All My Exes Live in Texas

Hey yall! Yesterday was a great day. I really enjoyed perusing the stuff at city market with my girlfriend and a friend of mine from high school that happens to go to the same WW meeting. I ended up picking up some of my standard fare that I'd normally get at the grocery store like bananas, green onions and tomatoes, but I also picked up some stuff I've been meaning to get like flax seed, tumeric, red hot pepper powder and although the bison dude was out of flank steaks, I picked up some stew meat instead. Now I'm gonna decide how to marinate them and I'll make some steak burritos with black beans and rice. My girlfriend was luke-warm to the concept (partly because of the inflated price), but I would be thrilled to make the switch from beef to bison. The nutrition information speaks for itself. No matter how lean a cut of beef you get, the bison beats it out in every category.

After that, we wandered over to the Asian market and walked up and down the aisles, browsing the exotic foods and enthusiastic packaging with broken English. The girls decided to try these strange fruit-flavored, individually portioned translucent jellies. I grabbed a bottle of hoisin sauce for my stir fry and a pack of nori and sushi mat because I've been really thinking about giving homemade sushi a shot.

We came home to briefly decompress in the afternoon, then jumped back in the car to get some incidentals at Targ-Mart and some groceries. While we were picking up toothbrushes and stuff, we wandered over to the lawn and garden section and started looking at some charcoal grills. I'm ashamed to admit I've never lived at a place that allowed me to have a grill before I moved to my house, but even so, I have lived here for almost 1 ½ years now and still never got one. We've been talking about getting one for a while so when we saw a pretty decent 30" grill for only 30 bucks, she offered it as a suggestion for my birthday this Saturday. I agreed it'd be a great gift, so we snagged it, a bag of charcoal and some grilling tools. I'm lookin forward to grilling some bison steaks, shrimp skewers and corn on the cob all Summer.

Speaking of birthday stuffs, I've pretty much got my plan in place. A couple of us up here in KC are going to pile up in my car and drive down to Dallas, stopping off at my father's 100 miles down the road to trade up my car for his Jeep Liberty (lest the passengers die from lack-of-legroom syndrome). I'm really looking forward to it because the 14th is not just the day I emerged into this world 29 years ago. It is also the day that Dallas is celebrating St. Patrick's Day this year. I am going to celebrate my birthday with pints of Guinness and Bailey's on the rocks. I won't be weighing in that day, nor will I be updating the blog from Friday afternoon when we leave until Monday evening when we return. I promise to have a treat for yall when I return, though: some pictorial love. I won't have the official progress photo taken until I crest that triple-digits-lost goal, but I'll show ya something else.

So I've covered the Texas portion of this post, but what about the exes? I started this journey with triple-X shirts starting to hug me a little tight. I still have some of my XXX wardrobe in the rotation and I'm starting to wonder how much longer I can get away with wearing stuff that baggy. Even the XXLs are starting to get a little loose.Well, today I decided to try on my favorite Star Wars t-shirt just to see how close I'm getting to XL. It isn't quite ready for its public debut (nor will it ever if my GF has anything to say about it), but it is definitely getting close. I'm actually right now at about the size I was at the end of high school. Back then, I was stretching my XLs out as much as possible to avoid the inevitability of being forced to move up to XXL. Considering I have 40-60 pounds to go, I may very well be wearing larges when all is said and done. I didn't even know those were real sizes for adult men when I started losing. Therefore, I've decided that one of my non-numeric goals is now to get to a size where I can wear that shirt without feeling awkward or uncomfortable, at which point I'll take a picture and share it with the world. I know you're just itching to see it.

For now, though. I've got my sights set on the big dog: 100 pounds lost. It's so close, I can almost taste it. I bet it tastes like fresh crisp salad and with grilled chicken breast, fat free cheddar and light french dressing. I could be wrong, that may just be my lunch.