Feb 6 - The Urban Forest

  Off I set after work, wending the now familiar way to Miss Mischief's house.  I arrived just as she did and we got changed and headed off, and this time I remembered my camera!  There are a number of wetland areas and ponds within the narrow sliver of parkland, surrounded by signs describing what bird is that and cautioning do not feet the ducks.

 

   Today our weekly temptation was even more alluring than normal.  For three weeks in a row now, we've successfully passed Dairy Bell without heading inside for an ice cream.
  I remember one year as a kid, Mum took me down there and we bought two eleven litre tubs of icecream, mint-choc-chip and cherry ripe, for my birthday party.  My friends and siblings and I ate nothing but ice cream all day.
  The main reason we've avoided temptation for the most part is that neither of us carries any money on our walk and we inevitably forget about Dairy Bell until we are walking towards it.  Today before we left though, I had remembered but we decided to be good and forget again.

  It was a really hot stinky sweaty walk today.  I didn't know until I saw the temparature board on the way home but it was 36°C on our walk today!  I was definitely glad to have my water bottle, my hat and my sunnies.  I still got a little dehydrated though so I'm fighting off a headache at the moment with chilled water and airconditioning.  Miss Mischief and I admitted together that if it wasn't for the other, neither of us would've chosen to go on a walk, so the principle of a weekly Wednesday walkie is definitely a winner.

  I headed home to find my kitchen bench tidy and my dishes done, my floors swept and possibly even mopped, or at least wiped.  I love my Mum.  There was a note:
 

 

  That's right, my mother has so little faith in my ability to look after myself that she even mocks me.  More fool her, I got my dishes done for nothing!  Thanks Mumsy xoxo.  Anyway, I showed her...  I've laid almost all of them away (some were still damp) and I tidied up my breakfast bench even further and I emptied the recycling tubs.  So there!  Or maybe that's just exactly what she planned!  I've clearly fallen foul of reverse psychology and my mother is an evil genius.

  Today's food and exercise were:

• Breakfast was a quarter cup of Carmen's Classic fruit and nut muesli with Jalna a2 low fat natural yoghurt with a teaspoonful of the Masterchef's apricot jam, pumpkin seeds and slivered almonds.
• Morning snack was a white-flesh nectarine.
• Lunch was a Mission spinach and herb wrap with one slice of Bega So Light tasty cheese, baby spinach, 100g of champagne leg ham, two sliced mushrooms and half a tomato.
• Afternoon snacks were (spread across the afternoon) a yellow-flesh peach, a Pink Lady apple and a 35g Carmen's yoghurt, apricot and almond bar.
• Exercise was a 50 minute, 3.8km walk.
  
• Dinner was a sandwich of two slices of toasted multigrain bread, Black Swan 'fresh' guacamole, four fish fingers (done in the AirFryer) and iceberg lettuce.  I followed that with vegetable sticks, the remainder of the guacamole as it was use-by today and a little hummus (no where near what was photographed).
• Dessert was a 170g Dairy Farmers 98% fat free vine passionfruit yoghurt and a handful of cherries.

  It's still very warm in here.  I have a feeling that this will be an aircon-left-on-whisper kind of night.  I started another new book last night.  The work reading 'Drive' was just a teensy bit dry so I've begun Deranged Marriage by Sushi Das which was one of the half a dozen books I bought at the second hand book store in Launceston.  So far so good.  It follows journalist Sushi Das own life, trying to escape her expected arranged marriage as a young girl of Indian background in England.  It's quite light-hearted and funny so far.
  Time to at least try to get some rest I suppose; both the forests I faced today have very much worn me out.
  Jess