Update

Hello? Is anyone still he- Oh, HI! Remember me? Your occasionally witty but always neurotic host? Yeah. Sorry it's been quiet on the Cymber front lately. As I mentioned....what? a week ago?...the Cymber household was felled by a particularly nasty cold/flu type illness. Turtle was feverish off and on for several days and as he started getting better, I started getting worse. It was a long week of "Mommy, come play with me!" and "Mommy doesn't feel very good, buddy" and resultant "bad mommy guilt" and disappointed Turtles and misery and anguish and torture. Good times.

Yesterday was the first day I think I felt 100%, and even that was tempered by a host of personal problems that brought me down. One of those was the stunning realization that the universe has it in for me. See, the thing is....well....it has to do with.....um....you know, let's just start at the beginning.

I have a long history of comfort eating. In fact, my history of comfort eating is probably responsible for at least half of my current weight problem. Bad things would happen and I would down a pint of Ben and Jerry's or a couple of candy bars in order to feel better. Then I got in the habit of eating that ice cream or those candy bars and even though I wouldn't eat them every day, I would feel like I needed something sugary after every meal. Before I knew it, my daily intake of crappy food greatly exceeded my intake of fruits and vegetables, and well, you know the rest.

Now, though, I'm making a conscious effort to change those habits. But it's very difficult to overcome 30 years of programming in a few months. Which brings us back to the present. I've got personal problems. And I'm doing my very best to deal with them in positive ways (and probably failing miserably, but that's beside the point.) I went back to the gym yesterday for the first time since I fell ill. I've been abusing Snark's Mistress's status as an almost-psychologist. And I've otherwise kind of withdrawn from all of the other things in my life so I can take the time to work on me and getting things fixed. And through this process, I have avoided the stash of Easter candy still in the cupboard. All of this represents some significant progress, in my opinion.

But even I have my limits. And yesterday at the grocery store, I came dangerously close to those limits. As I was wandering through the produce section, picking up the fruits and veggies I would need for the week, an ad on someone else's grocery cart caught my eye. You know those tubes of Pillsbury cookies? The ones that look suspiciously like this:

Yeah. Those were bad enough. Snark's Mistress and I have been known to purchase those little tubes from time to time, grab two spoons and go to town. We wouldn't even bother with the baking part. But, you know, that wasn't so bad, because I generally felt that homemade cookie dough tasted SO. MUCH. BETTER. And if I wanted cookies (or cookie dough) that badly, I was better off just making it myself. So it's not like we ever went overboard with the cookie dough tubes.

But now? NOW, Pillsbury is packaging brownie mix in a tube. BROWNIE MIX! B.R.O.W.N.I.E. M.I.X. The cookie dough was bad, but the brownie mix is EVIL. All of that fudgey chocolatey goodness? At a time when my resistance is low because I am having issues and my instinct is to face plant into a vat of sugar as it is? CURSE YOU, Pillsbury! Which brings me back to my original point which is that the universe kind of hates me.

I did walk away from the tubey brownie goodness last night, which means the score is still Cymber 1, Universe 0. But I'm not spiking the ball, yet. It doesn't look like things will be improving in my personal life anytime soon, and if things get much worse, I place no expectations on my ability to stay away from the Very. Evil. Brownie. Tubes. So, if you're in the Phoenix Metro area, and you see a woman on the floor of the grocery store in a pile of empty brownie tubes, with chocolate all over her face and a crazed look in her eye? Feel free to say hi. I'd love to hear from you.