Kind Of Stinky Outside

We've had alerts about how bad our air quality is the past few days, you know, where they tell you not to go outside and breathe? And the story is being reported from a school where a line of cars is idling along coming to pick up their children. I know kids aren't allowed to walk to school these days and I guess if the air isn't fit to breathe you don't want them out there walking around in it anyway, but we talk so much about how fat the kids are these days and maybe they could use a little exercise and maybe all those cars going back and forth to all the schools every day isn't helping the air quality all that much.
Apparently they weren't reporting from the school because of all the cars coming and going adding to the pollution, though, but rather because the kids were being kept inside at recess.

We have a shift in the wind this morning, though, with some cooler air coming down from the bay area, and along with it is the smell of onions. Lots of onion fields between here and there I guess.

And, oddly enough, and adding to the air pollution, is the fact that we have had not one, but two haystack fires within the past couple of weeks. I had never heard of a haystack fire before, but I guess where there are animals that need to be fed, there are feedlots with lots and lots of bales of hay stacked up, and where there is hay and hot weather, there must be a little spontaneous combustion going on. Now, when you think of a haystack, you think of those picturesque ones where the hay is stacked up like a teepee in a pastoral setting with birds flying around and fluffy clouds in the sky. No, the haystack fires should have been called balestack fires, because they were huge, and I mean HUGE, stacks of hay bales. Lots of money worth of hay, too, with damages in the tens of thousands of dollars. And this is what a haystack fire looks like.

Not much else of any excitement is going on around here, just the usual cat poop scooping and such. I did actually fix myself some real food for dinner last night, some apricot almond chicken and I even ate a vegetable with the chicken, some cooked up carrots. I had thought about riding the bike over to the sandwich shop but it was very hot out and I also though about the $7.00 that the sandwich shop charges for a sandwich, and decided to save that $7.00 and also save me sweating and breathing in the dirty air alert air.

I'll share the apricot almond chicken recipe here, I may have shared it before but it bears repeating because it is so EASY to make, and me being an I like sweet foods type person, absolutely delicious.

Apricot Almond Chicken Breasts

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
3/4 cup apricot preserves
1/4 cup chicken broth
1 tbsp honey mustard
1/4 cup sliced almond (or however many almonds you want, silly to measure them, just sprinkle them on the chicken already!)

1/ Sprinkle the chicken with the salt and pepper, place in a baking dish coated with cooking spray. Bake uncovered at 350 for 15 minutes.
2/ Combine the preserves, broth and mustard in a small bowl and pour over the chicken. Sprinkle the almonds on and bake 15-20 minutes longer or until done.

EAT. YUM. DELICIOUS. Actually, when I make this recipe I only use 2 chicken breasts but the same amount of sauce so that there is lots of extra sauce and each bite of chicken is deliciously apricoty and almondy. And SO EASY TO MAKE!

Well THAT Was Weird!

Yesterday I was sitting down to eat my lovely diet lunch of an apple, cottage cheese, and an egg on one of those 'thin' bagels. I haven't been eating much bread at all, like maybe 4 pieces in the last 3 weeks, but an egg sandwich sounded really good and the bagel was whole grain and only 100 calories except for the butter that I put on the bagel. Anyway, I'm about halfway through lunch and all of a sudden my face starts tingling and then burning. Burning to where I am in pain and starting to panic because WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON AND WHY IS MY FACE BURNING!?!
I had to go get a wet washcloth to put on my face because it was BURNING! and then it started tingling and burning on the backs of my upper arms and I'm starting to think that maybe I am having an allergic reaction to my lunch or maybe someone has poisoned my apple or my cottage cheese. I googled face burning and tingling but came up with tons of different causes, none of which was a poisoned apple. I was wondering if I should dail 911 or call Keith at work to come and take me to urgent care, and then finally after about 20 minutes of extreme burning it started to go away.

So, I tried calling the doctor and of course they were still on their lunch break and the office was closed but I was advised to dial 911 if it was an emergency which by now I was thinking maybe not so much because if it had been a poisoned apple I'd probably be dead by now instead of starting to feel better.

Anyway, I finally get through to a real person at the doctors and they take a message about my weird symptoms and say that a nurse will get back to me later. Later ended up being about 5 pm when the nurse finally called me back and said that it sounded like flushing and that was a side effect of my new cholesterol meds. A side effect that was not listed in the side effects when I googled my new meds, but that is beside the point, I was just glad that it wasn't poison.

So, I google flushing, which I'd never actually heard of when it doesn't involve a toilet or a city in New York, and what do you know, niacin causes flushing in almost everyone who takes it. Now, Keith was advised to start taking niacin for his cholesterol issues so I though maybe I should start taking it, too, since we both have the same cholesterol and too fat for our own good issues. But, I guess I shouldn't have taken the niacin on top of the new cholesterol meds and all the other vitamins and fish oil pills, etc. that I'm already taking because IT MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE YOUR FACE IS BURNING OFF!

So, problem solved and no, I won't be taking any more niacin any time soon.

And, it looks like my eating cottage cheese instead of a peanut butter sandwich is finally paying off with my not so accurate scale saying that I've lost 6 or 7 pounds. We'll see for sure when I go back to the doctor in a few months for the results of some more expensive blood work to make sure that my new meds aren't screwing up my liver and I get weighed on their fancy digital scale. I was starting to get rather discouraged at being hungry but not seeing any changes on my scale, so seeing a little weight loss is good and does give me incentive not to run to the store and buy a tub of Ben and Jerry's because ice cream is sooooo good.

I think Mother Nature played a cruel joke on us when she made it so very easy to gain weight and so very hard to lose it.

And, speaking of losing weight, we were doing pretty well on taking a little bike ride after dinner the past few weeks, but lately our air quality reports have been telling us that the air quality is not just unhealthy for sensitive people, but UNHEALTHY FOR EVERYONE! So, do you go outside in unhealthy for everyone air and go bike riding or do you skip that bike ride until the air is better? Exercise is good but not when the air will give you black lung while you are exercising.
Plus, Keith is outside in the bad air all day anyway and I still have to ride the bike on my errands in the morning, so...it's probably better to just stay inside after dinner and watch Jeopardy.