Just trying to work in as many veggies as possible, that’s all. Still a devoted omnivore. I had a tasty morsel of dead pig in the form Canadian bacon this morning. (Many thanks to Canada for making circular ham and calling it bacon, which just makes it feel more fun.)

I brought this nice little salad with me from home. No processed food for me, no sir. Uh, you don’t see that bottle of spray salad dressing. (Note to self : Stage photos more carefully.)

Actually, I love the spray salad dressing (this one is Balsamic Breeze from Wish Bone and it’s wonderful)  because I do not like a lot of dressing on my salad and spritzing seems fun. It’s only one calorie per spritz and not overly sweet despite the HFCS in it.

I like my salads like I like my men: Chunky, bright, full of surprises and a little on the nutty side. Here we have a bevy of lettuce leaves with carrot shreds, thick cucumber slices, grape tomatoes, and unsalted almonds.

The key to not getting burned the hell out on salads when dieting is to mix up the ingredients. I like to add fruit — fresh and dried — small amounts of cheese, meats and as wide of a color palette of veggies as I can find. Also, don’t have one every single day or every time dining out. Salad burnout is the surest way to motivate me to run for a cheeseburger.

I share these lunches here on the blog so I can track what I am eating. Tell me what’s in your lunch bag? How do you avoid salad snooze?

Yeah, you read that right.

Went to the Rolling-Stones-song-inspired restaurant today for lunch with my husband. And we had salads. Nice healthy, totally on-Weight-Watchers-plan salads.

Look how pretty!

And they were delicious. Just a wee bit of ham (all you see here is all I had) and lots of veggies. And yes, I am totally the douche canoe that dips her fork in the salad dressing instead of pouring it all over the greens.

But then the server brought us garlic cheddar biscuits — little pieces of euphoria.

Garlic cheddar biscuits are the work of the devil for those who are counting calories. And these biscuits blew the ones at Red Lobster off the culinary chart.

They were crisp on the outside, flaky tender on the inside and, well, I just made happy in my pants thinking about it.

We each only had one. We both wanted her to bring a whole tray. It’s how I imagine Amy Winehouse felt the first time she got high. And look how that turned out.

Not sure if I can ever go back to Ruby Tuesday’s.

If I do, I’ll need to go to rehab. Yes, yes, yes.

It was going to be a busy night.

And indeed it was busy, but none of that shit actually went down.

First thing I did after dropping my bags on the table and carelessly tossing my coat on a chair was to fire up the oven for a marinated pork loin. To the top of the pork loin I added the some fresh chopped fennel fronds (that’s the fine greenery at the top of the stalk) and into the oven it went. Then I planned to take the fennel bulb and slice it into a salad.

And I decided to use a mandolin slicer I bought a while back that I had not used yet.

Slid the bulb down the blade, nice clean slice. Slid the bulb down the blade again. And that’s when the bulb slipped.

And that’s when the fleshy part of my right thumb came off in a nice, clean slice.

Wow, ouch. Many curse words were uttered. Loudly. Ran my thumb under water, look at the wound. Damn. I could see the fat and the flesh, but luckily no bones. It was hard to see much of anything for all the blood. Hoylier found the severed part of my thumb on the cutting board. He threw it, the blood-splattered fennel bulb and the finger-eating mandolin away.

Pressure and ice didn’t stop the bleeding. I let the pork loin finish cooking and we tried to eat, but after 45 minutes the thumb was still gushing.

Shit. Another damn trip to the emergency room. I hate emergency rooms.

We tried to go to an urgent care practice over by the mall. Got there to discover their hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. WTF? That’s not even normal office hours.

So we headed to the other hospital in town, not the one I went to when my blood pressure spiked last fall. We checked in and hung out in the waiting room, where the TV was set to Fox News.

Like I wasn’t in enough pain, I was forced to listen to that cockknuckle, Bill O’Reilly. (Thank you, Bloggess, for the best word EVER.)

After a couple of hours I was ready to leave, because I was pretty sure my thumb had stopped bleeding. But then they called me back and we figured we’d come this far, might as well see the doc.

As soon as we removed my homemade bandage, blood squirted out all over the examining table. Almost four hours after I sliced this hunk of flesh off my finger the wound was still spewing. Not good.

I was very grateful to have Dr. StandUpComedian on duty. If I can’t have a doctor that looks like George Clooney, I like a doctor with a sense of humor.

I told him my thumb wouldn’t stop bleeding. He told me all wounds stop bleeding…sooner or later.

I told him I didn’t want to watch while he put six stitches in my thumb, two of them through my fingernail. He said it’s was only required that one of us looks. Might as well be him.

I told him I was tempted to take a shot of tequila for the pain before we left the house. He said I should have brought enough for everyone.

Loved this guy.

He put my Humpty-Dumpty finger back together again, put this huge-assed bandage around it and sent me off with a prescription for Lortab.

It occurred to me that I ended up hacking off a portion of my thumb, effectively ending any dream I ever had of being a hand model, trying to make a fresh salad with healthy vegetables.

I never required stitches at the emergency room when I dialed for a pizza or picked up a cheeseburger from a drive-thru window.

How dangerous is this “healthy eating” craze, really?

But hey, I did lose at least an ounce or two, right?