Ramming Speed (aka Food and Sleep - What Are Those?

Do you remember that graphic scene when the giant galley full of oarsmen is rowing along at their regular cruise speed and the galley master picks up the pace to double speed? The pounding of the big drum picks up and everyone starts rowing faster. And then they call for ramming speed and the drum is going so fast you're amazed that the drummer can bang it that fast and that loud and the oarsmen are going as fast as their arms can move and they start to drop off the benches from exhaustion while the mean guy with the whip is telling them to row harder? Then they finally stop the boat and all the oarsmen slump exhausted over the oars and call for water. I wonder why I am thinking of that today. :-) Another eventful weekend is behind me and the pace is beginning to pick up. This weekend, I had five events from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Of course the hotel was in a different spot (between thirty to sixty minutes away) from each of these five events so that added some time as well. The rest of the Grand Family had it a bit easier since two of the five events were Transitionals so only two of us had to be there and the rest could go do fun things. The logistics problem of this sort of thing is food and sleep. I have tried to learn to do without these, but it appears that I am addicted to getting some of each of these. Unfortunately, those are also the two things that you never seem to have enough time to manage. And for me, when I eat badly, I feel badly, so that can be a real bother. The other problem with eating badly is that you gain weight, lots and lots of weight. My Grand Warder year, I gained ten pounds. I gained another seven during the first half of my Grand Marshal year and then said, hold it, I can't do this for another four and a half years at ten pounds a year. Since Labor Day, I have now lost the seventeen pounds I gained and am back to where I started, which was still with five to ten pounds to lose, but at least my clothes fit again. So here's a sample of the problem. On Friday morning, I have my nice little instant high fiber oatmeal, just like I do most regular mornings, I have my little 250 calorie frozen lunch thing at lunch time and then I go off to the airport to catch a plane to Ontario, thinking, foolish mortal me, that I will have a chance to have a regular dinner at one of the restaurants next to the hotel before the evening event, at which I am supposed to arrive by 6:45 pm or so. Ha! The plane lands around 3:45, only about five minutes late, but at Ontario, all the rental cars are reached by shuttle, so it takes until 4:30 to get bags, do car paperwork, load car and leave airport. Okay, I think, we should still be okay. It's thirty minutes to the hotel and another thirty to the event, and thirty or so to check in and change clothes after dinner and a little squish time because the event doesn't actually start until 7:30 pm so if we arrive at 6:50 instead of 6:45, it is not a total disaster, so that still leaves forty-five minutes for eating, so that seems okay. As expected, we get to the hotel around 5:00 pm and we are loaded into the room around 5:10/5:15 pm and I am thinking woo hoo, dinnertime! Then I find out that some people are worried that we will need an hour to get there because of possible traffic and that perhaps more changing time is needed than I had calculated, maybe twenty or thirty minutes and not ten and the caravan wants to leave at 5:30 pm, so that means change now and get going and no dinner. So I resign myself to eating fast food in the car in a formal, a prospect that requires either a beach towel or copious napkins. Then begins the mad race to get into a petticoat and formal, find the closest fast food on the GPS (Taco Bell, it turns out), get to the drive through, get the food, reprogram the GPS and try not to spill everything all over myself as we head into the famous LA traffic. We got to the event in plenty of time and had no wardrobe failures, so I have to count that as a success, but I am less thrilled with my food for the day being: oatmeal, frozen lunch, Taco Bell taco salad with no sour cream (best I could think of for eating in the car since it comes in a box), and scoop of fruit after OV. Then there's the sleep thing. We get done around 10:15 or so and back to the hotel around 10:45 pm and I know I have to get up no later than 7:00 am the next morning, so I try to be quick about getting out of the formal, changing for bed and doing all those night time things, but darned if I find it completely impossible to fall asleep for a while because you are all wired after one of these things. You've been high energy talking to people and socializing and it takes a while to "discharge all the static electricity" so you can go to sleep. I finally fall asleep around midnight and drat it, I wake up about 6:45 am, which is about when I get up during the week and any more sleep than that just isn't going to happen. So, giving in to the inevitable, I get up and get ready to go from Yorba Linda to Fallbrook, which will take me a bit over an hour. The hotel has a nice free breakfast and knowing that the day's food may be iffy, I take the time to have two hard boiled eggs and a scoop of hash browns before I leave. I drive down, we have a great Transitional and then the local ladies have a baked potato bar for lunch. Hurrah, I think, I am actually going to get lunch. Yippee! I have a nice potato with cheese and onions (no worries, I carry monster breath mints in my purse) and think that I am doing good. I get back to the hotel in Yorba Linda and again think I am doing good on time, but then I found out that everyone else had dinner at 4:00 pm, which would have been too early for me, having just had my lunch at 1:15 pm, and then everyone is in a hurry to get going and the net result is no supper. Now usually I am very good about skipping the sweets and sugary treats that are often served after an Official Visit, but now I am in the dining room and they are serving two inch cake squares and little ice cream cups and I haven't had any dinner and I think to myself, okay, it's fourth and fourteen, time to punt. If I eat the cake and ice cream, it's not the best dinner in the world, but then I won't need to stop at some fast food place again on the way back to the hotel and the fast food is not particularly healthy nor low calorie either, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. I have the cake and ice cream for dinner. So Saturday comes out: two hard boiled eggs, one scoop hash browns, one medium baked potato with one butter pat, a scoop of chees and some chopped onions, one square of cake, one ice cream cup and a scoop of mixed nuts. This is probably not the recommended menu on any diet I can think of at the moment. We go back to the hotel and get back about the same 10:45 pm or so as Friday night, but this time I have to leave by 8:00 am and I have to pack and check out of the hotel too, so needless to say, I won't be sleeping in. I manage to fall asleep a little earlier (exhaustion is useful that way), but of course the alarm goes off earlier too. So now it is Sunday morning and I am at the free breakfast with my two hard boiled eggs and scoop of hash browns again, but this time, the end of the morning event and the start of the afternoon event have only one hour scheduled between them and there is load in and out time on either end and travel time in the middle, so there is no spot for lunch. I am thinking to myself that going from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm without eating is a bad idea, but there is literally No Time, so I ask the handy GPS for fast food again and the naughty thing tells me that the best I can do is a KFC about a mile out of my way. Well, something is better than nothing, but how am I going to eat it, I wonder. So I head over there and discover my saving grace of the day, Popcorn Chicken. Did you know that it is relatively easy to eat in the car if you skip the sauce. You can drive with one hand and eat with the other and the carton fits okay in a cup holder too. I arrive for the afternoon event with a whole five minutes to run to the bathroom before the afternoon activities start. Yippee! We get done with the event and we are off to the airport. The event gets over around 4:00 pm and the plane is leaving at 6:40, so we decide to eat at the airport. Well, it turns out that three of the six places to eat at Ontario airport are closed on Sunday afternoon, leaving only, you guessed it, fast food. So, trying desperately to eat something less greasy, I opt for a grilled chicken salad at the Carl's Jr. It was not bad, but it was not much either. So I get home and I realize that I want something, but not a lot to eat before calling it a day. So I have a little soup and salad thing at a restaurant near my house and that rounds out my Sunday food: two hard boiled eggs, one scoop of hash browns, one large Popcorn chicken, half a grilled chicken breast on a bunch of lettuce, a cup of broccoli cheese soup and a small side Caesar salad. By some miracle of fate, perhaps the amount of walking I have to do at the events, my weight did not change at all over the weekend, at least according to the scale this morning, but it was a close thing. There's got to be a better way. Next weekend, I am in Richmond, Martinez and Concord.