Push it to the limit

My Hub, who is not a singer, has taken to doing dancy performances of some song involving the words "push it to the limit" (I might recognize it, were I in any way confident that the tune he's using has a relationship to the tune of the actual song) when I'm on the exercise bike. He's such an adorable dork.

He is, by the way, losing weight. Five pounds, last time he checked. To his great surprise, in spite of changing his diet not at all, exercise is enough for him at this point. (Which is what I've been telling him for years, but whatever.) His gut is shrinking, he informs me, and he has to wear a belt to keep his pants up. I'm so proud.

He decided to figure out how to use some Textured Vegetable Protein chunks, and did experiments. He did something with taco seasoning, and browned it (it browns!... well, I guess it would, it's protein after all) and came up with some awesome taco "meat". Genius. However, then I got horrible gas pain that made me want to die, so in the future TVP experiments will also involve Beano.

With TVP and tofu running cheaper than meat, and now that he's decided that he doesn't hate either one, he's declaring the genius of my "save money, eat vegetarian" plan. Yay!

He misses meat, it seems; he is too cheap to buy himself red meat, so his total meat consumption this month has been pepperoni, chicken tenders from Trader Joe's-- frozen individually in one of those big plastic bags-- fish fillets from Trader Joe's-- also frozen individually in one of those big plastic bags. The thing about the fish fillets and the chicken tenders is that he doesn't have to bother thawing them; they're thin enough to toss directly into the pan. No red meat in the house, however, and this weekend he started to noisily miss it.

So we go out for dinner, and I was expecting him to get beef, beef, and more beef, and be noisily happy that he didn't have to eat anything vegetarian. He did indeed order a hamburger, but before that point he was drooling over a few of the vegetarian sandwiches on the menu. I love this man. Unrepentant carnivore, but he also doesn't really care what something is made of, as long as it's tasty, so any tasty vegetarian fare goes into his mental "things that are great to eat" file, mixed right in with everything else, not in a sub-category. And now he's figuring out how to cook TVP. I am keeping him, big time.

My pants fit a bit better. Nothing huge, but the scary muffin top/camel toe thing has receded, and I am able to fit (not well) into my skinny pants, albeit with the scary muffin top/camel toe thing. Hey, it's progress. Slow progress, but I'll take what I can get.

My knee decided that it hated me, though, and I had to press my Hub into service to haul the laundry up from the laundry room (three floors, poor boy) because going up and down the stairs just murdered me. I iced it, and stretched it, and it got better. Still kind of scary.

Sadly, now that we're feeling like we ought to go jogging again, it has abruptly become FREAKING HOT out. Boooo. I'm scanning ahead for a break in the weather so we can test this out again, dammit.

And that's all I got right now.