05/31/10 – Food

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter and some fresh cherries

Lunch – spinach salad, 9 grain bread, baked potato chips, sugar-free Jello, sugar-free cookies

Supper – steamed chicken, onions, potato & broccoli, melba toast bites, spoonful of dark chocolate gelato.

Tonight when I was getting to the end of my bowl of steamed chicken (etc), I realized that I was full – very full. I wanted to finish up the end of what was left in the bowl – some potatoes and onions – but I stopped myself and reasoned that I did not have to eat that last little bit. Yes, I was brought up in the generation that was taught to “clean your plate” and consequently throwing out food is very difficult for me. I can easily do it in restaurants where the plate is taken away from me, but at home I find it extremely hard to throw out food. If there is quite a bit left, I will have it the next day, but if there is just a little bit left I almost always eat it in spite of the fact that I am full. I have to be very mindful to stop and make the decision to throw out the food. So, for me, throwing out those last few bits of potato tonight needs to be noted and counted as a step in the right direction – the direction towards food sanity.

05/30/10 – Food

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter and fresh cherries

Lunch – at Red Lobster – yummy biscuit, salad, shrimp, baked potato

Snack – some pretzels, some veggie sticks and a few potato chips (the baked kind). Can you tell I had the “munchies”?

Supper – a very weird supper, but I ate what I wanted and enjoyed it immensely. Two Eggo blueberry waffles and the leftover mashed potatoes from last night.

Have a good Memorial Day

Perfectionism (A long wordy post)

Quite often I find myself not wanting to quilt because the thought that I am not perfect at this craft stops me cold. I look at magazines and see award winning quilts and instead of enjoying the beautiful quilts, I lament that I have never acquired that level of expertise. I decide in my mind that everything is too hard, would take too long, and I couldn’t think up the designs in the first place. So why should I bother at all? Then someone will remind me that you have to work at the craft; that the expertise only comes from years of practice and failing. Sorry, but that does NOT inspire me. It just increases the size of the mountain I must climb.

Oh, I have periods of not letting the perfectionism factor stop me. I sew, I quilt, I buy fabric, I continue haphazardly, enjoying the colors and patterns. Most of all though, I love my fellow quilters – the friends in my Bee group, women I admire in my Guild, and many, many quilting bloggers.

As the years have gone by I increasingly lament the fact that I am not good at quilting. As I bemoan my shortcomings I have begun to notice that my listeners are getting tired of hearing my sob story.

My unhappiness got so bad that there have been many times recently when I seriously considered throwing out or giving away ALL my fabric and quilt books – thousands and thousands of dollars worth of quilting stuff. It was not bringing pleasure into my life and instead was making me miserable.

Enjoying lunch with my friend Brenda the other day, she patiently sat listening to me once more go on and on about poor me, lousy quilter me, never good enough me. What do I expect people to say? “Yes you are lousy. You better quit quilting.” Hardly. The usual response is “Oh Bonnie, I love your quilts. You’re too hard on yourself. Your quilting is fine.” They might as well be saying, “blah, blah, blah” for all that I listen to that reply. But Brenda replied with something that I have heard before, but have never felt as deeply. She gave me the “enjoy the process” speech – and it penetrated my thick brain that the whole point of quilting or stitching or knitting or reading or eating or being with your friends or just about anything that you do is to enjoy the process.

The people I admire most in the world are those that have enthusiasm – about what they are doing or what they just acquired or where they are going or what they had to eat or what they are reading. Who wants to be around someone like me who whines and complains about being less than adequate? Not me. I want to be around the person who can’t wait to show me their latest garage sale find, who just has to tell me about a good book, who got some fabulous new fabric, who had a great idea for a quilt project and who made a wild, crazy, wonky quilt. I don’t care if the quilt they show me is perfect – all I care about is the enthusiasm and pride with which they share their craft.

So right here on this public blog, I am vowing to stop the negative thinking and begin to truly enjoy the process of quilting – picking out the fabric, deciding on a pattern, cutting everything apart, sewing it all back together again, and sometimes doing my imperfect but unique (and wonderful) machine quilting.

If I slip up on my vow, would you please remind me? Thanks!

05/29/10 – Food

Breakfast – 9 grain bread and cereal.

Lunch – spinach salad (with egg & bacon bits), crackers, and a Skinny Cow ice cream.

Afternoon snack – TJs veggie sticks.

Supper – the leftover chicken dish from last night, some mashed potatoes, fresh cherries and some sugar-free cookies.

Happy Saturday

It was a happy Saturday at my house. I machine quilted (cross-hatch) this little pieced pumpkin quilt and it is now ready for me to hand sew down the binding. My machine quilting is a little less than perfect, but it is OK with me. I like the over-all effect and will think of it as “quirky” quilting.

I used a varigated thread that had yellow, gold, orange and beige which adds to the quirky nature of this little quilt.

There was time also to work on this little piece of stitchery which is from Blackbird Designs – one of the August miniature stockings.

Finally, I made a little progress on my latest binding project.

Time went by very quickly today as I enjoyed working with needle and thread.

05/28/10 – Food

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter and fresh cherries

Lunch – chicken salad sandwich on whole grain bread, pickle slice and potato chips (at a restaurant)

Supper – chicken, onion and broccoli cooked together in chicken broth, mashed potatoes, sugar-free Jello with Cool Whip (Free) and some sugar-free cookies.

Snack – some yummy almonds.

To those who might read this blog, you will notice that I don’t often put down portions/amounts – just a list of the foods I have eaten. Sometimes I don’t eat all that much and sometimes I practically lick the plate. For example, the sandwich I ate today had very thick bread with extremely chewy crusts, so I left a lot of the bread on the plate. Now, if the bread had been the kind I have at home, I would have eaten every last crumb. The chicken dish I made tonight was too much with the mashed potatoes, so I left half of it for tomorrow but I ate every last morsel of the mashed potatoes. The reason I just list the food is because this blog is for my personal benefit. I know how much I ate and am just listing the foods to keep track of what not how much I have eaten. This is not a reducing diet. This is a personal food journal.

05/27/10 – Food

An odd day food-wise………..

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter, a few leftover strawberries with a half cup of cereal and skim milk.

Lunch – I really didn’t have lunch exactly. I had a 1:00pm appointment at my home and since the person coming was usually early, I didn’t want to get caught eating lunch so at 11:30 I had some Guiltless corn chips with a little melted cheese – a snack portion. Surprisingly enough, it filled me up and when the appointment was over I left the house to run some errands and completely forgot about eating a normal lunch.

Then I made the mistake of going to the grocery store around 3:30 – hungry! How many times have you heard that you shouldn’t go to the grocery store when you are hungry? I wanted almost everything I saw – from healthy to outright fattening. The good news is that I didn’t buy any of the fattening foods and the bad news is that my bill was $78.46. $17.26 of that was for fresh cherries! Yikes. I’m going to savor every single cherry. Another $9.73 for lettuce, spinach and broccoli. Looking over my grocery bill almost everything is $3.00 or $4.00 – for salsa and applesauce and sugar-free Jello. When did the prices get so high? Fortunately I did have coupons that saved me $26.89.

So, by the time I got home around 4:00ish, I was hungry. I made a spinach salad and two small pieces of fresh 9 grain bread. For dessert I had cherries – a bowl of cherries (not a chair of bowlies). Then the “munchies” attacked me and I started trying a bite of this and a bite of that. Very dangerous. Unable to stop, I forced myself to clean up my dishes, turn off the lights and walk out of the kitchen.

05/26/10 – Food

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter and a scrambled egg with a little bit of O’Brien potatoes.

Lunch – sandwich, pickles and TJ’s veggie sticks. One helping of sugarless cookies.

Mid-Afternoon snack – Guiltless corn chips with a small helping of cheese.

Supper – Carrots, onion, broccoli – steamed. Small helping of mashed potatoes. Two teaspoons of dark chocolate Gelato.

05/25/10 – Food

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter and some strawberries

Lunch – sandwich, pretzels, one spoonful of dark chocolate gelato

Supper – smoked turkey sausage, baked beans, salad with broccoli, WW fudge bar.

Right now I am feeling stuffed and uncomfortable – like I ate way too much.

05/24/10 – Food

Breakfast – toast with peanut butter and some strawberries

Lunch – the left over lobster pizza from yesterday’s lunch and a few TJs veggie sticks. Strawberries and a few sugar-less cookies for dessert.

Supper – a big salad with egg and broccoli, some Guiltless corn chips and one small teaspoon of dark chocolate gelato.

Met with my quilting bee group tonight and had a piece of no-sugar-added apple pie with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream.