* Didn't watch the Big Game, but judging from my Twitter feed, I didn't miss much. (As much tv as I did watch yesterday, it was mostly re-runs of "The Incredible Dr. Pol" though some episodes I've seen so many times I reflexively switch away when it's an animal I know will wind up not making it...)
*I worked some more on the current quilt top. I have almost all the "fancy" blocks done, then I have eighteen plainer ones, then I can set it together.
* I also ripped out and restarted the "Socks for the Deputy Headmistress." I had made some bad mistake in the beginning rows of the knit-purl pattern and figured just starting over was better.
* Had fasting blood work this morning. I've been eating more carefully but did not do the "restrict added sugars 100%" thing I've done in the past, so we'll see. I hope everything is good. I do feel as if I've lost a little weight with my new, more-careful eating plan, based on how my clothes feel - especially my "high waist" seems to be slimmer. (My new "eating plan" - not calling it a "diet" - is reducing the amount of carbohydrates and added sugars I eat (mainly by sharply curtailing dessert-type things, or replacing them with fruit), and also eating more vegetables. It's the boring old eating plan most doctors recommend but it does seem to work for me. I DO allow myself periodic "splurges" and already have planned that when ever I take my "birthday fun day" I am going to get whatever food I want from a restaurant, and I might even stop and pick up a big cupcake on my way home)
I broke the fast with an apple fritter from the donut place on the way back to my office on the grounds that if you can EVER have a sugar-dipped, fried treat, it is right after you fasted for 16 hours and had blood drawn.
This time the phlebotomist was on time, though I can't be too cranky about last time: she had trouble getting her kids ready for school, she said.
It was interesting to hear how different people checked in. I said "I'm here for fasting bloodwork," the woman after me said "here to donate to your vampire," and then a couple other people just said "labs."
* I started reading "The Silver Branch" the other night (Didn't get very far; that was the night I think I had the GI virus and my concentration was not good). I'm enjoying it thus far even if it *isn't* the continuation of the Marcus/Esca/Cottia story (apparently Marcus and Cottia were the grandparents, or perhaps the great-grandparents, of one of the men in this novel).
One thing I like about it is how vividly it is written. I find this is often the case with slightly-older novels that were aimed at children/teens - you can imagine the sounds and the smells and what the interiors look like, all of that. (In some ways, the style of the writing reminds me a bit of Susan Cooper's "Dark is Rising" sequence). It's the kind of book I can "lose myself" in, and I like that.
(I'm still reading "Père Goriot" but I find the cynicism one of the characters is expressing: that apparently everything you do in life, you should only do for your own advancement, and there is no such thing as love, etc., etc. kind of depressing. I can't tell if Balzac is parodying that attitude or if he is actually speaking his philosophy to the reader through the character. I kept thinking "This is nothing like Un Cœur Simple that we read in high school French" but now I think of it, that must have been Flaubert... and that had a very different tone to it: "here is this uneducated, unknown woman, who has nothing to her name AND YET she has value because she loves the children she cares for and her parrot and she can commune with God." I think I like Flaubert better than Balzac...)
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