catheroominations

I have this problem with pants in that they never fit me right. I mean never. I’m not talking about the length of them either. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but if pants fit my hips, butt and thighs they are huge in the waist. They’re so huge I could probably carry my camera in the back of them (and I have a DSLR). A size that would fit my waist wouldn’t go over my butt because I am so out of proportion. I consistently buy pants that don’t fit because there is no such thing as a pair that will fit my body.

Yesterday I bit the bullet and took two pairs of new pants from Ann Taylor Loft (regular price $60, on sale for $20!) to have the waist taken in to fit me. This tailor has a great reputation and a friend who has a similar issue takes her pants there all the time. I was confident they could get these pants to fit my body and I was willing to pay whatever it cost.

I tried on the pants in the fitting room and came out, my arms folded low on the waist to keep the pants from gaping obnoxiously. I stepped on the carpeted nook in front of the mirror and lifted the hem of my sweater so the nice Russian lady could see my dilemma. There was so much of a gap, she could see straight down the gap to my purple chonies. She grabbed a handful of waistband and said in a thick accent, “Ah yes, classic body,” as she pinned the extra fabric. I smiled inside and wanted to hug her. Oh, and she might have said “classic booty,” her accent was that thick. I do know that having a small waist and a healthy dose of junk in the trunk is not very classic. Because if it is, Ann Taylor and her other designer friends would make pants that fit me. And they don’t. Some brands even make “classic fit” styles and ha! No way, no how are they going over this classic booty.

(I just realized that I got Ann Taylor pants tailored. Har de har.) The pants will be ready early next week and I can’t wait to see how they fit.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you know all about my quest to reach my driver’s license weight, and that I get up at o’dark thirty to go to boot camp every day. My buns of steel aren’t quite there yet, and I don’t have a six-pack but if you see me I will offer you my stomach to punch so you can feel my two-pack. I’ll never have Michelle Obama’s arms, but I’d like to have tighter Catheroo arms. The point is that I’m trying. And I have toned and firmed here and there and I love that. Psycho as it is, I really love getting up in the dark every morning. No! Really, I do! At the beginning of our workouts I get to look up at the moon and stars. I can see the Little (or is it the Big) Dipper while we warm up. The air is so crisp and clean and we’re all out there sweating like pigs while most of the world is just waking from a good night’s sleep.

The best part is when I drive home. Until we set the clocks back, I get to see the sun rise in front of me:

So beautiful.

Some of the list below is redundant, but I want to show that I’m still doing it. Losing weight and getting healthy isn’t a quick-fix. It’s a lifestyle change. I really don’t remember how I used to eat back when I weighed more than 150 pounds.

Aside from the exercise, here are some of the changes I’ve made and continue to keep in my routine:

• No more Starbucks (I’m more of a Peet’s girl anyway). No pumpkin spice lattes, not even a nice hot cup of plain old coffee. Jasmine green tea and water are all I drink on a daily basis. Too much caffeine makes me really jittery and a little wacko in the head.
• I must have 7 hours of sleep at a minimum. If not, I miss boot camp. If I miss boot camp I get very grumpy. You wouldn’t like me when I’m grumpy. Often my sleep requirements cut into my Glee or Biggest Loser time, but that’s why DVRs were invented – to allow ME to see my shows and sleep. Thank you, DVR inventor guy!
• Water, water, water. I fill my SIGG 1-liter bottle three times a day. I drink my water, I drink it up! And yes, I also pee all the damn time. This offers me the joy of seeing weird restroom habits at work which I will address in a future post.
• I limit carbohydrates like bread and cereal to pre- and post-workout meals only. I need carb energy for boot camp and I replenish lost nutrients after workouts but I really try to stick to early morning only. I get healthy carbs throughout the day from veggies and fruits and brown rice or other whole grains. Do you realize how hard this is when I just received some goodies from here?
• Eating whole/clean. Most of what I eat (aside from pre- and post-workout time) has no package. I focus on vegetables, fruits, eggs, and lean meats. OK so the meat comes in a package, but I ain’t killing and plucking my own chickens and wild Alaskan salmon doesn’t swim in the suburbs.
• No, no, no refined sugar. I don’t even eat the fake sweetener stuff. One hint of sugar or a substitute and I go off the deep end. When I do crave some sugar I allow myself two Trader Joe’s dark chocolate wedges at a tiny 70 calories. Dark chocolate has anti-oxidants you know, so this is a perfectly legal snack food. I have been known to not stop at two wedges, but continue until I have eaten an entire layer of eight. And then I am filled with guilt and self-loathing and that kind of blows. So yeah, I try to avoid the sweet stuff.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m not focusingtrying not to focus on weight as much as I am on sticking to my new lifestyle. The weight is coming off slowly but surely and I’m just 5 pounds shy of the next “decade” of weight on the scale. I want to see that second number on the scale change. I know it will…eventually.

I apologize for this post being all over the place. But it’s my bedtime and I didn’t have a chance to make it flow real well.

Well, today was the big dunk test to see how much body fat I lost and how much muscle I gained. I mentioned before that when I was tested at the beginning of the 10-week boot camp challenge I was at 34.1% body fat. That is in the poor range, so there was lots of room for improvement.

Over the last 10 weeks I have missed maybe 5 days of boot camp and three of those were because I was out of town. I have a serious addiction to this boot camp and I am a completely different person on the days we don’t have it. I’m tired, sluggish and kinda bitchy, really. But on boot camp days I have so much energy, especially immediately after. I could beat Tigger in a bounce contest I am so hyper afterward – even at 7 am. The exercise part of the challenge was not hard for me. I mean the working out was hard, but the motivation to do it? I just wanted to because I love it. The workouts push my limits, and sometimes I might hate some of the exercises, like burpees, who the hell invented those little shits of torture? I do the reps and I sweat like a pig, burning around 500 calories on the weekday workouts, and more than 600 on the Saturday workouts. I swear, I frakking love boot camp so much that I’m going to get a license plate frame made that says BOOT CAMP IS MY PROZAC because holy damn it is.

The food part of the challenge wasn’t too horribly hard for me either, only because I had changed my eating habits last Labor Day when I joined Weight Watchers. I needed to make a few adjustments in this challenge though, like cut out all sugar (no more dark chocolate from Trader Joe’s) and refined flour products (no bread – gah!), and boost my protein intake focusing on lean meats and those high in omega-3 fats like salmon. I learned to love some new foods, like almond butter and flax seeds, and didn’t really miss sugar or alcohol. Social events pretty much sucked as far as will power went, and I had moments of weakness, but when I did I picked up where I left off and got back to healthy eating as soon as I could.

Each week I took measurements and weighed in. The first week I lost four pounds and I thought, “Wow! This is a piece of cake! At this rate I’ll be at my goal weight before 10 weeks is even done.” So very not true.

I lost no more weight for a long time after that. WTF? For weeks the scale did not budge. I was losing inches though – half an inch here, two inches there, but I could not get past the number on the scale. Even my clothes told me I was transforming because I had to pull out my smaller pants about halfway through the challenge. But the scale was stuck. I thought it might be broken, but I trudged along, working out five times a week and eating vegetables until I practically turned green.

Throughout this I’d watch my friends go out to lunch while I sat at my desk eating food I prepared and brought from home. I watched Matte enjoy wine while we watched TV and I slurped water from my SIGG bottle. I went to parties and allowed myself one glass of wine that I usually couldn’t finish, came home sober, and woke up sans hangover. The non-hangover mornings were an added benefit to this new way of living, and with the two liters of water my body craved every day, even my skin looked better – another bonus. Eventually I lost a couple more pounds, but they didn’t seem indicative of the amount of work I was putting into this.

Basically I kicked ass for 10 weeks and was nervous and excited to see where my body fat would be at today’s dunk test. I was so excited I could not sleep. I woke up at 5am wondering if it was time to go yet and every five minutes after that to see if it was 7.

When I got to the body fat testing place I saw that my toughest competition was about to get dunked in the time slot before mine. This woman has not attended boot camp as religiously as I have, but she told me awhile back that she’s lost double digits in pounds and in inches. Bitch. Many of my fellow boot campers have hinted that I was a lock to win this because I have shrunk so much and look so toned. Unfortunately, there was no way for me to know how I had really progressed until I did the dunk this morning.

The dunker dude called me into the truck for my turn while my fierce competitor was still inside in the changing room. When she came out, I asked her about her test and she said she had a 10% improvement. This is practically unheard of, and the dunker dude told me that only bodybuilders lose body fat at a 1% a week rate. I knew when I got into that tub of water to see how buoyant I was I needed to get to 24% body fat.

I didn’t make it. She beat me, taking me out of the running for a free year of boot camp. After all my hard work, determination, anal retentive boot camp attendance, and piles of rabbit food, I would not win the challenge. I faked a smile at the supportive dunker dude when he handed me my report but I wanted to cry.

After I changed out of my sopping swimsuit I went out to find my boot camp instructor who was outside jumping up and down to hear my results. She wanted to capture my excited reaction on video for her website. Only I wasn’t excited, I was dejected. I worked SO DAMN HARD and I didn’t win. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I couldn’t think about how awesome my body feels, how much less space I take up in the world, how I don’t feel bulky anymore, and how my body doesn’t jiggle in places where it used to. I didn’t care that my waist is 26 inches or that my thighs have shrunk and if you touch my abs, they’re hard. It didn’t matter that I went from a poor 34.1% body fat to a healthy 29.6%. I had lost the game, and I had lost to the person I knew would beat me – the person who WAS NOT at boot camp every single day. WTF?

DAMMIT! I WORKED SO HARD! So, she had a baby a year ago and still had baby weight to lose. Whatever. Who cares? She doesn’t work. For all I know she has a gym inside her house. Maybe every time the baby sleeps she rides a spin bike, or climbs a Stairmaster. Or maybe she has a nanny and spent every day at the gym or at a spa getting fat reduction treatment. She could not have won fair and square, could she? She didn’t work as hard as I did! I was sure of it because people think I am insane about my devotion to this, and that woman is so totally not even close to insanity. Not to diminish how busy moms of newborns are, but all I could think was she worked out outside bootcamp, something I couldn’t do.

I was fighting back tears the whole drive home. Yes, I’m a sore loser. I don’t care (pout). Anyone who worked as hard at this as I did would be pissed too. All week, Matte and I looked forward to going to Hobee’s for blueberry coffeecake smothered in butter after the dunk test. I know you’re not supposed to reward yourself with food, but sweet baby jesus, I needed something sinful to eat. After learning I didn’t win though, I no longer wanted it. I wanted bell peppers and lettuce and tasteless food that might make me lose more body fat. My boot camp instructor was hosting an end-of-challenge celebratory BBQ in the afternoon and I didn’t even want to go to that. I was afraid my emotions would betray me when she announced the winner of the contest was someone other than me. I wanted to crawl into a ball and cry like the big fat baby I was, but the coffeecake won and I savored every scrumptious bite.

I once read a quote that said “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Never was it more true than today. Comparison to my boot camp rival is what stole the joy I should have had in my own success. I mean, I am now in a healthy body fat range! Just 10 weeks ago, my percentage was “poor”. There’s nothing lower than “poor” except dead. I lost 8 pounds of fat, and gained 2 pounds of muscle. I LOST FOURTEEN GOTDAMN INCHES! FOUR. TEEN. INCHES. I mean really! Today me could kick 10-week-ago me’s ass.

It took me a few hours and some retail therapy to realize I was being a dipshit. Do you know how good it feels to put on jeans that you haven’t even been able to pull all the way on in over a year? I’ll tell you how it feels. It feels AWESOME! As awesome as trying on clothes in the Macy’s Juniors Department and having them fit! It’s also very satisfying hearing people who haven’t seen me in awhile ask, “WOW! How much weight have you lost?” They never believe me when I say, “Only about eight pounds,” because it looks like more. That’s all boot camp, baby.

So despite my disappointment at not winning the free year I’ll still go to boot camp. I’ll pay my hard earned money and get up at 5 am and go workout in a beautiful park (in the dark these days) with my incredible trainers who will kick my ass every day. I go partly because of my addiction, yes, but mostly because I am making an investment in myself and the returns are not only guaranteed, they are frakking incredible.

Today is my birthday and it has been awesome.

I treat birthdays like a little kid does, and I like to celebrate for a week or so. If a card or box comes in the mail, I don’t wait until my actual birthday to open it because I want to open it NOW. Birthdays aren’t about the presents, I know, but I can’t help it! I love the presents! Today though, some of the best things were not presents. Don’t get me wrong, I received some lovely things from my family and friends, I’m just saying that the non-present stuff was pretty kickass too.

The boot camp girls sang happy birthday to me while we did our post-workout stretching. Hearing people sing to me usually makes me cry (I’m a sap like that) but I was too busy stretching out my sore glutes to cry.

My birthday latte from Peet’s. It wasn’t free; I bought it for myself, but it was a treat and oh so delicious.

I spent the afternoon at Preston-Wynne Spa in Saratoga with my friend Rachel. I got a seaweed detoxifying body wrap and an hour-long massage. After the body wrap, the aesthetician applied a fabulous body-smoothing oil and while she was massaging it into my arms, she siad, “Wow! You have some serious muscle in your arms!” and when she did my stomach, she said, “And your abs have a lot of muscle too.” So, the bootcamp is paying off! After the treatments, they brought Rachel and me each a glass of champagne, which almost put us to sleep after our relaxing treatments. My body wrap technician found the last bottles of Tunisian Flower body wash, skin smoother and sugar scrub that they had in the spa. It has been discontinued, so I was very excited to buy the last of it! I wish you could smell it because it smells like vacation on a tropical island.

When I got home there were more presents and cards in the mailbox – YAY!

USA aired two episodes of Law & Order SVU that I have never seen before. That never happens.

If you’re not on Facebook, you should be because on your birthday you get about a million birthday wishes written on your wall. Too much fun!

You should also be on Twitter and you should tweet something about how it would be really cool if a celebrity you follow sent you a happy birthday tweet. Because then you might get something like this:

Now I’m headed to dinner with the hubby – nothing too fancy because I’m still doing the 10-week boot camp challenge, but after Saturday when I get my body fat tested again (update on that after I get the results), there will be mouth-watering filet mignon and many other illegal foods (along with copious amounts of red wine). See? I told you I like celebrating for more than just one day.

People, I DID IT. I completed all 30 days of the 30-Day Shred. That means every single one of the last 30 days, I let Jillian Michaels kick my ass all over my living room. She worked my thighs, my shoulders, my biceps, my hamstrings, my back, my abs, my abs, my abs, and my abs.

And you know what? It SHOWS. My pants are so loose, especially in the waist (which is where they’re already loose, but I’m not complaining) and hips.

And my ass? It’s rounder and firmer and doesn’t jiggle much at all when I run and jump in place.

I still have work to do and despite the lost inches (I have no idea how many because I didn’t take measurements before or after) I am not even in my goal weight range yet. I know the lack of weight loss is due to muscle gain so I’m no longer beating myself up for the scale not budging. Instead, I removed the scale from my house. Stupid little square panel that gives me bad news all the time. Get outta my house!

One of my motivators during the last 30 days, aside from the friendly competition with the others at Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans is that I have a wedding to go to later this month. The dress I am wearing is a halter, so I need good arms and a nice back for it. Wanna see the dress? It’s here. Cute, huh? I don’t typically wear long dresses, but my friend Liza bought the same dress for a wedding (we both hate our legs) and let me try it on. I was in love. That love grew stronger with a 20% coupon Liza sent me. My arms and back don’t look like the model in the photo because sometimes I eat. But I still think the dress is flattering on my newly shredded self.

I HIGHLY recommend this DVD to anyone who wants to be in better shape and get some all-over toning. It’s a very challenging workout but oh so worth it. If you’re not accustomed to exercise, don’t fret, there are lower impact versions of the moves for beginners. All you need is a mat and some hand weights (I use 5-pounders but might increase to 8). You have nothing to lose but sag and flab, so try it! And if you do, let me know so I can cheer you on. I’m planning to extend the 30 days for as long a I can, so I’ll be shredding along with you. We can curse Jillian together.

This morning, I was thinking about what to shoot for today’s 7 Days shot. I came up with bupkiss (or is it bubkiss?). Making or eating my breakfast? Been there, done that. Drying my hair? That’s so 2007. Nothing exciting is happening today. It’s Monday for Pete’s sake.

But then. Around 10:40 this morning. An earthquake hit. It was small, just 4.4 or so, but felt big. Because really, when you’re not accustomed to the earth moving under your feet (or chair in my case) any jolt feels big. No one was hurt; nothing was damaged. But my heart raced for about 30 minutes afterward.

The best part was that I finally had an idea for today’s photo. Duck and cover!

Sorry about that tremor this morning, my fellow Bay Area peeps. But I really needed an idea for my photo, so Mother Nature helped me out. Plus, after the gorgeous weekend we had, it was payback. Like rent. Or an earthquake tax. “You want sunny, warm days? Sure. But I’m gonna shake things up a bit to make you appreciate this weather.”

We do appreciate it, Mom! We do!

A letter to AllanThinks and AliThinks, 25th of March, 2009

OK. You guys were at Al’s tonight, right? For a Twitter meetup?

Well…

I had this co-worker (I will call her S) when I worked at the University of Kentucky Department of Surgery Publications Office. I always felt that she was too smart for me although we got along very well. She was very “bookish” like I was, but in a more highfalutin’ way. She once recommended I read some Flannery O’Connor and I tried, but UGH. Way over my 24-year old head. S and I both loved cats and French, and Berea crafts, and Birkenstocks, and other similar things, so we became friends. Our other coworker, C was also into cats and things so the three of us were work buddies.

We sat in one large room with our boss. Let’s call her W. In our drab room of an office, each of us sat in our own corner, with our back to the center of the room, and partitions beside or behind us to simulate privacy. So friendly! Because W demanded Total Silence so she could focus on such things as plasminogen activators, thrombocytopenia, or documenting sex change operations, the three of us with poorer work ethics began conversing via email. Considering that the office was about 20 feet wide by 25 feet long, this was not the quickest form of communication because it took so long to send our thoughts through the tubes all the way around the world or where ever they went before landing at our desks. But we were to remain mute unless a surgeon walked in needing our editing or desktop publishing expertise, so email was the only way for us to talk.

I think it was Tuesdays that were Street French days. Each week, one of us was in charge of teaching the other two a new word or phrase. Sometimes it was so hard not to snicker at what would appear in my inbox. But if I let out a giggle (or a fart, for that matter), I was afraid I’d be knocked upside the head. (I regret not backing up those emails on a floppy disk so today I could sit there and look at that floppy, thinking, “I sure wish I could see what I saved on there, but this Mac doesn’t have a floppy drive!”)

Anyway, I digress. Or did you not notice?

For some reason, just yesterday I decided to look for S on teh internets. Lo and behold, there she was! She has a web site and she is still like totally ohmigod smart and stuff too. She’s also on Twitter, but I didn’t click the Follow button for fear that she’d find my own Twitter page. I mean, it would be like Chrissie Snow requesting to follow Stephen Hawking. S does tweet some lovely poetry though. I sort of want to stalk her for that. She even has a couple of poetry books published. I have one that she sent me years ago.

Just in case I am painting a not-so-nice picture of S, you should also know that she is also a very nice, caring person with a dry wit. But, remember on How I Met Your Mother when Ted’s college girlfriend came back and they hooked up? And how Ted’s friends felt like everything and everyone seemed beneath her? That’s how I feel around S. Unlike the Heir to the Massengil Fortune on HIMYM, it’s not on purpose, and it’s not her fault. I know that I am intimated by her intelligence, and it’s like, totally me and not her, but still.

(It’s taking me a long time to get to the point, isn’t it? This is how I talk in real life, by the way. I include several unrelated details you probably don’t care about, but they pop into my head so I must include them, however haphazard they are.)

OK. So. I went through the posts on S’s blog, and one of them from earlier this week promoted a poetry event she would be attending on Wednesday (tonight). At…

wait for it…

Al’s in Lexington.

So when I saw Allan’s tweets about you guys being at a Twitter meetup at Al’s and the bar being taken over by the poetry people…

DUDE!

(S would never say dude, even for dramatic effect, by the way.)

My two universes collided in Kentucky tonight. Did the walls shake or anything?

I felt a rumble under my feet all the way over here.

*The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel. It’s a really cute story, sometimes sad, but a really fun read listen. I checked out the audio book from the library.

Sizzle did something fun a LONG FREAKING TIME ago, and I wanted to play too. She assigned me the letter N.

Here now is a list of ten things that I love, that all start with the letter N.

1. Newcastle Brown Ale
My college sweetheart, John introduced me to beer, and Newcastle was our favorite. To this day, if I go to a bar or restaurant and they have Newcastle on tap, that’s my first pick. And it’s often in our fridge. It is oh so good. Nice and nutty flavor, never bitter. John passed away in 2001, and every time I drink Newcastle, I think of him.

2. Nikon
I shoot with a Nikon D50, and I have an SB-600 Speedlight, also from Nikon. I adore my camera and I hope to collect more, and better lenses for it in the near future. I love what my Nikon can do with what I see. I love it so much, it’s almost like it’s an Apple product or something.

3. Neil Patrick Harris
John, the college sweetheart I mentioned above used to get told by everyone that he looked like NPH. That was during the Doogie days and he was always kind of “gee, thanks a lot” about it. But today Neil Patrick Harris has a hotness quotient he didn’t exhibit when he was Dr. Hauser. If you have never watched How I Met Your Mother, I highly suggest you tune in. I recently noticed there was a laugh track on the show, and I can’t believe I never heard it before. The show is so funny on its own, it certainly doesn’t need a laugh track, and I’m so distracted by the wit, I must tune it out or something.

4. NPR
NPR have some killer programming, and I subscribe to two of their podcasts. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and the Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz are two of my favorite programs on NPR. They’re both clever, intelligent, and both of them make me feel really smart when I get an answer right. For their year-end shows, Wait, Wait… replayed an episode featuring President Obama while he was in the Senate. If you can find it, listen. It’s funny radio without being idiotic. Also, look for the episodes with Denis Leary and Campbell Brown. Wait, Wait brings out the funny in people. And those who are already funny are downright hilarious on this show. Oh, and the Amy Sedaris episode – classic. Shall I go on?

5. NBC Universal
What is it with NBC and their addictive programming on Thursdays? Back in the day there was Cheers. There was Hill Street Blues (or was that a Tuesday night show?) and then Friends, Seinfeld, Will and Grace, and ER. And now, The Office and 30 Rock (and the final season of ER) occupy my DVR on Thursdays. How do they do it, those people at NBC? Plus, they own Bravo, which airs Top Chef and Project Runway. There are other good shows on other networks, but NBC knows how to do Thursdays right. Oh, and Tuesday nights, The Biggest Loser is huge (pun totally intended) at our house.

6. Newton Faulkner
Work has been really busy of late, and when I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed, I just put in my earbuds and find Newton Faulkner in my iTunes. He calms me, without distracting me from what I’m doing. By the way, he was born the year before I graduated from high school. I’m so old, but that young’un can really sing.

7. Natural Peanut Butter
Ingredients: Peanuts, salt. That’s IT. As I attempt to change my eating habits to more whole foods and fewer preservatives and processed crap, natural peanut butter has become a treat. It tastes like peanut butter, not sugar. I love the consistency because I can feel the tiny bits of peanuts in there, even in the creamy version. I bought a jar from Whole Foods for $1.99. Who knew one could find such goodness at Whole Foods for just $2?

8. New York City
I heart NY, for real. I’ve only been there twice, once in the humidity of summer (I was on the Today show, did you see me?), and once in the frigid winter. I love the energy and I feel safer walking around alone there than I do in San Francisco. I took the subway from Midtown to Harlem alone and was never worried about a thing. When friends took a cab to dinner, I walked. I adore Central Park and was fortunate enough to run a race there in July of 2005. Being a theatre geek, I go a little nuts over Broadway, and on my last trip packed in as many shows as I could. I want to go there in the fall one year and take hundreds thousands of photos of the architecture, the city lights, the food, the people.

9. Nintendo Wii
Although I have neglected my Wii of late, there was a time when I was addicted to it. Addicted, I tell you. I regressed back to my Atari days and would tell Matte, “just one more game,” before I would hand over the controller. There were weekends when we wouldn’t get dressed at all, and play Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy, and Guitar Hero for hours at a time. We would break for food and the bathroom, and other than that, we were molded into the couch cushions, watching Nintendo’s version of ourselves bowl, flip around to fit into bubbles, and play rockstars. Now my addiction to television has distracted me from my Nintendo.

10. Nob Hill Foods
This is my favorite I-can-buy-anything-at-this-store grocery store. I love Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, but I usually have to go to a second store to supplement my groceries. But not when I go to Nob Hill. They have gorgeous produce, and killer cuts of meat. They have enough organic stuff to choose from and a lot of low-fat and low-calorie versions of things as well. Their generic version of shredded wheat is better (yes) than the one at Trader Joe’s. The biggest plus for me is that Nob Hill is close enough to my house that I can walk, assuming I’m not doing my “big” shopping. Oh, and they have a sushi bar, which includes brown rice versions of some of my favorites. Yes, I know brown rice is probably blasphemy to sushi snobs, but sometimes I need my fix, and brown rice is a healthier substitute. When I shop on Saturday mornings, I must grab a nonfat latte from Peet’s, which is right inside the store. Awesome.

If you want to play, leave me a comment and I will assign you a letter for your meme. I promise not to give you X or Z. It’ll be a good letter. And, like Sizzle, I won’t assign you a deadline. I think it took me 2 weeks to get this post done!