We had a holiday pretty well from Jane’s birthday back in October, (with intermissions of atonement)—then Thanksgiving, small dose of atonement, then the week before Christmas, with goodies both arriving and abounding, we began to be ‘bad’, with pizza and cinnamon sticks, ice cream (they now make a no-sugar-added and a low carb ice cream: Lucerne from Safeway is particularly good, so we had a couple of gallons of that.) And pasta. And went out to eat a few times. And fruit cake; and champagne. And once out to the sinful waffle house. And an entire tin of Almond Roca, plus an entire tin of Scottish shortbread cookies…

Well, can you wonder we gained some weight? I gained six pounds, Jane maybe a bit more (she says she won’t torment herself by checking until she’s started down)—so now we diet.

I am delighted to report that once a communique from the mouth went to the brain (it’s back to the strict side of the diet, ma’am, and it’s that meatloaf again)—the weight peeled off at high speed. I began losing 2 lbs a day, so you may guess there was not much substantial about that weight gain: water weight—but nothing the body thought it should hang on to. Jane is back where she was; I’m one pound away from it; and this 3 days after a very indulgent (clean up the candy and cookies and pasta) New Year’s Day.

I’m even cheating a little on the resumption of the diet, giving us a cup of veggies outside the evening entree. So the body ‘remembers’ what it’s apt to get, ergo what it needs to pare down to.

We are continuing the office cleanup. I have now a batch of completed business papers over 6 inches high: this represents, after rejecting some of the attachments which no longer matter, and clipping everything neatly into clam clips, half the file drawer. I have drawer 2 to go, but the fact the printer and I have reached a peace in which I feed it paper loosely and carelessly (which is what it’s designed for) and it doesn’t paper-jam; and I have set the Adobe thingie for 2-sided, in which it queries me to be sure, because we have a lot of papers with surprises on the backside. These papers are going to go into a plastic bin, and I am beginning to think there are very many other things that would do better in electronic, searchable form. I’m finding a lot of unsigned duplicates of contracts I have in signed form. Those can go.

And I can do this when taking a break from the story, which is also starting to move. It’s hard to write during the holidays…