Sunday. The preparatory day. The day before everything great, and everything that sucks the sould and the joy out of life - or Monday, as it's more colloquially known.
I don't feel that tomorrow's going to be a typical Monday. I mean, yes, there'll be the usual "Who are you again?" sensation of seeing my colleagues, albeit on Skype (did I mention? Love working from home), but by the time that happens tomorrow, I'll have biked for an hour. I'll have taken the first steps back towards a productively Disappeared future.
Today has, it's fair to say, not been full of steps back towards a productively Disappeared future.
Had a McDonalds breakfast with d before she went to work, and yes, I had a double sausage and egg muffin, and yes, I had it as a meal, and yes, I enjoyed every mouthful of it. It was like saying farewell to a greasy, moderately gross old friend. If it helps, I had water as my drink, rather than the caramel frappe that was winking at me, swaying its creamy hips from the menu board. I eschewed it. I told it "shoo." If we're going to be huuuuggely generous to me, we could call that a one-all draw.
Then I did a day of 'being a good son.' Went with Ma on a three mile hike, which only stopped itself being somewhat more like a six-mile hike when we encountered a big barred gate with signs on saying, in slightly more convoluted language, "Sure, you can come over the gate if you like. Can't guarantee it's not a minefield though. Just sayin'..."
Did what I believe my American friends call 'Yard Work' for a while, sweeping leaves from where they clearly wanted to be to where Ma wanted them to be (in a bag), and then dumping them out front, so that, when the wind blows, they can escape and scatter themselves over other people's front yards. Fairly sure this sort of nonsense is why I've never been overly keen to have a yard till now, but there it is. Flipped my mother's mattress (nothing marks the advance of years more, I find, than being invited into one's parent's bedroom to do stuff they would previously have done with their spouse). Then I ate a Ma dinner.
My mother, bless her, has an interestingly limited repertoire when it comes to food preparation. She's mostly of the mind that there's much more interesting stuff to do (a mindset I rather share), and so, throughout the whole of my life, she has frequently substituted quantity for what might otherwise be thought of as quality. Vast quantities of rice, or pasta, or potato were offset in her case by the vast quantities of salad with which she padded out her own plate. For those of us who are rather more vitamin-averse, the space on the plate was always double-heaped with gorgeous, gorgeous carb.
One thing she does reasonably well (or perhaps we all think that about our mothers) is the traditional "Sunday dinner". Nowadays, it would be fair to say that it's one thing Waitrose does reasonably well, but she warms it up like a pro, bless her. And there's sooooo much of it.
I ate the whole thing without complaint today. And then yes thank you, I'll have a couple of mince pies with cream, as I haven't had any yet this year and after these, I'm not going to...
Just when you think there'd be no room left in me, I came home and had a bowl of Bran Flakes, jsut...because. My step-counter for the day logged 8977, across a distance of 4.2 miles, burning off 469 calories (this doesn't actually include the yard work, so part of my wheedling little personality is whispering "So, more than 500 calories really, in all probability"). So, ultimately, I've worked off the double sausage muffin today. Still probably over my 'allotted' calorie allowance for the day, but that, as I said at the start, is the nature of the day before, the day before you start something big, and long-haul, and slow, and patient, and starey-eyed determined.
Tomorrow, we bike at 7.30. And we bike again at 5 or 5-abouts. Tomorrow I say no to things that taste good and feel good, because the feeling of having eaten them is bad. The feeling of being this way is bad.
The idea of not feeling bad any more is what makes tomorrow feel like a beautiful thing.
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