Summer Friday

Yesterday was my first official Summer Friday -- hands in the air for the Friday dance!

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Do you know about the wonder that is Summer Friday? It goes like this: in an effort to help employees get a head start on weekend plans (i.e. drive out to the Hamptons), companies allow employees to leave the office early. Every company has a slightly different arrangement, but ours is pretty simple. We can leave at 3pm, provided our work is done. There has to be someone in each department who stays the full day to provide coverage, but for me that means I only have to stay every 3rd or 4th Friday. Not bad!

I had hoped to use this time to meet up with a friend for a drink (feel like I've been so out of the loop with my girlfriends lately), but everyone was either working or, in fact, headed out of town this afternoon. I decided to spend the afternoon focused on two things I love: shopping and eating!

On not stress eating

Either the universe is trying to show me how far I've come in the past few months, or it is just a big jerk sometimes -- either way, I have been TESTED.

As you may have read, today was a stressful day. When the full impact of my crummy situation hit me, I reacted: I cried, I yelled at myself, I threw a few things, and had myself a nice meltdown.

But here's what I didn't do: calm my stress with food. And I didn't even want to. Success! (And believe me, even in the moment I realized this was big).

Bad day? I'll take about a million of these.

SO often over the past few months I have reacted to the many stresses in my life by giving myself a temporary shot of comfort in the form of something delicious. I don't even want to think about how many times I have been dealt a mid-morning blow at work and then ditched my healthy lunch for a slice of cheap pizza from the hole in the wall on the corner. And it never works!

And so today ends in a MUCH better way than it began. Crisis averted, and I didn't add insult to injury with a big pile of chocolate. Today, I made the best choice.

Boo for losing my wallet -- but hooray for small victories!