I must never work from home (Weight Watchers update #3)

Happy New Year's Eve! I hope you are all having fun. This afternoon, I joined an impressive crowd at Fleet Feet Sports in Annapolis for a 5K fun run called "Last Run of the Year." Tomorrow, I'll be doing my first run of the year, aka: day 1 of the Annapolis Striders' 2011 half-marathon training. In between, I'm supposed to be working on a sermon for Sunday. Instead, I just cooked a big (and delicious) meal of steak, mashed potatoes, and a spinach salad with a homemade bacon vinaigrette dressing. And, of course, I uncorked a bottle of pinot noir purchased over the summer, because you can't eat steak without red wine!

This dinner highlights a little problem I have noticed this holiday season. Allow me to lay it out for you: I am super-duper busy, leaving little time for my hobbies. Thus, when I have time off, I like to spend lots of it engaging in those hobbies. One of my favorite hobbies is cooking. Thus, when I have time off, I cook (and therefore eat) like its going out of style.

Today, as on several mornings over this holiday season, I made a favorite holiday breakfast of french toast with cranberry sauce. Fortunately, I'm out of champagne, so I didn't drink a mimosa with it, but I did that on three other occasions this holiday season. For lunch, I took leftover rice from Chinese takeout, some leftover veggies from shepherd's pie, and a leftover orange-glazed pork chop from Christmas Eve, and made orange-y pork fried rice. Then, for dinner, I had the aforementioned steak feast. That's just today. At 11 tonight, I'm going to put a chicken in some brining liquid I made so that I can try Thomas Keller's fried chicken recipe for lunch tomorrow. There's still another steak in the fridge too...

Thankfully, I also like going to the gym more often when I have extra time, so I've put in several extra hours of exercise in between all this eating. Thus, I only gained 1 pound over Christmas week and I'm hoping to at least break even this week. Also, my New Year's resolution is to get my food budget under control. If all goes well, this should have the side-benefit of reigning in my cooking frenzies just a little bit.

If there's one thing I've learned from all of this, its that I probably shouldn't work from home. Ever. I sometime dream about setting up a counseling office in my house, seeing a few clients a day, and spending the rest of my time writing. Its a nice idea, but I think its better for me if I'm separated from the kitchen at least 40 hours a week. Maybe I could install some kind of timer-lock...

Happy New Year!