20 Excuses to Cheat on the Diet

Stupid Reasons:

1. It’s only a little pasta.

2. I swam 50 laps yesterday. That’s almost a mile. Or so.

3. Don’t you think losing 1.7 pounds overnight is a bit much? Maybe we should put the brakes on this dieting phenomenon for a day or so.

4. On other days when I’ve fallen off the Diet Wagon, nothing has happened. In fact, after I ate the lamb souvlaki pita and the deliciously greasy French fries sprinkled liberally with feta cheese, the weight went down 1.2 pounds.

5. I can’t face another bowl of baked eggplant. 😛

6. It’s a hideous hot, cloudy, steamy day that’s so miserable the air is clammy even indoors where the AC is blasting away. This calls out for comfort food.

7. It would be a shame to let all those beautiful, sweet  Campari-type tomatoes go to waste. They call out to be made into comfort food.

8. I can’t face another plateful of cabbage salad. Or any other kind of salad.

9. It’s so hot in here that Cassie can barely bring herself to harass the Human with Ball. She needs a piece of limp spaghetti to cheer her up.

10. M’hijito has gone incommunicado and will not answer requests to help his crippled mom haul a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets back to the house from Costco. This calls for comfort food.

11. The ongoing PITA hurts so much I can’t even contemplate dragging through a regular grocery store, to say nothing of limping almost to the back of a gigantic Costco. That also cries out for comfort food.

12. Harvey broke last night and today ran up a $70 repair bill.

13. That comes a day after the $100+ tab for cleaning out the DE filter, which in this ungodly heat must have damn near kilt the service dude.

14. An unplanned $170 in pool bills leaves too little money to buy a year’s worth of pool  tablets from Costco, anyway.

Real Reasons

15. On top of their usual round of headaches and the days of not knowing whether the house in Yarnell is still standing, La Maya and La Bethulia have both come down with a nasty bug. Other people’s misery should be acknowledged and honored with comfort food.

16. Half of beloved Yarnell has been reduced to piles of ashes. Many homeowners there were uninsured. It remains to be seen how much, if any, of the town will be rebuilt.

17. Nineteen fine young men were lost to the pile of ashes. In making the loss of half the town seem insignificant, this also makes the event infinitely worse.

18. No one seems to know when the residents there will be able to return to their property. Water and power are out; the water situation was described by a Yavapai County Sheriff’s deputy as “extremely bad,” and cleanup crews want to replace all the propane tanks, any one of which may be a continuing hazard.

19. The climate change some of our craven leaders would like to ignore and of which the current ten-year-long drought is just one manifestation pretty well guarantees that over the next few decades most of the West’s forestland will die off and burn away. Some of the most magnificent country on the planet is becoming unlivable.

20. It is way too late to do anything about this. Such things render the choice between spaghetti and cabbage salad irrelevant.