eat, pray, love....and laundry

The other day I finally got around to folding the laundry that had been sitting in a basket on top of the dryer for almost a week. It's not uncommon for me to pull the things that need to be hung up from the dryer right away, but to put all the socks and underwears in a basket to be dealt with later. Though a full week is a pretty long time for me to put off the inevitable folding of socks (I really hate folding socks!). As I folded the last of it, I realized that these were the last of Jerry's laundry items. Once these last pieces were folded and put away, there'd be no more of his stuff to wash, fold, or put away until he returns next month. I guess it's a silly thing, but it made me a little sad, made it a little more real that he wasn't here. As long as there were little bits of him, it still felt a little like he might be home at the end of the day. But now there is a definite absence of him in the house. No annoyingly long (and inside out) olive green socks in the laundry. No toothbrush near the bathroom sink. No emptied pocket trash on the table. No upside down hat in the living room, filled with his emptied pocket non-junk. No discarded clothes in the bedroom. It's funny that some of the things I find annoying when he's here are missed when he's not!

I'm currently reading Eat Pray Love and am finding that it really resonates with me. I suppose that's not very surprising or uncommon, given how wildly popular the book as become...it must resonate with a lot of people. There is so much I see of myself in the author. Not being thin or having a disastrous marriage, of course!! But her control issues, in particular. Her descriptions of her internal workings and struggles feel so much like descriptions of my own. The book has prompted a lot of self-examination...in a good way. It's also prompted me to really want to go to Italy and eat a lot! I'm especially yearning to go to Naples! I'm putting a trip to Italy at the top of my travel list now!

Last night I talke to Elyssa for the first time since Christmas and (oh my goodness!) she sounds older. Seriously. The last time we spoke, she sounded more like a little girl. Last nigt she sounded like a young woman...a teenager (gasp!). It really intensified how much I miss her and how much we're missing as she grows up. But it was so great to talk to her after all that time!

I guess this entry is a collection of mismatched thoughts...I wasn't happy to just focus on one :-) The last of my thoughts for today has to do with my weight loss experimentation this week. Earlier in the week I suspected that I wasn't eating enough. I don't normally pay attention to calories at all, but I decided to figure out approximately how many calories I had been consuming daily. And it was under 1,000 calories, which is too low. As an experiment, one day I added over 400 extra calories and the following day I saw some weight loss...so I was severely undereating! Now I'm not adding quite so many calories, but eating more than I had been and seeing (and feeling) much better results!