Bring Me Sunshine

We are still hanging in with the diet, it's been 8 weeks. We've been pretty good about sticking to it with only a few deviations - hamburger and fries once, and Carm's birthday weekend, a few other little cheats - but they are nothing much, just toast with peanut butter and Pho twice. BUT I'm getting pretty sick of cooking. Yesterday I spent over an hour just making lunch - between making a soup and getting stuff cut up for the salad it just took a long time. Suppers usually take an hour to an hour and half to get to the table. I'm getting sick of it and need a break... I've been making batches of cooked vegetables ahead of time to mix with lentils and rice. That helps a bit. I'm going to also cut up a bunch of stuff for salads ahead of time too - having a few days of chopped vegetables in the fridge should help matters somewhat. How do you keep with your diet yet get a break from cooking?

All that said, we are having company for supper (you know who you are!) but the cooking doesn't bother me one bit - we are having company! Or as I tell Spike - we have friends coming over. I mentioned to Spike who was coming and he looked around and ran to the window. He loves Jo Ellen! I love having people over and in fact would far rather, have people over than go out.

Yesterday Carm got sent a link to this youtube with a song (The Jive Aces - UK's No.1 jive and swing band - new music video for the Morcambe and Wise classic "Bring Me Sunshine".) - I really liked it - especially on this rainy day:

Today's word of the day is biophilia (bye-oh-FILL-ee-uh noun : a hypothetical human tendency to interact or be closely associated with other forms of life in nature).  I am most at peace when I am in touch with nature. Perhaps owning a parrot lets me indulge my biophilia needs right in my own house. The dogs are another one of nature's creatures that I connect with, although they are more tamed than parrots.

Living in the country also keeps me in touch with nature - there are so many birds around that I can hardly look out of a window without seeing one (right now I can see 3 outside the little window to the left of my desk and one more from the window at the right). A few nights ago, around 5:30 pm I looked up into the sky to see hundreds of white flashes flying towards the west, they were little flecks of bright light strewn across the sky. It was so beautiful. I couldn't tell what kind of bird they were - I was hoping they were something exotic like snow geese - but later I saw some flying over lower and could tell they were gulls.

My pleasures today: last night's pleasure was resisting the call of the cheeseburger and instead having a broccoli/red pepper stir fry on brown rice that tasted great - too much soy sauce though so today I'm up 2 pounds - dooh ; getting the house ready for guests - okay, doing the actual housework wasn't a pleasure but having it clean and smelling fresh like a lemon was - there's something about nice about using the lemon vinegar dustcloths - did I ever post the "recipe"? ; being inside warm and dry on a cold, rainy Saturday.