self indulgent waffle

At last, some al fresco dining:

Lunch yesterday. (curried beef mince and naan).  Nice.

Some new pretties for my scrapbooking on Saturday:

Still not sure about this:

Carry on regardless.

Tonight I am going along for my last Rosemary Conley class.  (Still can't remember whether I had blogged about joining that or not?)  I joined just after the army exercise class debacle.  This is my eighth week, and I have lost 8lbs.  You can't really see it, and I can barely feel the difference, apart from feeling a bit better and a bit trimmer.  I can't face keeping this up for lengthy periods though, as a) to lose any more weight would be bloody hard and I KNOW I wouldn't keep it off - I already have increased my exercise, cut down the wine and cut the pigging and b) I find calorie counting very at-odds with eating 'good food' and I get resentful.   There is a lot of focus within the dieting community on low calorie foods, and many of these are full of bad stuff.  I find myself reading the articles about people who have lost 5 stone or more, and their 'before and after' styles of eating make me want to cry.  If I had to face life with a handful of rasisins for a mid-morning snack and a chicken salad for tea for ever more, well.  Think I'd take up marathon running to give myself a bit of leeway. 

I like a pizza now and then, I like to have a homebaked muffin with a coffee on the odd morning when I have them around.  I like to cook hearty foods without having to compile a long list of calories and fats beforehand.  This said, I also do like to cook sometimes without the addition of fat and find it tastes nice (curried beef mince) and I also do get a bit of a kick out of saying 'no thanks' to the offer of biscuits and sweets, because I know really don't need them. 

Dilemmas, dilemmas.  It's all about moderation.  Life in moderation.  

This is a bit of a blither about the work, life and times of me, me, me, so feel free to skim or skip.

On a couple of evenings a week I work at the local hospital as a ward support clerk.  This mostly entails trundling around the wards throughout the evening checking that the patients they have listed on their white boards match the patients recorded on the computer system as being there.  (ha!)  If they don't it's a case of either admitting or discharging people as necessary.  The real skill in the job lies in getting one of the nursing staff to commit to a better answer than 'er, um, if they're not on the board then they must have gone home', or, my personal favourite, 'yeah, she went to Budleigh, or Exmouth, or somewhere like that', which is what I got the other night.  This is, of course, assuming there is a nurse, any nurse, available for comment.  More often than not, it's like bloody Tumbleweed Town and I am left leafing aimlessly through piles of notes trying to match people to paperwork.  Maintaining accurate patient movements under these circumstances makes the job a little frustrating and I often end up in a filthy rage, cussing and a-swearing back in our little office. 

This was pretty much the case last night, when I was working alongside (there are two of us on any one evening) a woman I call Polly Pineapple.  She is, exactly as you would imagine her to be with this name.  Bubbly, positive, sweet, nice.  That aside, I call her PP because she eats fresh pineapple on a daily basis, and has done, apparently for many, many years.  We often have the pineapple debate of an evening when I challenge the availability of fresh pineapple and she is adamant (and I believe her), that she 'just always has fresh pineapple'.  She obviously knows a secret or two because she has just had her 50th birthday, and boy, she looks good.  As fresh as a pineapple. 

Last night she popped out of the office across to the kitchen (presumably on the hunt for fresh pineapple) and by the time she came back,  I had taken a phone call and was in a temper.  'Blimey' she laughed, 'I only went over there for two seconds, what happened?!'  I explained to her that in my world, things can tilt from good to bad and vice versa very suddenly and she remarked  'well, it must be on a dodgy axis or something then' to which I threw my head back and cackled out loud.  Oh yes.  Life on a dodgy axis indeed.