Motormouth Monday

Happy Monday, world! It is a snowy morning in St. Paul. And, if you want to know a secret, I'm kind of excited about it. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm bummed about hardly having any fall at all, and I will get very sick of winter come mid-January, but I did get a little tingle of excitement this morning seeing those big fluffy flakes falling.


Weekend Recap

Had a pretty nice weekend, actually. Friday night we had planned to stay in, but decided to go up to North Minneapolis to watch the Twins’ game with two other couples. It was a heartbreaker of a game. I’ve never really had strong thoughts about this before, but now I can unequivocally say, “I hate the Yankees”. Jeter is so freaking smug, I can hardly stand it. I really was wishing for him to catch a ball right in the kisser.

Saturday, I slept in a bit and then had some Steel Cut Oats for breakfast – J made them overnight in the slow cooker and it was so nice to wake up on a chilly morning with snow on the lawn and the warm smell of oatmeal and dried fruit filling the kitchen. It’s an Alton Brown recipe – I’m sure you could Google it if you are intrigued.

After breakfast and lying around a bit, we drove down to Burnsville to check out the new Becker Furniture Outlet. We still need some furniture for our house. Mostly I’ve been looking on Craigslist, but haven’t had a ton of luck there, so we made yet another trip to a furniture store. I’m not a huge fan of furniture stores anymore and will be very thankful when we have no need to buy any more. No luck with furniture this weekend though.

On Friday, J had an appointment with a recruiter, and couldn’t find his dress shirt, suit pants or dress shoes. We gave the house a good once over and still couldn’t find them and concluded they must have been a) lost in the move or b) left in Rome when he went there for work in May. So, we went to the suit store and got him a really nice new suit, two shirts, and two new ties. He rarely has occasion to wear a suit, and the last one he’d had for 10 years, so it was time for an update anyway.

Saturday night, two of J’s, now former, co-workers took us out to dinner at Roat Osha in Uptown. http://www.citypages.com/2009-01-28/restaurants/roat-osha-replaces-uptown-thai-staple-sawatdee/ It was okay – slightly better than average, I guess. We had a fried tofu red curry, which was not really spicy or flavorful enough for me. I didn’t try the Pad Thai. We also ordered beef skewers, which were very tasty. I was surprised that it’s a sister restaurant to Tum Rup Thai http://www.tumrupthai.com/, which I had really enjoyed when we went there a couple of years ago.

After dinner, we headed over to Moto-I to play some bumper shuffleboard – super fun. http://www.moto-i.com/ If you haven’t been to Moto-I, definitely give it a try. It’s a sister restaurant to The Herkimer http://www.theherkimer.com/ , just down the street, and it’s easy to tell - if the Herk was an Asian place, it would be Moto-i. If you go, ask for the honey martini – I’m sure it has another name, but I don’t know what it is…they drizzle honey in the glass and then make a martini with saki (made in house, I believe) and vanilla Stoli, then rim the glass with cinnamon and sugar – yummy!

After that, we decided it would be fun to see the midnight showing of Shawn of the Dead at the Uptown Theater. We’re pretty sure that Saturday was the zombie bar crawl, because we saw several groups of zombies out and about. As a result, we thought SOTD would be packed, but it was quite the opposite. We bought our tickets and went across the street to Zeno http://www.zenocafe.com/ for a snack and coffee before the movie. Had this awesome flatbread with figs on it – really, really tasty.

SOTD was great, and I only took two little naps during :-) I don’t remember the last time I was up til 3:00 in the morning.

Yesterday was a nice lazy day in the house. I did some cleaning and found J’s lost suit pants and shirt in a laundry basket all ready to go to the dry cleaners. Oh well, he needed a new suit anyway.

Last night was J’s first curling game of the season and they got off to a great start. It was a fun game. I divided my time between watching them curl and watching the Twins lose to the Yanks again.

Wow, that was quite a long weekend re-cap!

What do I want?

So, I was doing some thinking about what I want and where my desires come from. I think a lot of my desires come from what I *think* I should want. I’m so out of tune with myself, that I don’t even know if what I think I want is truly coming from me, or if it’s from an outside influence. And, I’m so often wishy-washy about my goals, I wonder if it’s because of that. So, how do I know what I want?

Things I think I want:

• I want to feel energetic, healthy, and attractive
• I want to feel successful, a sense of accomplishment
• I want to be admired

It occurs to me, as I write this list, aren’t these things what everyone wants? Of course, I want to be healthy, of course I want to be successful – and I do think that achieving my weight loss goal will help me fulfill these desires – however, there must be something that holds me back, it seems like it would be so obvious to keep myself on a path that leads me to the above things, why do I choose not do it?

Perhaps I have *conflicting* goals.
Possible conflicting goals:

• I want to be comfortable
• I want to be comforted
• I want to be indulged
• I want to be fun

I’m starting to see these lists as two versions of me. The first list is my grown-up, serious self. The second list is the petulant adolescent self. Is there some way for me to have goals that satisfy both of these versions? Is there some balance that can be achieved to appease the whiny teenager when she says, “I don’t want to eat healthy, I want to eat the tastiest thing on the menu!” or “I don’t want to run, I want to watch television!”? How can I get the adolescent to grow up? And how can I get the grown-up to chill out a little?

Today, I’d like to work on formulating a goal that can help me achieve this balancing act – something that allows me to feel like I’m making progress, but I’m not taking away my own freedom.

This has been a very long post – thanks for hanging in there!! Have a great Monday!