The Fluffbucket Diaries

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.

Good morning. Here is your periodic reminder that cats like boxes.

If I had seen this on a proof in the newsroom back in the day, I would have burst out laughing like I did when my husband showed this to me this morning: “Well, thank God we can all come back inside after all these months.”

Nowadays, I try to avoid politics in this space, as there’s enough of a cesspool of it elsewhere on the Internet. But as a pro-life Catholic who usually votes Democratic but often finds some of the party’s overly earnest fellow travelers irritating, I can’t help but link to this interview with James Carville in Vox (emphases below mine).

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods. …

We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it. …

Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.

Incredibly glad that somebody is saying it. Out loud.

There’s a nice bit of writing in the Washington Post accompanying a recipe for pandesal, the classic bread roll of the Philippines:

“To eat like a Filipino means eating multiple times a day, not just three square meals. Many will have a pandesal in the morning and then a sizable breakfast, called almusal, later with eggs, meats and, of course, rice. It’s not a meal without rice."

This is what I grew up with. This is also why going low-carb in January was as seismic a shift as I imagined it would be.

The husband picked up stickers after his second COVID-19 shot yesterday to make up for my sticker shortfall after my own vaccination. I love him.

Another week, another 2.4 pounds lost. Now at 247.4 pounds. That’s a 12.6 percent loss since I started all this in January. At least another 70 pounds to go.

I’m not as blasé about this as I might sound. But I just realized that I forgot to post my update yesterday; this time, I didn’t delay it because I wanted to get a decent weight to log here. I just plain forgot. Maybe I can blame that on post-vaccine brain fog.

Meanwhile, I think I’m largely past the COVID-19 vaccine side effects now. C, however, is dealing with the same kind of hit-by-a-truck aftereffects that I woke up with Saturday. On top of that, he has a 101-degree fever.

I’ve always been envious of C’s good health and fully expected him to lord a lack of side effects over me. I didn’t want him to go through this, especially since it seems like he’s got it worse than I did over the weekend.

Following the White Sox and the Padres with equal intensity this season is going to kill me.

Advil Dual Action is my new best friend. Between that and a nap late this morning, the second-shot achiness dissipated enough to let me run a few errands. Still sluggish this early evening, though.