The remnants of a winter storm that hit the US midwest last week came through the area over the weekend. Friday morning, I look outside… just a little rain, I can deal with this. Well, my umbrella is busted and i came into work with soaked boots, and jeans. It rained like that all through friday. It poured. After work, I did some groceries, treated myself to a new fucking coat because gdi I wanted it, and braved the short walk home in high winds and rain. It totally sucked.

Of course, my basement leaked. I wouldn't call it a flood, but it was pretty bad… worse than I've ever seen it leak. My basement does have a few leaks that I know I need to deal with, though money issues always tend to get in the way. This time, water trickled in through the walls practically everywhere it could reach. It got into the cold storage room where the boyfriend had been storing some things, including his mattress.

I MSNed him that night before he headed back to my house for the weekend. I told him his mattress had been ruined. Of course, he's mad. And I'll be honest too, that evening I was pretty pissed off at how mad at me he was about the mattress. I know I had told him I'd wrap it up in plastic to prevent any moisture issues, but that room had been bone dry for as long as I've lived in that house, so I never, ever expected anything in there to get ruined to water damage.

Anyway, we decided to salvage the mattress and the first thing that needed to be done was to get it out of the basement to dry it off on the front porch. (the porch is covered, the backyard deck is not). It took two tries to get that fucking thing out of my basement. I don't even know how they managed to put in in there when the boy first moved in. He succumbed to allergies and frustration the first time we tried. The next time, we were pretty much ruthless. Through force, we squashed and bent the mattress and squeezed and dragged it up those stairs.

Never again will I store anything like that in my basement. As much as I love my boy with all my heart, as soon as he finds his own place, that mattress and his futon couch are out of here. Having my house back will have some benefits for my sanity.

I'm always on the lookout for the perfect combination which could bring me good energy, mental strength and general well being. I'm not sure I can find that in the 3-4 coffees I have a day, or the glass of wine every dinner, or my recent indulgences in unsavoury foods. I gave myself the excuse: I have to do something for me, I have to allow myself certain pleasures which I've never allowed myself before. That's great, and now that that's past, I'm left the same, lethargic, out of shape person.

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker one day, which inspired me to pick up a book he mentioned that his s/o was reading: Skinny Bitch. It's supposedly a diet book, but it's more like a 125 page rant about the american food industry, more particularly the meat and dairy industry. It heavily promotes veganism, and does it in that puerile “no-nonsense”, bitch-talk with attitud attitude prose. The reader is berated about bad habits, and of course there's an entire chapter devoted to sledgehammering you over the head about slaughterhouse abuse and practices. Fun, reading. Because I can see where these chicks are getting at (and of course, pretty much agreeing with a lot of what they had to say), the prose, rant and subject matter didn't really bother me. However, it was supposed to be a book about losing weight.. and it doesn't really tell you in any scientific terms why switching to organic, vegan foods help you lose weight.

As a vegetarian for 11 years, I can most certainly tell people that vegetarianism alone doesn't make you lose weight. Neither does veganism, especially in places where delicious vegan foods are readily available. To me, ridding your body of all the crap that goes onto and into food production, detoxifying yourself of all those drugs and hormones they put into meat, and killing sugar and caffeine and other retarded addictions from your diet make complete sense to me. However, unfortunately the book doesn't really go into why it'll help you lose weight. In short terms, it basically just tells you it's crap, then goes on to list references from other publications telling you why it's crap. Meh. I wonder if it continues to perpetuate the stereotype that vegans are all snotty wannabe activists.

It was a fun read, and a good boost to get someone into vegetarianism/veganism, but it was hardly a diet book IMO. Still, I shelled out the twenty bucks at Chapters for it and read it the next morning. There was advice in it I already knew… I don't know why it took me reading the book to decide to really get into it. Stuff like getting sugar and caffeine out of my system and drinking 8 glasses of water a day.

I've already started a bit this weekend. I'm thinking tomorrow I'll get into it full swing. Green tea instead of coffee in the morning, I should always be drinking water and I will need to eat more fruits and veggies. I don't feel like I really need to lose weight, if anything I should tone up a bit more (back to yoga perhaps), but I really want to stop feeling constantly tired, bored, and listless. I need to be able to focus and concentrate better on whatever I'm doing. Hopefully getting rid of some of the crap in my life will help me. I'm probably due up for a detox, but the holidays would be a really bad time for that.