2002-10-05 - 11:16 p.m.

Sick and Tired

Today, I got just fed up. I got sick and tired of being tired and sick.

The plan for today was to go to a local chess tournament. It would be silly for me not to go, seeing as it was practically just down the street from the Hamster Palace. However, the events of last night sort of played hob with that idea. It was mainly my fault, the result of bad planning.

For dinner last night I was planning to have pot roast, and I was going to use a recipe in the new cookbook I bought. I like Lily's recipe for pot roast a lot, but I wanted to try something different, something without mushroom soup as its base.

Unfortunately, pot roast takes a long time to cook, and I got a late start on it. The meat didn't start simmering until after 6:30 in the evening, because it took me longer than I thought it would to get in ingredients together. The meat was supposed to marinate for a couple hours, but I cut that short to let it start cooking. I didn't want to be eating dinner at midnight (AGAIN). Also, while I was making it, I found a mistake in the recipe. During the directions it said "add vinegar" but it wasn't mentioned in the ingredient list. How much vinegar do I put in? A jigger? A quart? I just put a tiny bit.

In spite of me cutting the marinating time to was after 11:30 before it was done, and when I cut into it, it was less well done than I would like. Pot roast is supposed to practically fall apart when you dig into it with a fork, and this didn't. I didn't really dig the taste of it that much either: Lily's was miles better. Well, live and learn. How else do you learn if you don't try new things.

Of course the problem with eating so late is that you're adding fuel to your body just when you should be thinking about winding down and going to sleep. I was tired, but too amped up to sleep. As it started to get past 2 a.m. I started to notice I had a tummy ache. It got progressively worse, and then I broke into a cold sweat. Suddenly I had to dash for the bathroom because my dinner was coming up again.

That was distinctly not fun. I thought I was done with this puking stuff. Although by now I was worn out and feeling crappy I still couldn't sleep. I think it was starting to get light when I finally drifted off.

About two hours later, my alarm went off. It was time to get up to play chess. I no longer felt sick, but I definitely didn't feel like eating. I threw on some clothes, went to the tournament, arranged for a half-point bye for the first round, the went back home and got a couple hours more sleep. When I woke up I felt much better, but still not 100%.

Returning to the tournament, I was paired with Bobby, the guy who'd drawn the grandmaster last Sunday. This tournament was at a rather quick time control, and I had stupidly shown up for my game twelve minutes late. We played a rather complex game, and I was better for most of it, but it was long. At move fifty I was at the point where I should have been cashing in, but I was running out of time. Then the inevitable blunder came, and I wasn't winning any more. A couple moves later I lost on time.

Very galling. Of course I certainly could have used the twelve minutes I was late. I then contemplated the fact that there were two more rounds to go, and I needed to get something to eat, but I wasn't sure of what I could eat that wouldn't make me throw up again. So, I did the logical thing: I withdrew from the tournament and went back home and went to bed.

After a little more sleep, I decided it was time to get something to eat. I was tired of feeling like crap, just utterly fed up. So I went and got my usual lunch that I would get before I went on this diet: a sub at Subway with a bag of chips. Supposedly a "healthy" lunch choice, but with like a week's worth of carbohydrates as determined by my diet. I didn't care. I just wanted to feel like a human being again, not roadkill.

After that I went to the local library and did a little research on a project I'm working on. I found I was feeling quite a bit better, but I knew I was going to pay the price for it with a sky-high blood sugar tomorrow. Later in the evening I made one of those blunders that seem to be characteristic for me now: I meant to return to the tournament to find out who won and collect the games after the last round ended, but I waited too long. By the time I got there everyone had gone home and the place was dark. Damn. I guess next week's chess column is going to have to be about something else!

Yeah, I was naughty today, but tomorrow I'm planning on going back on the diet. Still I really have to do something about this mental fuzziness and general listlessness, but what?