Lazy

I don't have much on my agenda today--go for a run, study pharmacology, make food for hubby's little birthday celebration, which we will have tomorrow. But I have been completely unmotivated all day long to do any of it.

PastaQueen, it's your fault!

No, of course it's not PQ's fault. But reading her entire archive on her blog has been my procrastination/distraction of choice today. Here's why I'm unmotivated today: it's an overcast, yucky day here, I'm hormonal, and perhaps the few drinks at the graduation banquet last night didn't help my energy level today, either. Also, I've been kinda down all week, for various reasons, including being hormonal. Money is tight, I miss my hubby, etc. School is flying by, but still feels like an unending stodgy march toward a distant goal a lot of the time. I know that's a contradiction, but deal with it.

So anyway, Saturday comes and I sleep in, and spend the morning and early afternoon reading PQ's adventures as she went from 372 lbs to 160. (Or so. I don't know how low she got, I'm only up to 2005, and in her recent posts she has stopped weighing herself, although she just ran a half marathon and published a book.)

Anyway, I finally got myself to walk to the store for ingredients to make vegetarian lasagna and cupcakes for my husband's 34th birthday (which was Wednesday, but he was in Oregon then.) I decided the best way to get myself motivated to run would be to have some coffee and cook. Baking the cupcakes would end up with me eating some of the batter, which always makes me feel like I've done something much worse than just eating cupcakes, so I'd definitely want to run that badness off. And Jeff Galloway's book recommends drinking a cup of coffee an hour before a run, for people who drink coffee anyway. I drink so little now (I'm back to my usual, pre-grad school coffee consumption, which is about a cup a week or less) that I don't think it's going to kill me. And if it helps me feel more like getting something done today, all the better.

I had a funny realization when I was preparing the lasagna. I make lasagna on the fly, no recipe--it's pretty easy, and it's always pretty good. But this time I decided to just use the half box of lasagna noodles that I had in the cupboard, because we really don't need that much pasta anyway. Making lasagna nowadays is sort of anxiety-provoking because who needs a big lasagna pan full of delicious lasagna sitting around? Not me, and not anyone else trying to lose weight. But my hubby loves my lasagna, so I make it for him for special occasions. So, now I was getting ready to put the lasagna together, and realized that I only had enough noodles for 2 layers. That didn't really seem good. I have this big fancy lasagna pan that I bought a few years ago just so I could make the perfect lasagna in it, and it's a fantastic pan. But this time it would end up with a sort of shrunk-down skinny little lasagna. I was thinking about how it was probably for the best, that we should have a mostly vegetable (and less pasta) lasagna anyway, but sort of disappointed in myself for not getting more noodles at the store and having a disappointing lasagna for my husband's birthday (hormones, anyone?), when it finally dawned on me that I could just use a smaller pan.

Duh.

It just didn't occur to me, because I was making lasagna, so I have to use the lasagna pan, right? So I got out a 8x8 square dish that I have, and bingo, problem solved. A good lasagna, but less of it, so we don't have to gorge ourselves for days on end or force ourselves to throw away perfectly good food in the hopes of sparing our asses a few unnecessary calories. Sort of scary that it took so much thought to come up with that solution. But there you have it, your future nurse anesthetist, tackling the difficult problems of the autonomic nervous system AND how to make a smaller lasagna. I think I've pretty much tapped my mental resources for the day.