Well, this is good anyway

Had the appointment with the nutritionist today, which went about like I expected, only longer--solarbird and I were there for an hour and a half while this woman quizzed me thoroughly about my history with food and weight and such.

The good news is, she was pretty pleased with many of our already established eating habits, and she approved of my ditching the soda and of my strict snack rationing. The bad (albeit expected) news was that I need to bump up my fruit and veg intake, and also definitely resume my free weights exercises. I also need to ditch the efforts I'd started to have juice with lunch, on the grounds that juice is less helpful than having actual fruit. Meanwhile, Dara has been advised to edge the veg up during dinners, and the nutritionist made a good suggestion about putting the veggies on the plate first, so as to have them dominate the territory.

I am to keep up with this food log thing. And I think I'll be resuming the weights on Saturday when I'll have my first window of time free to work 'em in. Till then, I'll keep up with the current food habits; I'm already seeing improvement in my appetite just by ditching the soda and by rationing the snacks. And I've been inspecting the drink shelves at Whole Foods to see what I can purchase to drink with lunch that a) isn't water and b) doesn't have too many calories. The HonestTea brand seems potentially good; I found their "Community Green Tea" flavor today, which had only 34 calories to the bottle and just enough cane sugar and orange flavor to it to make it not too bad. I think this'll be my lunch drink for a while.

I think that in the interests of keeping this in the forefront of my brain, I shall start adding food log data to pertinent posts (like this one). And just to throw in other pertinent numbers, I'll resume more regular tracking of my walking as well. I'll slap this stuff behind a cut, though.

Meanwhile, the Stunt Boob has been acquired, and it's surprisingly comfy and natural-looking. Enough that it boggled both me and Dara. Should it happen that I have to postpone reconstruction surgery for whatever reason, I think I'll be able to put up with wearing this for a while.

( Today's food and exercise stats... )

Book Log #35: Blood Brothers, by Nora Roberts

That I have read two Nora Roberts novels back to back I ascribe entirely to the fact that La Nora semi-regularly posts comments on smartbitches, and each time I see her post up there, the cooler I find her. Therefore, I felt obligated to pick up a couple more of her books.

The second of this last round of buying Nora was the first of her current paranormal trilogy, Blood Brothers, Book 1 of The Sign of the Seven. This was paranormal more in the vein of psychic/Gothic rather than fantasy, I note. In the hands of another writer, it might almost have been a horror novel plot. We have a small East Coast town where three young boys accidentally release a demon that proceeds to terrorize the town and drive everybody batshit every seven years--while the boys, who have been granted certain extraordinary abilities, have to figure out how to do damage control every time the demon strikes. Now, twenty-one years later, they're joined by three women who share their unique gifts, and all six are teaming up to face down the demon, hopefully for the final round.

(I'm pretty sure that Ms. Roberts wasn't thinking of the old Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons" when she wrote this thing--though I have to admit a little voice in my brain kept asking, "Are you one with the Body?" every time I read about the town's previous incidents of going batshit and otherwise perfectly normal people raping, murdering, committing wild acts of vandalism, killing themselves, etc., and the survivors not remembering much about what happened after. Aheh. But I digress.)

It's probably fairly pat and predictable that each of the men has a counterpart, ability-wise, among the women. Caleb and Quinn both can see the past. Fox and Layla are both psychic. And Gage and Cybil can see the future. Naturally, these pairings are also clearly getting set up romantically as well; in Caleb and Quinn's case, pretty much right out of the gate. However, despite the predictable pairings, the six lead characters are likable. Quinn in particular is very sympathetic to me as a reader--Nora gets points for a woman who cheerfully loves food, is aware that she needs to change her eating habits to stay healthy, and is productive about it rather than angstful. I also very much liked Quinn's very straightforward handling of not only her feelings for Caleb, but also the paranormal events at large. She pretty much poleaxes poor Caleb, and charmingly so.

Since we are dealing with a cast of six main characters, Book 1 is not surprisingly mostly devoted to bringing everybody on stage. There are initial low-level rumblings out of the demon, just enough to let the cast know that this time around it's more powerful than it used to be--and to let them all get used to the idea of facing it together. Other than that, though, not much happens; therefore, Book 1 leaves me very much with a prologue-y sort of "okay, now let's get to the main action" feeling. But it's a good enough feeling that I'll be seeking out Book 2. Three and a half stars.