Here comes the whine

First, let's give away some symphony tickets, mmkay? The deal was: You tell me a story then I gave one story teller some tickets. Well, guess what? Every story is a winner!!! Wha? Alright, I only had one story teller, so even though it's a bit anticlimactic, let's cheer on Commenter Scott for sharing his lovely engagement story as that is going to be the best part of this post today. Yay Scott! You're a winner!! Now just e-mail me and I'll get your your tickets. See how easy it is to win stuff here on the Haute Mamas? Now on with the whine: I'm tired and stressed and hungry. The End. Really, that is where I should leave this post, but as many people can attest, I'm not really good at "doing the right thing" nor "leaving well enough alone." Since my mom has been gone (come back, mama, we misssssss you!), my kid has been making her way into our bed most nights. She's really stealthy about it. Some nights I don't even realize she's there until my alarm goes off and there's a person between me and the clock. But most of the time, the knee in the kidney is her calling card. It's my fault because I'm very sympathetic about this. So really I should just give myself a good kick in the ding dong for whining about a condition that I've created and shut up already. But like I said, this Haute Mama don't roll like that. See, as a child I was very scared at night: scared of the dark, scared of noises, scared of creatures climbing over our back fence and getting me. Margaret, too, is scared at night: scared of the dark, scared of noises, scared of something getting her. So years ago when she started getting scared, I started letting her in our bed. Now she's 8 and tall and pointy. Bill and I are old and big and tired. We're all sleeping in a queen-sized bed. Which is why I'm tired. I'm stressed because I work for a newspaper. Now, don't get me wrong, I love working for The Daily Sentinel. I love our newspaper and the people who work here. But Google "newspapers dying" and you'll get approximately 4.6 million hits. The the demise of the Rocky Mountain News hits way too close to home. That's all I have to say about that. I'm hungry because I'm tired and stressed. As I've said before, I'm a eater. I like to eat when I'm happy, sad, tired, sick, stressed, blah, blah ... you get the idea. So for the last 7-1/2 weeks, I've been participating in our offices Biggest Loser Challenge. I had been doing really well, but then last week I gained a pound. That was a bummer, but over all I'm down over 15 pounds and have done so just by counting my calories (obsessively) and by exercising more (and in case you were wondering, I didn't join a gym or get a personal trainer or buy an expensive piece of workout equipment, I just exercise while watching TV instead of sitting on the couch. Hello free workout). So it's been good, but because I'm tired and stressed, the constant urge to just eat a bunch of crap is overwhelming sometimes. To quell that, in the evenings (never on work time, of course), I drink a beer ... er, I guess I should say a light beer. 110 calories and I definitely feel better afterward. There you have it, the whine of one not-so-Haute Mama.