Lentil Soup

1 cup black lentils
1/2 cup red lentils
1 set of celery stalks (1 head of celery)
2 carrots
1 onion
2 Tbsp cumin
1 Tbsp paprika
1 Tbsp italian seasoning
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp thyme
6 cups chicken broth
water as needed (I think I used 6 cups?)

Rinse the lentils, put them in the chicken broth, cook.

While the lentils are cooking, slice the vegetables and brown the onions.

Put the vegetables in when the red lentils have dissolved. Add more or less water depending on how much broth you want. Cook until the vegetables are at the desired consistency.

I change around the vegetables and spices and often use green lentils. Using the red lentils adds lentil flavor to the broth.

General Life Update

Robert is in third grade. Thomas would be in pre-K but he's going to unofficial pre-K in his home day care instead. He's already academically ready for kindergarten so we're perfectly happy with this. (Okay, it would be nice if our wonderful neighbor who runs a home day care got the half-day breaks, but Thomas is waitlisted everywhere along with her foster care / adopted daughter / adoption in progress / not sure the status daughter, so it's not as if that changes anything.)

Robert is doing okay in school. He's acting up less in class as he gets older, but now we're working on he has to do ALL the work. He's not doing okay in Sunday School, but they assure me he's so much better.

Mmm. I should resume feeding the kids multivitamins. We ran out of multivitamins and I stopped and we're no longer out of multivitamins and I haven't restarted.

I took the kids to the Museum of Natural History in February, in advance of my sister visiting and all of us going to see the dinosaurs. (We consulted and saved my boys' first experience of the dinosaurs and the big blue whale until her arrival. But the museum membership is about two visits, so I figured I'd get my money's worth of buying a membership, and buying it before her arrival meant we could take the boys there when it was too cold to play outside.) Anyway, with the dinosaurs off limits, then-second-grade Robert wanted to see the space stuff. I was horrified at what the Mars scale said -- oh, I was wearing a backpack and there was stuff in it, but I was still over 200 pounds. So that, and shooting pains in my feet when I first stood up (it was tolerable after a few steps), motivated me to start dieting, and I joined Weight Watchers (online only) in March. I've lost around ... well, our scale was broken when we started, but I was about 200 when I joined Weight Watchers and I was about 160 prior to Thanksgiving, when I gave myself 48 hours off. My feet are SO MUCH HAPPIER.

Kaz lost a little weight with me at first but has gained it all back and then some. He has an injured knee, which is functional but painful; the operation helped but was a disappointment, because it looked like it was going to help a *lot* and then it didn't heal quite right. He's got a second round of physical therapy authorized, which he says is helping. Part of the weight problem is that his stomach is acting up and coca-cola helps it a lot. I've just earlier tonight mixed up two tea infusers with herbal teas for stomachaches; we'll see if either helps, and if either is palatable without so much honey that they're as bad as the coca-cola.

I hadn't been to see a doctor for non-emergent stuff (that is, went when I needed something for a sinus infection) in years, and the eyedoctor / optometrist had been urging me for years to go see an ophthalmologist about my double vision and I'd been coping with the double vision (one eye is dominant so it wasn't as crippling as it sounds.) After losing a chunk of weight I finally went to a regular physical and the doctor said much the same, with more emphasis. The ophthalmologist referred me to an eye muscle specialist, who operated. I was expecting the operation to help. I was not expecting it to simply work -- she'd cautioned me that both overcorrections and undercorrections were possible, with undercorrections more likely in my case. But I went to see her the next day and she took the eyepatch off and I had a brief moment of double vision and then things snapped into focus and I couldn't even choose to see double. Closed my eyes and repeated the process, until after a few times my eyes snapped into focus correctly the first time (well, not instantly, but a normal unfocused / focused, without a double vision step.) I go back to work tomorrow.

Next week I have a lunchtime appointment with a podiatrist, hopefully to make me an insert. It's worth doing but I'm not too concerned about it -- losing 40+ pounds has made such a difference that if it doesn't get any better I'm still happy. He said the remaining problems are almost certainly arthritis in my high arches (specifically the right foot) but that he needed an X-ray to confirm before he could do anything. The X-ray did confirm, but I haven't seen him since; just got around to making the appointment when I was home from work recovering from surgery (not that I actually needed much recovery but the surgeon wanted me to rest and recover, and since I took vacation time to do it I don't have to concern myself with whether or not I was actually sick enough to justify all the time off.) Meanwhile, I've been wearing my Renaissance garb 2-button shoes a lot. The sole doesn't have arch support at all, but the leather molds around my food so it gives me slight arch support *exactly* where my arch is.

Let's see ... life recently has been work, reading, kids, family, designing a Marvel comics 1980s variation (a little fan fiction and a lot of plotlines for fan fiction), and diet.

Work goes okay.

The reading is 65% science fiction / fantasy, 10% nonfiction, 5% romance, 20% RPG game books. All estimations, of course. Everything either in mobipocket / Kindle for the Kindle or PDF (the game books) for reading on the computer. Mmm. I really should do daily Bible readings.

The Marvel comics 1980s variation is to pick a point (roughly December 1983), do an alternative to Secret Wars, and break continuity there. Things before that point are pretty much unchanged, things after that point are ... well, I've only reached 1986 and I'm only making significant changes to X-Men and New Mutants, but after the break point the old continuity has no inertia; if I have something I think works better or even something I think works as well that I prefer, I change it. (Marvel retains all rights, this is only for my personal entertainment, etc.) It's an interesting intellectual exercise, but does have a "too many moving parts" problem.

Diet -- well, I tend to obsess about my diet when I diet at all. Mind, I don't track very often, but I do think about things I eat or don't eat in Weight Watchers points (which often about to knowing I don't have a clue.) I've pretty well upended my diet: new recipes when I cook, different snacks, different choices of meals when I order out. Not everything is different, but most is, and pretty much all the old food I still eat I eat less (candy, pizza) or more (fruit) of now. I enjoy my food every bit as much now as I did a year ago, but there is a LOT of saying no to things I want and this version is significantly more work. I've joined some unofficial Weight Watchers related facebook groups, so I've been reading about the changes in the UK. Roughly, they reduce your food point allowance by 1/4 and make many forms of ultra-lean protein (beans, lentils, turkey and chicken breast, turkey breast, hen eggs, fish, nonfat plain yogurt, tofu, "quorn") cost 0 points the way (almost all) fruits and vegetables already do. Quorn turns out to be a UK meat substitute; I'm curious whether tempeh and/or seitan will be 0-point when they bring the same plan to the US food choices. On the whole, I'm looking forward to the change. I'm going to have to massage some food choices, but not counting points for some actually very filling stuff sounds great.

What else ... in five pounds I'm going to start attending meetings. I need to lose ten pounds *after* attending meetings to make lifetime and stop paying money. More importantly, I want the help maintaining the weight loss. I went down to a healthy weight before getting married and pregnant. Not really beating myself up for gaining a chunk of weight with the pregnancy, but it does mean I've never succeeded in *keeping* the weight off. The work doesn't end when I've lost enough pounds; the work changes to a harder-for-me-I-think phase.

I just had a lovely Thanksgiving; it was wonderful to see so many old family friends and talk to adults besides the handful I socialize with about things other than work. I missed my sister Susan and the Williams boys who couldn't come and especially the people in the Thanksgiving crowd who've died, but it was great as it was. I got two expressions of regrets that I didn't make the carrots that I'd made last year (I didn't make anything for Thanksgiving; I did the plurality of cleanup work Thursday night instead), so I guess those are a tradition now and need to appear next year and thereafter as long as they're eaten.