Blog posts are supposed to inform or entertain or inspire. Mine tend to be confessions.
Here’s one. I had cookies for breakfast.
They weren’t even homemade. They were thin broken Oreo type cookies that must have been put in the grocery bag first, with the half gallon of milk on top.
Combing through the package, picking up chunks of sugary filling mixed with crumbs, I reminded myself of an elected official I once worked for. He’d take bits of crust and run it over the dinner plate, sopping up whatever remained. That’s okay at home, but this was one of those dinners with eight pieces of silverware and a tuxedoed waiter standing behind your chair to whisk your plate away once you finished. I dutifully left a tiny bit of food in the center of the plate along with the fork, tines down.
Back to my transgressions.
When I’m on land, I can’t seem to rid myself of bad habits. I snack at five o’clock in the morning. I snack while writing. I snack while doing the dishes. I don’t snack in the shower, although I confess to drinking brandy if I’m soaking in a bubble bath.
The boat is different story. I call it my “get healthy place.”
A 32-foot boat home has just enough room for essentials. On grocery day, the tiny refrigerator is packed to the walls. The cupboards barely have enough room for dry goods. Storage is under the settee in the salon and it’s hard to get to. You have to wrestle a five –foot long cushion from under a table to reach the lid.
The boat has no room for snack food although I do keep an emergency stash of chocolate behind the coffee, just in case we get caught in a storm. It calms me, remember?
We’re on our way to the boat—we stopped off at my daughter’s in Sonoma—and I will soon be svelte again, or at least as svelte as I can be. Unfortunately, I will have to use my non-existent will power to resist the kitchen drawer full of salt water taffy she has, which she doesn’t touch.
I touch it. Unwrap it. Pop it in my mouth.
Chocolate ones are best.