I have a whole additional week at home and this makes me very happy. Work continues to be crazy, so losing a day or two to travel means I'm left working super long days the rest of the week and never get a day off. This weekend, I intentionally avoided work. It seems a little pathetic, but that was harder than it seems. Yet, I knew I needed to recharge; I've noticed lately I was getting impatient and frustrated than I'd like. Looking forward, I head back to the Middle East next week for another race, so I'm trying to enjoy home and be a little bit of a hermit. As the Roommate tells me, "Put extra sleep and recovery into the bank now while you can."

So my expat life isn't all the sexy and exciting this week. I'll work, work out, watch TV or read and repeat. To avoid another delivery food week, I spent all day yesterday doing food prep. Some of it can be eaten now, but a lot of it was fermented foods that take a few weeks. I've been doing water kefir and other ferments for about a year now (all goes along with the gluten-free, dairy-free, etc diet) and I truly notice a difference. It isn't a huge one...more subtle. As in, I notice when I stop eating ferments, pro and pre-biotics. I just feel sluggish. Over the weekend, I got some sauerkraut (takes about 3 weeks), kimchi (takes anywhere from 1 week to 3 weeks) and water kefir salsa (only take 2-3 days) going. I also made some egg cups to eat for breakfast and bread and butter pickles....because they are awesome.

I have no excuse to eat out or eat crap this week. I'm notoriously bad at grabbing bad snacks or simply not eating during the day if something isn't prepped and easy to eat right in front of me. I tried to be smart and got ahead of all of that and hopefully will have some good eats all week. And I already have a food date out on Wednesday for Mexican...and I'm excited!

Now back to tackling my Monday!