Sunday Morning Barbacoa

We actually woke up early the second day in a row. Well the kids woke us up. Seth slept with me last night and the alarm went off at 7 and he was up for the day. Wonderful!

Actually it is good. I got up to make coffee and chorizo con huevo for breakfast. When I went to the refrigerator to get the eggs I realized I had forgotten them on the front seat of the truck last night. I always put them in front with me so they don't break in the back but this time that idea back fired on me. No eggs! so I told Rey I'd go get some from Matamoros Meat Market around the corner and he said he'd go get barbacoa instead.

Yes barbacoa has a lot of points but not if you just eat a couple of tacitos in moderation. That's what I love about Weightwatchers. You can eat anything in moderation so you don't feel like you're depriving yourself of anything. What you have to master is self-control and self-discipline. That's the hard part!

Barbacoa always reminds me of my uncle's bakery. He had one of the first Mexican bakeries in Houston. I need to ask my father again what year he opened the bakery. I can't remember if he said 1955 or around there. I think that what he opened first was just a small store and then it expanded into a bakery. I don't have memories of it in the early days like my sisters who are 9 to 15 years older than me.

My memories barely start in the 1970s and only last until 1981. My uncle was shot during a robbery in January of 1981, a month before my 11th birthday. But I still have wonderful memories of his store with the grey cement floors.

If I close my eyes I can vividly picture the layout of his store in those last years before he died. When you walked in there was a pay phone to the right. Then along that whole wall there were Mexican food products. He started carrying these way before there were any Fiestas. The refrigerators were directly across from you when you entered the front door. The counter was to the left. Also to the left along the wall was the glass case of sweet bread. The pink cookies with sugar in the center, the cuernitos, the golden brown marranitos, the big fat white and yellow conchas, also brown and yellow ones, and the empanadas with the rich orange sweet camote filling. Across from the sweet bread display case was a small wooden magazine rack that held Mexican magazines like Vanidades, Alarma and the Lagrimas y Risas pulp fiction filled with stories like "Raratonga."

Saturday nights they put the cow heads in the big ovens and they cooked slowly overnight so that Sunday morning they sold the rich barbacoa meat. People came in the morning and bought it by the pound to eat it for breakfast or after church. The rich dark brown meat glistening in a corn tortilla with some salt and salsa.

When my uncle died my mother helped his widow run the store for about a year but then she lost interest in it all and closed the store and moved away with her four young children. Years of my uncle's work forgotten. I wish his children knew their rich history. They were only 5, 4, 2, and about four months when he died and they were raised away from the family and away from these stories. One day I'll tell them.

Must Love Dogs

http://www2.warnerbros.com/mustlovedogs/ Loved it! I'm a sap for romantic comedies that include John Cusack. "Say Anything?" Need I say more? I'm an '80s child.

But this is the part that always interests me. The author. http://www.clairecook.com/

I have a screenplay in mind that will be my second project after the Primas Hermanas novel.

Sorry for my Absence

Housework and duty calls. I've been folding clothes for 2 nights in a row after making dinner and walking. No time for anything when you are trying to exercise and eat right. I've lost 9.5 lbs by the way. :) I will reach my goal for the first 10 yet! Onward march!

I had the rare luxury of having both kids asleep by 10 p.m. (Miranda fell asleep in the stroller at 8:45 while I walked) and I did take some extra time to read this blog by my ex co-worker. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE it! http://blogs.chron.com/auparis/ Read it if you want to experience France.

I am so jealous when I read it! Jealous in a good way. I've already been 24 and spent a month in Spain with my girlfriends. I don't need to be complaining about nothing!

But I so long to to be in Europe again. But I'm excited that I'll be in the Caribbean soon meeting new places like Jamaica, Gran Cayman and Cozumel. I've never been to any of those places and I've never been on a cruise at all so I'm excited at the prospect of a new experience. What is life, but a series of new experiences? I hope to continue to have them over and over until I'm old and gray.

Lazy Saturday

TODAY (or should I say yesterday since it's officially Sunday) I had the craziest laziest terrible on my Weight Watchers day ever. I literally slept the whole day except for a few hours when I went to Target to buy some stuff for a baby shower, and then went to the baby shower for a few hours, from 3-7:30ish. I ate way too much there and then I fell asleep on the drive home and came in and kept sleeping until 10 along with the kids. (Instead of going walking because it was early enough to go.) Well Seth woke up first and Rey stayed up with him. Now here I am bright eyed and bushy tailed with them. The kids are watching a Pooh movie and I'm updating my blog.

I can't believe it's humanly possible to sleep as many hours as I do every couple of weeks on Saturday. It's like I just can't wake up and I sleep and sleep. Then I feel so guilty like I'm wasting away precious time. Then I remind myself that the body has a way of catching up on sleep whether you want to or not. I'm restoring my brain and all the time that I run around during the week.

I have been craving COFFEE all day! I'm out of flavored creamer and I can't stand coffee with milk unless it's especially cafe con leche. I even wanted to do a Starbucks run this morning for breakfast even though it's a good drive for a run. I wish we had a Starbucks somewhere close to us! I think I'm going to write to Starbucks to mention it to them and I'm going to point out that the light rail may eventually run this direction. I wonder what's the latest on that.

I'm so glad to hear when people are reading and especially when they can relate to what I'm writing. I saw a friend I hadn't seen in a long time today and she was telling me how much she enjoyed an earlier post about house cleaning. Then I got a really sweet post from a complete stranger in San Francisco that just happened upon my blog and liked it. THANKS to all of you for reading.

On a negative note. OK I won't say negative, let's just say challenging. I've had a really bad past 3 days on WW. I don't want to feel like I'm falling of the wagon but I've never had 3 consecutive bad days before. I am so on the brink of 10 pounds. It's like I get there and then I gain another pound back and I can't stick the 10 pounds. Going at this rate I never will. So I have 2 days to redeem myself before Tuesday morning weigh in. That means I have to be especially good for these next 2 days. Send me your encouraging words!

The cruise is in less than 3 months now. YES! We're going, thank goodness. I'm so glad I didn't go ahead and cancel it because things ended up working out after all. We need a family vacation and I haven't left this country in 5 years! What that means is that I'm going to have to wear a bathing suit on a beach soon and I need to keep working out!! I started adding some slow jogging to my walk and I feel really good when I do that. Hopefully it will help get rid of some of the rolls on my back but I know I have to add some good ol'fashioned aerobics for that.

Well good night readers everywhere. It's late and it's time to get us all in bed.

Mucho Poquito o Nada

Last night I asked Miranda, "How much do you love me?" It's a question game I often played with my own mother. I would ask her, "Quanto me quieres? Mucho, poquito, o nada?" She would playfully answer, "Nada," or "Mucho." I told Miranda this story and she answered, "Mucho!"

I came to work today and a co-worker was very upset because she received a phone call from her mother. Her mother has cancer and is a diabetic with heart problems. She and her sisters just found out that her mother has a tumor and that the chemo she's taken hasn't done anything for it. She was very upset and was crying.

It brought back so many sad memories. One of my sister Hilda dying of cancer and also of my mother dying of heart problems. All I could do was hug her and let her cry on my shoulder. I literally felt her pain.

I think of myself thirty years from now, if I'm still here, and I imagine Miranda going through the exact same sorrow. I don't want that. Seeing my co-worker like this and remembering how I felt when I lost my own mother is all the motivation I need to continue on my quest for good health.

"Cuanto me quieres?" I asked.
"Mucho, mucho," she answered.
How I wish I could hear those words again.