Is it over?

Wow. This weekend seemed to drag on forever! Not really in the good way either. It felt like it just kept going and going and it was boring!

Saturday we spent most of the day just lounging around. We finally got up and went grocery shopping in the late afternoon and other than that, I don't think we really *did* anything else. Yesterday we had a friend from Vegas stop by to visit. A friend of hers from the store she used to work at here passed away and she came for his funeral. Poor guy was only 42 years old.

Nothing particularly good or bad about the weekend. Just one of those ones where it seems like it was never going to end. I felt a bit discombobulated the entire time.

Why hello there, pain-free knees!

I'm doing much better this morning! My hips are still a little achy, but my knees feel pretty good and I don't have that all over pain that I did yesterday. Thank goodness!

I'm hoping I continue to feel well because if I do, and the weather isn't too horribly hot this weekend I have plans to work on my yard. It is, in my opinion, the nastiest yard on the block. At least as far as yards that can be seen from the street go.

When we bought the place back in 2001 it was in horrible disrepair. I'm pretty sure the guy who owned it before us was batshit crazy. He'd torn down walls and then built half walls in a few of the rooms. He used some sort of nasty thick foam glue to put up sheets of styrofoam and the garage and yard were absolutely full of junk. Big junk, little trashy things like empty laundry soap bottles and cardboard boxes. I wish I could say that we've since taken care of anything and I have just upkeep to do, but that's not the case. There's still all sorts of junk that was left behind, only now there's our junk that needs to be gotten rid of as well. We had two trees fall a couple of years ago and though I cut them up and stacked them, they're an eyesore and I want to get rid of them.

Anyway, enough rambling. I mainly want to get a few bags of trash bagged up and try to kind of make a few piles for future disposal. I've thought about renting one of those large dumpsters, but they're really expensive! Since that's not really an option at the moment I told my husband that I'm going to start throwing away at least two bags of garbage from the yard every week until it's gone. It'll take awhile, but at least it's proactive instead of letting it just sit there!

I hope everyone has a nice weekend. I'd like to catch some of you in chat one of these days but I keep missing everyone!

Excuses

Now that I'm a little more rested and no longer sick, I guess it's time to write a post that has something to do with what this blog is about - food, diet, exercise etc.

As much as I'd like to present a valid excuse, I don't really have one that'll hold water. I haven't been doing anything "right" the past week. I haven't been drinking enough water, haven't been counting calories or watching what I eat. The only exercise I've had is walking while shopping and moving our a/c unit out of the window and cleaning it yesterday.

I started out thinking "Hey! I was sick most of last week!" but I wasn't sick over the weekend...

Then I thought "Weekends always throw me off, it's no big deal!" but I promised myself that I wouldn't use weekends as an excuse to completely ignore good eating habits.

So, in a nutshell I've been kind of pushing the weight loss thing out of my mind lately and I'm probably going to pay for it by seeing a gain tomorrow when I weigh in. The thing is, lately I haven't really cared if I lost or gained or stayed the same. I want to care, but for some reason it just hasn't seemed all that important (which is stupid considering this is my health at stake!)

I guess I just get tired of thinking about it, you know? I like being lazy and eating whatever I want. I don't necessarily like thinking about what my next meal will be or how many miles I'll have to walk to burn off the soda I just drank or the slice of coconut cake I snarfed. Trying to be proactive though, I know that this kind of thinking isn't good.

I've thought about getting a dieting/exercise buddy locally, but I hate putting myself out there (to the point where I seriously think I've got social anxiety) and the only person I know actively trying to lose weight is my Mother in law. We've made plans to walk together and even made plans to spend a week setting up her pool, but it NEVER. HAPPENS. I get tired and annoyed with setting up plans to have them canceled so I've stopped making plans with her. When she brings it up I tend to give a straight answer.

I'm not upset or even feeling down, just musing. I'm wondering what exactly it's going to take to get me motivated enough to lose a substantial amount of weight. I looked at the chart that Crystal posted and I've got a ridiculous amount to lose. It seems so out of reach, but I've noticed that instead of feeling overwhelmed, I just don't care. Ugh! How to get out of that way of thinking?

Better

Thanks to all of you for the get well wishes and concern...it means a lot to me!

I'm doing a lot better now. I still wasn't feeling all that great by Friday, but my headache was ebbing and my tummy troubles had gone away. My hubby and I went out Friday evening and bought me a new laptop! I'm still getting used to it (like having a really small keyboard...not used to it at all!) but it's fabulous to have a computer that reacts quickly to commands and has a nice amount of space.

I'll write a longer post when I'm not so tired. It's been a really long weekend and I'm exhausted.

Surprised!

I've been avoiding the computer and the scale all weekend because I've been eating poorly. Well, that and we've been busy. Saturday was Paul's birthday (it was very nice!) and yesterday we had a barbeque with his parents. I made an absolutely beautiful pineapple upside down cake Saturday morning since it's Paul's favorite. Luckily, we sent half home with his parents!



Anyway, I wasn't expecting to see a loss at all, and was bracing myself for a gain. I was kinda blown away when I saw that I've lost 3.8 pounds! Yippee! The only thing I can figure is that I ran my butt off most of the weekend and that counteracted all the bad crap I ate. I'm not complaining!

The weeks should start getting more regular and "normal" now. There are no serious holidays coming up for awhile, and Paul won't be taking any more vacation days for now. I'm hoping that'll help me stay honest during the weekends, at least more than I have been. I was happy to see a loss this week, but I doubt it's going to happen every weekend where I eat like that.

Hope everyone else saw a loss this week!

Normalcy

Paul's back at work and I'm...sitting here catching up on everything and planning the day. It was awesome having him home, glad he's back at work today though! I can't seem to get anything done when he's around. Not due to him being clingy (which used to be a very real problem) but because I really like spending time with him. Who'da thunk it?! I get to spend extra time with him next week too, because he's off for Memorial day. Hope another long weekend doesn't do me in like this one did! When my schedule changes, my good eating habits hit the road.

Now it's time for a confession. I'm a daily weigher. I've heard that it's not good for you mentally to see your weight fluctuate so much (because it does!) but I weigh first thing in the morning and leave the scale alone for the rest of the day. I can't help it! I'm down by almost two pounds since yesterday so I'm convinced that I was holding on to a lot of water weight. The temperature here has soared in the past week and when it gets really hot, I hold on to fluid. I don't sweat a lot at all; it just seems to stick to me. So, I'm not stressing the weight gain at all. It'll come off; it's all good.

I have been trying to figure out why it's so hard for me to stay in healthy mode when Paul's home. I think it's due largely to the fact that I don't see him for large chunks of the day and when he's home for the weekend he's not exhausted like during the week. Therefore, I like to do special things...cook big breakfasts, go out to dinner, have snacks while we watch movies or play video games. Unfortunately, all those goodies add up every weekend and it sabotages the hard work I've put in during the week. I seriously need to formulate a plan to help me with that. Fool proof snacks for at home, "safe" things to order from restaurants. I'll try to work on that this week.

Paul's birthday is on Saturday. I'm planning on getting him one of the black and red Nintendo DS's because it turns out that as much as he bitched about not liking hand-held games, he loves mine! His favorite colors are black and red so it's awesome that they've got one with both colors. I'm also looking in to getting him the two Transformer games for it because he's expressed interest. Don't know if I'll be able to find them though. He's not big in to sweets, so I can forgo a cake (thank goodness!) but I may take him to the Thai restaurant we haven't tried yet. Either way, I'm not going to stress a birthday meal...life's too damned short to miss out on a good birthday dinner every once in awhile!

I do have some semi-stressful stuff coming up soon. I'm hoping I can get through it without eating the world or killing somebody. June 6th my mother in law has to go to Las Vegas for either surgery prep or surgery (I haven't gotten all the details yet). She wants me to either go with her to help her drive or take care of her ward Jerry while her and my father in law are gone. I hate driving in Vegas, and I don't particularly like Jerry. BUT, I promised I'd do one or the other and I can't flake. I don't mind helping but everything is a drama with my in laws and I'm not really looking forward to it. Around the same time, my Aunt, Uncle and cousin are coming for a visit. I abhor my Aunt and don't really even want to visit. She's an uppity snob of a woman and I seriously believe that she must shit exotic flowers from the rain forest...nothing else would be good enough for her! My cousin is a sweetheart, and I can take or leave my Uncle...he stays quiet (probably to avoid my Aunts wrath) so I barely even know him! They're coming the week of my Dad's birthday, which is the same week my mother in law is going to Vegas...argg! I'm stressed that my Mom is going to get on her high and mighty horse (what better way to battle her sister but to play that she's better?!) and be pissed that I'm helping out my mother in law during that time. My mom isn't a fan of my mother in law (they've fought a LOT in the past 12 years) and every time I do something for my mother in law my mom takes it as a personal attack. Cross your fingers that I get out alive!

Ugh, anyway. Sorry for the long rant. My family is my biggest stress factor and I pretty much like to avoid even spending time with them. If I could hang with my step dad the entire time and help him work on the house or fix a friggin' car, I'd be thrilled, but chances are I'll be stuck shmoozing with the female side of my family. Blah.

Nothing really to do with dieting or losing weight, but it's certainly a big stresser for me!

Edited to remove some personal family details. I have some snoopy family members and the last thing I need is to deal with any backlash from someone reading something that might piss them off.

Recouping from the weekend

I am friggin' exhausted. The weekend was an absolute blur and it felt over in a flash, yet when it was happening it felt like it was lasting forever! (Does that make any sense?)

Saturday we got up bright and early to go to the swap meet with Paul's parents. We wanted to look around and be out of there before it got too hot. Our local swap meet has expanded so much since I first moved back here that it took us from about 8:30 in the morning until 11:30 to walk it all. I'm not complaining though...I got a little sun, got a little exercise and found a few nifty things on the way.

We didn't stop when we got home. We dropped off the stuff we'd bought, ran to the store so I could get a card for my Mom and pick up a couple of gift bags and then Paul dropped me back off at home so I could wrap her gifts and shortly after that my parents came over to do a video chat with my sister. THAT was fun! Put two non-tech savvy people in front of computers and watch the schadenfreude. My sister isn't very good with electronics of any sort and my Mom doesn't even know how to turn on a computer. Once I got them going though they were fine. They chatted for an hour or so and I uploaded some pictures for my Mom so my sister could see them. They left, Paul got home and we headed back out to go to my parents house.

My Mom didn't seem too impressed with either of her gifts. She opened the knit tablecloth I made for her and said "OH! It's another tablecloth!" Guess you had to be there...it was really anti-climatic. I also bought her a depression era candy dish because she's in to that sort of thing. It's green glass with flowers etched in to the base and a triangle shaped handle in the center...I wish I'd gotten a picture of it because it was beautiful. She said she liked it, but in the same breath she said it wasn't that old, like because it wasn't stamped with proof that it was a 1930 candy dish that it wasn't good enough. I guess I was disappointed because I wanted her to like it. I shouldn't have been surprised though because she's like that.

Oh well. Moving on. Food was fine. Mom made ribs, corn on the cob, scalloped potatoes and stuffed mushrooms. The potatoes and mushrooms weren't fit for human consumption, a fact I realized after I put them on my plate. My Mom gets her feelings hurt easily and I couldn't put it back :( Wasted calories ladies. They sucked. The ribs and corn were great though. Thinking back, that's really the only real meal I ate that day.

Sunday was pretty rough because we were running around so much. Mother's day sent us on a scramble to find some nice looking flowers. I'd wanted to wait because I didn't want nasty dried up flowers, but it turns out that that's about all that was left in the stores. I finally settled on matching African violets in cute little gift bags for two reasons. One; they were the same so there was no "playing favorites" (Anyone else out there deal with ridiculous shit like that between Moms?) and two; they were live plants, not cut so they'll last longer. It always makes me sad when I get flowers and they die a week later. At least this way they'll stay pretty as long as they take care of them.

I got even more exercise in last night when we rearranged two rooms. Yep...we were laying in bed, getting ready to go to sleep when my husband started complaining of being hot. I'd mentioned earlier in the day that because it was just the two of us and we don't get a lot of company we could move our bed out of our tiny bedroom and put in in the pop-out part of our living room, directly under the air conditioner. I was thinking about this because during the summer when it can stay 90-100° overnight, and sometimes up to 115° during the day, quality of life goes way down. It might look trashy, but at least we'll be comfortable and that's really all that matters to me. So from 8:30 to 10:00 last night we moved, and stacked, and boxed and threw shit every which way. This morning my entire house, from one end to the next looks like a cyclone hit it. Today I'll spend most of the day trying to rearrange so I can at least walk through the house without tripping over stray books and knick knacks.

Long winded post...I guess I needed to vent a bit. I didn't have the best weekend eating wise, but I'm optimistic that I'll see a good loss tomorrow. My first weigh-in..I'm excited! I decided to share my weight with y'all, since I know you won't judge me for it. I don't think I've ever told anyone but my husband what I weigh, but seriously...you can tell by looking at me, so screw it. 328. That was the magic number on the scale when I weighed myself last week. Yuck. Hope I won't be seeing that number, or any higher, ever again.