I recently returned from my parents’ house, where I fed their feeshies (mostly young tropical goldfish, plus a last surviving tilapia my dad caught fishing) while my parents are vacationing in Guilin, China this week. I was looking forward to hanging at the ‘rents by myself, as they usually have food in the fridge, which is a detail lacking in my own home. A huge, gaping detail. They didn’t have much food as they ate most perishables in preparation for their vacation, but I did dig out some multigrain rice which I ate with some bittermelon and cucumber cold dish my mom still had in the fridge. In the freezer, I was excited to find a few Marie Callender’s boxed chicken pot pies, and continued making a glorious pig of myself with one’s almost-immediate consumption. And then I saw that each pie contained 460 calories, more than half of which were from fat. Geez. What’s next? I dug some more in the freezer and found a cardboard cylinder of vanilla ice cream. Yech. It’s just like my parents to buy vanilla, what a waste of ice cream. If you’re gonna get that most sinful of frozen desserts, it should be worth your calories, you know? Like chocolate malted crunch, or mint chip, at least black cherry. But wait, what’s that in there? Another carton in a different color! I pulled it out. French vanilla. *sigh* About one-third of the way through the first carton, I managed enough willpower to put the spoon away.

What brings on the good appetite? Well, two things. I’m happy. I’m relaxed. After work today, Mr. W and I had a brief and affectionate chat about what’s making me drag my feet in all this wedding planning. I confessed I was giving him time to realize that this isn’t really something he wants to do as doing the domestic thing with me goes against all the plans for his future that he’d dreamed about before meeting me. After his two kids are well off into adulthood (son’s 18 and daughter will be 17 in a month), he was going to retire, sell his property, and travel the world like a vagabond. That lifestyle isn’t exactly conducive to raising an elementary school-age kid with me. He said that you can’t predict life and that sometimes you think a river is going to flow one way and then an unexpected rock or something makes it change its course; it’s natural. But a river isn’t going to wake up resentful one night cuz it’s stuck in a house in a California suburb instead of on a boat in the Caribbean because of a 5-year-old asleep in the next room that it didn’t want (to borrow an image from a friend). He laughed at me and said, “Go plan the wedding.” Turned out he had a whole other dream in his head now — one that involves being a retired dad, who’s going to bring his young hot Asian wife (okay, those are my edits) into early retirement so that we could be super-involved PTA parents, the kind of over-involved parents that other parents complain about with “Who calls a meeting at 10:40 on a weekday morning?! Don’t they have a life?” so that we could vote each others’ motions in without other parental intervention (joke). And when the child is young, we’d do “educational” travels with him/her in the country, and as the child got older, we’d do farther and more extended traveling, maybe during summer break, visiting our varied heritages in China, Taiwan, Germany, etc. Other kids get to look at photos of the Great Wall of China, our child will bring in show-and-tell photos of him standing ON it. That’s pretty cool. Altho I don’t think I’m game on the spending one year in this country, and the next in another country, thing. I’d like my child to have stable schooling, if possible, and not have to make new friends every year just to lose them again the next year. How traumatic. I love that I have friends with whom I could make some reference from decades ago, because they were there through some event with me.

The other reason I ate like a little piggy tonite is cuz my gym trainee and I stepped up our game at the gym this week. She’s now familiar enough with the gym, gym equipment, and proper form to really work on strength training. So we dropped our cardio down to just the 5-10 minute warmup in the beginning, and then we hit the weights hardcore. We increased all of our weights at least 20% and dropped our reps from 15 relatively comfortable reps to 10 very difficult ones, working to failure. And because we’re working to failure (stopping when we absolutely are unable to push another rep in good form), we’ve split up our target muscle groups into 2 days: Monday and Thursday are upper body (chest, back, biceps, triceps, shoulders), Tuesday and Friday are lower body (quads, hamstrings, calves, abs), with a day of cardio on Wednesday to rest, plus hopefully cardio on weekends. The results should be tighter, leaner muscles, increased metabolism, and improved strength. Several women have brought up concerns already that we’re gonna “bulk up”, to which I reply that we don’t have the testosterone in male bodies to bulk up, and we’re not going to take steroids to compete for Ms. Universe, either. It’s a pretty common misconception that women are gonna look like men if they do heavy weights, and hopefully my gym trainee (who did not have that misconception, much to my relief) and I will dispel that myth among people who come into contact with us. I observed very early on, like a decade ago, that you almost never see a fat chick on the weight floor, but you do see plenty of them on the cardio equipment and aerobics room. What’s that tell you? My gym trainee is looking great, by the way. Just today, someone stopped me in the Clerk’s Office and said that she noticed my trainee’s arms look toned, which she saw through my trainee’s sweater. “Did you tell HER that?” I asked the complimenter. She said she did. I’m glad my trainee’s getting verbal support, cuz I know that we certainly do get a lot of haters who tell us we’re obsessive and should skip the gym to indulge in lard-bucket lunches with them.