I have cramps. I feel like Jack The Ripper is pulling my ovaries out through my kidney, and taking my spinal cord with it. So I guess I'm crabby, which may explain my tirade on LLBean last night.
In kitteh news, I'm calling the vet today to find out when Not-So-Little Leonidas can get snipped and declawed. Leo doesn't know how to interact with anyone without using teeth and claws anymore. He's a maniac with razors.
Unfortunately, he knows he's adorable and can play that well.
When caught doing something particularly evil, like kicking all the litter out of his box, or shredding the papers on my desk, he'll roll over on his back, paws up, and try to look submissive. Or he'll crawl into the crook of my arm and look up at me like, “I wuv you!”. Blink. Blink.
It's been a weekend of behavior relapses for him. He hasn't dumped water in over a week, then this morning he flooded the kitchen. He hasn't been keeping me up at night, but yesterday I went to bed early, so he took that as a cue to tackle my head for two hours.
Yesterday he was busy stealing stuffed toys from my daughter's room. He dragged a giant blue monkey downstairs by himself:
So, yeah. Not much sleep last night. Plus we LOUDLY, lost power at 12:30am. All the air conditioners stopped running at once, and the TV powered on (Our bedroom TV does this when we lose power. I don't know why.). It's amazing how loud the sudden quietness can be. Even though we got it back within 5 minutes, I woke up every half hour after that.
In other news, my diet/exercise regimen is failing beautifully. Remember those Slim Shots I mentioned back in July? Remember I said they didn't taste that bad? Well, they didn't at first. After about a week, I couldn't swallow them anymore. Too plasticky.
I'm still trying to maintain portion control, but my biggest downfall is stress eating and sugary snacks. I bought a book on stress eating which sucked ass. It spent the first 200 pages explaining why we stress eat, and gave examples of people's underlying problems.
I hate to self diagnose here, but I didn't fall into any of the categories which included: child abuse, spousal abuse, wanting to go back to the womb, unable to properly assert yourself, etc. etc. It took 200 pages before I got to a simple “eating because of work related stress”, in which case you're supposed to “challenge yourself” to not eat. They give you some examples of reassuring phrases to use when the urge strikes.
Yeah, I've got enough challenges with just keeping my job. I KNOW I'm not supposed to stress eat. If I need a mantra, I'll start practicing yoga. Which is probably a good idea, actually.
So it doesn't help that I did the grocery shopping whilst hungry, and in addition to the healthful items like lettuce, veg and low fat yogurt, I bought a tray of baklava. It was fresh and syrupy. The fillo crackled “Eat me!” from an aisle away.
I read recently about an herb called Gymnema. Supposedly it was used by herbalists to treat diabetes in ancient India and Africa. Now it's used in some Asian countries as a dietary supplement for weight loss. I got some from the local GNC for 9 bucks. Somehow, it manages to kill the urge for sweets. Or make them not taste quite so good. Since that's my Kryptonite, I'll try just about anything.
So far the Baklava hasn't been calling my name, so who knows. I'll let you know if I'm able to keep my paws off the pasteries. In the meantime, here's a link to the absolute best chocolate brownie recipe I've ever tried:
Baker's Chocolate One Bowl Brownies
