The Fluffbucket Diaries

We went for a walk on a hot and humid Saturday around a local reservoir. Only a bit over a mile. Only needed to stop twice for mild back discomfort and annoyance with the heat. I couldn’t have made this walk easily six months ago.

This week’s favorite subreddit: /r/CatsAreAssholes/.

And in a related development, this week’s favorite McSweeney’s list: Eight Famous Poems Rewritten by Your Asshole Cat.

The husband brought this home per the veterinarian’s suggestion to deal with some cat behavior issues.

If I knew this would work on you,” the husband said to me, “I would have bought them for the entire house.”

Baseball creeps into so many corners of our lives.

I watch baseball on my Kindle Fire, provided Winslow lets me.

Saw the bariatric doctor today. Dr. O. was very pleased with my progress, and so was I, once I weighed in at 244 pounds at his office. This makes for a 39-pound loss since mid-January, or nearly half my initial 80-pound goal.

I ruminated about expanding my goal beyond 80 pounds, as I’ve mentioned here. But Dr. O. stopped me, reminding me to celebrate what I’ve done up till now. If I want to lose more once I hit the 80-pound mark, fine, but he didn’t feel a need to discuss that right now.

Otherwise, we talked about the joys of MyFitnessPal, exercise, the importance of sunlight, and COVID-19 vaccinations; then he re-upped my prescriptions, reiterated that this weight-loss thing is a long-haul deal, and sent me on my way until our next appointment in August.

He also wants me to make an appointment with my primary care doctor, largely to show off the weight loss.

Returned to confession and Mass yesterday for the first time in roughly 6 months.

The priest gently chided me for letting my anger at all the divisiveness in the Church keep me from the sacraments: “This [division] has been going on for thousands of years,” he said. Or something like that. But he didn’t flinch as I went on, even when I admitted that I had pounded down a chicken leg on Friday just out of spite, I was so angry.

He asked if I had at least been praying, and I admitted only with my kid at bedtime – beyond that, not even so much as a morning offering. “Why, even second-graders do that!” he said. I could tell he said it with a smile (even behind the curtain), but it still stung.

Fr. L., the guy I usually turn to for confession, was a little tougher on me than usual at first, but I didn’t mind. He spent a little more time advising me this time around, and I appreciated that. With Pentecost coming up, he advised me to ask the Holy Spirit to lead me in a fresh start, gave me my penance, and sent me on my way.

My takeaway was that I can’t let annoying people and Church politics get in the way of prayer and my relationship with God. Fr. L. is particularly insistent on people maintaining a regular prayer life as much as possible, and he’s absolutely right to be insistent. And I’m grateful for that.

I"m still annoyed at the divisions and failures of the Church; reading this piece just now by a priest who was kicked out of seminary for being Black doesn’t help my anger. But, as Fr. Bruce Wilkinson writes of his experience:

After I worked through some of my anger and sadness in reflection and prayer, though, I realized something important: I was not going to allow other people’s hatred to control my life.

Why? Fr. Bruce makes it clear at the end: “I couldn’t help being in love with God, and God wouldn’t let me go.”

God doesn’t let go, no matter how livid you are with the Church, His people, and sometimes even Him. And I’m grateful for that, too.

Just ordered a copy of this graphic memoir. The blurb had me at “difficult Filipino mothers and their children’s unwavering quest to make them happy.”

You can order the book and view sample pages here.

Things that exhaust me:

• Celebrities who won’t stop talking about themselves
• Requests to get together
• Church politics (pick a church, any church)
• Gender politics
• Political correctness
• Liturgical correctness
• Theological correctness
• Weekdays

Things that soothe me:

• Baseball
• Scrolling through social anxiety posts on Instagram
• Scrolling through posts of bungalows and old houses on Instagram
• Old photos of Frannie
• Weekends

After a lot of years hanging out with people who prioritize theological and liturgical purity over Christlike personal behavior, I needed to be reminded of this tonight.

I need to find some Anabaptists to hang out with. Or at least read more about them.

Went down a disturbing Google rabbit hole that began on Facebook this morning with a bizarre, out-of-nowhere comment from a former colleague. It ultimately ended with old news from 2016 that another former colleague from the same newspaper had been charged with drugging a woman and raping her repeatedly over several years.

It’s already been been a long morning, and it’s only 8:40 a.m.

I’m down again. Weighed in this morning at 246 pounds, which is 3.2 pounds down from last week. (That’s a 37-pound loss since I started all this in January.) This makes up for the 1.8-pound spike in weight last Tuesday.

I’d like to think that falling ill before dinner yesterday and throwing up a bit – and largely skipping dinner afterward – had little to do with it. But it probably did.

Feeling better now. I suspect there was some kind of mild food poisoning involved.

Other health practices have been up and down. Sleep is somewhat okay, though I’d like to get a little more than 6.5 hours of it a night. I need to get back on the pilates and YouTube workout wagons. And I have to be more regular with getting some decent amounts of sunlight daily.

Still, clothes are fitting better. More rings are loose on my fingers. And Chris said during our breakfast out yesterday that I’ve clearly lost weight in my face. All that makes me happy.

I see the bariatric doctor a week from today. Looking forward to it.

Andrew McCarthy just released a new memoir about his Brat Pack years, although he was never really part of the so-called Brat Pack. He’s making the interview rounds to promote the book, and this piece in The New Yorker reminds me of how I had a massive crush on him back in the day.

He speaks in several interviews of how he was very much an outsider during the heyday of the “pack,” largely by design. Having realized in recent years how much I have been a chronic outsider all my life, it’s no wonder I found him particularly relatable.

After a late breakfast at my favorite suburban Greek cafe, this was my Mother’s Day afternoon. Couldn’t be happier.

Insert “Fernando CATís Jr.” joke here.

My brain has felt scattered and weary for a couple of weeks now. Hoping for some sort of reboot this weekend.

The term “empath” annoys me, though I can’t put my finger on why. But I still relate to this.

Probably not what Red Barber had in mind when he talked about “sitting in the catbird seat.”

The New York Times says I am not flourishing. Find out if you are.

It’s been more than 10 years since I last worked in a newsroom. There is a lot about it that I don’t miss. But I do miss newsroom people.

This was not unexpected after more than 3 straight months of weight loss. I was up 1.8 pounds on the scale this morning.

I’m still down nearly 34 pounds since January, but I’m still scrolling through the old food diary to figure out what might have led to this first reversal since I started. According to my records, I never went above 100 grams of carbohydrates over the past week, but that might have been bad logging on my part at one or two points – namely Friday, when I went ahead and had several squares of regular pizza for the first time in forever. I’ve had a piece here and there since I went low-carb, but not “several.” (But it was still a lot less than I used to eat in one sitting.) Also, I’m not limited in calories – just carbs – but I did go significantly over the MyFitnessPal app’s prescribed calorie limit (like, by 600+ calories) a couple of days. My snacking has also been a bit more frequent and fatty or high-carb (I really have to lay off the peanuts and pork rinds), and I haven’t logged as much water as I had been.

Perhaps just as significantly, I had a lot of nights of poor sleep, at one point logging barely 4 hours. Plus I logged one Pilates class, and maybe one day above 3,000 steps. I could get off my ass a little more (and my painful lower back and hips would likely be grateful).

I’m not too upset about this. It was inevitable. At least I have an idea of how to move forward: A bit more sleep, a bit more water, a bit more movement. Onward.

My kid has me sucked into Dragonvale. Feel free to friend me.