Mmmm…. A nice warm cup of Caramel Crunch decaf and a hearty piece of thickly frosted devil’s food cake. It’s totally okay cake, and totally delicious. We finally found a local source for The Butterfly Bakery sugar free products locally! I don’t “need” my cake to be sugar free, but the piece of sugar free cake is a lot bigger than the regular sugar cake for the same calories! When I first tasted the double chocolate sugar free muffins, David didn’t realize were sugar free when he got them for me, I thought they must be sweetened with Stevia. Stevia is the only non-sugar sweetener I’ve ever tasted that has absolutely no not-quite-sugar taste. Even Splenda, which I love, has a slightly not-sugar taste. But The Butterfly Bakery doesn’t sweeten with Stevia, their sugar free products are sweetened with Lactitol, a sugar alcohol made from milk! I used my pocket Weight Watchers point’s calculator and I could have one of those huge muffins for breakfast and still have yogurt, fruit and coffee! In the Toledo area you can find The Butterfly Bakery products at Giant Eagle in the refrigerated section of the bakery. David brought me home the frosted devil’s food cake. With that Devil, I’m in Heaven!
A couple hours after dinner, dessert was easy. Tonight, dinner was the challenge. David picked up a package of Amish chicken breasts when we were at Sofo Foods, my Italian grocery in town, Monday. After a couple of nights he worked, and he had steak last night. When David has steak, I usually have tamale. I get a six-pack of corn husk tamales from Schwan’s every now and then and they fit perfect when David has steak because he likes tamales as much as I like steak! Tonight I was going to do the chicken breasts the easy way – Shake-N-Bake. They were huge and I figured I’d cut one on half and cook one for me and whole breast for him and freeze the other half and whole for dinner next week some time. So, I opened up the package and was a little bit frozen looking at them.
Now, I know this makes me sound incredibly clueless white collar suburban, but the chicken breasts had BONES! I have never in my life cooked a chicken breast with bones in it. I have cooked whole chickens with bones, the carcass makes great soup, but never, ever, have I done just a breast with bones. David had never really seen a raw chicken breast with bones in it out of the package either. I am so glad I decided to do Shake-N-Bake tonight because the bake time for with and without bones is different! Learn something new every day, huh? Now I know many of you reading this are looking incredulously at the screen and more are probably laughing at me. It’s oaky. I only aim to entertain. The chicken, by the way, was wonderful. Amish chickens are a cut above, even if not a cut away from the bones.
It was windy today! I was working on this week’s school assignments and would get a chill because I was seeing fluffy masses falling out of the corner of my eye. It was relief that it was NOT snow! It was leaves falling from our oak, and the neighbors' oaks. All falling in our yard. I had to do some budgeting this year after our spending last year and either the snow plowing or the leaf raking had to go. Since that was my bill, I got to choose. Easy enough, really. Rick from Rapid Snow Removal plows the driveway, shovels the walks and salts everything. I have an incredible fear of falling on the ice. Okay, I have an incredible fear of falling in the kitchen too, but the fear when there’s ice is about quadrupled. I feel less guilty about leaving David to rake the leaves than shovel the snow. From when I used to be able to do both, leaf raking is less strenuous than snow shoveling and the temperatures are more extreme with snow too. So we aren’t getting the leaves raked this year so I can be sure that no matter how much snow we get we can get a professional plow job. Still, it would be nice if the wind could figure out a way to blow the leaves out of our yard instead of in!Weigh-In day wasn’t a happy one this morning. I was up a pound. I know that had everything to do with not really sticking to my plan yesterday. A little too much candy and a big bowl of popcorn. Popcorn, even air-popped, does that to me because it makes me retain water. Weigh-In day is Thursday and as a rule, I don’t eat popcorn on Wednesdays.
We’re going out for Pop’s birthday Saturday to my favorite local Italian restaurant, La Scola. I’ve wanted to take my Dad there since the first time we went. That first time happened to also be with Tori and Rina and they both said at that time, “We have to come back and bring Papa!” Well, that will be Saturday. After dinner, the girls are going to spend the night with us. I need to have the dining room ready for games night!
I was very pleased to find out that a problem I’ve been occasionally having since July is more than likely an MS symptom. In perspective, anything that’s an MS symptom is not something else wrong with me. I am a member of a discussion group in the Weight Watchers community of women on the plan and dealing with MS. So I threw my since July problem out there for discussion to see if anyone else had experienced it. It doesn’t happen every night and it has never happened more than once in a night, but sometimes as I’m just about to fall into unconscious sleep, I hear a loud noise that instantly puts me wide awake. When it first happened in the summer, we were sleeping with the window open and I thought it was from outside. I woke David up and asked him if he heard something. Yeah, dumb. If he’d heard it, he’d be awake too. It happens once or twice a week. The responses were as varied as MS symptoms are. But about half of the replies were that they had experienced that noise that wakes you up as you’re falling asleep. We all agreed that it was one of the less debilitating symptoms, but I encouraged everyone who’s had it happen to mention it to their neurologist next time they see them. I have an appointment with my new local neurologist in January and I’m definitely going to mention it in that first visit. Like I said in the forum, in the long run we owe it to each other and to everyone not yet diagnosed to tell the doctors everything. If one neurologist has just one patient with a given symptom and she talks to a colleague who has just 2 with that same symptom, it could start some dialog that could eventually add another piece to the MS puzzle, no matter how small it seems. That one piece could complete a section that suddenly makes sense to researchers. But the doctors can’t compare notes if we don’t give them notes to compare!
Okay, much homework to finish tomorrow, so bed time! ‘Night!
1 comment:
Interesting comments on this problem. I've heard of it before, but never knew the cause. Sometimes if I'm sleeping or just dozing, I will wake up sharply because someone has called my name. But there's never anyone there I just assume that I subconsciously must have been thinking about the person.
I totally agree with your idea of everyone sharing everything, no matter what, with their doctor. It's a big step to finding cures. Now it's time for breakfast and then get ready for the camera show that I am going to this morning. You have a wonderful day, hugs, Edna B.
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