Welcome to Hotel Soda Detox

So, as many of you may've read, after starting the South Beach Diet, I felt phenomenal until yesterday, when I started feeling dizzy and off-balance..even more so than usual..and today, I figured it out. I'm not drinking caffeine any more after coffee in the morning. I was so geeked up on caffeine, and honestly, before starting this diet, I had even cut down, that I'm literally having withdrawals. Also, am still retaining water in my feet and now, hands, to the point that I look like Princess Cankles and the Mayor of Sausage Finger Village. Ugh...At this point, I haven't lost any weight and am somewhat dismayed because everyone who has tried this diet has lauded losing 5-8 pounds in the first week...well, there are two days to go, I've eaten everything I'm supposed to, and even exercised...sigh...alas, I'm not giving up, I just think, if we can put people on the moon, we can make diets that work instantly.

We're watching "The Golden Child," which never ceases to crack me up. It's nice to see Eddie Murphy when he was still funny. What happened to him? I think his last movie was "Daddy Day Camp vs. Dr. Doolittle: Electric Boogaloo." Sad..which brings me to...what ever happened to Jodie Foster, Edward Norton, Denzel Washington, Naomi Watts, and Nicole Kidman, to name a few...why aren't they making movies?

I have this mental list of productive things to do this weekend with my newfound energy:
1. Clean out my car. Any of you that have known me for at least 10 years know that I have a long-standing history of disgusting cars. The '93 Ford Probe I got when I graduated from high school wasn't a bad car, but for some reason, I chose to throw anything and everything into the backseat and floorboards of that car. My best friend Amanda once rode with me somewhere to meet mutual friends and secretly asked another friend to give her a ride back when something in the car bit her..(allegedly).

When I sold that car privately, there were books, my tennis racket, food wrappers, and possibly a small Mexican family living in it, but I couldn't clean it out because my ankle was broken, so my mom let the buyer drive away with God knows what. The funny thing was, that car also had about 5 bumper stickers on it which included, "It'll be a better world when teachers and schools have all the money they need, but the military has to hold a bake sale to buy weapons," "I'm Pro-choice, and I vote," and "Diva." A man in his 50s bought the car, and my friend Ellen saw it parked at Belk about 6 months later, and he had taken all the stickers off except for "Diva."

2. Straighten our bookshelf. Since I was 7, I've collected books. My grandfather got shipments of books from publishers and let us choose what we wanted, and he reviewed the rest for newspapers and the publishing companies. If I had to go to a desert island and choose only three books, I would die. Smitty had no idea what he was getting into as far as acquiring books along with a winsome bride. When my father died, I got some of the most precious books in the world, including his master's thesis on J.R.R. Tolkien and all of his Norton anthologies he used for teaching his literature classes. And the best part is that they're underlined with his favorite parts, some of which he and I used to discuss. I miss my dad.

3. Washing our dirty, stinky dogs. Frankly, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but they are both long overdue for baths. Every time I get out of my car and they ebulliently greet me, a wave of general outside stench and stinky dog washes over me. I know how Norton deals with baths (shakes uncontrollably while giving me a dirty look and trying to escape), but I haven't given Zooey a bath yet. Should be interesting. In fact, I believe I shall enlist Smitty to take pictures. I don't take enough pictures..and I would like a photographic measure of how much weight I will lose...it'll be like before and after pics involving dogs..perhaps there's a fetish site where money can be made....hmmm