Do you remember long ago, when I posted a venting post about the Crazy Cake that is so beloved in Paul’s family? It is a Depression Era cake, and so it contains no eggs, no butter, and only one tablespoon of baking cocoa per entire layer of “chocolate” cake. (Those quotation marks are just as bitchy as you imagine.)

Trust me that I know and understand that a Beloved Family Recipe can taste DELICIOUS to a person, even if it has no butter and no eggs and features a Depression-Era skimp on cocoa. (And of course it is LOVELY to have a cake option like this if you are looking for a dairy/egg-free cake for allergy reasons, though I’d advise DRAMATICALLY INCREASING the cocoa.) We have similar recipes in my own family, including a cherished delight that has come down through the generations and is nothing more than pork sausage seasoned with salt and pepper and baked into rolls of white bread dough, then dipped into ketchup; this is our HUGE SPECIAL OCCASION meal. We also have a green Jell-o salad that has cottage cheese in it, so please don’t think I don’t understand sentimental family recipes.

But I also understand that my sentimental family recipes are not OBJECTIVELY good to people who didn’t grow up with them and so have neither the “family” nor the “sentimental” elements. I expect Paul to eat the white-bread-wrapped sausage rolls on my family’s special occasions, but I don’t expect him to talk about how AMAZING and EXCEPTIONAL the recipe is, which is what his family does about this cake. It’s so MOIST! It’s so DELICIOUS! It’s the BEST CAKE EVER! Not like those inferior “BOX” mixes! (They say their quotes all bitchy-like, too.)

So if this cake is cherished to you because of you grew up with it and your grandma baked it whenever you visited or whatever, and your family always brings it out on special occasions, I DO get where you are coming from. But I think in order to discuss the cake further, we need to remember and agree that it is a DEPRESSION ERA cake. It was meant to substitute for the real thing when essential ingredients were not available. It’s like a diet recipe that uses fat-free “cream” and artificial sweetener and cottage cheese and applesauce to simulate a dessert. It is a MAKE-DO dessert, a SURVIVAL dessert. We now have ACCESS to the butter and eggs and cream and sugar and cocoa, so GOD KNOWS why we would continue to make do with the survival cake. On the other hand, I now have the option to eat filet mignon on Christmas Eve but I would greatly prefer my salt/pepper sausage wrapped in white bread and dipped in ketchup, and I would resent any attempts to tell me the filet mignon was “better,” so I DO get it. (But if our recipe had been made from inferior ingredients during the Depression, like suet and tongue-end mixed with stale bread crumbs to simulate meat, you can bet I’d substitute the better ingredients now that we had them, rather than preserving The Original Recipe.)

In short, I have feelings and opinions about this cake, and yet I am committed to making this cake for Paul every year on his birthday, and I am committed to doing it with as good an attitude as I can muster: I will tell YOU how frustrating I find it, but I will not vent to HIM. (Much.) (Anymore.) And also, I have a certain percentage of self-identity invested in my baking, and food/gifts are my love language, and so I want it to be as good as possible: I take no pleasure (very little pleasure) in having it come out terrible. I have re-copied his mother’s recipe onto my own index card in my own handwriting, to reduce the resentment I feel and hopefully improve the results by not making me feel as if her grating, critical, bossy voice is in my ear. I have committed to NOT trying to substitute butter/eggs/etc. to make it taste “better,” remembering that I would not want Paul to substitute any ingredients in one of my cherished family recipes, if he ever made one of my cherished family recipes for me.

But here is the thing: for at least the last half-dozen years, and possibly longer, the cake has come out IMPOSSIBLY BADLY. It NEVER came out of the pan easily, but it used to come out in no more than two to three pieces per layer, and I could paste those together with frosting and resentment—but the last half-dozen years, it has had to be SPOONED out of the pan in chunks. I am not exaggerating when I say I have cried and screamed, literally cried and screamed, after carefully carefully carefully applying Crisco and flour to the cake pans, carefully following the recipe, and still getting oily pale-brown chunks that can’t be formed into a cake. Paul has had to spend more than one Birthday Eve reassuring me that it’s okay and it doesn’t matter and that he’ll have something else as his birthday dessert, and no one should have to do that on their Birthday Eve and/or on the topic of their once-per-year special sentimental dessert. THIS CANNOT CONTINUE.

Here is where you come in, I HOPE: If you make this recipe as a Cherished Family Cake and you like it, can you tell me anything you do that HAS to be done to make it come out right? Maybe I copied it wrong from my mother-in-law’s stupid picky bossy recipe card. Or maybe it literally requires two tablespoons of actual vanilla extract (that’s the same as the amount of cocoa), at the current non-Depression-Era price of roughly six dollars, and maybe everything is going wrong because I substituted imitation vanilla or because I made the assumption that 2 T. was a transcription error and it should have been 2 t. Maybe my attempt to add more cocoa is the problem, though I have tried going back to the original two tablespoons, with no improvement. Maybe there was an instruction about removal-from-the-pans that I thought I could do without. Or maybe when I rolled my eyes at instructions such as “Beat exactly two minutes BY THE CLOCK!!!!,” I was rolling my eyes at actual essential elements of the magic spell. I may have worked in a bakery, but that doesn’t mean I understand MAGICAL SPELLS. I will accept the magical spell from YOUR family’s recipe, even as I resisted it from Paul’s family recipe. I will accept YOUR gentle guidance even though I rejected Paul’s mother’s bossy fist. (Gah, that woman was the WORST with recipes. All of them were either “Oh, I don’t really use measurements or instructions” with a merry little laugh, or else SUPER DUPER EXCESSIVELY PICKY AND DETAILED WITH LOTS OF ALL-CAPS.)

And I’m not above some fussy prissiness in a recipe. When I was on Weight Watchers, if you had told me I needed to whip a mixture for two full minutes, or use the fat-free sugar-free version of an item, or use ground oatmeal instead of flour, I would absolutely have done it without blinking or flinching. And now that I’m on keto, if you told me to use a particular kind of meat, or use more butter, or use a specific weird expensive sugar substitute, I would be similarly all-in. “Doing it the right way” is not a problem as long as it is not my mother-in-law telling me what is right. (And if you’ve never had a single problem and it’s the easiest/best cake in the world and you don’t know what I could be talking about, you know that’s not helpful and you can keep it.)

Follow-up: After writing this post, I impulsively decided to make the cake in a no-birthday-pressure environment, just to see what happened, and maybe to get some good photos of it sticking to the pan. And instead it came out beautifully, and did not fall apart into any chunks. Here are the things I did that may or may not have been important:

• A wet-ingredients bowl and a dry-ingredients bowl, and not combining until the last minute. Which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.

• Then mixing them for EXACTLY TWO MINUTES BY THE CLOCK (with one pause to scrape the bowl), which I have done before, because see also: really trying to get this right, even if it means allowing end results to take priority over irritations and resentments.

• Letting the cakes cool for 15 minutes, then using a soft spatula to go around the edges before de-panning, which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.

• I did, however, QUADRUPLE the cocoa powder, because 1 T. per cake layer is nothing more than FOOD COLORING. Even a QUADRUPLE amount is not really enough, but I don’t want to ruin Paul’s childhood memories. But I have increased the cocoa before without him noticing/minding.

Second follow-up: Wait. Wait wait wait. THE OVEN. Our oven was gradually failing for a number of years, then we recently replaced it, but then we moved so I never tried the cake in the new oven. The new house has an oven that we have noticed is very good: some things that were troublesome to bake before are now non-troublesome. And “oven” is the only answer I can think of that explains why I USED to be able to make the cake come out right, but then couldn’t anymore.

The existence of snow is enough to defeat me this year. On a day when it does NOT snow, and when the previous snow has been handled/melted/dried to the point that the roads/driveways are clear and dry, I can just barely make myself do the absolutely required tasks of my life: I can shower and dress, I can go for groceries, I can take the children to their appointments, I can keep us in clean laundry. I can’t unpack any more boxes, but that genuinely can wait, and also I tell myself that with every week that goes by without needing the contents of those boxes, I am another week closer to knowing if I can get rid of that stuff entirely. (This does not work when, for example, I buy another box of envelopes because I can’t face digging out the stationery/office box. But it works for SOME things.)

But the snow! It’s a giant mess that just DROPS on us! Just drops EVERYWHERE! And we have to go outside and CLEAN IT ALL UP. And we CAN’T really clean it all up, so then we have dirty slush everywhere, and we track it everywhere, and it falls off the bottom of our cars into our nice clean garages, and our terrible children walk across our nice clean floors without taking their shoes off and then say “Oh whoops” like it’s not the end of the world!

And when it snows, it makes a mess of SCHEDULES, too. Appointments that are now difficult and dangerous to get to! Errands that need to be delayed until we can shovel out! Driveways that MUST be shoveled by 8:00 a.m. because someone is coming to clean/deliver! Trips to the grocery store that have to be done earlier than planned (along with half the town) or else later (when the milk/eggs/bread/cheese situation is getting dire, and slush gets tracked inside with every load).

Moving during winter was a terrible idea. We have this new giant steep depressing driveway that I already hated before shoveling was a factor, plus we have to keep going over to the old house to shovel THAT driveway TOO. And we discovered something new for me to resent about the new house: the roof is set up so that it dumps snow directly in front of the two doors. The last time it snowed, I carefully shoveled that whole entire area (walking a distance with each shovelful, because there’s nowhere to PUT the snow)—and a couple of hours later, it was as if I hadn’t been out there at all: over a foot of snow, blocking the doors, with a nice clear clean roof shining in the sun. We shoveled it again, and soon there was an ice slick there instead: the dripping from the roof made what was basically an icicle puddle. There were ice stalagmites that explain why the threshold of one doorway is chipped weirdly so that it lets in drafts: the ice forms in lumps so that the door won’t open, so then you have to hack at it with a shovel, and damage occurs. And that area gets no sun, so even with salt and sand and time, there is still a nice little welcome mat of ice to menace anyone who comes to the house.

Paul says helpfully that there are “things that can be done,” but it is not clear to me that that is the case. There’s already something built into the roof over each door, something that looks as if it’s supposed to divert snow/rain, but does not manage to do that at all: when it rains, rain pours down off the roof directly where you’re standing as you struggle to unlock the door; when snow is melting, it drips right in front of the door to make ice RIGHT THERE. Paul said something vague about a canopy, but I don’t know; the problem seems bigger than that to me. It’s a Total Design issue: the driveway was built to go right up to the house, and to go all along one side of the house, and the snow from the roof is GOING to fall off right there; if it doesn’t fall directly in front of the door, it will fall directly to the left of the door and still need to be shoveled, and we’ll still have to walk a distance to find a place to put each shovelful. It’s a bad design, and now it’s our responsibility.

I try to be optimistic: spring is coming! Just because the daffodil stems I bought at the grocery store earlier this week dried up without opening, that’s not an omen! There can only be so much more snow, and tomorrow is March! MARCH! But winter will come back next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that. “And this is just our lives now,” said Elizabeth while helping me shovel an area we had shoveled earlier, capturing my exact sentiment. At this point I have to think bigger picture: Just think what a relief it will be when we move out of this house someday in the distant future!

This is the time of year my grocery store offers little bundles of ten closed daffodils for $1.79, and if your grocery store does something similar I highly recommend finding a vase in the back of your highest cabinet and taking it down and putting some daffodils into it. I go to the grocery store twice a week, so if I buy a bunch each time, I maintain a nice full bouquet even when I have to take out the wilted ones. It bolsters my late-winter mood SO SURPRISINGLY MUCH, just having some yellow spring flowers in the house. If you don’t have a vase but you do have a Goodwill, check there: ours has TONS of vases for like a dollar each, and I would think their supply would be especially high right after Valentine’s Day.

Speaking of mood-bolstering, it was so fun to talk about music with you guys on Twitter the other day.

I sat at my computer while replies came in, listening to option after option on YouTube. So many good songs! I went with Kiss (Prince), Owner of a Lonely Heart (Yes), Everybody Wants You (Billy Squier), Call It Love (Poco), and The Cure (Lady Gaga). (That last one doesn’t at all match what I was looking for but I wanted to hear it so I put it in.) There were a ton of other suggestions that were exactly the kind of song I like, and the only reason I didn’t choose them was that I’d already chosen them on previous occasions. Here are some of those, mixed with others I’ve brought before, in case you are looking for similar songs:

Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper)
Footloose (Kenny Loggins)
Take On Me (A-ha)
Venus (Bananarama)
Joking (Indigo Girls)
Least Complicated (Indigo Girls)
Hearts of the World Will Understand (Starship)
We Built This City (Starship)
Love Walks In (Van Halan)
Dancing in the Dark (Bruce Springsteen)
Dancer in a Daydream (Ace of Base)
All Out of Love (Air Supply)
Can’t Fight This Feeling (REO Speedwagon)
Walking on Sunshine (Katrina and the Waves)
Jump for My Love (Pointer Sisters)
Straight Up (Paula Abdul)
Love and Affection (Nelson)
Free Your Mind (En Vogue)
I Remember You (Skid Row)
Just Can’t Get Enough (Depeche Mode)
Invisible Touch (Genesis)
Edge of a Broken Heart (Vixen)
Pictures of You (The Cure)
So Alive (Love and Rockets)
Mystify (INXS)
Slide (Goo Goo Dolls)
Name (Goo Goo Dolls)
Walk Like an Egyptian (The Bangles)
Just What I Needed (The Cars)
Magic (The Cars)
Best Friend (Queen)
Wait (White Lion)
Don’t You Forget About Me (Simple Minds)
Closing Time (Semisonic)
Good Riddance (Green Day)
Wonderwall (Oasis)
I Want You (Savage Garden)
Against All Odds (Phil Collins)
Take a Chance on Me (Erasure)
Bizarre Love Triangle (New Order)
Birdhouse in Your Soul (They Might Be Giants)
For the Longest Time (Billy Joel)
Obsession (Animotion)
Forever Young (Alphaville)
To Be With You (Mr. Big)
The Power of Love (Huey Lewis and the News)
Glory of Love (Peter Cetera)
Jimmy Olsen’s Blues (Spin Doctors)
Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong (Spin Doctors)
You Spin Me Round (Dead or Alive)

(I realize some of these came out in the 1970s, but we were still listening to them later on. There was a big Queen fad after Wayne’s World came out, for example. And in high school I found a Cars Greatest Hits album on a clearance rack and listened to it a million times.)

This morning Elizabeth, age 13, got mad at me because after I agreed that nine of the ten things she told me about one of her classes sounded annoying, I mildly countered the tenth thing, saying I thought it was a reasonable thing for the teacher to assume. She argued back, near tears, then lashed out that she would just go complain to the teacher about things 1-9, then!

Then 17-year-old William said, as I was walking out the door to bring the other kids to school, that no one told him we were going to a movie tonight, so he hadn’t changed his work schedule, so he couldn’t go. We have been talking about this movie all week. It’s true it’s not like I said to him, “William: remember, we are going to the movie on Wednesday, so be sure to change your work schedule”—but the original plan was to go last Wednesday and I DID say that very thing to him then, so when it was postponed a week I guess I assumed he would realize he would need to do the same thing again? He says we never indicated that the movie was going to be tonight, just sometime in the future. But since it did come up numerous times in other ways throughout the week, I don’t see how he can not have known. My guess is that he didn’t think of the work implications until this morning, then suddenly did think of it and felt dumb, and then panicked and tried to make it our fault so he could huff around the kitchen huffily instead of saying “Oh no, I screwed up the plan!”

All of this was before 7:15 in the morning.

It’s so discouraging to do SO MANY THINGS for kids: listening and supporting what they say, acquiring for them the things they need for projects, keeping a supply of their favorite foods, keeping them supplied with clothing, seeing things they’ll like and impulsively buying them, keeping track of their appointments and writing their notes for school and remembering to pick them up, reminding them about so many things—and then have them be upset over the tiny percentage of things I don’t do. It’s especially annoying when it’s not something I got wrong or made a mistake on (though occasional human error should ALSO be understandable): it would be one thing if I said I would be sure to get X and then I forgot, but in a lot of these cases it’s NO ONE PUT IT ON THE LIST SO I DIDN’T KNOW WE WERE OUT OF IT or YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HANDLING YOUR OWN WORK SCHEDULE or I’M NOT GOING TO SIDE WITH YOU AGAINST A TOTALLY REASONABLE THING YOUR TEACHER THINKS.

Reading this over, I think this comes across like I’m the meek martyred mother figure, rushing around in everyone’s service, allowing the family to walk all over me, wincing and apologizing—but that is not how it is and not how I mean to convey it. I say those all-caps parts LOUDLY and TO THE FAMILY, not just in my head after they’re all gone to school/work and I’m alone in my housewife apron. I say “NO ONE PUT IT ON THE LIST!” when there’s a complaint about being out of something, and “We have been talking about this for a WEEK!” when someone claims ignorance of the schedule, and “You are supposed to be thinking ahead about your schedule and handling it WITHOUT me reminding you” when there is a conflict. (Okay, I didn’t say “I’m not going to side with you against a totally reasonable thing your teacher thinks!” But I did re-assert, mildly and kindly, that I really did think the teacher was reasonable to assume the students would know what time class ended.) It’s just, I’m feeling irritable-sad-cranky-resentful that their first impulse is to blame me, and that they don’t seem to compare the things they see as my failings to all the things I DO do for them, not that any child ever HAS made that comparison, not in all the history of time.

This morning I think I was getting some misdirected blame for stuff going on in other areas. Elizabeth is probably upset about something about that class, so when I disagreed with something she said, she took it as a chance to redirect the upset at me. William is probably overwhelmed with senior year and work and waiting for college decisions, and so when something slipped through the cracks, he found a chance to blame someone else for it this time. And I know a parent is supposed to be a safe place for that, but don’t you get sick of it sometimes? I get sick of it sometimes.

An update on the commenting problem is that it’s not fixed and it looks as if it never will be—unless it suddenly and unexpectedly resolves because of some software update or whatever. If you’re having trouble commenting, either persistently or intermittently, know that you’re not alone: I am still getting plenty of emails and Twitter comments about it. We can’t seem to fix it. (I still can’t comment on MY OWN BLOGS unless I’m replying to someone else’s comment from the dashboard.) We have repeatedly contacted the web host. Paul is a computer guy and has repeatedly investigated/tinkered. I have gone into the commenting settings and tried to change things that might help.

Nothing helps, and we can’t even find a pattern: last time I wrote about this, I asked for feedback that Paul could use to diagnose the issue or to help the web host diagnose it—but there was no pattern. Some people could comment from their desktop computers but not from their phones; other people had the opposite issue. Some people could comment as long as they went to the site directly, but not if they followed a link (like from Twitter/Facebook); other people had the opposite issue. Some people could comment on the regular blog but not on the baby names blog; other people had the opposite issue. Some people could comment before, but now can’t; others couldn’t comment before, but now can.

It is discouraging and disheartening and maddening. All I can do is advise you to try what is working for other people: a different browser, phone/desktop instead of desktop/phone, link/direct instead of direct/link. I really am holding out hope that there will be some update on the host or on WordPress or something, and that’ll turn out to be the missing piece that fixes it all.

I wish I could give you a link to my new flatware; I love it so, so much but can’t find it online, and it’s so difficult to get a good photo of it. It’s by Cambridge and claims to be the Celeste pattern, but I couldn’t find it on the Cambridge site. (I bought it at HomeGoods.) Here it is tucked lovingly into its own separate tray:

And here are is the set of six small spoons (I give them to the kids for things like yogurt, when a big spoon would tip over the container), in a heap with their small-spoon-and-spatula-and-chopsticks-and-whatnot siblings; they’re a different brand but look very similar except with more of a matte look:

Here’s the best I could find for shopping links:

• Cambridge Logan, which is the same colorful kind of flatware but a different shape
• Cambridge Beacon, also rainbow but even less similar in shape
• Cambridge Cortney, again also rainbow but different shape
• set that looks exactly like mine but is suspiciously unbranded and inexpensive (the 20-piece set I bought was $39.99)
• Berglander, which is a different brand and a lower price than mine, but looks similar
• Kadina, which I’m all but certain was the brand of my set of six small spoons
• another insufficiently-branded set that looks just like mine; I wonder if the Cambridge packaging on mine was fake?

Also, I am almost certainly going to be taking a chance and ordering these suspiciously unbranded but darling tiny little flower coffee spoons:

(image from Amazon.com)

I am taking a day off from my voluntarily restricted eating plan, and that combined with writing about the chocolates reminds me that it’s a good time for an infrequent-as-promised (I haaaaaaate constant diet talk, but I like periodic check-ins) diet update.

I have been on the keto eating plan (very very low carbohydrates, plenty of everything else) since July 2017. I have not increased exercise; it’s been an eating change only. Here are previous posts on the topic:

• Keto Grocery Shopping List (not just a shopping list, but also telling you about the diet for the first time, and talking about Diet Talk in general)
• What I Eat on the Keto Diet
• Cholesterol Report After a Year on the Keto Diet

I have never before stayed on a restricted food plan for this long. I lost about 60 pounds in about a year plus a month or two, and since then I’ve been maintaining. With experimentation, I have found that I can take one to two days off per week and still maintain my current weight.

It was odd to get to a point where I felt like I was done losing weight. That has never happened before with a diet: I always go off a diet before I’ve lost as much as I want to. I’ve never been in maintenance mode before. I’ve heard it can be way harder to maintain than to diet, because it’s still most of the work of dieting but without the motivating thrill/reward of seeing the numbers go down. I will say more about this in a minute.

It is also odd to realize that my chosen stopping-point would be a Nightmare Weight/Size for someone else—in fact, for many, MANY someone elses. It is impossible to escape the culture: we thoroughly receive the message that thinner is always better, and certainly if you CAN be thinner you SHOULD be thinner—and even if you CAN’T be thinner, you should STILL be thinner. People much, much thinner than I am are struggling hard to lose more weight. Much-thinner friends talk about how they hate their bodies and feel like they’re wearing a fat suit, and I can be sympathetic even knowing that at my current size (the smallest I’ve been in over a decade) I still outweigh the friends by fifty pounds or more. I know that weight gain/loss is relative (on the way up, my current weight appalled me, whereas now it contents me), and I know how it feels to get away from what feels like your own normal weight; and I know we tend to look more forgivingly/lovingly at other people’s bodies than at our own; and I know that when people talk about their own weight they’re rarely talking about anyone else’s. (I originally put “they’re not talking about anyone else’s,” but sadly I think we all know of people who drop hints about other people’s weight by talking about their own weight. It’s just that I am fortunate not to have any in my regular circle.)

I wasn’t sure, when I started out, how much weight I was trying to lose. For one thing, I had very little hope of accomplishing any stated goal: I’ve been on so many failed diets, it felt stupid to have hopes/goals. For another thing, I didn’t know how much I COULD lose, even if the diet did work. But what it came down to eventually was figuring out where did I feel RIGHT, and I wasn’t going to know that until I got there. And sure enough, there was a point where I just started to feel Right, and I gave it some time to see if I would get restless to lose more weight, but I didn’t, and so I decided to attempt to stay there.

I am just barely out of plus sizes. According to the BMI chart (may it rot in hell where it belongs), I am obese (may that word, too, rot in hell where it belongs). I feel cute, and most of the time I like the way I look now, and I don’t mind as much having my picture taken, and I have a much easier time buying clothes. It’s much, much easier to walk, and to cross my legs, and to get down on the floor and back up again, and to sit comfortably, and to climb stairs, and to do things like crawl into the back of the minivan to vacuum it. There has been a significant uptick in Male Attention, which is so irritating/infuriating I can hardly express how much it makes me want to start screaming and strangling, while at the same time it’s queasily gratifying in a way I hope you just immediately understand without me having to unpick it further, because I realize it’s gross and yet I feel like you will nod cringingly, knowing what I mean even as your hands form the strangling position and a scream rises in your throat.

Do you remember that 80%/20% thing, usually applied to grades, about how you can get 80% of the result with 20% effort, but getting the last 20% result will take the remaining 80% effort? (A professor once used this as, apparently, a way to motivate us to work much harder to get an A; my absolute take-away was that it was obviously way more sensible/efficient to get the B.) I feel as if I’ve applied that concept nicely to this diet, though I wouldn’t say I put in only 20% effort. But still: same KIND of thing. I did not want to get to the point where I was working hard all the time to lose another half-pound or whatever. I didn’t want to have to exercise hard for hours a day, or think about calories constantly, or be hungry all the time, or feel wrong for eating food. I wanted to be happy at a place that was easy to maintain, not stuck feeling like I’d stretched the slingshot as far as I could and would be rocketed back to my old weight if I relaxed at all. I didn’t want to have to put in constant, unrelenting effort to achieve/maintain small results.

I was worried that maintenance mode would be too hard: as I said above, I’d heard it was difficult to stay motivated without the reward of decreasing numbers. But I have found that the reward of increased treats is plenty for now. We’ll see how long that lasts, but right now I find “numbers staying within a certain range on the scale” plus “yay, one to two days of non-dieting per week!” is plenty motivating, and more pleasantly peaceful than when I was hoping for the numbers to go down. I like the feeling that it’s no big deal if I need to take a day off for a get-together or special occasion. I like the feeling of coasting instead of pedaling. I like the feeling of looking at the scale just to check, as opposed to hoping and/or feeling disappointed.

It also helps that I am now completely acclimated to the keto eating. When I started, everything felt so upside-down from what I was used to, and sometimes I would get stuck, feeling like there was NOTHING I could eat, NOTHING! and that this was IMPOSSIBLE! I vented about this to a friend who had been on keto longer than I had, and he told me he didn’t feel that way anymore: that he felt like keto was Just How He Eats Now. I found that news dismaying: I didn’t WANT it to be normal, I wanted it to be a weird fad diet that then I could go OFF of when I was done losing weight. But then more time passed, and now on my diet-following days my food feels normal/familiar. And then on my days off, I eat everything I want, and it’s like a holiday. Everything tastes so good, and there are so many choices! On my on-diet days, if things feel rough, I just think ahead to my next day off. And now that I’m maintaining, that day is never very far away, so I’m never telling myself “No,” I’m always telling myself “Yes, just wait a little longer.”

And I want to make sure you understand that a “day off” or “day of non-dieting” is not a day of Sensible Non-Keto Eating. Like, it’s not as if it’s five or six days of keto weirdness, and then one to two days of eating grilled chicken and fruits/vegetables and milk and a piece of whole-grain bread, maybe a half-cup of vanilla ice cream. No. The days off involve things like pizza, french fries, potato soup, bagels, doughnuts, ice cream, candy, fast food, snack-cakes. Whatever I pine for on the keto days, I eat on the non-keto days. Candy/chocolate used to be the most important thing to me, so it’s interesting to me that what I most want on days off are things like breads, rice, potatoes, and cakey things. I think it’s the texture as well as the flavor: keto doesn’t have much with the texture of bread/potatoes/cake. I also want grapes, grapefruit, and those little Dove Mini ice cream bars. My long-term goal is to have more days off but with less extreme party-food eating on those days, or maybe to be off the keto thing entirely and just be eating well with reasonable treats, but we’ll see if that ever happens. The current “all on or else all off” seems to work with my temperament better than moderation.

Anyway, that’s how it’s going. I realize this story could still end in me ditching the diet and gaining the weight back. That is true of a statistically enormously large percentage of diets. But FOR NOW, this diet is working better for me than any diet ever has, and also it feels sustainable for now.

Okay, that’s enough diet talk for awhile. (I mean, YOU can talk in the comments section, though I recommend re-reading this post first; it’s hard to talk about diets. But I mean that I will now wait a fairly long time before doing another post about diets/dieting.)

I have mentioned before that Tipsy Swistle is a cheery little chore-doing house elf. Another thing I have mentioned before (I should just cut-and-paste today’s post out of snippets from old posts, or make it a series of links to other posts) is that what I would really like for Valentine’s Day every year is a heart-shaped box of nice chocolates, and that for whatever reason that does not seem to be something Paul can/will do, and so over the years I have come up with a work-around to reduce resentment and increase happiness: we go out to dinner (but not ON Valentine’s Day, because of crowds) for our joint Valentine’s Day gift (with cocktails and dessert, so it’s fancy), and I buy myself the box of chocolates (often after Valentine’s Day, to get them at 50% off).

I’m not saying this is a great solution, or entirely free of hard feelings (is it really SO VERY DIFFICULT to go into a store and buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates once a year??) but it means there ARE chocolates in a heart-shaped box and there IS some sort of Valentine’s Day acknowledgement, which I DO want, and I realize many people DON’T want that, and that’s fine too and maybe one of those people should have married Paul and spent many happy years calling it a Hallmark holiday or whatever.

This year I wanted a box of See’s chocolates: the keto diet means I eat less candy than I used to, and so when I DO eat candy I like it to be Ultimate Candy. But I dithered with it in my cart. Even with the current shipping deal, shipping was still $5 on top of what was already some very expensive chocolate; and it cost another $6 extra to get the heart-shaped box, and is that REALLY worth it for something I will likely end up throwing away after keeping it for way too long because it seems as if I really ought to be able to find another use for such a pretty box? And probably I should just get the usual 50%-off box of non-See’s from Target.

Well. Tipsy Swistle did not think these were reasonable concerns and just went ahead and hit “Complete order” (after adding a box of the peanut brittle chocolate bars I love) and then cycled the laundry and cleaned out a pitcher and gave the kitchen floor a quick touch-up mopping. This morning I am very grateful for all of those things: the nearly-empty laundry baskets; the floor, which yesterday afternoon was making me crabby with its smudges; but especially for the order confirmation from See’s in my inbox.

The housecleaners have been here twice, once before we moved in and once after. Their next visit is approaching, and I am so filled with dread, and the dread has been building for days. I said to Paul that probably I should get used to ALWAYS feeling these days of building dread before every housecleaning visit, and he said sympathetically, “Yes, now that they’ve been here so many times, I’d say that’s a safe conclusion.”

Here is something that helps, a little: making two lists, one for things I want to do the night before, and one for things I want to do the morning of. I am trying not to go overboard with these lists, but there are some things I like to get out of the way so the cleaners don’t have to deal with them (e.g., taking some stuff we usually keep on the counter and tucking it into a cupboard), and there are some other things I like to do so that the cleaners don’t spend time doing them (e.g., I have everyone make their beds). Plus, I make the kids get everything out from under the beds/couch.

Here is something that does not help, and I wish I could stop: assuming the cleaners are thinking bad things about us. There is literally nothing I can do about what they may or may not be thinking, and also I can’t read minds, and also it’s not as if bad thoughts were physical things that emerge and do damage. I have got to stop looking at our house/lives through an “Imagined Negative Thoughts of a Housecleaner” cam. It serves no good purpose.

Here is another thing that helps, a little: remembering when I did cleaning work as part of my in-home eldercare job, and how I did NOT have the kinds of negative thoughts I keep worrying about our housecleaners having. I felt GLAD when I arrived at a house and there were obvious things that needed cleaning! It was SATISFYING to do the dishes, make the bed, wipe the counters, give the kitchen a quick lemony mopping. I was NOT thinking bad things about the people who lived in the house! When I folded the throw blanket, I was thinking “There, that looks nice and tidy, and it shows I have cleaned in here!” and not “This throw blanket should always be FOLDED, and it better STILL be folded the next time I’m here!” or “This person should have folded their OWN throw blanket rather than leaving it for me!” Not at all! Not at all!

Here is another thing that does not help, and I wish I could stop: thinking how different it is to clean for people who are not able to do it themselves, vs. people who are absolutely able to do it themselves but don’t feel like it. I don’t think I would have had the same glad/satisfied attitude if I’d been cleaning a large messy house for people who didn’t feel like cleaning it themselves—though maybe I would have. My mom had a job cleaning houses when she was a teenager, and she describes a similar glad/satisfied feeling. She says the worst house was the one that was spotlessly clean and shining already when she got there. She says that when she made the beds, it was because it was a quick task with a big visual impact, NOT because she was thinking “These people should have made their beds.”

Here is another thing that helps, a little: remembering that “so that they’ll do the housecleaning” is only ONE of the reasons we wanted to hire housecleaners; the OTHER reason was “so we’ll be motivated to keep the clutter at bay.” The dread is what motivates me to keep up with the clutter. It’s too bad it has to be dread rather than excitement, but we all have our own temperaments to contend with.

And also: do I feel better if I imagine the alternative? Like, if I pretend that every other week there was a day when it was up to ME to go around thoroughly cleaning every floor and bathroom, do I feel GOOD about that? happy, excited, eager to do some scrubbing? No. So would I prefer to dread doing the cleaning (and then also have to do the cleaning), or would I prefer to dread the day someone else comes to do it? Easy answer.

I made a mistake—or rather, did what was technically the right thing to do, and yet was still basically a mistake.

Our homeowner insurance on the old house came due, and it occurred to me that I should call them and tell them we didn’t have any STUFF in there anymore to insure: coverage for personal property is a big part of the policy, so I was imagining a nice little savings. Instead, the insurance company said they could no longer insure the old house, because it was (1) vacant and (2) not our primary dwelling, and that they don’t even offer such policies. I said wait, wait: we were going to be listing it for sale any day now, this was just a normal move, we weren’t planning to keep it vacant—and he said no, that didn’t matter. He was nice about it, but decisive.

He put me through to a partner company that does insure such properties. At this point I was still expecting a savings. I also thought that since it was a partner company, all the information on the old house would transfer. An hour later, after attempting to remember things like when did we replace the roof and what was the finished square footage, I had a new policy that cost 2.5 times what our old policy cost. TWO POINT FIVE TIMES. I was dismayed. I asked for clarification. She said it’s because vacant houses are actually the MOST expensive kind of property to insure, because no one is there to watch over them.

I ventured that I thought I had probably made a mistake by calling: that if our policy hadn’t coincidentally come due, I would never have known we were SUPPOSED to have a vacant-house policy, and we would have just sold the house and canceled the old regular policy without ever knowing. She was very nice but just as decisive as the other guy: she said she totally understood the feeling, but that actually if something had happened to the house while it was waiting to be sold, we would not have been covered under our old policy. That is: YES, we could have gambled on nothing happening, and that’s what most people do when they move (probably because many of them, like us, don’t even know they’re doing that), but that we would have been coasting on no actual homeowner insurance, while still paying for homeowner insurance and thinking we were covered.

Well. And we’ll get a prorated amount of this new expensive policy refunded to us when we do sell the house (less a non-refundable $250 portion). And now if it burns down, or if a potential buyer gets hurt while viewing the house, we’re covered. And it wasn’t much extra to add vandalism coverage, so now I can stop worrying about someone breaking in and spray-painting or whatever. But the odds of anything going wrong were so small, I wish I’d stayed ignorant and just paid the insurance bill.