As I have aged, I have learned a few things.  Unimportant things in the whole scheme of life, but a few things that have made my life easier.

The United States Postal Service can send an email every day that includes a picture of the mail to be delivered that very day.  It is called USPS Informed Delivery.  Daily except for Sundays I get an e-mail showing incoming bills, notices, invitations, advertisements, and letters. It is unbelievable that these details are immediately retrievable from “the web” and sent for my review. It is exciting to read that a payment I had been expecting will grace my mailbox, and dismaying to see that another errant invoice from EZPass will torture me.  (No matter how many times I call them, they cannot seem to get it right, and bills for tolls are mailed rather than just being paid out of my EZPass account.)

One advantage to this is that I can screen my mail before it comes. This comes in handy if a particularly large bill I am trying to keep Hubby from seeing is slated to arrive.  I merely make my way home in time to meet the mailman and retrieve the offensive invoice before Hubby gets to it.  (Yes, I did spend an additional hundred dollars at Kohl’s for a new outfit I really did not need…he doesn’t need to know that…) Reversely, if my mail is all ads for Stop and Shop and flyers from a company that cleans gutters, there is no need to make mail pick-up a priority.  It IS scary to think that this information is so readily available, but for now I am enjoying the novelty of it. 

     Another new discovery I have made is about fiber. Ever since health class in high school I have known that getting enough fiber is imperative to a healthy gut. Try as I might, I have never been able to eat enough to match the required 25 grams of fiber a day, which can be found in raspberries, (8 grams), apples (4.5 grams), boiled split peas (9 grams of fiber, and, yuck!), boiled greens, (5 grams a day, and, double yuck!), Raisin Bran (5.5 grams of fiber,) and cooked Quinoa, an oat bran muffin and oatmeal (clocking in at 5.5 grams.) The fruit I like best, grapes, has less than 1 gram of fiber, so I would have to eat 25 pounds to get the daily required amount.  Suffice it to say, 25 grams of fiber have never entered my body on a daily basis. As a result, my “gut” has been far from healthy my whole life.  The worst thing about that is the amount of time I needed to spend in the bathroom in the morning, which, on a positive note, gives me plenty of time to play the many games on my phone, but, on a negative note, leaves me only a miniscule amount of time to get ready for work. My hair is always disheveled, no make-up graces my eyes, and my outfit is often mismatching or wrinkled.

All of that is behind me now as I have found the secret and it is called Metamucil.  This treasure helps me feel less hungry between meals, helps maintain a healthy blood sugar level, lowers my cholesterol, and promotes digestive health. I initially tried putting it in my morning tea but could not stand the taste. However, for the past three months, a teaspoon of this golden cache has been added to a morning smoothie.  I had always been a fan of frozen strawberry daiquiris, so having a blended morning drink with frozen strawberries, orange juice and a teaspoon of Metamucil has been delightful. Sometimes I mix it up a bit and have yogurt, a banana, some blueberries, and a teaspoon of Metamucil. There are a million variations of morning smoothies to satisfy my gut, all with the resulting benefit of a quicker trip to the bathroom in the morning. This would normally give me plenty of time to get ready for work, except for the fact I continue to sit on the toilet for another half hour or so and play games on my phone which results in disheveled hair, no eye make-up, and a mismatching or wrinkled outfit.  Some things never change.