Bats and Hawks and Little Brothers

We went out to my dad's place, about an hour outside of Vegas in Logandale. Hot as hell...literally. He has a thermometer on the porch, in the damn shade, and it read 118 degrees. In the SHADE, ya'll. Ridiculous.

Logandale is the country, about 1000 feet lower than Vegas, which makes it hotter. But it's in a lake basin and super fertile and green. Lots of farms and it's just super lush compared to Vegas and it's 'desert landscaping', which basically means rocks in your front yard.

We left about dusk, and just as everyone was outside (I have eight siblings, remember...and my nephews, and my step-mom, and a family friend thrown in) the bats came out. A zillion bats. And a few hawks diving for them. I got a little paranoid about those hawks...hoping they didn't get the notion to divebomb my baby. Seriously, they were that close. The bats were freaking me out. They came within inches of the people.

At one point in the afternoon one of my nephews got the idea to weigh and measure everyone. Oh yeah. Yep. I'm stepping on a scale when I easily outweigh the next heaviest person (Jill) by 75 pounds, and both of us are the only two who weigh more than 200 pounds. Not even. I was pretty proud of myself though that I didn't get any anxiety over it. I just said, "yeah, no thanks."

I didn't overeat either. I did eat one and a half of the best, softest, yummiest oatmeal raisin cookies in the world. Totally worth the 300 calories. I compensated by eating less at dinner--because I needed less since I'd eaten the cookies, plus a few chips and Kev's homemade salsa.

One thing that I've decided lately--I'm going to do my best to make sure that I eat the very freshest, best food I can afford. A nice salad, three or four ounces of grilled chicken breast with Montreal seasoning, and a chewy dinner roll--it was easy to skip the pork ribs. The cookies were delicious and worth the calories. I would have eaten two of them, but I shared with Ruby.

I'm starting to feel much more confident about my ability to stay at or just under 2000 calories in a day. I haven't gone over about 2300 calories since the second week of May. And even 2300 calories is okay--it's my outer limit. For those days when I'm just feeling hungrier. According to the calculators I've found online, my body needs about 3100 calories to maintain my weight at my current activity level.

I took today off the gym. Tomorrow my plan is to get in my 60-minute bike ride, plus swim with Kevin and the kids afterward. I'd like to do 15 miles in the hour. That's my goal. I did 8.5 in thirty minutes on Wednesday. (And by swim I mean splash around in the pool, which isn't exactly laps--but it's way more active than sitting in front of this damn machine, right? Right!) HAHA!