Hooray!!! You guys, I have two favorite holidays: Halloween and Thanksgiving. Halloween this year was AMAZING, and I’m starting to get really excited about Thanksgiving, too. Like last year, I’ll be spending the holiday with Trisha and Jesse (who are MARRIED now!!!), but this year we’ll have a few other members of our “Seattle family” with us. It won’t be vegan like last year — the other folks demand a turkey! — but Trish and I are both doing all vegetarian dishes. It’s also my first time cooking for Thanksgiving by myself. I usually do it with my family, and last year Trish and I cooked together (with help from her amazing sister). But I am ready for the challenge! I did the grocery shopping today, and I am soooo super excited!! I am doing the candied yams (they will be so disgustingly packed with brown sugar and marshmallows!), and I’m also doing a cream cheese corn casserole and a dish a reader suggested on Facebook. I don’t even know what it’s called, but basically you put pie crust in a muffin tin, fill the “muffins” with brie and cranberry sauce, and pinch them closed and then throw the whole mess in the over. It sounds so delicious, and I hope I don’t fuck it up. :)
It will also be the first time in awhile that I’ve thrown calorie-counting to the wind. I have finally worked out my medication situation so I don’t have intense sugar cravings at 2 o’clock in the morning, and so I’m finally getting the opportunity to get in the shape I want to be in. I am busting ass at the gym almost every day and being really careful about what I eat. I’m losing weight on the scale — it’s amazing how fast it falls off when you eliminate the 1500 calories of sugar and carbs you were eating in the middle of the night — but, more importantly, I can feel my body changing. My muscles are becoming more pronounced, and I am finally getting those hot side-ab muscles — you know, the ones that line your pubic bone. I think those are so sexy, and they’re finally starting to show up on me. It’s really exciting, because I have been busting my ass working out for a long time now, but that can only help up to a certain point when you can’t get your eating under control. And now that I am finally able to control what I eat more specifically, it’s been really rewarding to see all that work pay off in cool little muscles I never believed I could have. Getting my body to where I want it has kind of turned into my latest project. I’m completely addicted to going to the gym and kicking my own ass and seeing progress. I really love it these days, and I look forward to going every day. My trainer Kristen keeps suggesting that I should start training to enter a fitness competition next year. I don’t think I’ll do it, but it’s in the back of my mind as a possible goal, if I run out of other useful goals. Kristen was like, “When you first stumbled in here, you smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, you told me you pretty much only ate Burger King and Taco Bell, and you could barely do a sit-up without having a coughing fit. Who are you?” Tee hee. I love being reminded of my progress. These days, Burger King sounds so gross.
I hung out tonight with Jaclyn, one of my best friends from LA who was in Seattle to visit her family for the holiday. She’s another one of those rare and precious friends that I completely respect, that I can be completely honest with and never feel judged or feel like there’s some sort of power struggle in place. We just totally connect, like we’re cut from the same cloth, and we talked forever, and it was amazing. I still have a lot of unresolved issues regarding how and why I left Los Angeles — I’m starting to realize it was probably much more traumatic, and affected me much more deeply, than I initially admitted to myself — but I’m getting closer to resolving them. It got a lot worse before it got better, but it’s getting better, finally, and spending time with Jaclyn helped speed along the healing process. You really can’t put a price on good friends. I am so, so blessed in that department.
Last item: Leo has a Santa costume. It fits him perfectly, unlike the banana debacle. He will be debuting it at Thanksgiving dinner. Please start getting excited for the pictures.
