milk
Lunch - wholewheat pasta with mushrooms, onion, and tomato sauce
Afternoon snack - two cups of popcorn
Dinner - ground beef with tomato and kidney beans, on quinoa

And I'm hungry....huuuunnngggggrrrrryyyyy.....

The kids are tucking into ice cream. Luckily ice cream isn't one of the food stuffs that shakes my world, and I don't even feel like I'm craving something sweet (despite the box of yesterday's cookies sitting on the countertop). But I do feel like I could eat dinner again.

Over Christmas, one of the books I read was "Sacred Hearts" by Sarah Dunant, in which one of the characters embarks on a self-imposed anorexia; and she talks about so-called 'Holy Anorexia' in which members of religious orders, or religious hermits, would starve themselves to make visions appear. I'm not quite there yet, but give me a couple of days.

Mind you, I have a lunch date at a fancy Palo Alto restaurant tomorrow. Do I really have to eat leaves? It's unseasonal, even for California.

Death by Lunch

Hubby has given up paid employment - for the time being - and so is available for lunch. And coffee. And snacks. Though he protests the need to stay slim and lovely, he always seems to be up for a meal out. Honestly, I am too, because eating at home just get so dull. However, I can't see that this will be good for our collective waistlines.

Lunch today: A 1/3 lb beefburger on a multigrain bun with blue cheese and bacon, lettuce, tomatoe and mayo; and a side of skinny fries.

Positively health food. (Well, there's a vegetable...)

The Impossibility of Restraint

I forgot to weigh myself this morning, so that'll have to be tomorrow. I didn't have any morning snackerel, but that resulted in a state of ravenous hunger by lunchtime. I was compelled to have french fries with my turkey and avocado panini sandwich at Epi (lunch out on a Wednesday being compulsory by virtue of my house cleaning team taking over every room in the house simultaneously).

Rainy, gloomy day today. I am so looking forward to watching Deep Thought play a soccer match in the rain this afternoon.

Death By Eating Redux

We spent the weekend at Hidden Villa, a youth hostel about half an hour away from us. It's the oldest youth hostel in the USA, and easily contains the 21 of us in our party (10 adults, 11 kids). It rained on Friday, was dry and windy on Saturday, and has absolutely bucketed down today. On Saturday we managed to do a walk over the hill, then toured the farmyard to look at the chickens and pigs. Friday was board games; Sunday was Easter activities for the kids. ("Why do we have to do so many stupid craft projects?" asks my grateful younger daughter.)

That gives you the basic shape of the weekend.

The main story of the weekend is the amount of food we brought and ate (and, to some extent, brought home again). Friday was baked potatoes with chilli and cheese, followed by fruit; then evening crisps and Roses. Saturday was cereal breakfast followed by bagel lunch - so far so good - but then we had roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, brussel sprouts, peas and gravy for dinner (with seconds), followed after the kids were abed by mango upside-down cake and ice cream, with a chaser of cheese and biscuits. I may have managed to eat some chocolate and rich tea biscuits in among that too. We collectively waddled to bed at midnight. This morning began with everything bagel and cream cheese; then lunch was bacon, sausage, fried egg, mushrooms, and half a hot cross bun with butter.

We haven't had a great couple of nights sleep - the beds at Hidden Villa are really titchy and, of course, sharing with the kids feels strange. So we're all rather tired. I had a bit of a nap on the sofa this afternoon... We attempted to go out for a pizza for dinner, but everywhere was shut. We ended up at Il Fornaio, which is a fancier Italian restaurant. In a moment of restraint I had cannelloni con pollo, resisting all the heavier pizza type foods, though the fact it came in cream sauce probably negates all the good intentions.

Death By Eating

Sunday was a ridiculous eating day.

First of all the kids begged us to take them to the diner for breakfast (see last post), which we didn't finish till about 10am.

Then we were heading up to San Francisco to see a ballet at 2:00pm, so we had to eat an early lunch. At 11:30am we were forcing ourselves to eat sandwiches.

We ordered drinks and snack for the ballet intermission - experience tells us that we need something with caffeine in it to revive us at half time - and the only small thing on offer was a plate of chocolate dipped strawberries. Hubby declared that he felt queasy afterwards.

Then at the end of the ballet, which was only 4:30pm, we headed to Max's Opera Cafe on Van Ness, as we had promised the kids we could eat dinner there. Pointing out the early hour, I suggested that we drive back home and go out to eat downtown, but Deep Thought revealed an urgent need for the loo - which she had failed to mention while we were in the theatre - and so Max's it had to be. I think the kids mostly like this restaurant for its desserts, but on this occasion they were forbidden to have any. We ordered our entrees which, when they arrived ten minutes later, proved to be as enormous as any we've ever seen. I had the crab cakes with fries and coleslaw. I didn't eat any coleslaw - too much onion - and only one of the three crab cakes. Deep Thought had half my fries. She had ordered a BBQ pork wrap, which provokes images of a healthful sandwich substitute full of salad, yes? How wrong can you be? She ate about a third of it, and an untouched half came home. Little Starlet, who is currently in a meat and two veg stage, ordered the beef brisket with mashed potatoes and roasted carrots. There was enough mash for at least four people. She bravely made an igloo in the middle of it, then most of that came home too.

What is it with restaurants? Why do they insist on giving such big portions? I imagine it is so people think they are getting value for money, but all that happens is that you bring the excess food home, keep it in the fridge for a couple of days and then throw it away, complete with the extra refuse created by the "to go" plastic boxes. Really quite ridiculous.

Incidentally, the ballet was "The Little Mermaid" which was the first modern ballet that we'd taken the kids to. They didn't like it much, especially because the music was discordant; but Hubby and I enjoyed it more than the traditional fru-fru ballets like "Swan Lake". We actually found it emotionally affecting, which is definitely a first for us with ballet.

Wot No Willpower

Glad to see that OEM has returned to the weight-loss fray, because I need some moral support. I've definitely been slacking in the past couple of weeks. Stinky cold, time of the month, rain...all conspire to stop the would-be slimmer doing anything than eating and sitting around on one's expansive bottom.

Today is a case in point. Here's what I've consumed today:
Rice chex for breakfast;
coffee and scone for mid-morning snackerel;
butternut squash soup, french stick and blue cheese for lunch;
tortilla chips and melted cheese (aka nachos) for mid-afternoon snackerel;
pan-seared tuna with mashed potatoes and cauliflower, followed by homemade apple and blackberry crumble with custard for dinner;
Cadbury's creme egg to celebrate the children going to bed.

Not exactly low calorie.

I did go for a three mile walk this morning along the Baylands. By the time I was half way through it had started to rain. That, combined with the biting cold that lead to actual hail stones later in the afternoon, encouraged me to walk a bit faster, so I was going at 1 mile in 15 minutes. Even so, I don't think I walked off my creme egg. Alas, Little Starlet is off school sick (stinky cold reprised) and Hubby has flown to Baltimore on a business trip till Thursday; so my well-laid plans to do 45 minutes of exercise every day this week (in accordance with the instructions in "Grow Younger Next Year") will no doubt fail dismally.

But are we down hearted? Well, yes actually.

More or Less Better, No Excuses Remaining

I've just finished eating a Cadbury's Creme Egg. I know I shouldn't but somehow I just don't care. I had Cheerios for breakfast and a Caesar salad for lunch; but then I got hungry and ended up eating an almond croissant with a latte in the afternoon.

I expect to be well enough to go to dance class this week, and I've arranged to go for a walk with a friend on Friday morning; so I've got some exercise in the offing this week after doing nothing at all last week. I'm finally sleeping a bit better so I don't feel so limp and washed out.

It's funny how we all swing back and forth between being "good" (i.e. depriving ourselves of the good things in life, like Cadbury's Creme Eggs) and wolfing down as much "bad" stuff as we can find. It's a disease called Lack of Willpower. I went to the grocery store and deliberately didn't buy any treat food except for Skinny Cow popsicles (which are really for Deep Thought - I don't like them). No cakes, no biscuits, no chocolate, no crisps, not even any unusual crackers. I figure that if I can resist buying them, then I'm less likely to eat them. Not buying them at the grocery store won't, of course, prevent me succumbing at a coffee shop, but should make the overall consumption fall. It's also a good thing for Deep Thought to have less sweet stuff in the house. When you're a 10 year old diabetic, it can be hard to resist.

Days of Relative Goodness, Nights of Coughing

By the time we got back from Death Valley at the weekend, I had a stinky cold. I've now had it for a week and I Am Fed Up With It. The worst part is the cough, which is pretty bad during the day, but keeps me awake at night. Hubby says I was wheezing attractively in my sleep yesterday. Lovely. So I am tired, but trying to stay in good humor. Sickness is the reason I've not been posting.

Our house remodel has also reached some kind of tipping point. This week has been ghastly - activity in every room in the house - but we also got the kitchen back! Hurrah, no more obligatory restaurant food.

For the past two days I've been very abstemious with the eating. Cheerios for breakfast, caesar salad with a little chicken for lunch, a granola bar for snack, a nonfat latte for other snack, and a modest dinner. On Tuesday my modest dinner was a cheese sandwich. Yesterday it was pasta with salmon in cream (not so uncalorific, but not a very big portion). Today I whipped up pasta with egg and bacon (again not a big portion). I did also give in to the temptation of a chocolate croissant at Douce France, though....while I was watching Deep Thought do some of her homework. I couldn't bear the idea of going back to the worksite formerly known as our house, so we hung out for over an hour. You've got to buy something, n'est pas?

Also snacked on crisps this evening. Well, I'm sick!

No exercise this week. One, I'm sick (did I mention that?). Two, it's been raining. Three, I've been crazy busy with volunteering, food shopping, moving things around in the house, and so on. Like OEM, I have every intention of getting back to the exercise, but just for now I think I need to focus on shaking off this cold.

Back Home and Into the Calorific Stuff

Today we drove from Calico Ghost Town near Barstow on I-15 to the San Francisco Bay Area. The drive took about eight hours. We stopped at the China Town Buffet in Bakersfield for lunch, and at Starbucks in Merced for the 3:30pm stretch-the-legs stop. Far, far too much was eaten at the buffet. I only had one plate of food (whereas many people in the restaurant had four or five) but it was that calorific, cheap Chinese food that you just know is furring your arteries and killing your brain cells even as you chew it. Well, never mind, it tasted good!

By the time we got home it was 6:00pm. Our kitchen is still out of action - though close to completion - so we headed into town for a pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen. Yum. Yes, I know I should have had the salad but the pizza was calling.

No exercise of any kind today. Yesterday we spent a couple of hours ambling around the Calico Ghost Town, which doesn't count; and the day before we spent an hour and a half walking across the sand dunes at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley, which does. I am determined to pick up the pace a bit with exercise now we are back.

I've finished reading the pink health book "Younger Next Year", or whatever it's called, and I'll review it soon.

Crazy for Fondue

I've had another ridiculously busy day, prepping for our RV trip and also the building work in our bedroom while we're away. After my Multi-grain Chex breakfast - which didn't happen till after the kids had gone out to school with Dad - I visited Safeway to buy 15 gallons of drinking water. Then I took popsicles to school for Little Starlet's birthday snack (she turns eight on Sunday), then it was back to the supermarket to do the shopping for our trip.

Hubby appeared back home with our rental RV at about 11:30am, after which I traipsed in and out of the house with armfuls of stuff: pans, bedding, towels, medicines, shampoo, etc etc. I employed several shopping bags, but it was still many trudging trips up and down the plywood path across our battlefield front yard. I truly think it counted as exercise.

The highlight of the day was Little Starlet's birthday dinner at La Fondue in Saratoga. OEM will remember it well, I know, as we went there during the Christmas holidays. We had the cheddar, bacon, buttermilk and beer cheese fondue first course; followed by the meaty grill second course (Little Starlet decided she liked buffalo, but did not care for wild boar or savage duck); and then the course we were all waiting for, the Decadent Chocolate fondue dessert. Yum. About a million calories, but well worth it. The children really enjoyed having a "fun food" experience in a fancy restaurant. We sang Little Starlet "happy birthday" and she seemed pleased by the whole experience.

Frantic Day

I'm having a seriously frantic day. This morning I had the weekly site meeting for our remodel which took two hours. During the day I received multiple visits from the Site Supervisor with many questions. We also lost our water supply twice, because the landscape men dug through the water pipe, and the phone was out of order.

I began to work out what we will take in the RV, heaping pans, plates etc on the dining room table. I also sorted through our food box to see what we might like to take along, and to compile a shopping list for tomorrow morning.

At the same time as this, I was trying to sort through the closet in the master bedroom, as it will be demolished while we are away on our RV trip. I filled up a black garbage bag with ancient bras and unspeakable knickers, emptying two out of my four drawers in process. Lunch was a bowl of chicken tortilla soup and two Karvla crackers with a bit of cheddar.

At 2pm I had to head over to school to help with a Valentine's Day project. I obtained the materials for this from our family room by waiting for the builders to have their lunch break and then climbing through the construction work from the garden.

At one point I was so wound up by all the things I needed to do that my hands were shaking. The day ended well though: Little Starlet had her class play, in which she was the star, and she did a fabulous job, funny, loud, expressive, the lot. We went out for dinner afterwards to Mike's Cafe in midtown Palo Alto. I had lasagne, which was tasty.

No coffee shop stop today - no time.

Too many lentils

I had lunch at a friend's house today: lentil soup, wholewheat bread, and cheddar cheese. Tasty, but I've been suffering ever since. Have I mentioned that I have Crohn's Disease? Which means that too much fiber is A Bad Thing. We made up for that with a visit to Zao Noodles in downtown Palo Alto for dinner. I had bought bread and soup for dinner, but couldn't face Round Two of nutritious virtue. Maybe we can eat that tomorrow when I am scrambling between the end of Deep Thought's medical clinic appointment and the start of my dance class.

In the interests of mutual education, I have just started reading "Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond" by Chris Crowley and Henry S Lodge. It's aimed at women in the late 40s who are menopausal - so not quite me just yet. So far the main ideas seem to be (1) give up eating fast food of any kind and (2) exercise six days per week. I'll report further when I've got past chapter two....

But where to eat lunch?

Among various chores this morning I found time to do my ultra-virtuous six mile walk, and beat the rain too.

Returned home to find the house full of tarry smoke. Bleugh. The family room is now off limits - the door has literally been sealed up. There is one man ripping the door frame off the dining room French windows, and another man in a digger outside the living room door. So I am an exile in the house, bowl of virtuous vegan pumpkin soup in one hand, small chicken sandwich made with one slice of double fibre brown bread in the other. Maybe Little Starlet's room would offer some respite?