BACK IN THE SADDLE!

Hello faithful blogpets!

I know I've been gone for a long time and so much has happened!  I got married in March of 2013 and my father was unable to attend because he wasn't feeling well.  We thought it was just a bad stomach flu but with his diabetes those can really do a number on him.  In June of 2013 he was diagnosed with stage 3C colon cancer and in August of that same year he passed away just 10 days before I was slated to leave for my honeymoon in Maui.

Major life experiences like that really show you what the person you're with is like.  They either shine or they turn very ugly very quickly but I don't think anyone could skip through as mediocre during a crisis of such epic proportions.  Snack Monkey turned very, very ugly.  Less than 24 hours after receiving news of the cancer diagnosis (while watching Robin Roberts give her ESPY speech, no less) he asked me how long I was going to let the news 'ruin our marriage'.  Apparently there is a time limit on finding out that your father has received a death sentence and it's less than one day - after that one must buck up and be perky and ready to go fishing or they're 'ruining their marriage' in his eyes.  Let me back up a bit.

Our marriage was shit before that and never should have happened in the first place.  Snack Monkey's friend had planted seeds of drama by lying about things she'd read on this blog and instead of actually reading the blog for the truth, he bought her lies hook, line, and sinker.  I'd tried to break up with him multiple times throughout our 6 year relationship before we got married and each time he'd refused to move out.  As everything was in my name and I was the only one paying any and all of the bills, I wasn't about to move out and support his ass so I was stuck with him.  His exact words were "if you want me out, you'll have to have me legally evicted" and when that didn't work he would start crying and saying he had nowhere else to go and begging me to give him a month to find a new place and then a month would turn into a year and he would still be living under my roof pretending everything was tits and roses between us.

In October of 2012 I broke up with him officially and made him move into the guest room.  In February of 2013 on Valentines Day he asked me to go to dinner with him and when I refused he promised it would just be as roommates.  We were over, I was already meeting new people and seeing a few casually.  I agreed if it was JUST as roommates.  It wasn't just as roommates though.  Once we got to the restaurant and got seated he started acting all couple-ish and I finally put the kaibash on it in the middle of the meal and walked out crying.

You see, the problem was that I did love him but he had so many horrible behaviors that I couldn't accept, not the least of which was his drug use and he was constantly lying and telling me he'd stopped but then I would find paraphernalia in the garage or under the mattress and the whole vicious cycle would start all over again.  Being solely financially responsible for him wasn't a picnic either.  He worked but he kept every penny that he made for drugs and then he would come to me asking for money to put gas in my car so he could drive it to work, if I couldn't afford to buy him the concert tickets he wanted he would become verbally abusive and call me names like "bitch" and "cunt" and say I was controlling him.  But when he wanted to be sweet and charming he really could do a good job of it and I would end up taking him back and believing his lies over and over again.

Valentines Day was just such an occasion - he followed me out of the restaurant and we talked until sun rise.  It involved mostly talking but also some yelling and some crying - in the end we put the wedding back on for the original date which gave us less than a month to plan something we'd thought for almost a year was never going to happen.  During that month he was sober, he contributed around the house, he contributed to the bills, he was cooperative, we went fishing and had fun ... but pretty much the instant that the vows had been said and the guests were gone, the same old bullshit started up again.  At my father's funeral he threw a fit because he was ready to leave and head back to Vegas but I wanted to stay for a few hours and visit with my family - two of my siblings were at the funeral that I hadn't seen since I was 5 years old (really big age gap ... like, my oldest sister is almost old enough to be my mother) but he wanted to come home so he could get high and I was standing in the way of that so he made a big mess of everything.

The behavior continued during the honeymoon as well.  Despite my best effort to not ruin the honeymoon by crying over the fact that I'd buried my dad just five days earlier, he found cause to complain about everything else.  Literally, everything including the free luxury suite in a 5-star resort in Maui, of all places, that my boss had given us as a wedding present.  It was a disaster.  In January of 2014 I told him that I was no longer allowing him to drive my car because I learned he'd used it to make a drug deal.  The car was in my name solely, I made all the payments solely, the insurance was in my name and he was using it to make drug deals.  I could have lost my car!  He flipped out!  He started screaming, calling me a bitch, saying I was controlling, asking how he was supposed to get to work and when I told him to take the bus he said "only losers take the bus".  No ... responsible people making an honest effort to get to work take the bus - losers mooch off of others and then freak out and act like a 2-year-old when they don't get what they want.  He left the room - I was at my desk working at the time - and came back an hour or so later to tell me how sorry he was and how much he loved me and how he didn't mean any of what he'd said.  I took it all with a grain of salt because I'd been down this road with him too many times and I was done.  I didn't care.  I nodded and said ok and when he believed I'd forgiven him he asked "were you serious about not letting me use your car?".  I said yes and he flipped out all over again, screaming, calling me names, saying he hated me - apparently his apologies had been really sincere (sarcasm).  He took off his wedding ring (metal) and threw it and it shattered.  I'm not sure how that happened as I've never seen metal shatter before but shatter it did and that was like a sign from my dad.  It was over.

I drew up the divorce papers and gave him pretty much whatever he wanted just to get him to sign them without a courtroom battle which meant he got Vladdy and according to the papers he was supposed to get Jazz but he decided later that he didn't want her and told me to take her to the pound.  I don't take animals to the pound ... ever.  When I take an animal into my life it is a commitment that I make and dumping it at the pound just isn't an option.  He also got away from paying off the new laptop that I'd bought him with my Best Buy card and his share of the Maui Honeymoon.  I paid it all just to get him the hell out of my life.  I boxed up all of his belongings, put them in the driveway, took a picture of the drug paraphernalia and texted it to his best friend with the message "you can either come get him and all his shit or I can call the police and ruin his life".  I should have done the latter but I don't care much for police.  I don't think they're all bad but it's a bit of a craps shoot and the shit was, after all, in my house.  Needless to say, his friend came and got him.

I took in a roommate, a friend that lived in Arkansas, to rent the guest bedroom and help with the bills.  He provided his first and last month's rent in the form of a giant wad of cash deposited on my desk after I'd gone to bed.  I woke up the next morning, found it, and immediately rushed down to the courthouse to file the divorce papers.  Snack Monkey was shocked.  He didn't think I'd go through with it.  He thought I would just need time for things to blow over and he'd be able to get me back.  Several months later my roommate and I started dating and a few months after that we got married.  We've been living under the same roof for nearly 4 years now and I still haven't found a single thing wrong with him ... I think he might be a pod person because he's too perfect.

In 2015 I changed jobs and in 2016 I spent most of the year on doctor ordered bed rest due to medical problems.  One of the side-effects was that I was losing weight at an astounding rate of nearly 50 lbs in 6 months and I wasn't doing anything to make it happen.  My diet was shit as I'd reverted back to fast food due to time constraints of the new job, I didn't exercise at all, I spent 16 hours or more of every day on a computer either working, writing, or gaming.  There was no healthy reason for me to be dropping the pounds but dropping them I was and I was almost back down to the lowest weight I'd managed during the course of this blog.  Sadly, once the doctors figured out what was wrong and fixed me - the weight loss stopped and I've been maintaining ever since.

But I'm not blogging about weight loss anymore - at least not for now.  I am blogging again though!  I have a new blog called The Constitutionalist's Daughter.  It's a memoir about my dad and the really unusual upbringing that I had which included being homeless and indigent for while, being sovereign citizens, being smeared as white supremacists in the newspaper (even though it wasn't even remotely true), and spending more time in a courtroom growing up than I did in a classroom.

If you'd like to read it - there are currently three chapters published and I publish a new chapter every 2 weeks!  Plus I include pictures whenever I have some that are relevant to the subject matter.  I'd love to see you all over there!

Skipped Supper

I didn't exactly intend to skip dinner last night, it just kinda happened.  Normally I eat dinner within an hour or so after I get off of work but last night I had kind of an interesting day at work that I couldn't get out of my head so I kinda just lazed around for a couple of hours after work musing on it.  Finally I suggested to Snackers that we go out to eat because we'd forgotten to take anything out of the freezer for supper and all we had available was junk food.  He agreed but also wanted to take the dogs to the dog park so we took them with us with the intent of picking something up to eat on the way home.

Well we spent about an hour and a half at the dog park and by then it was almost 9 o'clock.  I hate eating that late so we just came home and after a long look in both the fridge and pantry I just couldn't wrap my head around anything that looked good so I gave up and went to bed instead.  Woops?  Bah, I'm sure skipping supper every once in a while can't hurt too bad.





Food:
120 oz of water
1 cup of coffee w/creamer
1 granola bar
1 fish burrito
3 chicken tostadas
1 glass of red wine
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Daily Caloric Intake: 1321




Activity:
Yoga: 30 minutes
1.5 - 2 hours of rearranging furniture, cleaning, and moving heavy objects around.

The Grocery Store Conspiracy

These 2 steaks were originally 1 giant steak

I have heard a theory that the reason "good" foods like unprocessed meats, fruits, and vegetables are so much more expensive than "bad" foods like boxed meals and ramen noodles is because grocery stores benefit from a "fat America".  The theory posits that if people are subliminally encouraged to eat crap in the name of financial hardship they will eventually have to (or choose to) spend money on other products such as diet pills, exercise equipment, pharmaceuticals, vitamins, etc ... most of which can also be purchased from your average, every day grocery store down the street.

I have always dismissed this theory on the basis that it seemed like too much of a "long shot" for the grocery stores.  With some experience in balancing a pricing matrix of my own, both at work and with my books, I know that it's often beneficial to do a BOGO (buy-one, get-one) deal, and other similar deals, if the retail value of one object is more than double the wholesale cost of both objects together.  Then you think you're getting a deal but the store is still, in fact, making a profit and selling more product than they might otherwise.  I also know from multiple previous experiences in retail that many retailers mark their products up by at least 2.5 times what they pay for it.  Example: A necklace that I buy wholesale for $3 I can sell at retail for $7.50 or more (I don't have this luxury with my books because that would price them over $25 a pop and no one would pay that much for them).  So in order for grocery stores to sell "bad" food so cheap they have to still be making money off of it or it wouldn't be worth it for them in the hope that you'll spend more on pharmaceuticals than they've lost on the bad food you might have purchased over the last 10 years or so.  Sure, maybe they're overpricing their meat and produce but it does seem like those things would cost more to provide in stores than a box of Roni right?  I mean produce and meat has to be refrigerated, it has a shorter shelf life which means profit loss on spoiled food, a problem you don't have with boxed noodles and canned ravioli.

But then we went to our local ceviche market for, what else, ceviche and decided that we should check out the other items on our shopping list while we were there to see if we could save some money.  First of all, the ceviche market is owned, operated, and caters to Mexican Americans and the latino community in general so even though it's a big, clean, beautiful grocery store many of the items on the shelves are things I've never seen before.  I don't mind that though, I love browsing ethnic grocery stores and I remember how much Snackers and I loved the one that we found in Korea town.  But explain to me how WalMart, Smith's, Albertson's, and Fresh & Easy all sell our favorite steaks for around $7 per lb but this latino grocery store can sell it for $3?  And, this is the real kicker, it looks soooo much better at the latino store!  In WalMart, especially, you have to be really picky when picking out fresh meat because a lot of their meats are left out long enough that they start to turn brown inside their packaging and yet the entire meat counter at the latino market was a beautiful bright red color and looked as though it had been cut fresh off the cow just hours before.  And that's not the only thing, the produce section at the latino market is bigger, fresher, more affordable, and a much much larger selection.  Milk, dairy, and bread products, however, were at least $1 more than what we get them for in our usual haunts.  One thing to be learned is that if you can do it without spending more on gas driving from place to place than what you save on groceries, it can be really beneficial to shop your list from multiple stores.  It might seem like $1 here and $2 there but we bought 5 LBS of lovely red steak for $15 and in the past we've paid $14 for 2 lbs of the exact same cut at other stores.  Food for thought ... literally.








Food:
130 oz of water
1 cup of coffee w/creamer
1 granola bar
1 fruit bar
1 fish burrito
1 weight watchers ice cream
--------------------------------
Daily Caloric Intake: 1051






Activity:
Yoga: 30 minutes
Playing @ the dog park: 1 hr

The Weekend

A lot happened this weekend.  I wrote a nice long post up for Friday then forgot to log back in and post it (I didn't even touch a computer all weekend which, for me, is both rare and a very good thing).  Friday's post was all about chasing this little Rottie around who had a broken frisby stuck around her neck at the dog park on Thursday (which I eventually managed to rescue her from after tiring her out) but I think a weekend summary might be more interesting.

Friday's intake came in 1272 and activity included 30 minutes of yoga and an 1.5 hours browsing stores like Pier One and Michael's for unity bottles for the sand ceremony we'll be having at our wedding.

Saturday's intake was 1239 and activity included 2 more hours of browsing stores like Joannes and Hobby Lobby for bottles as well as cords for the handfasting, and grocery shopping.  We took a mid-afternoon nap for about 2 hours (ooooh it was so nice, it's been such a long time since we snuggled up together and took a nap at the same time), did laundry and otherwise prepped for Sunday.

Sunday's intake was 1386 and we were up bright and early to get dressed and head out for a special event.  We had planned on grabbing 6" subs at Subway but it wasn't open yet so we were forced to settle for a breakfast burrito from Carl's Jr. because we were running short on time and I knew we were going to need some kind of breakfast before we got to where we were going.  Sign-in for the event was at 8 a.m. but the event itself didn't start until 10:30 so once I got us signed in we had 2.5 hours to kill walking around looking at booths, went across the street for coffee, and walked 1/3 of the event to visit our friends that were setting up their entertainment at the second stage.

Crossing the finish line!

The big event you ask?  A 5k walk for AIDS.  It was a charity walk so it was free to register but the idea is that you register and then raise money for the cause.  Unfortunately we didn't find out about it until Friday night so we didn't have time to raise funds but we made some donations of our own and one of the gals at the event told me that Walgreens donated $5 for every registered "walker" at the event, so that's cool!  Because it was a charity walk there were no numbers to pin on our shirts or "winners" etc. but I did the walk in 40 minutes, passed close to 50 people and counted 12 people between me and the golf-cart that was leading the procession when we came down the home-stretch.  It felt awesome and was a whole lot of motivational fun!

Snackers registered to walk with me but when we first got there he ended up walking all over the place because our friend's kid was there with his band to provide entertainment for the walkers as they passed one of the way-stations that were set up here and there throughout the route.  So Snackers went to find them while I signed us in, he got lost and did half of the 5k trying to find the right spot, then headed back to the stage to see me, then went back to where his friends were at etc. and by the time it was time for the actual walk he was pooped and bowed out.  Oh well, I had fun and got some SERIOUS sun.  Damn ... I'm going to have to figure out how to avoid tan-lines between now and the wedding without actually avoiding the sun.  I love the sun too much to avoid it.



Food:
120 oz of water
1 cup of coffee w/creamer
1 FiberOne bar
1 Healthy Choice lunch
1/4 cup mixed nuts
10 oz grilled steak
12 asparagus spears
----------------------------
Daily Caloric Intake: 1306




Activity:
Yoga: 30 minutes

Schedule

Here's the very rough schedule that I've been living since school ended - occasionally I've traded in the 1hr of exercise in the evening for either an additional hour of writing or an additional hour of relaxation with Snackers.  My schedule when I was in school was basically the same except that my evening hours often included a lot more than 3 hours of study.  I would typically exercise as soon as I got off work at 4, then eat dinner at 5,and then sometimes I'd only have to study for 2-3 hours and could spend the evening relaxing with Snackers or writing and sometimes I'd study all the way from 6 p.m. until bed time ... which usually led to me laying in bed for an hour or so trying to work through some problematic code in my head and not being able to fall asleep until well after midnight.


Monday - Friday:
A.M.
6:30 - Wake up, pour coffee/water, let the dogs out, boot computer, go potty, get dressed, log calories, blog.
7:00 - Work
9:00 - 10 minute break (let dogs out, refill water, grab a granola bar, feed dogs, go potty)
11:00 - 10 minute break (same as above but feed cats instead of dogs)

P.M.
1:00 - Lunch break (refill water, eat, do yoga)
2:00 - Back to work
4:00 -Cook/eat dinner, clean up
5:00 - Study PHP (3hrs)

8:00 - Write (1hr)
9:00 - Exercise (1hr)
10:00 - Write (1hr)
11:00 - Relax/spend time w/Snackers, shower (30min - 1hr)
11:30/12:00 ish - Go to bed


Saturday - Sunday:
These are the days when Snackers and I usually spend a lot of time together, I get to sleep in if I can, we take care of grocery shopping, chores around the house, etc.  I almost always am up doing something whether it's something fun with Snackers, running errands, or taking a leisurely evening walk but he considers weekends "our time" because my week days or so full (actually I think he's starting to resent the fact that I am so busy all of the time) so I let these days flex around him.




Food:
120 oz of water
1 cup of coffee w/creamer
1 granola bar
1/4 cup raw nuts
1 healthy choice lunch
10 baby dill pickles
2 tbsps natural peanut butter
1 serving seafood and veg stir fry
---------------------------------
Daily Caloric Intake: 1289




Activity:
Yoga: 30 minutes
On my feet @ dog park playing, chasing dogs, and otherwise doing anything BUT sitting down: 2 hrs