Well, hi.

It's been a while.  Over a month, actually.

I didn't mean to take that long of a hiatus, but my life has been kind of moving along at a pace faster than I can keep up with, so I let the non-essential activities slide by the wayside in order to continue to be able to handle the important things.  You know, work, eating, paying bills, sleeping.  That kind of thing.

The move back home as officially been completed, and R. is safely off to his internship.  It's going to be a very long six months of only being able to see each other on occasion when our schedules line up (if it ever happens.  I'm crossing my fingers!), if the two months where he was back in California were any indication.  I miss him. He did, however, leave me the pancake mix and chocolate chips.  He did this while knowing full well how terrible I am at making them.  I'm going to take this as a sign that he'll be back for them.

Most days, I work.  Which means breakfast in the morning, a packed lunch of whatever I can grab while rushing in the morning, and dinner of some kind.  My job doesn't allow me the ability to snack at all, which means I've had to adjust my eating habits since snacking was one of the main ways I was able to keep hunger at bay, and continue to make smart eating choices.  That is, when the snacks were smart to begin with.  But now I've learned to adjust to three meals a day, not overloading one or the other, and keeping things healthy.  A sandwich for lunch, or leftovers, possibly some rice with chicken and salsa verde and a few Babybel cheese wheels melted in.  Breakfast is oatmeal mixed with greek yogurt for protein, and dinner is usually a protein and carb, and a vegetable if I can get my hands on it.  All well and good.

I admit that there are downfalls.  Like the fact that even though I know I get lunch, I never really know when I'm going to lunch -- so it could be earlier or later than I expected.  If it's earlier, I'm starving by the time I get off work, and stopping by Chick-fil-A or Great Wraps is a much more appealing option for dinner than coming home and wasting time cooking.  Take time to cook while hungry, or have instant gratification of waffle fries in mouth?  It's a difficult conundrum.  There are days when I eat late and I'm still starving.  I have managed to keep the worst of those at bay with an emergency Luna protein bar in my lunch box for desperate times, but there are only so many protein bars you can eat in your life before you hate them. Even tasty ones like Luna bars.

I haven't been very creative with cooking lately, so I don't have any good recipes to share with you.  But I promise that I will, very soon.  I'm working on writing up some of my old standbys that I usually just make from memory.  Some of them I don't think I ever wrote down, I just created.  It's about time I wrote those down.

Life is good, even if the future seems lonely right now.  I'll try not to get sappy on you guys, but I will say that I feel like Bonnie without her Clyde right now.

-A

P.S. R. managed to get my Grandma to allow him to cook in her kitchen.  She refused to sit down or "not help" the entire time, but it's still a pretty amazing feat.  It's things like this that make me love him!