Wednesday Check-in

Hi all!

I know I’ve been absent for the past couple weeks. It has been a struggle for me to get back into the swing of things. The good news is, Mom goes to a home this week, and Dad is nearly done with the spend-down, which will help him qualify for Medicaid. My dad is not a rich man, but the government decrees that he has to spend half of his carefully squirreled away savings & investments or they won’t pay for my mom’s care. Weird, eh? This does relieve a lot of the stress that was giving me fits of writer’s block. While my stress still remains (who among us doesn’t have stress and can we trade lives for a few days?), my mind is beginning to clear of the cobwebs of worry for my parents. I know people who have written through the deaths of their parents and, like those women who can work full-time, cook gourmet meals, keep a clean house, and pursue a doctorate degree while raising happy, healthy children and keeping their mates satisfied, I just don’t get it. I applaud them, but I will never be one of those people. As my teen says, “Mom, you’re a worrier.” Worry leads to stress which leads to a lack of sleep which leads to a foggy brain. And weight gain.

For some reason, the picture is not loading, so I'll just tell you the number and add the picture later if it allows me to. I am up to 199.0 again.

Yup. I gained this week. I haven’t seen that number in a couple of months now. I can only blame the stressful past month so much on this one. In all honesty, I gained because I was not careful in my eating. I went back to old, bad habits, and didn’t track my eating so I could ignore the elephant in the room, no fat jokes against myself intended. I ate pasta like the world was ending tomorrow. I ate candy—stupid peanut butter cup Easter eggs. I ate a third of a loaf of French bread on my own. I ate often. I ate late at night. I ate from boredom in the few spates of time I had where I should have been writing or relaxing. Wrong choices, and lots of them, all contributed to my weight gain. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I kept exercising, through it all. The other good news is that I can come back from this. I feel no need to throw out the baby with the bath water and toss my diet into the trash can. What I do feel is the need to re-set, to start over again. And this is something we can all easily do when it comes to this sort of thing. The past is the past, the future is not yet written; what I do now is what counts. So, I am going to heave myself back onto the wagon of healthier eating and let’s see if I can’t bring some more weight loss back to this blog next week.

As to writing, I have written a grand total of 25 words this month! Go, me! All right, not so great by any standards. I have re-set myself for the writing, as well, and a brand new Little Bites Challenge is now open for April. Those who wish to participate, the goal for the month is 7500 words, which is the 30 days of April multiplied by the 250 words per day. For me to catch up, I will need to write 725 words today, which is doable if I set my mind to it.

I now have received my (six!) twenty page each entries to judge for my local RWA's writing contest which must be completed by the end of the month (the 27^th to be exact). This definitely adds to my overflowing plate, but I am glad to do it.

At the moment, I am exhausted (it’s quarter past 10 in the morning and I’ve already been awake for longer than I slept last night), so I’m going to leave you with your prompt and vocab word and meander off for a 15 minute or so nap.

Prompt: Cinderella in Space. Re-tell the classic fairy tale in a sci-fi setting.

Vocab: Vacuum: A lack of air. (While not a very unusual word, it is often misspelled and is appropriate to the prompt.)

See you all soon!