Medicinal Ouzo

Last week, Dallas and I traveled to Florida to attend a trade show where one of my clients was exhibiting. Now that we are all about eating clean, we had pretty serious food issues.

"My God, what will we eat?" I asked, "How will we get enough fiber?"

See, here's the thing. I have obsessive/compulsive tendencies. Oh, I know...shocking, right?

But this eating lifestyle had proven to be so successful for the two of us that I was coming out of my skin fretting about how we were going to maintain things when we were looking at having every single meal, for FOUR days, out at a restaurant. So, I came up with this great plan to take a bunch of food with us.

And this is why my husband is a saint.

Because, instead of telling me that my head was on fire, he simply asked what he could do to help me prepare. He's emotionally intelligent like that.

So, we filled a cooler full of fruit, vegetables, organic bread and all the trimmings for sandwiches, organic plain oatmeal, ground flax meal, wheat germ and protein powder. As it turned out, we ate every breakfast and most lunches from our chilly bin. Dinners were a different story.

Oh boy.

On Friday night, we went out with my customers to this noisy Greek place called "Opa". We started the evening off with shots of Greek liqueur and I can tell you first hand, that nothing good comes from mass quantities of Ouzo.

Dallas and one of my clients had lamb for dinner. They were so excited about this because lamb is one of those foods that you either love or hate and it is firmly in my gag category. I loathe it, which is problematic for my Kiwi husband considering lamb is one of New Zealand's national treasures. Consequently, the only time Dallas gets a sniff of it is when we are out. Just seeing the grease on his lips after he polished off a chop was enough to cause a rise in my gorge so, I drank more to settle my belly.

See there? What did I tell you?

That is my husband.

On a table.

With a belly dancer.

Do you think he's looking at her boobs?

Hmmm....

So this is how the evening went and eventually, we all ended up on the tables dancing because Ouzo takes every last drop of self consciousness and flushes it down the toilet.

The next morning, we dragged our sorry behinds to the gym and as I started running on the treadmill, I experienced a searing pain in my right toe. Cramp? Spider bite? Gout?

None of the above.

I stripped off my running shoe and sock, turned my foot over to have a look and extracted a sliver of porcelain roughly the size of Texas out of my toe.

Word to the wise: when dancing on tables, it is best to leave ones shoes on.