Best laid plans and all that

First of all, I need to lose five pounds. I was 134.8 this morning--still within my acceptable goal range, but waaaay at the top end of it. So I need to get serious about exercising and eating well again. I told Brian this when I got up this morning (he was up watching Return of the King and drinking beer at 7 a.m. I guess his internal clock is adjusting just fine.) and 20 minutes later he offered to make me sausage and eggs for breakfast. I said no and stuck with my Life cereal.

I never made it to the gym yesterday. At 11:15 I got a call from a coworker in my department saying "you know we're all going out to lunch today to celebrate the end of the Grand Prix, right?" Well, no, I didn't know that. But I couldn't gracefully get out of it, so I went and had grilled chicken ceasar salad with no croutons (still too much dressing though), came back to a meeting that lasted an hour and a half and then had just enough time to finish up two proposals I had been working on so I didn't go to the gym. But I figured I could at least run again while Claire was at her swimming lesson, right? That didn't work either--there was a special ed community forum last night I wanted to attend, so I went to that, stopped at the grocery store on the way back, got home, had pizza for dinner at 9:15, got the kids to bed too late, packed lunches, and fell asleep on the sofa. So no exercise yesterday, and my food wasn't too good either. OTOH, I was too busy to snack yesterday so I didn't gorge on cookies or anything!

Sort of off-topic, but I'm very tempted to become a vegetarian. I was listening to a story on NPR this morning about attempts to revive the black footed ferret (or something; it's the only native North American ferret species) which was once thought extinct. They are running into problems because the ferrets prey on prairie dogs and the prairie dog population is diminishing because ranchers poison them so that they don't eat the grass that they need for their cattle. That's the Reader's Digest version--the whole story is a bit more complicated, but you get the idea. Anyway, I was listening to them interviewing a rancher who was explaining that these are the grasslands and there should be grass on the grasslands and all these prairie dogs are causing problems because they eat the grass and I'm thinking "he's blaming the PRAIRIE DOGS for eating the grass?" That would be like me blaming Connor who eats next to nothing for my high grocery bills! Hello? Prairie dog? Little bitty thing so small that a ferret can kill it? Compared to a herd of cattle that are so huge that they cause ozone damage? So clearly (to me at least) the solution is to get rid of the large beast that isn't even native to the territory if we want to preserve the grasslands and let the prairie dogs and ferrets have the run of the place. So I'm thinking I just need to stop eating beef. Not that I do very often, but it's the principle of the thing.