DEAR TYLENOL...

Whatever it is that you put into your magic pills, they really do work like magic. Nothing, absolutely nothing, makes me feel better when I have a cold like your little yellow, Daytime pills do.

Thanks very much,
Dominique

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It's amazing how my body responds to medication. It won't respond to Traditional Medicinals Echinacea Plus or orange juice or chicken soup or anything like when I have a cold. It only and I mean, only, responds to Tylenol Cold. It's like they're in cahoots or something. Of course, knowing that I only had one measly yellow magic pill left, I was very hesitant to take it but also knowing that I couldn't miss another day of work, I had no choice but to pop the pill on Thursday morning, right before I started my eight-hour shift. But that was on Thursday morning and finally broke down yesterday afternoon and bought another $15 box of magic, orange pills. Ugh, damn Shoppers and their convenience prices! Figures that I'd end up downtown feeling utterly miserable and in desperate need of some Tylenol. So yeah, the new Cold Plus (the regular Tylenol cold plus mucous relief, what joy!) kept me going for another 4-6 hours. I managed to get through Kiki's Delivery Service, which I did not get through the night before (sorry Sean!) and while Sean wanted to take a nap after the movie ended, I was all fired up and awake. But I did manage to take a nap with him anyway.

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But let me back up and show you some eats...from the 30th...pre-sickness:
Breakfast was the standard half WW English muffin with PB and coconut butter:Lunch was organic roast chicken drumstick and veggies:Snacks included grapes and strawberries:Along with the very last half of a chocolate walnut and dried cherry brownie (man, those were good!) and two squares of Lindt Sea Salt for my second breakfast:Sean and I were heading downtown for a concert after work so we decided we'd grabbed dinner in the city. Before that though, I decided to snack on some prosciutto sandwiches (read: prosciutto sandwiched between water crackers) in the car. Before the concert we dropped by Dufflet to pick up their lemon/lime coconut tarts:

Sadly the tarts were lacking the tart flavour that I've come to expect from Dufflet. Sigh. Their lemon tart is, in my opinion, one of the best tarts in town, so this was truly a disappointment. It was way too sweet and you could hardly taste it. The coconut top did make up for it--but not entirely. Not a repeat purchase. (And I think that's the first time I've ever said any negative about Dufflet Pastries.)

And then went to Steve's Music store so I could pick up something to clean my drum kit but it was closed. So we then headed to Whole Foods so I could stock up on the essentials (ie: Vita Coco) but they were all out so I ended up getting some watermelon, water crackers and other stuff. In the end we didn't have enough time to grab something to eat so I just ate my watermelon.

After the concert we ended up in the parking lot for almost an hour before we were able to get out and by that time I just wanted to get home to sleep since I had work in the morning. Thank goodness for the prosciutto and water crackers I had eaten during the drive into the city and in the parking lot.

PS: For those of you interested, the concert was Vampire Weekend and it was totally awesome!!!===

31st...Wednesday
I decided to try something new for first breakfast:Strawberries with two two-bite cranberry and orange scones from Whole Foods. The scones are a little on the sweet side but they're tasty. They kind of suck all the moisture out of your mouth but I like my sweet scones like that.

Lunch was organic roast chicken on a bed of pale red kidney beans along with roast veggies:It really does pay to make your meals way in advance!

Snacks were the usual grapes and strawberries:
Along with half a chocolate-dipped macaroon from Dufflet and two squares of Lindt's Sea Salt chocolate for my second breakfast oatmeal:Chocolate was consumed, macaroon was not :(

And as you saw earlier, dinner was the following because I was feeling downright horrible:===

1st...no April Fool's jokes here
With sickness setting in, I didn't really want to eat anything but I knew it would be a bad idea to skip out on first breakfast. I knew a scratchy double-toasted whole wheat English muffin wasn't an option so I went with two cranberry orange scones with Earth Balance (yay, finally) along with some Olympic green tea and vanilla yogurt, grapes and strawberries:

I assume it was all very yummy because I couldn't taste a thing!

Second breakfast usually involves oatmeal but this time I decided to swap my lunch for breakfast:Organic chicken soup with orzo, egg drop and a hidden chicken thigh. Sadly this chicken thigh was not even close to organic. Bad times ensued. Double sad that I was at work. Triple sad that I ate this soup earlier than I normally would have because I was sick. Ughs all around! Note to self: do not assume something in Whole Foods is organic unless the label says so!

Lunchtime was oatmeal with two chocolate squares and the following grapes and strawberries:along with this box of Vita Coco:I wouldn't normally have finished both boxes of Vita Coco so quickly but I was sick and being sick means I make excuses for lots of things.

Here is the chocolate and macaroon I had that still did not get consumed:Sean and I had plans to get our hair done later that evening but plans fell through when the time turned out to be inconvenient. We headed downtown anyway so that I could go to Steve's to pick up some cleanser for my cymbals and we grabbed some Korean food for dinner. No photos...it wasn't that great anyway. My dumpling and rice cake soup was really nothing to write home about though Sean's cold noodle soup looked way better. I forgot that Korean dumplings tend to be heavy on the ginger and ginger in savory form makes me want to gag. I was really hungry so I managed to eat all but one. Blech. Dinner left my Korean craving very unfulfilled.

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2nd...Good Friday
Breakfast was eaten in the car on the way to the city:Whole wheat English muffin with PB and coconut butter on top. Clearly I put way too much coconut butter on top--hence the oozing. Some of it even dripped onto my makeup bag in the background. And yes, I did lick the CB from my makeup bag. I can't waste good coconut butter!

Lunch was had several hours later after Sean went from this...to this:HOT! Wow Sean looks so young now! I think we now look like an age appropriate couple rather than him looking super old and me looking super young. Don't let that "before" shot fool you--his beard used to be longer than that. Plus I now this his hair matches his clothing. Before his hockey hair didn't really match his (I hate to say it), "indie/hipster" clothing.

I also got my hair done but I just got my colour touched up. Photos to come. A full review of Caplansky's will also follow but for now, here's the smoked meat sandwich and fries that I had for a late lunch (it was a little after 4pm):I was smart enough to only eat half of everything and take the rest to-go. This lunch was consumed while my nose was running non-stop. It was kind of gross. After lunch we had plans to hit up Greg's Ice Cream on Bloor St. but my cold had other plans. We had to hit up the Shoppers stat for above-mentioned Tylenol. I was going down--fast! After a quick stop into the devil store (just kidding!), we came out with a box of orange-coloured relief, I popped one of those into my mouth and then Sean and I stood in line for some ice cream--just the thing to cheer me up! Sean ended up getting a scoop of orange marmalade and I got a scoop of Fifty's Frost--a malted chocolate.

After that we headed back to Sean's place. It had been a long day in the city and I was ready for some downtime. Upon arriving at Sean's, I was hungry again so a snack was consumed:Tea along with a bowl of fruit...blackberries, pineapple, canteloupe and some sketchy blueberries that I ended up tossing into the green bin. I felt bad about it but Sean reassured me that no one else would end up eating them.

And that's was the end of the day's eats.

I'M BLOG FAMOUS

I totally forgot to post that several months back, I was busy reading and and my version of Katie's Fudge Babies were featured on her blog, Chocolate-Covered Katie. You can check out the photo here.
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Breakfast on the 3rd was the following:
Leftover maple breakfast sausage with a handful of spinach and scrambled eggs along with a piece of whole wheat toast.

Second breakfast was the following:Yes, that's right...just like my high school days, I took my cereal with me. On the right is my finished buckwheat cereal and on the left is some organic 2%.

Lunch was delicious--though in retrospect it may or may not have contributed to a major migraine:
Lemon and herb sole filet that I covered in dill-breadcrumbs and baked in the oven. Under that is some spinach and a maple breakfast sausage. Heavy on the protein for lunch that day but I needed the protein to keep me going throughout the afternoon.

Snacks were unhealthy as I ran out of frozen fruits and grapes long ago. Instead I had some dried dates, a couple Tim Tams (original) and a poppyseed and olive oil macaron:
I normally have lunch at 2:30 so by the time I'm done work at 5:30 and get home, I'm ready to eat my arm off. I ended up having a small bowl of buckwheat cereal:
While I waited for my sweet potato to bake in the oven. It was definitely worth the wait. Here's my dinner:
Stir-fried zucchini and red peppers (I'm not a huge fan of cooked red peppers unless it's on pizza), half a piece of steak, baked sweet potato with coconut oil, salt and pepper and mashed pumpkin. I didn't manage to finish all of it and sadly half of the sweet potato was leftover. Clearly I should have also said no when my brother asked if I wanted the last piece of Dufflet cake several hours later, but you know me and Dufflet cake...I can't say no:

I'm really glad that cake is out of my life now though. I gained about 2lbs while it was in the house and whether or not it was specifically the cake, I don't know for sure but back when I was a receptionist for an interior design company with Dufflet down the street, we used to order 3 cakes for the office (of only 55 people!) for someone's birthday (sometimes occuring 3 times in one month). When I left that job, I lost 7lbs and the only thing that I could relate to the weight loss was my decrease in Dufflet-cake-eating. Sorry Dufflet...as tasty as you are (which you are by the way), you are not conducive to my diet. But at least you're all-natural. I give you a thumbs-up for that!

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4th...Thursday
I had a major migraine all day long. I don't know whether it was a bunch of spice samples or a co-worker's perfume or something I had eaten the day before (could it have been the fish or the coconut oil), but it was bad. I took three pills in total--not cool.

Breakfast started out really well and tasty. I had the same thing for first and second breakfast:
Three small-size scrambled eggs with grape tomatoes and wilted baby spinach (I split this into two portions for first and second breakfast) along with a slice of whole wheat bread with cream cheese. I also had one of two bananas:Lunch was take-out, finally! Ever since starting the new job, there are no more lunches out, which of course is a good thing, but it's forced me to make lunch for myself every single night before or morning of and after a month, I was getting tired. It's kind of a pain in the ass to make lunch for just one person--especially when frozen meals and ramen bowls don't count as lunch. One of my co-workers was ordering from a nearby Thai restaurant, coincidentally the Thai restaurant my old co-workers and I used to frequent, so I got my regular green curry beef brisket with rice. Mmm, delicious.

Snacks for my work day included some more dried dates, Tim Tams and macarons, this time salted caramel and cassis.
Dinner that night was a mish mash of bland crap because my migraine was still roaring. I took a nap after work and then headed out to Jessie's house for some no-bake baking (more on that later). On the way to her house I had some white rice with lemon and salt and munched on some grapes too.

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5th...Friday!
I woke up late and scrambled to make a decent breakfast. For some reason I now refuse to leave the house without a proper breakfast and a proper breakfast must include eggs or peanut butter. Or in this case, both:Last piece of raisin bun toasted with Crofter's Asia and organic, natural PB. Two small hard-boiled eggs on the side. Those small-size eggs are so tiny. It's going to be weird getting back into large-size eggs.

Lunch was actually what was supposed to be Thursday's lunch but Thai take-out made the following take a backseat. It was okay since I didn't have to make a lunch for Friday, woo.Baked sweet potato with salt, pepper and thickened lentil soup, leftover stir-fried zucchini, leftover half of steak atop spinach. It was ridiculously delicious. It made me feel bad for my co-worker who was stuck eating a microwaved sweet potato (plain!) with Activia yogurt (bleh!) and a clementine. Girl, this is NOT lunch! And I don't know what the deal is with Activia but every time I eat it, it gives me a migraine--a bad one! I've tried it on three separate occasions but I just can't down it without a massive migraine occuring the next day. I give up! I'll never have belly-dancing innards.

Once home I was hungry, as usual. I think I should just stop mentioning that I'm hungry because y'all should know by now that I'm hungry. Really, it's true. Sometimes, no often, Sean is amazed at how much food this little body consumed. I'm sometimes amazed too but then I think it's Marzipandy, the tapeworm in my stomach who is doing all the food consuming.

Anyway, I snacked on these upon coming home:Mojito and salted caramel macaron (the latter of which was not consumed the day before) plus a coconut chocolate patty. This was a really bad idea since it set me up for failure for the rest of the evening. What the heck am I talking about? Well, this...Popcorn for dinner. Yeah it's organic and "natural" flavour but considering I have IBS, I should not have had popcorn for dinner. But who can say no to a bowl like this: I then also had a bowl of Frosted Flakes with a couple of tablespoons of buckwheat cereal for fiber purposes (at least I had organic milk with it): I also had some grapes, a pear, almost all four small roasted potatoes (that I cut up into chunks and drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper) and now some mint tea with a bit of chocolate milk added in, in hopes of creating some kind of mint chocolate liquid treat. It's ended up being a bit of a recipe failure but that's probably okay since everything else I ate that night was probably enough.

Now I'm off to bed!

I'M HOW OLD NOW?

27. Yikes! While some 27 year olds I know are living on their own or with their significant others or married and/or have children, I am none of these things. Does it bother me? Sometimes, but then I look at the course my life has taken and figure that where I'm at right now is probably where I should be. 27 does seem kind of old though. I'm on the wrong side of my 20s. I wish I was 25 again. I can't even begin to tell you the amount of times I said that when I was 26. I'm trying to change that though.

With the beginning of the new year I decided to make a change for the better. Putting an end to my beyond shitty job was first on the agenda. Second on the agenda was getting a new job and thankfully that was accomplished--though I did go through a period of feeling totally and utterly sorry for myself because I couldn't find a job within two weeks. What can I say...sometimes I have delusions of grandeur--or as Sean would tell you, they occur often.

Anyway, this year I want to read more and have decided to delve into two books I read when I was in elementary and high school: The Giver and The Chrysalids. They were both books I enjoyed during elementary school but the former was my absolute fave. The latter, with its sci-fi theme, is one that I think Sean will really enjoy so he's going to read it after I read it and finally he'll have someone to discuss a book with.

Later this year I want to start running. Or maybe jogging. Or just walking. I have no idea how my asthma is going to effect my running, or even the possibility of me running, or jogging, but it seems like something I would enjoy--or at least Caitlin's blog makes it seem like something tremendously enjoyable. I feel weird using her first name on my blog considering that I've been reading her blog religiously (ie: daily) for ages but never posted a comment (I didn't know where to start...she has like 100+ comments per day sometimes) so she doesn't even know I exist. It would be weird if I were a world-famous marathoner (ha!) and someone asked me who inspired me because my answer would be "Caitlin from Healthy Tipping Point" because Caitlin would probably be all "WHO?" Oh well. So yeah, I want to run. We'll see how it goes.

Whoa, anyway, here's a food recap:

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27th...Saturday
The rest of Saturday's eats included dinner:Parsnip "fries" with ketchup and scrambled eggs. The scrambled eggs were a very last minute addition because after eating a parsnip fry straight from the oven, my reaction was closer to wanting to throw up than wanting to eat them all like a cake from Dufflet. I realized that 5 small parsnips for dinner were not going to cut it so I decided to add a couple scrambled eggs to the mix and also added some ketchup in hopes of producing some kind of taste sensation akin to eating a slice of cake from Dufflet. (Apologies for all the Dufflet cake references but hopefully talking about eating the cake will stop me from actually eating all the cake. I've been eating WAY too much of the cake already--the scale told me so.) Dinner was eaten in the car--again--on the way to P-Mall so Sean and I could kill some time before watching Crazy Heart (starring Jeff "The Dude" Bridges). We ended up ordering noodle soup (mine with duck, his with BBQ pork) in the food court because that's what I do when I have time to kill. With our bellies full of liquid and hand-pulled noodles, we headed to Chapters to kill more time (and then bought books) and then finally watched Crazy Heart. Good movie but I prefer The Wrestler.

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28th...Sunday...check back for a separate post.

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1st of March...Monday
Having spent the previous evening at Sean's catching up on the fifth season of Weeds (WTF is up with that show sometimes??), I came home late and did not prepare anything for lunch the night before. What resulted was a day full of "FML."

First breakfast wasn't so bad...a raisin bun that I toasted, split in half and spread with natural, organic PB and Crofter's Asia spread:But from there it kind of went all downhill because someone at work threw out or stole my dressing (the only dressing that was originally in my house that did not contain sulphites) and so I was left to eat this, plain:Iceberg lettuce with three small-size, hard-boiled eggs. Not cool! Seriously, not cool at all. Iceberg lettuce isn't even good with dressing but without dressing and with three measly small-sized eggs, ughhh! I wanted to eat my arm!

I did have a container of these grapes handy but not realizing that someone had stolen my dressing from the work fridge, I ate them during second breakfast! So along with my sad, sad, the-saddest-salad-in-the-world, I ate a piece of birthday cake:And thank goodness for that piece of cake, because otherwise, I probably would have eaten a sample at work and who knows what kind of bacteria it would have contained!!

I met my dad at the soccer dome after work. I normally wait about 25 minutes for him but I didn't want to sit around the lunchroom thinking about how hungry I was so I decided to walk to the soccer dome instead. As soon as I reached home, I ate the following macarons from Nadege:The yellow one is salted caramel and the light green is olive oil. Dinner consisted of the previous night's leftovers with rice:Steamed chicken, stuffed mushrooms, steamed preserved pork sausage, stir-fried veggies. It was a lot of food but I finished it all because I was REALLY hungry!

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2nd...Tuesday
I woke up this morning not wanting another banana or bowl of oatmeal. I was craving eggs and bread and decided to really "do it up" for breakfast so I had the following for first AND second breakfast:Two small fried eggs on a whole wheat bagel with processed cheese and spinach. With first breakfast I had the remainder of my chocolate milk (a little less than 1 cup) and for second breakfast I had some water. It was super delicious and satisfying and it made my co-workers jealous...not that that's what I was going for but they were sad when comparing their yogurt and chocolate chip cookies to my breakfast bagel.

Lunch was also spectacular and featured a proper salad:Spinach with two maple breakfast sausages and goat cheese as well as a baked potato with crumbed feta, olive oil, salt and pepper:I didn't use any dressing on the salad as the goat cheese and sausage were flavourful enough. I often prefer my salads without dressing, as long as the additions to the salad have enough flavour to hold everything together...plus, I didn't use Iceberg lettuce this time.

Grapes and some dried dates rounded everything out though I didn't finish those all. Although I was a little bit full from my banana after work, mushrooms couldn't keep me away from dinner so I dug into a huge plate full of mushrooms. I'm kind of a mushroom addict...of the non-illegal variety. I absolutely love mushrooms, all of them. Straw, shitake, button, porcini, brown, oyster, king...mmm, delicious! The only mushroom I don't really care for is the enoki mushroom. I really dislike the stringy texture once it's cooked. It kind of grosses me out in the mouth. Anyway, my love of mushrooms resulted in this plate of mushroom and rice (with other stuff) goodness:
I am now in the process of making some buckwheat "cereal" so that I can have something other than oatmeal for second breakfast at work tomorrow. I still want something with enough soluble fiber to keep me satiated for four hours but I'm really tired of oatmeal considering that I actually really dislike oatmeal to begin with. Plus, I ran out of the oat and flax variety that I preferred and am now stuck with flavours like cinnamon spice and apple 'n cinnamon, the latter of which contains little chunks of freeze-dried apple and it grosses me out too.

Goodnight, all!