For breakfast lately I've gone from the tasty but high-calorie (and modestly pricey) practice of buying sandwich wraps and extra-sweet iced tea from Wawa, to making bagels at home and getting diet iced tea from Wawa, to, now, buying sliced sticks of cheese and bottled iced tea at the supermarket and eating those. Besides the cost and time advantages, and cutting several hundred calories per day out of my diet which I don't think is trivial considering my weight-loss objectives of this year, it gives the added advantage of giving me a meal each day that is, as all should be, made of cheese.
Pre-sliced cheese sticks have a lot of nice traits, among them simplicity and, since I buy the low-fat versions, a mere 60 to 80 calories per stick. They're sold, at least in my supermarket, in packs of twelve. The iced tea is also sold in packs of twelve. I do buy three packs of different flavors since despite my love of compulsive behavior I like a bit of variety, but this does also mean that once I've bought my flavors for the two-weeks-and-two-days, I've got that set and there's no variations. It would be nice if there weren't such a greatest-common-factor issue so that flavors could be rotated in and out. But I did have at least that I'd bought my first twelve-pack of cheese and my first twelve-pack of iced tea a week apart, so that they would be forever out of phase.
And then come Friday I had the last of my three cheeses (mozzarella, colby jack, and cheddar) with the last of a bottle of sparkling diet green tea. Incidentally, while I'm in favor of sparkle in principle, and feel safe saying most of the people reading this journal prefer the sparkle version to the plain version of pretty much anything, I don't think the carbonation works for green tea. On the one hand, I'm starting Monday with a completely blank slate. On the other: someone's been snacking. I'm pretty sure it's not me, too. And if they're snacking on my cheese they're doing it in an admirably balanced fashion.
Trivia: As part of his travelling library for the expedition, Meriwether Lewis in May 1803 bought Dr Benjamin Smith Barton's Elements of Botany for six dollars, and borrowed Antoine Simor Le Page du Pratz's History Of Louisiana, from Barton. Source: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Stephen E Ambrose.
Currently Reading: Orbit 11, Editor Damon Knight.