Energy Day 16 - 20: catching up

Whoops, as the month goes on I'm slipping on posting about my energy quest, just like back in October with the yoga thing. I shall now attempt to recap the past five days and then resume somewhat normal updates. Almost really for sure probably I will, because my bf is going to be out of the country for the rest of the week so I'll be bored and won't have anyone to talk to.

Thursday:
Saw a documentary called "King Corn" about how most corn is grown, what is done with it and how it's in darn near everything. Decided not to eat anything made with corn for 30 days. This is hard because it's not just Fritos (which now I'm suddenly craving every day even though I don't normally even eat them) and corn on the cob and corn bread and corn tortillas, there is also fructose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, vegetable oil that is made with corn and other sneaky stuff. I'm just glad I don't eat any animal products, since most animals eat corn (even factory farmed fish) so eating animal products looks, at the molecular level, the same as eating corn itself.

I was worried the mustard in the sandwiches I've been eating lately would have corn syrup, but instead the bit of sweet in it is from honey, which reminds me honey is not generally considered vegan, but I ate it anyway and hopefully those particular bees weren't pollinating any corn. I don't think so because corn only needs wind to pollinate itself.

We were supposed to have wheat grass juice this day, so we went to Jamba Juice before the gym but they were sold out...all they had was a shaggy, sad looking patch of hacked at grass behind the counter. We got smoothies instead, mine was the pomegranate paradise. It wasn't very good and I was worried about what might be in it. On the menu they aren't very forthcoming with the ingredients. I finally managed to find the REAL ingredient list for the pomegranate paradise and basically the main ingredient is apple and pear juice from concentrate. I think I'll stick to making my own smoothies with fresh pomegranate seeds in them!

Since we didn't have wheat grass and neither one of us liked our smoothies, we decided to go get burritos again. I'm sort of questioning the wisdom of not just getting out of the gym in the evening and promptly ordering a burrito the size of a small child, but of doing it over and over again. And, I'm hoping nothing in the burrito contains corn...like, the tortillas could be made with vegetable oil that is made with corn.

Friday:
I was going to go to the gym. No really! But about 5pm I suggested we make dinner at my bf's place instead. He countered with "let's go out to eat". Well hmmm...I could go work out at the gym OR I could go out to eat...that's a tough one. The toughest thing about it is picking out which restaurant to go to. We decided to go to a restaurant in Hayward that has a little wine bar built into it. This was good because we want to visit every wine bar in the bay area. We've probably been to over a dozen now, so that's only about 345,973 to go.

I should have known I'd had too much wine about the time we started planning our own lounge act, with me agreeing to learn how to play the piano so we could do this, and picking out suitable locations where we could just sort of start playing whether the owners liked it or not. I didn't catch the clue, though, and when we got home I actually had a fourth glass of wine.

Saturday:
I wanted to die. Curse that fourth glass of wine. Damn it to hell! But you know, at least I started my day with fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, courtesy of my bf who went to Costco and bought a large wheelbarrow full of grapefruits and various other large boxes of stuff that are now taking up vast amounts of space in his kitchen. I'm so sweet I'm willing to take some grapefruits and maybe some more pomegranates off his hands if he needs to be able to get to his kitchen door or use the counters.

My sweet bf also made pumpkin waffles with maple syrup and blueberries. I must say, pumpkin waffles are MUCH BETTER when you don't feel like you want to die. I spent the rest of the day recovering by napping and continuing my Stargate marathon, so as far as having ENERGY goes...well, actually I did pretty good there because what I was trying to do was horde up my energy for Sunday so I'd be ready to go wine tasting.

Sunday:
Sundays we occasionally go to Livermore for wine tasting and for brunch at Wente. For some reason my bf, the guy who ate the same flavor of oatmeal every morning for 20 years, wanted to try a new restaurant. In the past, finding a new restaurant has often involved using my iPhone to look up nearby places on Yelp to get an idea of whether we might like them and what they serve, however, ever since I spilled grapefruit juice on my phone it only works when plugged into a computer. Basically, my cell phone has now become a land line phone but still with the expensive cell phone monthly fee.

So instead, we used the gps to find a restaurant. This is not the best way to do it for two reasons.
1.) The settings on the gps allow you to choose "all" restaurants or choose based on type of food. To choose by type is confusing because we just want a good restaurant and we don't know if that's going to be american, french, italian...not to mention so many restaurants these days don't fit in a good category, like they might be pan-asian-california-cuisine and there is no category for that. So one is forced to view "all" restaurants, which will also list every Arby's, McDonalds, Subway, Dairy Queen, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, Carl's Jr., In & Out Burger and etc. It makes it very hard to find the restaurants that serve real food. The gps needs a category that is "everything but fast food".
and
2.) Just seeing the name of a restaurant doesn't really tell you much about it, certainly not whether it's good or bad or if you're going to find something you like on the menu or if they're open or ANYTHING. It's only a name.

We settled on a greek restaurant. I'm not sure if we really understood it was greek before we went in. I didn't anyway. We ended up having one of the worst sandwiches ever. So bad I decided to just eat my fries. Then I started to wonder if the fries were fried in vegetable oil probably made from corn and I decided it was very likely, so I didn't eat those either. Thank goodness for the hummus, at least that was good.

So then yadda yadda we went to some wineries that we'd never been to before and it really seemed like we made some good choices and Livermore is so much more relaxed and uncrowded compared to Sonoma or Napa. The people are nice and one guy even gave us a barrel tasting, which was pretty cool.

Eventually we ended up at the one winery we always go to when we go to Livermore and we got the owner and his gf to go out to dinner with us. I think they are starting to feel very comfortable with us because we went to an italian restaurant where they ordered pina coladas. The wine maker had a pina colada. Isn't that against some kind of rule or something?

Monday:
What did I do Monday? Oh yeah...another Stargate marathon. Hey, it won't be long now and I'll be done with Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis...I'm in the home stretch. Can't slow down now!

Did I have energy? You know, I actually did I just wasted it. I decided I should learn to knit. Or more like re-learn to knit, since I once at least knew how to make a scarf. I had knitting needles and a knitting basket and I made a kick-ass scarf for myself that of course I lost just like I lost my mad knitting skillzzzzz (and by mad knitting skillzzzzz I mean I could knit one stitch and didn't know how to actually finish off the piece.) I'm trying to assemble the things I need in order to start relearning to knit again and I think it could have been a great thing to do while watching 15 seasons of Stargate plus several Stargate made for tv movies, but I'm not waiting for my supplies to do that, so it'll have to wait for the Battlestar Gallactica marathon.

Tuesday (today!):
The winemaker and his gf called and wanted to have dinner with us again. I figured it must be because of all the very intelligent web 2.0 stuff I had to say to them on Sunday. I was spouting techo-babble and telling them how to create a dynamic CMS site like the biggest, smartest geek you ever heard. Or at least so I thought after visiting four wineries in under three hours. Since this time they never asked me once about their site, I'm now thinking my brilliant techno-babble was what triggered the winemaker saying "I'm tired!"

We had a fun evening, even though I had to tear myself away from scanning stuff in for FaceBook. I didn't quite get my 7-8 hours sleep the night before, but my energy was still decent, still drinking grapefruit juice and matcha smoothies, and I even did a few loads of laundry which I hate, hate, hate (though I must admit it's nice to have all my favorite clothes clean...)

Alright, I think there's just time for an episode of Stargate before bed...