Day 18, would you believe it?

God, but it's good to be back on plan. I have to admit that I'm a planner. I love plans, lists, spreadsheets, calculations, the whole shebang. Nothing makes me happier than putting together a plan, and nothing discombobulates me more than when life pops up and renders that plan invalid.

You would've thought that I would have discovered the joys of planning out my food for the day before this, but nope, apparently not. I'm getting it now, though. How I love waking up in the morning and knowing what I'm going to eat!

Things are going to get even more plannified, it seems, because starting next week our company is on summer hours-- which means we work an extra hour for the first four days of the week and then jet out of here four hours early on Friday. A truly awesome idea, that. Let me ponder why:

1) For the first time since he agreed to start getting up at 5:20 AM to keep me company in the mornings, my Hub actually has a reason to get up and get moving. While I work out, he'll be in charge of putting together our lunch and any breakfast supplies that we need (and possibly, if I can get him trained properly, my midmeals). He'll have an actual morning routine consisting of Things To Do, instead of occasionally doing things in the midst of farting around on the internet for a few hours. This pleases me. He tends to be more industrious when there's a time limit and a goal.

2) I'll be forced to pare down my wander-around time in the mornings, which is GOOD. The more wandering around, the harder it is to actually get started working out. Starting Sunday night, I'll have to set up for the next morning's exercise before I go to bed-- put out the weights and fetch the exercise ball, make sure my PDA is in place, plugged in to charge, and keyed to the correct screen for when I turn it on, and have my music (via iTunes or iPod) set in place and ready to go. Hell, I may even put out the garbage bags for the post-HIIT kitty litter scoopage. The goal here is to be able to turn off the alarm clock, kiss the Hub awake, put on my gear, hit the bathroom to put up my hair and take all my pills, then roll directly into the correct room, strap on my gear, and get moving-- within five minutes. We'll see how that goes.

3) More planning for meals-- although, granted, most of this was already going. I've been weaning us off of frozen meals, so now the plan is to cook big batches of lunches on the weekends, pack them up (God help me, I've ordered a case of 250 16 oz. microwavable containers for this purpose), and have grab-and-go capability restored. I'm just too excited about this.

4) Even MORE planning for meals, hooray! I have halfway convinced my Hub that if we're gonna be working an extra hour most days, the likelihood that we'll want to figure out what to eat after we get home is even smaller than usual. I'm hoping to be able to bust out a meal plan of sorts-- not so much "we will eat this meal on this day" but "we have these five options for meals: pick one!" My Hub hates to over-plan, even while he admits that my insane planning streak is responsible for most of the order in our lives (in that same vein, he's the one of us who can actually respond during an emergency, while I just freeze), so giving him no options is, well, not an option.

5) Breakfast at work! Which is actually a good thing, because it means that it'll be much more likely that my Hub will eat a regular breakfast. (He has been eating breakfast all week, I must say. Pancakes on Sunday, oatmeal on Monday, oatmeal on Tuesday, and some kind of quesadilla thing he made this morning. Good boy.) I can't wait to see how this works.

All in all, very good things. I've also discovered that by having half-days off every Friday, we'll be able to stretch our budgeted vacation days like mad: if we give ourselves a three-day weekend by taking Friday entirely off, it only counts as taking a half day. Twice as many three-day weekends for us! Hot damn!

My Hub is feeling much better, and thank God for that. I am now badgering him to go through Eating For Life, since I bought the damn thing in order to soothe his nerves. (Grrr.) I want to be able to plan out our grocery list based on what we need for meals, not have to cobble together meals out of our grocery list, and that requires a bit of discussion and planning. If he doesn't do it on his own tonight, I'm going to hide his computer until he does.

Speaking of El Hubbo and EFL, something amusing happened last night. I'd made some of those Fortified Fudgecicles (recipe needs tweaked, but definitely not bad) on Saturday, and my Hub discovered them last night while roaming around in search of dessert items. He roamed back out of the kitchen with one in hand. "When did you make these? These are great!" My jaw was on the floor. Eventually, when he demanded to know the recipe, I had to admit that it was made of sugar-free/fat-free pudding mix, evaporated milk... and cottage cheese. That's when he froze and stared at the fudgecicle suspiciously. "There's WHAT in them?"

He concluded that he likes them, but no longer trusts me not to put cottage cheese in things. Poor boy.

I kicked my own ass with HIIT this morning. By the time I was done, I was just gushing sweat all over the place. Truly awesome. I love that my little PDA program will time me and keep track of what minute I'm on and what level I should be pushing myself at... I just wish the little alarm was louder, or that the whole screen would flash. As it is, I can't hear the alarm over the sound of the treadmill, the fan, and my iPod.

I'm hoping to be able to bump things up about 1/2 mph by the end of my first BFL month. Knock on wood. For all I know I'm going too fast; I have no heart rate monitor so there's no way to tell.

Oooh, almost lunchtime. Pork fried "rice" (bulgar, actually), green beans, and Jell-O. Yum.