Lazy weekend

I had all sorts of good intentions about this weekend, mostly involving cleaning up the yard and the house. But the heat and humidity has sapped away all of my forward momentum, and I don't think I'm going to do any of it. I've really had difficulty the past couple days. We don't have central air, and Rob hasn't put the window air conditioner into our bedroom window yet. I'm having difficulty breathing, and I get dizzy standing up. I had real trouble standing up for the hymns in church today. There is a pollution/ozone warning in Minneapolis right now, so maybe that's it. It's truly inhuman in Fiona's room (my old office), the hottest room in the house. Rob and I have decided to get her a window air conditioner. Fiona's been having trouble sleeping, and her appetite has all but disappeared. Which is not good, as her appetite is small anyway.

I've had some wonderful talks with Fiona over the past couple of days. We went to a coffee shop to escape the heat for a couple house and talked, and then came home and talked some more. She really has grown up enormously in the past year and discovered a lot of things about herself. We've talked about all sorts of things: money, her plan of study at school, her hopes to take a semester abroad, ideas for majors, fanfiction, alcohol use among her peers, writing and anxiety, her friendships, our family dynamics, politics, personal ethics, self discovery, her memories of growing up, and our family traditions she wants to carry on to her own family some day, and more. I'm so very proud of her. She's quite worried about the future (starting with the immediate future, as in, OMG, will I find a job this summer??) I'm trying to be as sympathetic as I can without increasing her stress by pressuring her; that would be absolutely unhelpful. But she's suffering a lot of anxiety about student debt, and I can't blame her. God, it would terrify me, too. I wish I could do more to help; I wish we had saved more for college. But we really couldn't do any more than we did. I still feel damn guilty, though. I've been sending her links to some of the Occupy Student movement, which is doing a lot of political work on student debt. I've been checking in with her regarding how she's handling the transition home. She says that we've drawn a good balance on treating her more like an adult (some of her friends are actually jealous, as they've had rougher transitions going home for the summer); I've said she's made it easy because she really is a good kid about checking in, keeping up apprised of her plans. She's been suffering friend withdrawal.

Delia is doing pretty well at the moment. School's out for the summer, and she has a week before she starts her summer job. She went out garage saling with the new boyfriend of the moment yesterday, and then spent some time at the local lake beach. She had a new friend sleep over last night that she met at this local teenage program she's just got involved with, Treehouse. They cut and dyed her hair last night. The cut is a sort of artsy angled cut (a little ragged since her friend did it, but she's pleased with it). She chose not a wild color, as I would have assumed she would, but a sort of chestnut brown, quite like my hair color actually. I approve. I figure that Delia's essential inner restlessness will drive her to experiment with a lot of different identities, and as an experiment, hair dye is a pretty mild one! (There was one unfortunate incident: a streak of dye that landed on some wood paneling in the bathroom which they didn't spot it and clean it up quickly before it set. Oh well. It's been our house for twenty years, and of course there is going to be occasional collateral damage.)

Tip of the day

Here's my tip of the day from eibbil_libbie:

I found a brilliant site (and am probably the last to know about it) that takes a story's URL and translates the whole thing to PDF. In seconds. The site is here and I now have PDFs of all my HP and Twi-fic...and I can delete all the chapters I have saved in Word.

What's more, you can translate them to .epub instantly, too. I now can directly download fanfics directly from, say, fanfiction.net to my ereader in seconds: with hyperlinked chapter titles and everything. Awesome. Here's the list of fanfic sites they currently support:


adifferentforest.com
adultfanfiction.net
archiveofourown.org
dramione.org
efpfanfic.net (Italian)
fanfiction.net
fictionalley.org
fictionpress.com
ficwad.com
grangerenchanted.com
harrypotterfanfiction.com
hpfandom.net
mediaminer.org
fanfiction.mugglenet.com
myvampfiction.com*
siye.co.uk
archive.skyehawke.com
sugarquill.net
twilighted.net
twiwrite.net
tthfanfic.org
whofic.com
wraithbait.com
thewriterscoffeeshop.com

The following websites will be supported, but are not yet available:

fanfiction.portkey.org
thehexfiles.net
ksarchive.com
thepetulantpoetess.com
wattpad.com
fanfiktion.de

Trying to get off sugar

I am trying to drastically cut the amount of sugar I am eating. It's an interesting challenge. I hope that it will both help with weight loss and also help my general health, including continuing to keep depression at bay. I'm not telling myself that I'm cutting out sugar permanently. It seems to work better if I just say, for now, I'll choose this instead of that; I can eat it in the future. I've had one brownie in three weeks, which is quite a bit less than usual. I have a huge weakness for Starbucks brownies, and I was eating them three times a week or so. I've made that black bean bars recipe several times, which helps, too.

One of my other new tricks is that instead of eating a bowl of ice cream after dinner, which was getting to be a very regular bad habit, I'm instead eating frozen fruit. I made some watermelon sorbet the other night, but I've also resorted to frozen strawberries and blueberries. I should get some grapes and freeze those, too. And my new crack? Frozen mango chunks. OMG so good! I've told Rob that they are now mandatory to keep in the freezer.

Sure enough, I've quite significantly cut the amount of sugar I've been eating. I'm noticed that already my tastes are changing, so that now that when I do eat sugar, what I used to like now seems too sweet. A good sign.

Are any of the rest of you trying to cut sugar? What are some of your techniques that help you outsmart the cravings?