I left for the store today at 1030 and got home at 1445.  Now can you see why my husband doesn’t like going to the grocery store with me?  It’s because I treat Publix and Target like I do a trip to the mall.  I SHOP.  I browse.  I go down every aisle looking for interesting things even if there’s nothing on my list that’s located on that aisle.  I don’t look at my watch at all and have a great time.

I go through the sales papers and try to plan out meals.  Then I go through the entire store, reading ingredients and comparing prices between like items.  It takes forever.  I hit up Publix first, because I wanted to by nori sheets (for sushi rolls), and Target doesn’t carry them.  Also, because I wanted to check out the new Publix.  Well, it’s not new, but now that we’ve moved, it’s a different Publix than the one I used to go to, so it’s new-to-me.

Then I headed to Target.  We got our tax return back the other day, and Hubby doled out a little pocket money for each of us and then the rest went straight into our money market, which was totally depleted after buying the house, what with closing costs and buying ceiling fans and light bulbs and caulking and god knows what else we had to pick up at Lowe’s.  It’s a bit easier to sleep at night with some money back in the emergency fund, let me tell you.

To show you a bit about how much of a dork I am, I got myself a few prezzies with my tax return money today at Target- a mango slicer and a mandoline.  Yeah, I know.  Not very exciting, huh?  But, I’ve been meaning to get a mandoline for AGES and just kept forgetting.  It’s amazing though- I made sweet potato fries for my late lunch today and baked them in the oven at 450 degrees.  Tossed them with a teeny bit of salt and cinnamon and they were superyummygood.  I ate them all.

I’m also going to get a few books from amazon but I haven’t decided what I want to get yet.  Currently toggling back and forth between the amazon site tab and this tab trying to figure out what I want.  It’s a lengthy process, and I probably won’t finish deciding tonight.  I still have several Joanne Harris books from this summer that I started in chemo and was so brainfogged that I caught myself reading the same chapter over and over and eventually decided that it would be best if I tried after chemo.

I have to interrupt myself now to tell you about something totally disgusting that I just saw- I’m watching The Colbert Report on hulu, and the commercial was some kind of fake Extra with Mario Lopez talking about Philadelphia cream cheese.  They were listing favorite snacks from viewers, and one of them, I swear, was “spread some plain cream cheese on a piece of bologna and roll it up”. 

I’m sorry, but that’s not a snack.  That’s a heart-attack-in-a-snack, and frankly, if I’m going to have a heart attack, I’d like to go out eating something that I actually enjoy- like flourless chocolate torte with raspberries and whipped cream.  And seriously, what sort of hostess serves rolled up bologna as an appetizer?  It’s not like it’s fast- I think it would really be quite hard to spread cream cheese on bologna, which is moist, and then try to roll it up in some non-gross fashion.  Just buy some ciabatta and throw pre-made bruschetta topping on it.  Geez.

But, anyway,back to the store.  I was browsing the magazines (newsflash- as a charter subscriber of Hallmark magazine, I’m REALLY bummed about it ceasing publication with the current issue), when I overheard the following conversation between a husband and wife about their daughter:

Husband; “So, she asked me if there were going to be Yorkie puppies since their Yorkie is a girl.”

Wife: “Really?  What’d you say?  Here, help me get this lawn chair down.”

H: “I said that there weren’t going to be any puppies since there wasn’t a boy dog.  She wanted to know what that had to do with anything.”

W: “Here take this one and I’ll get the second one (hands Husband a lawn chair).  So what did you tell her?”

H: “I said that it takes both a boy dog and a girl dog to make puppies.  Then she asked if Popcorn could make puppies.  I said that ‘no, Popcorn can’t do that anymore since he’s been fixed.”

W: “Good answer, John.”

H: “Not really, because then she said “What?  Can’t do WHAT anymore since he’s been fixed?  What does ‘fixed’ mean?”

Now, I was very keen to what his answer would have been, but then his wife, (heifer), started blathering on and on about some beach umbrella and they didn’t finish the conversation.  I was so into it I almost yelled at him “SO, JOHN, WHAT EXACTLY IS IT THAT POPCORN CAN’T DO ANYMORE NOW THAT HE’S FIXED?!?”

But, being the mature person that I am, I did not.  Nor did I follow them about the store to hear if they finished the conversation at another point.  But, it was very, very intriguing.  Poor old Popcorn- now lacking in the kernel department.  Sigh.

It’s been a little over a week and a half since Lent started and I gave up, well, it’s kind of undefined.  I gave up sugar, but not all sugar, because my brain, like everybody else’s, runs on nothing but glucose.  So, I’m still eating fruit and whole grains and drinking milk so I don’t die.  And so far, so good.  Hubby even made brownies the other day and I haven’t had a one.

Mostly, I’m just trying to stay away from refined sugars like high fructose corn syrup and white sugar and things like that.  I can’t, simply can’t, give up my near-daily toast habit, so I replaced my regular jam with St. Dalfour’s preserves, which are sweetened only with fruit juice and they’re amazing (flavors like ginger orange marmalade and raspberry pomegranate).  And, since they’re more expensive than the 99 cent jars of grape jelly, I use less of them, so it’s less sugar overall.

I also got some healthy baking mixes that I’m pretty excited about, made by a company called Matisse and Jack’s that look really good.  I got the chocolate chip power bar flavor and the chocolate fudge brownie.  They both look really good- the chocolate chips in the power bar mix are Guittard.  With both mixes, you just add water and applesauce and either oil or yogurt and you’re good to go. 

They’re made with whole grains and flax seeds and all sorts of good things.  I’m going to whip up the power bar recipe tomorrow and add in a bit of dried cranberries and almonds and some vanilla and cinnamon.  Needless to say, I’m overly excited about them, but I don’t care.  I like being overly excited about mundane things.  It’s a big part of who I am.

We’re getting ready to watch Aeon Flux for our weekly movie night movie.  I saw it in theatres when it came out in December 2005 with Hubby before he was Hubby and we were still dating and hadn’t even thought about getting married yet.  Charlize Theron is amazing and I’m now planning on having her Aeon hairstyle at some point when mine gets long enough, only I’m not dyeing my hair black because it would make me look like I was dead.

In a slightly grim reminder that I spent the better part of last year in chemotherapy treatment, My fingers have been numb off and on the past 2 weeks with the cold weather we’ve been having.  By mid-January, the numbness and tingling had all gone away, which was a blessing, and it’s been here again, on every cold morning, for 20-30 minutes.  Feeling nothing in the tips of your fingers when trying to type is very strange.

Also, I’ve been itchy.  Not itchy like when I had cancer, (all over systemic itching that benadryl doesn’t even begin to help), no, this is my body exorcising remaining bits of chemo nastiness from itself.  I know this because it happened when I was still undergoing chemo.  Tiny bumps would randomly appear in strange places- a single one in the palm of my right hand, a few scattered across the knuckles of my left hand, and several on the backs of both knees.  They aren’t red, just raised, and about the size of a small mosquito bite. 

The weird thing is that sometimes they’re present and sometimes they aren’t, and they’re not always in the exact same place, and sometimes they itch and sometimes they don’t.  But, when they do itch, it’s all I can do not to claw my arm or leg off trying to stop the itching.  And as much as I know that I shouldn’t scratch because it increases the histamine response and will only make me itch more, I can’t resist a good scratch. 

When I had chicken pox twice last spring, I got to make up for all the scratching that I missed out on when I had chicken pox the first time.  Oh, my god, that was some good scratching.  Chicken pox, if you scratch them properly, will open up and ooze and then scab over.  When they scab over, they’re no longer contagious, so I just figured I was helping speed the process along.  Did I scar?  Oh, yes.  Every single pox scarred both times.  In fact, the scars from the March bout were just fading when I got it again in May, but not the scars are completely gone. 

Cortisone and benadryl halfway help with the chemo detox itching, but cool baths with baking soda have been my savior (thanks, mom!).  Mostly, I’m trying to drink a lot of water to flush everything out of my system, and that seems to be helping.

So, sorry that I haven’t written a long blog in a while, but here’s a little update.