Hello, and welcome to Saturday. I’m Crystal, and I’ll be your hostess this afternoon. Can I get you anything to start?
I survived another work week. It’s been one of those “feast or famine” situations when it comes to business. Since it’s the end of one month and the beginning of another, there’s always a mess of scripts to be filled. Birth control for half the younger female patients, maintenance meds for all the old folks, the usual. It seems like there’s a new clinic nearby, so we’ve been getting a load of new patients getting Suboxone by the week (I’ll have to talk about this more later). We’re either getting completely slammed, or it’s dead and I’m looking for things needing to be done.
However, today is Saturday. His schedule has him working two Saturdays, then off for the next two, and he’ll be home in an hour. Those Saturdays when I’m alone in the house are my “me time”. For the last three years, my Saturday mornings have been devoted to a long, grueling workout. We do workouts together during the week, but my Saturday workouts are a requirement for my sanity sometimes. I like doing something that I find challenging, and long, I can blast my rap music and I don’t need to share the weights. The weekly long workout is my way of resetting myself, the physical version of “have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” While he’ll come up and workout with me on the Saturdays he is home, it’s not quite the same. Today’s workout was 85 minutes of physical agony and mental bliss.
When he gets home, we’ll be heading out to get some groceries for the week. In general, we make a lot of healthy food choices. However, we usually make richer meals on the weekends. Tonight’s plan is shepherd’s pie. I haven’t had it in a long time, and I’ve never made it, and I expect it will be a bit of a learning experience for me. With this being Superbowl weekend, tomorrow we’re carrying on with the tradition of “appetizers for dinner”. This tradition started a few years ago when my mother decided she wasn’t cooking dinner, then making 5 lbs of wings, and mozzarella sticks, and chips with artichoke dip to be eaten during the game. I’m calling it “Snackerbowl Sunday” from now on.
Snacking is my weakness, and has always been my hardest food to give up. It’s a habit more than anything else for me; I’ll be hungry and get an extra snack at work in addition to whatever I bring from home. Because the extra snack is usually a bag of Skinny Pop popcorn, I feel like I need to finish the bag over the next week, and the extra snacking just continues. From there, the extra snack is now a habit rather than an actual need.
As a result, I’m making certain to have plenty of better snack options for myself in order to avoid overdoing it with the things I usually try to avoid. We’ve planned for two varieties of snacks this year, one batch for each of us. He’ll have some Buffalo wings, mozzarella sticks, and chips. On the other end of the coffee table will be my spread, consisting of portobello Philly steak pitas, baked sweet potato fritters, Buffalo cauliflower nuggets, and fruit. In between everything will be a variety of dipping sauces for everything. I’ll graze on my stuff, he’ll eat his and probably pick at mine.
“Will you at least have one mozzarella stick with me?” he asked the other night while we planned the week’s menu.
“You couldn’t stop me,” I told him. But I’ll stop at just one.
