Good news... and a bit of bad?

Well, we had a wonderful, wonderful break, with a resident woodpecker in the tree outside our window. Crazy weather, with a bit of everything. It even snowed for us! What a lovely treat to wander through woodland that looked like a scene from a fairytale, complete with gorgeous views, red kites flying overhead, roaring waterfalls and beautiful icicles. Magical!

We quite surprised ourselves as we didn't go mad, even given the multiple celebrations. We mostly ate pretty sensibly (with lots of whole grain things and vegetables), but I expected the scales to have gone up a lot more than they have done as we definitely didn't count the calories in any way. What with one thing and another (er, including several Accident & Emergency visits) we didn't even do that much walking. But even though we 'treated' ourselves to a few naughty things like a couple of bottles of wine, the odd pudding and deliciously lovely full-fat cheese for a change, I've only put on a couple of pounds in total. I'm still happy at 75kg.

And the bad news? All the lovely relaxing time we spent seems to have gone right out of the window, all in the space of one morning - yesterday, to be precise. And why? Stress!

I've come back to a very hectic couple of weeks at work and have already been hit by a variety of problems I hadn't anticipated, as well as the ones I guessed I'd come back to. My boss wants to meet me 'urgently' and hasn't mentioned either when or why. It's going to take me an age to catch up with the massive pile of email and post. I'm off to the physio tomorrow, and then I'm away on a training course from Thursday. The timing could not be worse to be honest. We even have a busy weekend coming up - with a dinner party as part of that. "Oooh", you must be thinking, "the poor fat lass"!

All this is going to make it very hard to get back on track though - especially with readjusting my attitude. I need to get back into a decent morning exercise routine and good healthy food choices. It didn't help that I didn't have much time yesterday morning as I had to leave a bit early - so what did I do? I chucked some cereals in for my lunchbox - hmmm, not very appealing! OK, I ate my apple at break (well, an hour or so later) and bought myself a banana to eat with my lunch, but what I very nearly did was to say 'pooh' to it all and go for a baguette and a choccy bar. Oooh, that was close!

Oh yeah, a tip to the wise - packets of generic soup-in-a-cup look like a reasonably low calorie, warming choice for lunch or a break, don't they? Not so. They are really chemically and crap. Don't even consider buying them! I had something red and glutinous that purported to be spicy lentil soup yesterday. I don't know what was in it, could not have identified it had I been blindfolded, and am not sure I want to know as it might have been anything. It tasted truly disgusting!

Today has started in an odd way - I was inadvertently party to murder most 'fowl' this morning. Sort of a re-run of 'Who killed Cock Robin?'.

There was a little bundle of feathers in my path as I walked to catch my bus - a robin. He was obviously hurt/dazed. The poor little thing fluttered onto the middle of the road as I walked towards him and I couldn't leave him to get run over so moved closer to him to gently persuade him to move further across the road and onto the relative safety of the pavement.

I'd only just turned away to leave him to recover when a sparrowhawk pounced on him! End of robin, with only a small squeak to mark his passing. Just a couple of feet away from me, it was. I can only assume that's why the poor wee thing was a bit dazed to start with. At least it was a quick end.