Hmmph.

Funny how every time I start, or re-start, or re-re-start I do so on a weekend where I'm committed to eating food with absolutely no nutritional value. I spent Saturday at a choral festival where I helped wrangle 175 third through fifth graders for several hours while they sang, folk danced, and giggled behind their hands as I attempted to clench a conga drum between my thighs and channel Desi Arnaz to accompany some calypso choir song the conductor picked out. The other teachers all paid to have a Chinese chicken salad delivered to them, but since I don't do the meat thing anymore and decided I wasn't going to spend $10.95 for an iceberg lettuce salad with Ramen noodles on it, I went with the kids' lunch. For the low, low price of five bucks I got two pieces of cheese pizza, Cheetos, Famous Amos cookies, and a Pepsi. I like it when I have a meal so nutritionally deficient my body actually dies a little from the consumption of it.

Today I ended up at a BBQ and was of course proffered many plates of meat. Lots of meat. Meat. Meat. More meat. Also, carnage. The throwers of said barbecue are the types of people who become mortally offended if you turn down the meat and talk with pained expression about their fathers who were beef farmers and their uncles who owned a hometown meatpacking plant, so when they put a half slab of pork ribs on my plate and looked at me with a very anticipatory expression I knew what I had to do. And damn, were those ribs good. Likewise the other mounds of BBQ related food I had (probably to excess).

But the good news is, of course, that tomorrow is another day at Tara and I don't have to eat BBQ with Ashley and Charles Hamilton on Monday. I'll resume my vegetarian ways with a black bean wrap and something...vegetably...for dinner.

My goals this week are to figure out a way to drink water that still allows me to be a teacher, because I'm uber-dehydrated right now. While I understand intellectually that thirty kindergartners can't be trusted to chill in a classroom for two minutes while I run down the hall every half hour because I'm pushing water, but somehow it seems just a little inhumane to make teachers develop camel bladders for the sake of their profession. Le petit sigh.

Also, I really want to wake up in the morning and do yoga. I've wanted to do this for two months now, but of the 60 days I've set my alarm for 5:30, I think during maybe 58 of them I've pressed the snooze button seven times and actually awoken at 6:50. Maybe by pledging my intentions of doing morning yoga to the Internets, I'll do it. Maybe. Make me do it, okay?

Thanks.