In addition to it being Zippy’s birthday, our Marine Ball Was
Friday. It was a nice start to a three-day weekend, but of course I wasn’t
about to go to the ball itself. This elicited surprise from some, though I
can’t imagine why. It’s pretty clear by my day-to-day attire that I’m not a
dress-up person. As much fun as the salsa class is, I suck, and I’m not a drinker.
Those three factors mean I’m not a prime candidate for the ball. I do like
birthday cake, though.
But I’m all about helping out, even if I’m not going to
partake. I met up with a group in the morning to help set up after my morning
run. There were something like 300 people going, and we fixed up the room,
which included laying the place settings and, get this, dressing the chairs. Our
chairs are these plain things and somewhere, someone created little clothes for
chairs. That person probably is raking in the bucks, because we had 300 of these
blue stretchy fabric things that went over the chairs Maybe they were
slipcovers; I never thought about slipcovers having feet and these things did.
Anyway, by the time I left, the room looks ball-ready.
I’d also volunteered to help take down, but I think they shut
down the party earlier than expected (or, rather, shifted it to Baghdaddy’s
earlier than expected) because when I got there are the pre-arranged 11:30
p.m., the take-down was almost complete. Instead, I grabbed a piece of birthday
cake and headed back to my apartment.
Since the venue is the cafeteria, we’re sort of getting by
on the food this weekend. There was no sit-down on Friday, so people were
wandering around with Styrofoam containers full of whatever. I went the “grab
and go” for lunch and got a turkey sandwich and celery/carrot sticks before
turning the corner and realizing there was real food, so I went ahead and took
green beans and a pork chop for supper.
I finally think that I have stopped gaining weight from all
the food here and might have started losing, but it’s still utterly depressing.
We have a TDYer here who’s a lot of fun and basically convinced me to go two
weeks without carbohydrates. I’ve no idea how people do this, because
everything good is a carb. The experiment lasted a total of two meals, because
they had fish and chips the first night. I passed on the chips but ate the fish,
which had some kind of breading.
I am trying, though. Breakfast is the worst because even
though I would never eat grits, potatoes and a biscuit for breakfast, I want
one of them with eggs and bacon. Lunch is hard because I am huge fan of the
soups. Bypassing the chicken noodle – it’s fabulous – for fish of some sort
(tilapia, maybe) and roasted veggies just wasn’t that great. I’m not a big of
big lunches.
The idea is to do this for two weeks to try to jump-start
weight loss, but we’ll see what happens. I really didn’t know practically
everything was carbs and had yogurt for breakfast. I’m not really good at this.
Plus, seriously, who can live without rice? Why would you
want to? A riceless world is not a pretty one. Or a tasty one.
It’s also a long riceless weekend since Veterans’ Day is
Sunday. We’ve got a ceremony planned and a 5k. We seem to average one of these
a month and I plan on running. One of the people who helped set up for the ball
this morning runs at about my pace (which is pretty slow) and we’re plan on
doing it together. I’m still kind of vague on the track and need to keep
someone in my sites or I might make a wrong turn. The courses for the two
previous races were the same but they change it up here and there, I’m told.
You do two loops around, but the second loop cuts some part off and that’s
where I get confused, plus at that point I’m pretty much sucking wind behind
everyone else.
It looks like my job, the actual work part, will kick in for
real next week. My job is to fill in for people who are on leave and someone’s
finally leaving. At some point, this was going to happen, so I’ve tried to
enjoy the lull as much as possible. Starting Monday, I’m pretty much booked
through mid-February. That includes and
R&R but it’s still nonstop. I’m glad. Lulls are nice but it’s been
something like six weeks. I’m ready to be busy.
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