City Girl

It's not a secret that if a chance came to move to Nashville or Savannah, I'd go.  I love big cities with all they have to offer.  I just don't like traffic.  I do enjoy living out in the country, with no neighbors mainly, and with the relative quiet, but I would love to live in the heart of a large city and be able to just walk outside and there would be new activity and experiences every day.

Yesterday, I found a papasan chair in Birmingham on Craigslist, so Chan and Ben and I headed down to pick it up.  It is a small chair and now I need ANOTHER size cushion, but I really, really like it, so it was not a total bust.  We went to a couple stores, had lunch at Whole Foods and walked around in the drizzle at Sloss for about an hour.

 

Well, Ben's all sorted out!

It was a good day!

Middle of the Month!

And I have taken...15 pictures.  Eep!  I did not even have a December photo folder until last night, how is that possible? 

 From Chick-Fil-A after skate Day on the 2nd.

This is one Chan asked me to take, it sent her into fits of giggles

My hair, from when I tried to go 'light brown'.  It was burgundy and was much worse than it appears here, the top was a purplish-pink!  There were huge gaps in the back where the dye never set, it was a fiasco.  Matt used a sick day to help me fix it.  Thank goodness for Color Oops!

The sunset from Southerland Station in Huntsville

From here down is from yesterday and our drive:

I feel I need more info!

This mustachioed man has replaced my sweet baby!

Drove all the way to Blountsville to the Frosty Freeze to have some fried pickles!

 This is the sulfur and arsenic springs at Blount Springs.  Matt and I went here about a year ago, the kids had not seen it and were interested in smelling them.  haha!

Last night I hit 800 calories in one go for the second time this week!  I was walking 3.3 MPH at 10% incline for an hour, then moved it to 5% and then to 1% and 3 MPH to cool down over the last 15 minutes.

My weight loss has not just been stalled, it's been like gladiator battle.  I have lost and gained the same 7 pounds 3 times now.  Well, 4 if you count the first time I gained it.  So I joined myfitnesspal dot com because I really like the lay-out and they have user-submitted foods, so everything I eat is already in a database, no digging through the trash for the info on a box or running around online trying to find a restaurant item like with fitday.

I have been logging in EVERYTHING I eat, down to the sprinkle of cheese.  It shows how many calories and fat grams I can eat in a day and still meet my goal of around 1.5 pounds a week loss.  At the end of the day, it adds the food you eat and the exercise you do and says how much you'd weigh in 5 weeks 'if every day were like today'.

I have been at it 4 weeks now, logging daily (almost, I did skip Thanksgiving!) and so far, so good.  Even keeping with my plan, I am have not dropped 1.5 pounds a week, though. (grrrr)  So, this week, I opted to double my exercise for the whole week, going 4 miles a day on the treadmill.  See if that will help...

Good News Friday!

The raise and alternate Friday's off deal went through at Matt's job.  Now, by raise, I mean a tank of gas a paycheck, not new car, but ANY rise in pay is better than what we've had the last 4 years, which is no raise at all and certainly no bonus checks, ever. 

I am more happy about the alternate Fridays off.  That will be like 26 more vacation days a year, what a great thing!  Of course our doctor and dentist are both closed on Friday's, so it won't really make that aspect of having a weekday off better, but 3-day weekends twice a month will be awesome!  Eep!

In other news, I bought the parts to fix the van today.  It has a warped rotor and needs a new stabilizer bar on the passenger side, so that means the other side gets them as well.  It's insanely close to Matt's week off to be shelling out the $300 to get it all done, but I think when that noise stops, I will reach a new level of consciousness, like a soul and karma and all of that.  One step closer to enlightenment.  The brakes are making an occasional metal noise, might as well go ahead and get the bars done while the tires will be off anyway.  Less on labor when I don't have to pay for the time to get the tires off and on on another visit later.  If they take the tires off...I have no actual idea.  But I will Monday because I get to help!  : )

When I was little, Daddy would move things around in the house, or we'd get a new appliance or move things from one floor to another-you think I am bad with rotating furniture every few weeks, my mother remodeled whole floors and changed their purpose five different times in my 8 years of living in that house.  I always got to carry the cord.  Daddy lugging a TV to the living room which was moved upstairs and later to the basement, then back upstairs again and me trotting along holding the cord, Daddy taking the skill saw out to cut some wood and me running behind him holding the cord off the ground.  That kind of 'I get to help'.  Mainly watch and ask questions and poke at things.

Speaking of Daddy, Judy is healing, but exhausted.  She gets out of the hospital tomorrow, we did not go see her today because he said she was flat wiped out and in a cranky mood due to pain and lack of any sort of rest.  After she gets home and can sleep a couple of days and get some of the drugs out of her system, we will descend upon her.  I think Daddy is excited about having her an invalid for a little while, it will be the first time in their marriage that he can locate her.  hahaha!  She is on the go ALL of the time.

I am FINALLY back down to my personal low weight again.  Birthday and Thanksgiving and birthday and another birthday all with big meals and sweets combined with the cold/wet had me packing on about 8 pounds rather suddenly.  It's taken a week of 1200 calorie days, walking 2 and 3 miles a day on the treadmill and really being careful with getting enough to drink to get rid of that.  I am pleased with the return and am focused on dropping another 5 pounds as quickly as I can, that will put me over 40 pounds lost and below where I need to be for my weigh-in in February.  And that will put me with less than 40 pounds to go!  I feel mired up in this middle area, but I have already done what I still need to do, so even if it takes 2 more years, I know I will get there-and stay there. 

I can't begin to say how good running makes me feel, even if I can't run for long.  I can do every other 1/4 mile, which is more than I could do a week ago.  A week from now, I will do more than that!  Or my hip will totally dislocate and my right leg will fall off.  It's a toss-up.  Right now, a heating pad for half an hour every night stops the pain from getting too bad.  It had stopped hurting at all about 15 pounds ago, but running I imagine puts the same stress as the extra weight on that joint and it aches.  Good reminder to not get this heavy again, as if I needed another one.

Tomorrow Matt is taking the kids out for part of the day.  I have rented One Day to watch while they are out.  I have a bag of popcorn set aside, I have a caffeine free diet Mt. Dew in the fridge and my snuggie blanket is washed, dried and waiting.  I am excited about a few hours alone for the second time in a week!  Literally the first time in 16 years that I have had time by myself at home twice in a single week.  The more time I spend by myself, the more I cruise the adoption websites...Zeppie is flat adorable and I love her, but she's not even close to another person tooling around somewhere nearby.  Which, for all my talk of alone time, I will miss as much as I would miss my right leg if it really falls off.

Go Here

Go here and answer questions about your tongue!


Go here and watch a documentary-for free!

Go here to see what the sleep talking man is saying. 

Go here and watch Charlie Brown...get revenge...

Go here and listen to some David Sedaris.  Check out his Christmas stuff.

Go here and find a reason to celebrate every day of the year.

12th Birthday

My baby is 12, my brain just balks at the foreignness.  It still thinks he's 6.  He walks in, just a shade shorter than me, with his starter mustache, his untrained hair, his big feet.  A man-child just as prone to walk outside in the dark to get something from the car alone as he is to crawl up in bed with me to sleep because something scared him.

I watch him grow.  He's like corn in a drought, the way it sucks up what rain and water it can get, the stalks groaning with the effort of growth.  His feet and hands were comically too large, then his legs grew and he shot up taller.  A year ago he was heading toward pudgy and now I keep having to buy longer pants in smaller waist sizes.  His knobby boy knees are no longer wider than his thighs, he runs in full strides, confident of his strength.  He loves to race against his own time, trying to be faster than he was last week or run more laps around the house.

This year he only wanted a couple buddies to spend the night and work on various building projects, so that's what I arranged.  I think he's feeling a little morose about missing out the group birthday song!

I am feeling a little morose myself, about having just one year left with a kid, then it's all teenagers and they will all be taller than me!