So here it is Saturday again; this time last Saturday I was heading for the Urgent Care. More on that in a minute.
People are starting to come back to campus. Monday was my department’s annual faculty & staff retreat, and there’s a lot of moving going on in the neighborhoods where lots of students live off-campus (like ours, although we have mostly graduate and medical students, because of our location, near the University Hospital – where I went for my ultrasound last week), and new students are moving into the dorms this weekend. The Farmers Market was extra crowded this morning, and of course, with all that moving going on, there was a kind of sudden and kind of unexpected heavy downpour just now that lasted about 30 minutes.
Work is still busy but somehow not as crushing as it’s been. I sent out draft syllabi to both my classes on Thursday and Friday – so to somewhere’s between 65 and 70 students. And I’ve started getting the online course spaces for both classes set up. Still a lot to do, but I have over a week to do it in – classes don’t start until a week form this coming Wednesday.
Which made me decide that I deserved a real weekend. Farmers’ Market, errands, cooking.
But first let me tell you about the fallout from my Urgent Care trip. Because my blood pressure was high at the Urgent Care (because I was F’ing terrified), they asked me to come back and get some blood work done, and also get a loaner blood pressure cuff and start monitoring at home. I went in Wednesday morning and my BP was still high in the office but I’m getting much lower readings at home, by kind of a lot, especially if I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. I’m supposed to check once a day and I’m submitting the readings in the app, and they’ll get back to me in about 2 weeks.
But that’s only the start. The blood work showed high cholesterol, although with a high percentage of the “good” cholesterol, and my A1c or HbA1c that you hear about all the time in diabetes drug ads on TV was 5.7 which now is the very beginning of too high – although 5 years ago, the last time I got this hemoglobin test done, mine was 5.5 and they let you go all the way up to 5.8 before they started telling you you were pre-diabetic. I now have a video appointment with my regular Dr. to follow up on all this on September 6th, but I already got a call from their office asking if I’d like to talk to a registered dietician about dietary changes to deal with my high cholesterol. While I was thinking, “fuck off” I politely said, “no thank you” to that one. Because I really don’t see what dietary changes I could make – I already eat very little meat, tons of fruits and vegetables, and exercise regularly. I do eat full fat dairy products, real butter, cream cheese, whole milk, whole milk yogurt, because they just taste better, but not very much of them. Whole milk is 4% fat so guess what – that’s 96% fat free. I wanted to tell them, hey, wanna hear what I ate today? No? well, here goes.
Breakfast: 1/2 cup lowfat cottage cheese with a tablespoon of pineapple preserves; a banana; and coffee with 2 tablespoons of (yes, the horror) whole milk.
Lunch: 2 ounce slice of homemade sourdough bread with 2 tablespoons of natural peanut butter; 2 cups of cantaloupe chunks
After work snack: the last of the cantaloupe chunks that Mark didn’t eat for his breakfast, probably a scant cup more
Dinner: 1/2 cup shelled edamame with peanut dressing; big green salad with some bad stuff – one strip of bacon, a hard boiled egg, and 2 tablespoons of grated cheese, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette; tomato crostini, two more small slices of that homemade sourdough, brushed with olive oil and toasted, rubbed with garlic, with fresh sliced tomatoes on top – sprinkled with a tiny amount of fleur du sel.
Exercise: about an hour of walking, part of the time carrying a 10-pound back pack, 8667 steps – shy of the 10,000 I aim for but it was a busy day without much time for exercise.
Point being that I – a typical middle class white woman raised in the ’60s and ’70s, have been counting calories since I was nine. I’ve been worrying and watching what I eat for over 50 years. I keep a diet & exercise diary as an app now, and am pretty good about entering everything. I think the high BP is from stress, and not sure about the high cholesterol, but I think it could be genetic. Both my parents ran a high cholesterol, and my mother ate very much like I do, and since she was a lifelong smoker, which I am not, it was lung cancer that killed her, not any of these other things. I don’t need more monitoring and advice – I need to relax about all this stuff, pay attention to my body, and eat what it tells me to. So really, Fuck off very much. Will I tell this to my Dr. in 2 weeks? Probably not, maybe something like it, a little less rant-like. Thanks for letting me practice on you.
So in the realm of possibly forbidden foods here’s what I’ve been cooking this week. Dinners were kind of uninteresting because we had lots of night of what I call some assembly required dinners, like leftovers plus salad. Monday or Tuesday we had what was left of the tomato galette – and I was on CSA recipes this week, and wrote it up, so here it is.
I do have a few more things to tell you about from the week foodwise, and we went to APT last night and saw a version of Sense & Sensibility, but speaking of cooking, I think I need to get to it right now. I’m recipe testing for the Dane County Farmer’s Market 50th anniversary book, and I’m on for some marinated grilled short ribs. I’m also supposed to test some air fried mushrooms, and initially they sounded like a nice side dish for the ribs, but I think I’ll do those another day. As long as I have to light the grill I think we’ll have grilled corn on the cob and grilled potatoes as our sides instead.
More food pics, thoughts on life, etc. to follow here – or maybe in a whole other post.