December 12, 2012

December 12, 2012 (Wednesday)
(Post 677, Day 346 of 2012, 711 days since starting this blog)

Daily Comment

I'm getting excited about the longest road trip I've taken in four-and-a-half years.

That's how long I've been in Syracuse. The last road trip was when I relocated here from the Raleigh, NC area.

That was a transition road trip. These are a ritual I've created for myself. Rites where I mark major transitions by driving for a day or more.

 So, that last road trip, back in the last days of Spring 2008, marked the end of one chapter in my life and the beginning of another.

That road trip marked a new start for myself after living twenty-four years in the same house, . That time, it was part of healing from three months of depression, including about six weeks when my depression was severe. The breakup of marriage number two had left me heart-broken, homeless, broke, and unemployed.

The previous ritual road trip was taken with Alex, with a drive the length of the North Carolina section of the Blue Ridge Parkway, over a long weekend, after Nell died.

The one before that, eleven years earlier, was a drive with Nell and nine-month-old Alex from Beacon, NY to our new home in North Carolina.

Eighteen years efore that, it was dropping out of CCNY and driving cross-country to Berkeley, California.

Of course, not all my long-distance driving has been motivated by personal change. The great majority of my road trips have been for the fun of it. At least twice a year, during all the time I lived in North Carolina, I drove up to New York and Massachusetts.  And before that, before I started my corporate career, I had a job as a sales rep, with a territory that went from Washington DC to Maine, and out to Ohio. I drove that route. It was for work, but I made it work and play.

I used to really, really like to drive.

Not so much these days. The romance has faded, though not entirely. But I still do it. I don't do it as often, maybe because I don't find it as much fun. The romance of the road trip is not as appealing, not felt as intensely.

Of course, this trip going back to NC is not transitional at all. It is celebratory, a  nostalgic run to catch up with friends in North Carolina, catch a little bit of some of the best parts of my time there, the parts with friends and music. That's exciting.

I have new wheels, and the fourteen hundred miles I drive between Friday and Wednesday, with its centerpiece of a reunion with a part of the music scene that was very important to me, was done on a whim. Isn't that romantic?

  

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Food and Diet Section

Year 2012 daily weight from December 31, 2011

 Today's Weight:        205.4 lbs 

Yesterday's Weight:    204.6 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:     + 0.8 lbs

Diet Comment

My late, off-plan eating yesterday had a negative effect. So it goes. Today's food probably doesn't bode well for tomorrow's weigh-in, either. I suspect there is sugar hiding somewhere in my otherwise conservative lunch out. I almost never lose weight when I eat lunch out.

Food Log

Breakfast
Chia gel.

Lunch
At Ling-Ling Chinese Buffet:

From the "Mongolian Grill", chicken, pork, bean sprouts, cabbage, onions, peppers, broccoli, mushrooms in garlic and hot pepper sauce. And kim-chee.

Dinner

Spaghetti squash with herbs and butter and organic ground beef with guacamole. Not shown: Cole slaw a salad of baby spinach, red cabbage and balsamic vinaigrette..

Snack
Egg salad.

Liquid Intake   

   Coffee:   30 oz,  Water:  114+ oz. 

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