Happy belated Father's Day, apparently I want you to be miserable

I guess the weight loss gods forgave me for my Sunday night indiscretion, because when I peeked at my weight this morning I had reached my new "decade"!  I will hold off on the celebration and buying of new gym clothes until my official Saturday morning weigh-in shows this weight, but still, yay!  I don't know if it was psychological or what, but I definitely felt more svelte today.

Newspaper encroachment level was high today.  I barely had room for my bowl :-)

2 biscuits Barbara's Bakery Shredded Wheat, blueberries, xylitol, cinnamon, skim milk

 Oof, this breakfast wore off hardcore at 10AM.  I know the time because I was halfway through Zumba when it happened and just felt like laying down for a nap.  My stomach was growling too, which NEVER happens while I'm exercising!  I had brought my egg whites with me in a cooler in the car though so as soon as I finished class I scarfed these guys with a KeVita.

I actually removed more of the yolk after taking the picture

 To continue my streak of doing things I've been meaning to do for a long time, I headed to the Dutch Plant Farm to pick up some cacti for a terrarium I am making for Will to take to work.  He loves a good cactus, and this terrarium made with rocks from up at The Farm was supposed to be a Father's Day gift last year but I never actually put it together and the jar has been sitting on my kitchen counter ever since.  I picked out three likely-looking specimens while Charlotte exclaimed over the birds and the pond they have there.  She wanted to hold the cactus, but I explained to her how prickly and ouchy they are, so she said "I just hold the pot" and grabbed it.  I told her no, she couldn't hold the pot either so I took it out of her hands and replaced it with a spray bottle instead.

As we drove away in the car I realized my right hand was stinging quite a bit, though I couldn't see anything wrong with it.  Then Charlotte started shouting "My arm hurtin'!"  The drive from the nursery to preschool is short, and when we got out of the car I wiped us both down with a wet paper towel to get whatever was causing the problem off.  I thought that maybe we were reacting to touching the coconut fiber hanging basket liner we had bought.

Well, by the time we were home I knew that the wet wipe hadn't worked, as we were both still in some significant pain, and when I looked REALLY closely, I saw quite a few infinitesimal fibers sticking out of my hand.  I carried a wailing Charlotte up to my bathroom, sat her in the sun, and started trying to pick all of them out with tweezers.  Charlotte was having NONE OF THAT THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND BY THE WAY ARM HURTIN'!!!!!  Of course that's right when Emily yelled up the stairs that Remy had escaped out the front door.  Fun.

Eventually we got most of the little fu@kers picked out of our flesh and the dog back in the house.  After a salad lunch based on dinner last night:

Greens, lamb, yogurt with garlic powder and salt, olives, yellow pepper, cucumber, sprouts, tomatoes, chickpeas, roasted pine nuts

I put Charlotte down for a nap, got some gloves and stuck that stupid cactus in the terrarium so that it couldn't hurt anyone anymore.  It turned out really cute, I think.

Emily added the tiger

THE cactus.  Never buy one.  See the TEENSY little fibers on the glass?  Those = misery

 Except that I didn't realize the needle/fiber things were loose and flying around :-(  I had assumed I had accidentally brushed the cactus with my hand while carrying it, but I had no idea how Charlotte got needles in her arm because she definitely didn't touch it.  Now I knew how.  And now I also knew why my face was stinging after blowing gently into the terrarium to get an unsightly clump of dirt off one of the more innocuous cacti.

I had to keep the tweezers on my person for the rest of the afternoon so that whenever an area got particularly bad or whenever light coming from a new angle lit up another needle I could pull it out.  Totally miserable.  And thank God I still have good eyesight or else I never would've been able to see these things.

I kind of want to just throw the offending cactus away but the inside of the terrarium is already covered with its horrible needles, so I guess I'll just tell Will to #1 Wear gloves if he wants to reach in there #2 Keep the lid on at all times and #3 Never blow into the terrarium!

I tried to console myself with a piña colada smoothie, and it worked at first, but because I am dumb and just didn't think about the fact that pineapple + dairy = sour, the smoothie quickly became unpalatable.

Nonfat greek yogurt, pineapple, coconut milk, coconut butter, pinch of xylitol

At least the first 2 sips were yummy.  I will try again tomorrow if the coconut milk yogurt in the back of my fridge is still good.

When Will got home we had dinner.

Leftover lamb, steamed broccoli with nutritional yeast, potato salad made from leftover potatoes, eggs, greek yogurt and turkey bacon (plus some seasonings and pickle juice)

 It really was too cold to eat outside, but since I was making ice cream at the time we sucked it up and ate outside anyway because the ice cream maker is SO LOUD.

Emily had asked for mango ice cream, and instead of passing off yogurt or coconut milk with fruit dumped into the ice cream maker as ice cream I made something closer to the real thing tonight.  I put Trickling Springs organic half and half, a banana, 2 mangoes, a splash of vanilla extract and about 3 Tbsp xylitol into the Vitamix to get them combined, then poured it into the ice cream maker.

Someone was anxious for it to be done.

Make that 2 someones.

3 someones?  My jaw was on the floor.

He kept fighting it, but he actually came back about 10 times for another bite, consuming at LEAST a serving along the way!  It was that good.

I had one bite :-(

Not the whole bowl

 Then I tried to convince myself that a couple pieces of fresh mango were just as good as the heavenly ice cream.

After that we went to the TV store to look at some TVs and see how thin they were and what their footprint is like since we're thinking about setting the new one on the mantle.  The mantle the previous owners ripped off the fireplace and hammered into the wall downstairs where there is no fireplace.  Yeah, we ripped it BACK off the wall and carried it BACK upstairs and now we're working on having it re-attached to the wall and widened a bit.  Our gigantic old TV is all but useless now, but the stupid tile fireplace makes things so difficult when we try to get a new TV!  I will be glad when this whole thing is taken care of...we've been trying to do this off and on since we moved into the house 3.5 years ago.

The girls, on the other hand, had a blast.  We were the only ones in the store and the associates, upon seeing us enter with 2 little girls instantaneously turned on Tangled for them to watch.  We literally walked in and 5 seconds later there were about 40 huge TVs showing Flynn Rider's face.  Emily went running around trying out couches with lighted cupholders and remote-controlled reclining features while exclaiming "I want to LIVE here!".  Charlotte had fun electronically scooping herself up onto the couches and on the way home said "Can we go back there when I'm older?".  That doesn't make much sense unless you realize that over the past few months we have told her we can go back to Disney World "when she is older", so apparently her goal list for the next few years is now #1 Go back to Disney World, #2 Go back to the TV store.  

We left with a phone number because we'll have to have someone come out and look at our freaky house before we can even figure out what TV we can buy.  

When I got home, I needed some chocolate.  I considered having only half my usual amount, but decided that was a stupid idea.

I was super-hungry by 9:00 so I had a banana with PB.  Use your imagination if you please, because I really don't feel like taking and uploading ONE picture right now.

Goodnight y'all.  Perhaps the invisible needles in my face will force me to sleep in a more posturally correct position tonight instead of on my face twisted sideways with one knee up.  I'm looking for the silver lining here, people.