My Take
DiVoran Lites
Torrents of rain, crashings of thunder. Two lamps on in the middle of the day. First day of diet. Feeling hungry, a little headachy from lack of caffeine.
Bill got the infrared grill from the warehouse where we had stored it. Why did we put it away? I don’t know. Last Christmas a grill quit working. There were only two on the shelf at the store. I bought one for Bill, Bill bought one for me, too. Grilling is best because we’re not allowed fats or oils. The melting fat in our bodies will provide all we need, all the calories, nutrients, and fats.
No breakfast, I drank a cup of tea with Stevia. I’m trying to talk myself into loving Stevia. I usually have a cup of strong coffee with lots of agave syrup and creamer, but I refuse to drink coffee without creamer.
We have a, “loading,” period before the diet. We start taking our HCG drops and for two or three days we gorge, eat anything we want. Those are the rules. Don’t ask me why. We kept trying to start the real diet, but pre-gorged for days and then seriously loaded. Last night we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken and had everything fat we could find—fried chicken, biscuits with lots of, “butter,” mac and cheese. At Publix, we got a pint of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate mint ice cream and brought it home. Is B. & J.’s still the fattest ice cream you can buy? The lush food made us drunk with love, drunk with a surfeit of food. We were so happy.
This morning we took our homeopathic remedy. It helps get the fat moving even though we are also on a 500-calorie diet. The remedy helps the dieter not to be too hungry. We’ve been on it several times over the years, and so have four other adult members of our family. All of us have lost weight and none of us has suffered any side effects except having to buy new clothes or have the old ones altered. A doctor developed the diet about fifty years ago. Back then they used real HCG instead of homeopathic and you had to have shots.
We only have two weeks, six days, and eight hours to diet and then we’ll be ready for maintenance. Maintenance is easy and quite pleasant. We’ll have salads with grilled chicken for lunches, plain meat (seasoned, but not sauced), and a fresh vegetable for supper. We’ll munch on two saltines or grissini and have an apple or orange for snacks.
At 5’4”, I weighted 128.5 for so long I thought I could get by with bread, pasta, cake, Lindt dark chocolate truffles, Lay’s Original Potato Chips. No. Pride goeth before a fall.
At my most svelte, friends at the Titusville Art League suggested I get my baggy pants altered. They gave me the name of their tailor. She is from Vietnam and is the old-fashioned kind like the big 
department stores once hired. In spite of the 139.5 lb on the scale this morning, most of the pants, shorts, blouses still fit. But I do have this pair of white cotton pants that are perfect, and a silk blouse that’s about the prettiest thing I ever saw, that I can’t wear. I’ve displayed them on a door to inspire me.
Last night Bill dreamed he saw two tiny birds in a nest. Was that him and me after our diet? Forty minutes from now, I’ll have a sliced orange and another cup of Lipton tea – with Stevia. The rain is over, but the sky is still dark.
So, I headed west for Inglewood, CA (where I went to college) but ran into heavy traffic before I could get close to my first destination. It was Sunday, and a bicycle marathon (with tens of thousands of bicycles) was being held that day and was traveling down Wilshire Blvd. causing traffic to be backed up for miles on either side of Wilshire. After creeping along for almost an hour, before I found a place where I could get out of that mess, I was tired, frustrated, and decided to call it a “Wasted Day”- giving up on seeing any museums that day and headed back toward the motel.
Airport to visit the Lyon Air Museum. This was a great experience, as all the museum’s aircraft are in flying condition and all their rare vehicles run. I got a special treat when they towed their B-17G, “Fuddy Duddy” out of the hanger and fired up all four engines. There’s nothing I enjoy more than the smell of a large aviation engine starting up. It’s something about the oil and gas mixture that does it for me. And, here I got to experience the smell of “Four” engines starting! What a thrill.
Navy Seabee Museum. This museum preserves and displays historic material relating to the history of the Naval Construction Force, better known as the Seabees, and the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps. During World War II, approximately 250,000 Seabees passed through the Naval Construction Battalion Center (NCBC) at Port Hueneme, on their way to or from Europe and Pacific Theaters. Among many other tasks they were asked to perform, over the course of the war, the U. S. Naval Combat Demolition Units (NCDU) working closely with the Army Combat Demolition Units (ACDU) were instrumental in removing much of the hazardous materials and obstacles from the beaches in advance of the June 6, 1944 Normandy Invasion.
that day. Cars were backed up halfway down the mountain waiting for a chance to find a parking space. I went into the lobby and took a look at the fascinating Foucault Pendulum, which was introduced in 1851 by French physicist León Foucault, as the first simple proof of the rotation of the Earth in an easy-to-see experiment. I walked around the outer domes and got a view of the smoggy L.A. basin and the Hollywood Hills.
Old Things R New 