Goodbye, hills

I finished and submitted my essay--did you know that tuberculosis has its very own journal?--and now I have to throw a few things in a bag because we're going to the beach for a few days!  That means more sand, but flat, and fresh fish.  Gotta hand it to the Outer Banks.

I'm especially pumped because, for the past few days, I've been living on sweet potatoes and rice noodles.  Fellow hosts of intestinal turmoil might recognize this as a variant of the classic bananas and congee/rice gut-calming diet.  Throw ginger ale in there too, and it becomes a surprisingly comfortable menu.  The longest I went on it was about two weeks.   This was before I knew that gluten was the culprit, and so I gorged myself on it during Christmas before going to Asia, where my system jumped at the chance to purge itself once it realized that I'd switched completely to rice.  Bye bye wheat, bye bye appetite.  It was actually not unpleasant. 

The only problem with the banana-rice-ginger ale trifecta is that I despise bananas.  As bland and soothing as they are lower down, they provoke revulsion higher up.  I loathe the taste and the texture often makes me gag.  The more I eat them, the more I hate them.  But their convenience can't be beat and so I choke them down. 

Fortunately, there's also a good chunk of potassium in sweet potatoes!  I'm probably missing out on vitamin C by nuking them, though, but a few days won't bring on scurvy.  Plus, Emergen-C.

Even more fortunately, I broke my diet last night with a small slice of gluten-free pizza without ill effects, and so it's on.  Fishies, beware.

I'd thought about lifting before we leave, but I still feel kind of drained.  Maybe just a few power cleans for funsies.