What better way to spend this Monday lunch hour than to recap the weekend just past? Well, I suppose one could argue that going for a walk would be better, since that might be a good way to ease some of the soreness left by yesterday’s workout as well as burn off a few of the extra calories I took in over the past two days, but it’s too hot for that. Maybe I’ll walk tonight, when it should be cooler, and when I can come in from outside to a refreshing shower instead of having to sit at my desk all sweaty and headachy from the heat. The air-conditioned comfort of my office it is, then.

Saturday’s first event was weighing in. I’d had a good week. I stuck to my newly-devised eating plan, which allocates my Weight Watchers points a little differently than the Wendie plan that I had been following. Instead of the one high point day on Wendie’s plan, I decided on two, to be used on the weekends, with the difference being made up by eating at the lower end of my points range on weekdays. Since I was struggling to stay within my limit on weekends but not having too hard a time on weekdays, this seemed worth a try. For the first time in a long while, my WW journal was completely filled out, with no blanks for weekend meals when I figured I’d blown it already so what was the point, and all days at the point limits I’d set for myself. I’d done three video workouts, meeting my target, and added a few walks for even more exercise. I faced the scale Saturday morning feeling I’d done a good job and hoping to see it reflected in my weight, and I did. The scale read 161, down 1.5 pounds from the week before and a new low for this weight loss effort. Very cool. Another 1.5 pounds and I’ll be halfway to goal.

Saturday’s main event was going to a quilt show with a friend who used to be a coworker (and is also the person from whom we adopted Bubba). Until a few days before, we’d planned to go with a third friend, but she backed out, deciding she’d rather cocoon with her family and not be tempted by all the quilt ideas and shopping opportunities. That was disappointing, especially since we’d changed our plans to Sunday, which better suited her schedule, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was committing to, but this gave us the opportunity to revert to our original plan of taking in the show on its first day, when the vendor booths would still be fully stocked.

The parking lot was already almost full when we got to the show site, but we found a space that only required a short walk through the heat and humidity to the building, where we sighed with relief upon entering the climate-controlled vestibule. We looked at the quilts first, and there were a lot of them. The main exhibit was pieces made by guild members, supplemented by three special exhibits, including one of Korean quilts that had been featured in a major quilting magazine earlier this year. The most unusual piece was a quilted bathing suit, made by a woman to celebrate learning to swim at the age of fifty so she could go down in a shark cage. The front had a wreath of pictures of her in her real bathing suit, and the back showed her in the jaws of a monster shark, all set on a beautiful design of blue and green squares. It was really delightful, a surprising idea well executed.

We hit the vendor booths next, alternately resisting temptation and giving in. This was the first time I’d been to a show with just Erica, and it turned out that we make a good shopping partners. The most important part of this is pacing; we seemed pretty well matched when it came to which booths we wanted to stop and shop at and which we could pass by with just a cursory browse. Also, even though this was the first serious fabric shopping we’d done together, we both were able to point out some things that the other liked, which bodes well for being able to divide and conquer if we ever get to one of the quilting superstores, where there are several thousand bolts of fabric to peruse. A quilt shop road trip might very well be in our future, as we really liked the offerings of several of the vendors whose shops are not quite local. We also talked about going to check out one of the guild’s meetings with an eye toward joining and maybe even having quilts of our own in the next show in 2004.

By the time we’d seen all the quilts and shopped the entire vendor mall, we were tired and hungry, so we finished our adventures with a late lunch at Chili’s. This proved to be a mistake from the diet perspective, as I lacked the sense or willpower to skip the margarita and choose an entrée from the low fat selections. Fortunately, I didn’t have the fried mozzarella sticks, which at one point were a given for any trip I made to Chili’s, and sometimes were the main reason to go there at all. I actually remembered that the last time I had them, they weren’t that good, and certainly weren’t worth the calories. When I got home, I searched the Web for nutrition information and found that the veggie quesadillas I’d consumed were about 25 points. Given that my official WW range is 20 to 25 points a day, that’s a little horrifying, especially since I had a margarita, too, and Chili’s doesn’t make them small. Yikes. Way to get the diet week off to a bad start. At least I’d had lunch late enough and eaten enough fat that I didn’t feel hungry for dinner and skipped it. Not eating when I’m not hungry; that’s a concept I haven’t always been able to put into practice in the past, so I guess the day wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

Sunday was more relaxed than Saturday. Mr. Karen and I worked out, doing one of our harder videos, The Firm Volume One (which is now known as Body Sculpting Basics or some such; it’s hard to keep track of all their reissues). A little later, we headed out to the multiplex to see a late matinee, but got there to find the ticket booths mobbed and the automated box office machines out of service. It wasn’t clear if we’d be able to get through the line in time to get tickets before the show started, and several movies had already sold out, so we left. We swung by a couple other theaters on the way home, but didn’t find anything we wanted to see with show times that wouldn’t entail a long stretch of cooling our heels. Frustrated, we had a minor disagreement about what to do once we got home, but made up over a dinner of pizza and cheese bread, which I bravely ordered without even trying to bribe Mr. Karen into doing. (Have I talked about my irrational fear of calling for pizza? Probably not; it’s embarrassing.) By the time we finished off the medium pizza and small order of bread, things were better. Sure, I’d had too many points at one meal again, but at least I wrote them all down.

This morning I debated whether to get on the scale. On the one hand, I’m still struggling to avoid weighing myself too often and getting crazy as a result of the numbers, so staying off the scale would be a good idea, especially since it was sure to show a gain, and I don’t need to be bummed out on a Monday morning. On the other hand, if my next Saturday weigh-in shows a gain, it would be nice to know how much of it was caused by my weekend follies. So I got on, and it said 161.5. That couldn’t be right. Only half a pound up? No way. So I got on again, and it still said 161.5. Amazing. To be sure, I got on one more time after I showered and the result was consistent. I do not understand it, but I’ll take it.

And now it’s Monday lunch, and I’m hoping the clementines I brought today aren’t moldy like the ones I brought on Friday. I love these sweet little citrus fruits, but evidently they don’t keep well. I brought an apricot as backup, one of the biggest apricots I’ve ever seen. I wonder if it’s a mutant. I also wonder if I should make more of an effort to get to bed early on Sunday nights so I’m not so tired on Mondays, which leads to brain sluggishness and allows ridiculous mutant apricot thoughts to flourish.