Muggy Tuesday

Just after seven am, and it's rainy and muggy outside. I opened the sliding doors to the front balcony to let in some fresh air and...nothing. A steady mist of rain is falling but strangely the air is still and warm. Tomorrow is the last day of Summer here, but typically we will get some of our warmest weather yet, before it starts to really cool off toward the end of March/early April.

Emily has been in the same pair of pjs for three days. I know she is at a loose end, it's been months since she's done any school work and thanks to the dickhead principal of our own school here it will be a while longer. We got the letter from the Department of Education yesterday, pointless exercise number 345, and faxed our reply straight back. I have emailed the new school Emily's subject choices and now we just have to keep on waiting.

She was revving up for an "incident" yesterday, I know the signs well. She wanted to work out on the Wii and asked her father for some batteries for the remote control. He suggested she look for them, she got shirty and expletives were exchanged. I know enough to keep out of it now, he made it clear I can't discipline her a long time ago. Suits me. She's a spoiled little brat who just sucks the fun and the happiness out of things when it suits her.

When Josh got home I asked him to go for a walk with me and Phill ended up coming with us. I know from experience that exercise is the key to weight loss, especially on this new programme that isn't as cut and dried as the old one. We had a good brisk walk around the block which includes of course walking back up the hill so we were all puffed and suitably exercised by the time we got home. We came in the back way to avoid Emily seeing us, if we'd asked her to come we would have had to wait five days for her to get dressed and the light would have faded. We were up the back looking at the vegie garden. We have this huge and I mean HUGE pumpkin plant growing out of the compost bin. The leaves must be the size of garbage tin lids. A few flowers so we might even get some pumpkin out of them come Autumn. Emily came outside and seemed to suspect nothing although she looked curiously at my sneakered feet. I had asked Josh to teach me how to use the Wii so I can do yoga and exercises on it and suggested we connect it out here in the lounge room where there is more room. So we did that, we rolled back the rug and he showed me and I did some balance and other exercises. It was so fun and I was really working out, I love that thing! We are going to leave it connected in here so I can use it during the day when I can't get out to walk or swim. Emily came out and wanted to use it and I asked her to wait till we were finished which caused her to flounce back into her room. She wouldn't come out for dinner (so we enjoyed dinner for a change) and I left her to it.

After dinner Josh and I played some games on the Wii Resort, and ended up playing ten pin bowling. Phill came and joined us and I went in and asked Emily to come and play and got told to "f*ck off". Charming girl. What fun it was! It was almost like being at the bowling alley. Earlier when she had stormed into her room there was the usual crashing and banging in there as she threw and broke things I assume. Then there was a loud crash like glass shattering. Phill and I went in there but we couldn't see what had happened and she told us to get out etc, so we did. It put a bad feeling in the air as it always does, but we just left her to it. At one point when I went in she was madly typing on the laptop (two keys are gone, how does one break keys on a laptop for goodness sakes?) I daresay she was typing vitriol about us all on Facebook. She must have forgotten that none of us have, or look at, Facebook these days and could care less.

It did occur to me as I got into bed that she might kill me in my sleep (I am only half joking here) but I woke up intact and breathing so she mustn't have done. Now this was all over nothing, or some imagined slight. But it was interesting that none of us really reacted to it and just got on with what we were doing. She can have her little dramas in there and wreck all her stuff and Phill can deal with it since he has mostly created the present situation. I'm glad to be relieved of my responsibility in a way. Nothing I did was supported or backed up during the biggest dramas, so he can have it. She is still threatening to leave when she's sixteen (only two more sleeps!) I'm hoping she goes before then so I can have the Ipad he stupidly bought her. Yes, an Ipad when she has broken her own laptop, then Josh's old one, and now her father's old one. Ok vent over, she's not going to cause me any more stress or unhappiness after everything I've been through with her.

So I am loving the Wii, the technology is amazing, it's going to be so handy having that to exercise with at home, especially when the weather is like this.

Today I am going to make some Pumpkin and Tomato soup, it's another old WW recipe, delicious and filling and zero points per serve! I think I have been going overboard with the fruit, but that can't be all bad. It will be interesting to see what the scales say on Thursday, but no matter what I know I am doing such a great thing for my health and will not give up. I have stuck to my points every day but one and used up a few of my weeklies on that day, and I have done some exercise every day, probably not as much as I could have, but the best I could do. I am feeling happy, energised, positive, well rested and well fed. Blogger is playing silly buggers this morning so I'll leave it now. The soup recipe will be up on the food blog by this afternoon.