"Did I mention this is a rant? Sense really has no place in it."

I just broke my shoe because of a can of soup and if you used a feed reader you will see the bizarre half title that got posted only because I can't type for crap. I just had to call Matt and tell him our night's plans have to shift because I'm not really into walking the length and breadth of shaws to get on sale ice cream and yogurt in broken shoes. I love that I can say something as crazy as "blah blah blah because the soup broke my shoes" and he just says "oh, ok". I'm secretly hoping that some day in the far far future he brings out this list of random shit I've said and asks "how did the soup break your shoe exactly?".

Meanwhile, my damn shoe is broken. I'm pissed about it even though they're too big and over five years old. They're expensive ass Danskos and I would have worn them forever, too big or not. I have the hardest time saying goodbye to shoes, even when they're broken and don't fit. I would have thought I'd feel justified in some online shoe shopping but I'm more sad. Maybe tomorrow.

Cats and dogs living together

"Today the sun was up at 6 when we left for work and it shouldn't have been, clearly the earth is now revolving backwards. Time to stockpile canned peaches and buckshot." I pulled that from an email this morning. It's one of those days when my brain doesn't stop humming and right now I'm thinking about what I should put away in case of "disaster" this winter. Pretty much I have cans of tuna and beans and tomatoes, and bottled water. I'm more or less of the mind that if things were that bad we'd freeze before we'd starve to death. Why bother with all that extra shopping?

There's something about this time of year and grocery shopping that just makes me insane. My parents were so thrilled when I got my license because they could send me to the store a hundred times a day when they forgot ingredients for their entertaining. I'd call from the checkout line and still I'd get home and have to turn around. They loved every minute. I didn't even host Thanksgiving last week and I went to the market FIVE times. I've been thrice this week already and we have to go again tonight. It's only wednesday. I expect I'll go to the store tonight and on friday discover I need a waterbuffalo or something for a very important recipe.

I hate going grocery shopping more than once a week, I always buy things I don't need and spend too much and eat too much as a result. Mostly it's baking things I need. The one good thing about still feeling a tiny bit sick is that I haven't been wandering down the cookie aisle and drooling so much because it cuts into my napping time. However, looking at my calendar and all the cooking engagements I have in there...there is going to be a lot of eating in the name of testing in December.

If I taste one of everything I have to make the next month, it's atleast two days of calories. TWO DAYS. I need to keep that at the top of my mind next month. Do I want to burn an extra two days of calories or not eat every cookie that comes comes off the production line? I'm not sure which I'm likely to choose right now but I'm determined not to start next year over 170. I'm not asking myself for any more than a 6 pound loss for the year. If I can't do that I'll never get to a healthy BMI.

It's Alive!

We had the internet at home last night and were able to operate without breaking anything just long enough to make one tiny post and order apple trees online. We got a Baldwin and a Winesap and 2 Canadian Strawberries because apparently we only like the freaky rare apple trees. Doesn't Canadian Strawberry sound like a good apple, apparently they're pink with stripes and I'm very excited about that. We ordered a few normal varieties too, if normal can be described as super yummy and withstanding of extreme cold. They come home to us in April and will bear fruit in like 10 years or something...which is why we had to start now if we want to eat a home grown apple by age 50.

In other things I want to do before I'm 50, I'm dressed like a grown-up today. The new folks have a much more strict dress policy, in theory anyway, so I'm trying to dress the part. I've been dressing pretty badly the last two years, trying to get the most out of one or two pairs of pants and a few too big tops. Wardrobe minimalism to be sure. I need to re-develop my own style and joy in clothes, I feel like it's been turned off a little too long. When I look back on it I can't help think I dressed so much better when I was fatter. I guess it seemed more important to dress nicely when I thought I looked so awful. And then there was the compulsive spending. It's easy to look great when you buy your clothes with a lot credit and very little sense.

I know I'm always connecting money and weight and I know that combination of evils is not particular to me. The two are so connected and they're both problems you have to fix from the inside out. I had to stop believing that I deserved macaroni and cheese for dinner because it was a rough day or that I deserved to wear nice clothes like the skinny girls did. There's no deserve about it. Macaroni and cheese is never going to be a healthy dinner and no matter how many fabulous clothes I bought with plastic it was never going to make my body smaller. I also had to stop believing that I couldn't do something because of my body, or couldn't do it until I was smaller. I'm still not sure which was harder to do, saying no or saying yes.

Sometimes when I look at a month or a few months worth of posts and see how very little my numbers have changed (back up again today, damn!) I get caught up in feeling like I'm not going anywhere. I have to remind myself how much I have changed. Yesterday I bought SEVEN bags of candy because there was a massive sale at Rite-Aid. Amy of, say, three years ago would A: have never admitted that, B: have opened and eaten at least one bag, C: would have left at least one bag at work for snacking. Amy of yesterday took it all home untouched and shoved it in the cupboard to bake with (Matt has this thing for M&M cookies lately). I was hungry yesterday and I never even considered hitting the chocolate. I just wanted more yogurt but I didn't have anymore so I waited until dinner. That's a big damn change in habits and choices and I need to give myself some credit for that. I forget that what will make a lifetime of health and happiness for me is keeping up a long string of tiny, good choices. I have to believe that if I keep up the little things, eating well and enjoying exercise, in a few years I'll look back on this time and think it's exactly what I needed to do.

Ooooh, it works!

We have a very slow internet connection, but it works. Something to work with anyway. It's pretty exciting!

Newfangled technology

I never, ever had my own room growing up. The third girl of a big family in a small house never gets their own room. It wasn't a problem though because I worshipped my sisters, especially their stuff. Stuff, which, all became mine when they went off to college. One of the things I wish I still had was the rotary style princess phone that was in one of those bedrooms. It was gorgeous and antique and it made me feel like Katherine Hepburn when I used it. I have no idea where it went to. It stinks that I can't find it in particular today because I just found out why the phoneline isn't working. After Matt slogged through a million miles of phone line, moved walls, held flashlights in his teeth in cold ass temperatures trying to fix the box outside...we learned from the phone company that we don't have touchtone on our line. If I'd had my antique phone we would've figured this out weeks ago. That, or you know common sense, could've solved the whole problem in a jif.

Every Thing Hurts

Do you know what is the stupidest thing to do when you might, maybe, kindof are still a little bit sick? That would be kickboxing. Kickboxing in your livingroom is the stupidest thing to do when your carcass is still harboring of the virus. Not only do you get the immobilizing muscle burn like you were kicking and boxing in quicksand and the nasty sweaty fever like Beth in Little Women that time when they thought she was gonna die, not just those! there's more! Remember the sniffles that were snuffed? not so much. The sore throat you thought was gone? it's back! with friends! and they're cranky!

Clearly, I'm dying. I should not be at work, and I should not be eating chocolate, and I should not go to the grocery store at lunchtime and haul back 70 pounds of vegetables. I should also, probably, not be so excited that my scale keeps dipping. I bounced between 168 and 169 all weekend and rested at 167.8 this morning. It might not be there tomorrow but right now I'm pleased. And nauseas. Hope y'all are having a very wonderful Monday.

Not that into you

Mr. Thai guy promised us on wednesday that he would be open for lunch today. We called four times and got four recordings before we settled for grilled cheese from the Whale. Then he sent his little brother over to face the music. It's hard being a fat girl in a small town.

Lost weight over Thanksgiving, must have been the prayer

Down another .2 of a pound from yesterday. It's much easier to be careful when you don't eat half the things on the table. Weight loss by vegetarianism. Unfortunately there was no actual turkey in those cupcakes and I ate one. I have another with me for after lunch, if I can hold out. Unlikely.

I'm at work all day today to help the two people that actually know we're open. So, obviously, I'm doing a bit of shopping. So far it's all for me, but the discovery channel store does have a rad robot making kit I might have to get for the nephew. I've been buying myself a lot of clothes. I picked up some workout gear wednesday which has been the worthiest purchase so far, the rest has been jeans and t-shirts and other things that I can't wear to work but apparently have to have to sustain life. Nothing like mass returns to the Gap in the holiday season. If they didn't love me before we'll be bffs after this nonsense.

So I opened with my tiny loss of .2 pounds but I want to bring it up again because it seems weird to me to lose so much and not have exercised at all this week. My dream thought is that all the excellent muscle I gained the last few weeks is doing it's magic and burning lots of calories. I think my cold is gone so I'll definitely be working out tonight. Should I be alarmed of the facts? I never had a scale so detailed as to know how much I lost in a week, exactly. It's about a pound this week, which is well under the recommended danger zone of 2 pounds a week. After so much stagnation I guess I'm just skeptical. Is my month of hardass work finally paying off? Will I now be screwed because I didn't workout this week? Will Matt eat the rest of the cupcakes before I get home if I ask him to? Life is so full of unanswered questions.

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Happy thanksgiving!

Feed a cold

When I was gone for two whole days Matt was really sick. He said he thought it was because I was away and he was worrying about me. Awww. But now I'm sick too and I'm thinking his nostalgia was a by-product of the virus. He just wanted points to make up for when he said he'd get me a meat thermometer for my birthday and I said I'd stab him with it. Young love!

I'm feeling like crap except that I'm another .2 pounds down. Woohoo for starve a fever! In lieu of exercising last night I built my bookcase, I'm calling it cardio on Spark. Pick up the piece and pound in the dowel, pick up the next piece pound in that dowel, it was just like aerobics without the perky instructor. I don't know how I got it done, just typing it makes me want to take a nap. Which I can't do because tonight I have to take a bath in bleach and do my Thanksgiving baking, so as not to infect the family.

I'm making turkey cupcakes, which I think will be the funnest, and a pumpkin cheesecake to impress Matt's mom and grandma. If you hit the cupcake link you'll see that it's a whole wheat, low fat recipe. I've never tried it and it's not in my plan (I'm making chocolate) but it might be worth a shot if you like pumpkin and whole wheat baking. Let me know if you do, I love pumpkin anything...but I thought two of the same dessert would be overkill.

Now I'm off to look dolefully at my soup until my lunch break is over and then pour it down the sink. Maybe I'll just make some tea. I don't think I'm sick enough to be so repulsed by food but it could work to my advantage tomorrow. A reason to not be glutten that has nothing to do with dieting and guilt and body image would be like Christmas come early.

"Irony's kind of ironic that way."

It seems as though I actually lost weight while I was away being a glutton. Which is unusual, historically. Das scale read 169 even. Slow and steady wins the race of making me completely insane. I guess blind frustration burns a lot of calories. Speaking of which, I have a bone to pick with New Jersey and their bastard of a highway system. If the blue sign says gas .4 miles right, traditionally there is gas .4 miles on the right. Not, say, no miles on the right as in doesn't exist at all. I didn't set tire in the state of Maine until 4, I've never been so happy to be home.

I didn't exercise at all while I was gone, unless you count power shopping and lifting that giant box from Ikea. I bought myself a big ass bookshelf. My house is overflowing with the books, it's an avalanche of literature. We're also overflowing with the bookshelves so I thought 1 huge shelf instead of 72 little ones. If it comes out looking in anyway reasonable, I'll be pleased. Matt will be having guests this week so I'm a little wired on getting the house ready. I also, randomly, bought a ton of wrapping paper. The one I picked for Christmas is black and white, you reckon our families will burn me at the stake for it? Maybe if I get red ribbon they'll just glare instead of the burning.

Have you noticed I haven't mentioned the purchase of clothes? Is it conspicuous? I should have known that placing an online order would screw my chances of finding something worthwhile in the real world. The only garments purchased were for my nieces who are going to be a whirlwind of pink again this year. Shoes however, I got three pairs. Which is insane. Unnecessary and insane. I don't know though, I really don't want to take any of them back. Shame I can't pass the winter in only plaid buckle ballerina flats from aldo, pants are so over-rated.

Sleepy in New Jersey

I'll be leaving in about two hours. Trying to avoid the worst of the NYC traffic. Have a strong urge to sell my car for a plane ticket, but there's no way it's worth that much money. And then how would I get all my crap from Ikea home? It's not a practical solution to not having to drive 9 hours. I have the feeling my master plan of avoiding the New York traffic will land me right in the middle of the Boston traffic. I have to admit I feel more comfortable traversing Boston at rush hour, atleast in Boston I can figure out the drivers. I had assumed that people in Jersey drove faster and had less patience but I'm wrong. I, with the pine cone and tassle plate, was the only one moving along wondering what the parameters of criminal speeding are in this state. In Maine if you go 25 over the limit they just arrest you, but then it's not like we have a lot of crime.

Whoops!

Missed yesterday and therefor no more nablopomo. C'est la vie. It's sort of a relief. Now Matt doesn't have to kill himself replacing our phone lines. If I don't "have" to post every day I'll settle for a pace that merely maims.

The thing about pants

So pretty much I'm going away this weekend with the express intention of spending a ludicrous amount of money on clothes and I just placed a gap.com order. I hate it when I do that. I have this "I can always take it back" thing in my head. I am painfully short on clothes, but I didn't order anything that would be really helpful...like pants. Which was silly. I guess I know what I'll be buying on vacation.

I sort of hate buying pants. Pants are very annoying when your weight is changing. Should I be saying slacks here? I probably should but it makes me feel like my dad. "Those are nice slacks, don't you look sharp", which you have to pronounce shaahp if you want the full New England dad effect. And then you have to go to Easter at my cousins house and freeze your ass off because they always have their thermostat set to morgue. You'll wish you were looking shaahp in a parka and Uggs. But that is not the point of this post.

Too large pants are really inconvenient. They fall down and you have to pull them up all day. And then while they're falling down you catch your heel on the hem and then you have to sew the hem. But you're not going to spend your valuable cupcake eating time fixing a hem on pants that hardly fit you, so you use stitch witchery. But you keep wearing them because you can't find another pair of pants so you have to wash them and then the stitch witchery which *promised* to be *magic* comes apart and your hem falls again. It's just innevitable that you look like crap because your pants don't fit. So you have to go shopping.

I bought a bunch of shirts and sweaters today because it appears that I don't have any. I'm so efficient at giving away my clothes when they're too big that now there's nada left. I always think I look like crap when my pants don't fit, but you know what? I look like crap when any of the clothes I'm wearing don't fit. I have to keep telling myself it's ok to buy clothes that fit. It's ok to move from XL to L to M. I tend to maintain when I splash out on clothes, like I hate to get value for money. I could just keep working and get skinny and sell them on Ebay like everyone else if I'm that worried about "wasting" a discount sweater from the gap. I'm going to try to remember that when they're too big in a few months but for now I'm raising my proverbial glass to wearing clothes that fit and losing weight at the same time. The audacity.

"Sugar and spice and everything useless unless you're baking"

"I've never seen so much mayonnaise in my life" said my boss at last night's work meeting buffet. I can't think of a better way to describe the experience, it was a mayonnaise extravaganza. It's weird to me because we were there discussing our health benefits and the dinner they provided was, well, nasty. Finger sandwiches, potato salad, potato chips and cookies does not a healthy dinner make. There was not a single bit of green, not even decorative parsley. I chose two sandwiches and potato chips because at least I'd know what I was getting a bag of Lay's. I also had a few cookies and I'm sure somehow they put mayonnaise in them too, I have my suspicions. One of the sandwiches was pretty obviously egg salad, so yay for protein. The other could have been anything. I'm pretending it was tuna over chicken because I eat tuna and not chicken, but honestly I couldn't have told you what animal it had been before the Holiday Inn got a hold of it.

So the meeting was pretty awful diet-wise but the benefits are awesome. And I think I'm still going to do the high deductible insurance thing. I know, I know I wasn't going to do it because of my knee and the expensive possibilities there...but it's just so alluring. They're giving extra super incentives to do the high deductible and it makes a lot of sense. Data shows that people who are responsible for their own medical bills (up to a deductible) take better care of themselves. Of course it's the insurance supplying the data but it makes complete sense to me. I do take better care of myself knowing that I'm paying for it out of pocket. I also don't go to the doctor for nothing which accounts for a big chunk of rising medical costs. I don't mean to advocate never going to the doctor but I don't think taking an antibiotic every time you have a cold is the best thing for anyone. It's no coincidence that antibiotics are becoming less effective when we consistently over-use them.

So, that was a ramble and it sounds like I've made up my mind but I haven't yet. I have this feeling that whatever I choose I'm going to be pissed about it come January. I'm also pissed about the brown and serve rolls I had for breakfast but it's just too late to undo it now. There's something about this season that makes me lust for brown and serve rolls, I bought a whole pack for Matt's chicken dinner. We had fakesgiving all on our own. It was nice but I didn't need to cook a whole pack of rolls. I just have to hope I have a backbone attack next thursday and lay off the butter soaked little vixens.

Last but not least I'm going to Philly this weekend and it will be a time of gluttony. I'm packing my pilates mat and a metric ton of healthy food. I just know it's going to be all shopping and eating and laughing with Holly, which is going to be awesome. This is me getting over myself to enjoy one weekend with my best friend. I don't want to be too disappointed when I get back though, maybe that thought will keep me ordering salads. Thank god they don't do tofu cheese steaks.

Super Magic Skinny Diet!!!

Ooops, do over. So I tried to fix that post I just wrote and it done got deleted. Our computers died and whooops, it was all gone. I thought it seemed, like, a little mean. Now I'm just about out of time to fix it. Instead, I can report that I bought a package of cookies today and I'm a little pissed with myself over it. I got ginger lemon instead of chocolate calorie explosion, but they're still cookies and no real replacement for lunch. Tsk tsk to me.

Never, never, never

I thought it would be cute to look up quotes about "chicken diseases" for a title. You know what happens when you put "chicken diseases" into google? You don't? Trust me you don't want to. Makes a girl glad she eats tofu. A girl is also glad to know that Matt won't die of chicken tonight. I've been framing those thoughts in my head all day. Only it's funnier if it's a live chicken and not a dead stone-cold chicken. And also if the chicken is wearing leather and possibly is a veteran of 'Nam. It's been a very long day.

Every minute I think "this is as bored as I could get" and then another minute passes and "Nope, I was wrong, this is boringer.". I have 15 transactions. That's not even 15 people. That's like 10 people and and half of them had multiple deposits. One just wanted two tens for a twenty. My boss keeps staring out the window like a caged animal and I'm starting to feel jealous because atleast she has a window. This is going to be one long ass winter in Maine.

"How can women be as thin as we are? We have personal trainers to work us out. We have specially prepared meals."

I was doing my daily troll for Buffy quotes when I found this one from Sarah Michelle Gellar. I really like it, it's so honest. I hate it when starlets confess eating whatever they want and having crazy amounts of food like the properties of science don't exist in their bodies. In their world eating a whole sandwich is a crazy huge amount of food, and then they go and work for 14 or 20 hours a day. That's not a fair comparison, that's not a real world scenario. It sort of makes me think more highly of the Oprah's and the Kirstie Alley's of the world. It's your job to be skinny and you failed, admitting that takes some balls.

I'm really relieved that it's not my job to be skinny. I stink at it. Or, in other words, we had waffles for dinner last night. Waffles and high fructose fake ass maple syrup. It's not really my fault, you see, there's this chicken. I pulled a whole chicken out of the freezer last saturday for a nice warm dinner for Matt on Sunday. The chicken, it was not thawed. Fair enough, we'll do it Monday. Monday, it was still hard as a chicken shaped glacier in my fridge. I've been having salads for dinner so it's no big if the chicken is still on ice, for me anyway. Meanwhile, Matt is starving to death. I fed him everything we had that wasn't also frozen. Last night was supposed to be chicken night, 4 days later it was still frozen beyond all reason and there was no Matt food left. So we had waffles. I could have had a salad, a very cold salad, but I didn't...I had waffles and butter and syrup.

I'm banking on that chicken being defrosted tonight. Can you die from eating chicken that was cooked while still frozen? Will this very post be used against me when Matt's family sues me for conspiracy to commit murder? Aggravated assault with poultry. I think it was more dangerous when it was solid, and hurling it would burn a lot of calories. Anyway, I'm tired of this chicken, making me eat waffles. I'm going to enjoy roasting his ass.


*edited to add that I need not fret over the chicken because Matt is bringing home Moose meat. E. Gads.

"Peachy with a side of keen"

i know i'm going to hate myself for saying this, probably tomorrow or in five minutes, but it's almost easy now. i felt like this before, i think in january or there abouts. like things were coming together and the pounds were falling off steadily and it just felt easy. i haven't gotten the falling numbers yet but the process is coming more and more easily. as long as nothing even remotely interesting happens between now and the next ten pounds...i'll be all set. i'm going to take it ten pounds at a time, work at maintaining it and go from there. i don't want to kill my easy breezy feeling with the more, faster, thinner thoughts that pop up so often. so i'm not going to think beyond 160. which is 12 pounds technically, i know. but it's my blog, i can be a hypocrite if i want to. it's in the constitution somewhere, practically verbatim. fact.

I've been looking for that practically all day. It's from last April. Thoughts like that kept popping in to my head this weekend, this whole healthy thing feels really easy lately. I thought it would be great to remind me of what happened when I mentioned things being easy last time, because it's been so easy since last April that I'm now 0 pounds! It's amazing!

Actually, it is amazing. I feel amazing. I want to be doing Pilates right now, I'm a teaser junkie. I just have to figure out how I can tape up my knee without ripping all the skin off. I like passing up the left over (still!) Halloween candy and being able to think "geez, even if I wanted chocolate I don't want that crap". I feel really powerful right now. Cliche'd, but powerful. Aslong as I can keep in mind that I weigh exactly what I thought I weighed in April when everything was sunshine and roses and look how that turned out. If my scales are five pounds apart, I've lost only five pounds since then. FIve pounds in eight months is not earth shattering. I haven't even hit that ten pound goal yet, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I do feel really great. I need to remember that too.

NaBloPoMo from home-o

I hate updating by cellphone. The problem with building the house yourself is that when there is a problem in a hundred or so feet of phone line, there's no one but yourself to blame. We have service, we have a dialtone, but you can't actually dial out. It's like a really boring horror movie. Which segues nicely into me having to go to Walmart this weekend. SuperWalmart, for bigger horror for your buck bonus.

I was only going to go to the grocery store. What with the early christmas shoppers (was there a Canadian holiday this weekend?) and the parades I wasn't going to do all my housewifely stuff in those crowds, cat litter just isn't that important. So I was on my way back when Matt needed something and the only place to go was Walmart. W can appreciate this when I say every spot was full. It was full on Christmas insanity. And ofcourse they didn't have what he wanted, heaven forbid, but I got myself some athletic tape for my knee.

Holly, my best friend/nurse/athletic trainer, told me months ago that they used athletic tape on their athletes. Five months later I tried it and it's awesome. Until you take it off. This was totally my fault, it felt so good even after I did my exercise thing, that I kept the tape on. For HOURS. Yes, I'm an idiot but I'm way less worried about my knee now. Knowing that I can fix it with the right amount of pressure in the right places is awesome. Maybe not fix it, but work with it and live with it. I should have learned to do what she says a long time ago. She's a goddess.

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Athletic tape above and below the knee. holly is a freaking genius.

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Messages from my mom i found today, never thought i'd hear her voice in my house.

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Almost connected! 170.2...the bastard.

On the shocking of the sports store staff

I just hobbled back from Cadillac Mountain Sports. I was surprised the last time that the clerk could hear my clicking. This time it was a boy clerk and he was visually pained by the sound. It was sort of awesome, except OW. He helped me to two kinds of compression brace and neither of them made the clicking stop. There is a larger "oh my god" kind of brace but it's a little pricey. I am cheaping myself out of proper medical care.

I postponed my fancy knee doctor appointment until I could get health insurace or independantly wealthy, whichever came first. That was when I stopped running for fear of my knee cap falling off on the road. Then it was mostly better but it still clickety-clacked going up the stairs but that was all. Then I got a bee in my bonnet about running again and I ran for a few weeks. I am a moron, I see that now. My knee has become hideously clicky. With a new and improved grinding sensation!

The last few weeks I have been stepping for 20 minutes (it never hurt my knee before I took up running on the hills) and then I do 25-30 minutes of Pilates. Every night. I felt like I wasn't doing enough and I had no excuse not to do those things. I have been really happy with the results of kicking my own ass. Even having had the infamous three cupcakes and other infamous things and having a tiny meltdown about some water weight, I'm still showing a loss this week. Precarious as it is. I know I wouldn't be 169.8 on the new scale if I wasn't sweating to the oldies all night. There is part of me that knows that the less weight on my knee the better and then there is part of me that hears and feels the badness in my knee doing Pilates. For anyone who doesn't do Pilates or isn't familiar, it is not knee intensive. You spend most of the time on your back (heh) and I can't think of any reason it should hurt my knee. In short, I'm freaked out. Almost freaked out enough to shell out for the knee doctor.

The take-over is sort of the best thing ever because it means I can insure my ass in January. If I can last that long. I already scrapped all my heels and bought some fancy Earth shoes and I even wear them. I'm going to think about the big giant brace some more and maybe buy it on Pajama Day. If anything is worth shopping at the crack of dawn in jammies it's that.

"I'm on the squad, which is great,'cause I feel like cheering and leading others to cheer."

This morning was a great morning because the new scale dipped under 170. I sometimes think it does that on purpose. Somehow the scaale knew I just wrote this whole thing about weighing a million pounds. And then, what, two days later it's completely where I thought it should be. Hating an inanimate object is such a waste of time. I'm pissed that I let myself get really upset about it when I didn't need to. What's worse is I knew I didn't need to get upset about it, like I knew I didn't need to get on the scale in the first place having spent my morning eating and drinking and making merry. Making merry of a morning is fun and all but not so much when you need to step on a scale to check in with your self worth.

It's starting to get old, the ups and downs of my mood being tied to a digital readout. Ten, size ten. Why, why, why can't I just take that joy and run with it? It's pretty damn awesome. Matt tried to reason with me, and that's the reason he used. He also said, more than a little sheepishly, "doesn't ones' menstrual cycle sometimes add false weight?" That's clearly an Amy-fied version of his words, but, there was something very clinical and please don't yell at me about the way he said it that I wanted to convey. Did it work? There's something about the use of "ones'" that just says "don't whoop my ass because 'ones'' could be ANYBODY".

In other news, completely irrelevant and unrelated news but oddly parallelled in hypocrisy to this post, the old site is back up and running. Have you been yearning to know how much of an ass I was in college, yearn no more. The link is in the sidebar. Proceed with caution, or atleast brace yourself for the bastardization of grammar.

Blogging? from home? you jest!

I just spoke to the most wonderful woman in the whole world, the lady at the new phone company. It's not like Verizon ever did anything to me, nothing particularly evil, but seriously if you just called Verizon would they know your name? I called to change our address. The address we waited so long to get, was in fact, wrong. The town called us a few days after I sent the forms to the phone people to say "Whoops, that number we gave you is totally wrong". The phone lady said "Oh, he gave you the wrong address...of course it was him". And so she changed it and then she said "by the way, I put through your work order yesterday and you should have service when you get home". Excellent. We, read Matt, have to connect the wires and such but if I really wanted to I could do my NaBloPoMo duties from the front yard. In a parka.

In which the blogger experiences vast and satisfying relief

The damn scale is back at 171 and I can totally live with that. No more weighing after breakfast, it's emotionally scarring. As is going to the dentist, which I did yesterday as per why my morning was so messed up. I needed to eat early so I wouldn't be hungry like the wolf but I also needed time to brush my teeth 47 times because that's what you do before going to the dentist...so they won't know you're a slacker. I had this college professor who used to live in Gloucester, Mass. Gloucester is a fishing community, a lot like Bar Harbor. Her husband had a doctor who simply adored him because he wasn't a fisherman and therefor his body wasn't trashed at 35. Usually, note the tone, going to my dentist is the same for me.

Every other time I've been to the dentist here in Maine, as opposed to in New Hampshire, they exclaim over my teeth. "They're so beautiful, you do such a good job" they used to say. I always enjoyed that because in New Hampshire they behaved as though my teeth were just short of falling out on their floor. "You should wear your retainer because if you don't the SUN WILL CRASH INTO THE EARTH AND WE'LL ALL DIE", is the chair-side manner you get at a New Hampshire dentist. I was really looking forward to hearing how gorgeous my teeth were and how they should be in Hollywood or something and I was disappointed, to say the least.

My hygienist spent the whole time "hmm"ing at me. That's just a shade less nerve-wracking than "ooops". So she did her thing to the tune of an orchestra of refridgerators and then called the doctor in. And he "hmmm"ed too. It's the dentist and you have all that stuff in your mouth so you can't exactly call them on the "hmm"ing so I'm waiting for the verdict and the talk about dentures or whatever and they start talking in dental speak. "Number 7 lower has a calcification, not yet fractured, put a watch on that...Number 16 upper has a thing that we can do a thing to before it becomes a thing, make an appointment stat for that one". My "stat" appointment is in January. How "stat" is January? You reckon if it was really bad they'd have told me? Or is it part of the dentist mystyque?

"A vague disclaimer is no one's friend"

Matt didn't work yesterday, he had like a house to build or something, so I did my commuting alone. It's sort of nice to be alone sometimes. I think about all the wild and crazy things I can do on my own...in Ellsworth. They're getting a Super Walmart soon so you know that town is going places. I, being me, chose to go grocery shopping. Jif was on sale and I had a coupon. Two coupons. So I bought four jars. If nothing else Matt will have peanut butter and whole wheat cookies every day for the rest of his life and I'll get the eternal joy of knowing I spent only 1.15 on fancy name brand peanut butter.

I was standing in line while the woman in front of me meticulously double knotted all of her shopping bags (I was totally eyeing her frozen peas too...good thing she tied 'em up tight). There was a young man behind me who, in retrospect, was smiling and trying to catch my eye while I was thinking bad thoughts about knot lady. And then he gestured to the jelly in his cart and said we'd be a good pair.

Peanut butter and jelly...get it? It was sort of sweet really and now I'm thinking I could have been nicer. I was a little too focused on being impatient but then maybe a litany of my sexual history wouldn't have been better than blowing him off. It was one of those things that just make me think "god, I look like such a straight girl...". It always sort of shocks me when boys do things like that. Like, you know, talk to me. Apparently I never noticed when girls hit on me either so it's probably safe to say the problem is all me. I guess I really am that self involved.

What else...life's supply of peanut butter...oh yeah, the damn scale...that's relevant. The old scale said 173. THE OLD ONE. Based on the current conversion of weights and measures that's A MILLION POUNDS on the new scale. I weighed later rather than earlier and after breakfast and a big glass of juice because I needed a fiberless sugar injection at 6 am and also the vitamin C. It's probably a little off for a number of reasons but it's not that off and it has me a little crank to the y. It might be time to only bake things that Matt likes and I don't, like bacon cupcakes and sirloin muffins. If I made all his food look like meat I'd never want to eat it. Or I could use my computer money on a treadmill. That's a decision that's going to seriously suck when I have to make it.

And I didn't forget dear Heather in the comments:

I've been tagged by another blogger. Here are the Rules:

Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog
Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird
Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs
Let them know they are TAGGED by leaving a comment on their blog
1. Link to my tagger.

2. Seven facts about me:

I've never been drunk and no one ever believes me. It might be against the law to live in Maine and not be a lush, I should check.

My oldest sister gave me my name. She wanted Emily to be called Amy, but my dad had his heart set on Emily. They promised her the next daughter would be Amy thinking they would never have another...ha.

I once set my cat on fire, but not in a serial killer way, and seriously she was fine, maybe I shouldn't bring that one up.

I taught my goldfish to eat from my hand. Both of them actually.

I'm secretly glad we're using paperplates to conserve water. I feel bad about the waste but I REALLY hate doing the dishes.

Circle of Friends is my favorite book. I read the paperback into bits in highschool. Later on someone bought me the hardcopy as a present but I wish I still had the paperback.

Matt thinks our tiny kitchen table came from a motel. I have no idea why he thinks that, I got it from my sister. His story is better though, I like to think of all the stuff it would have seen if it really did live in a motel.

And this is where I do that meme killing thing that I always do. I don't do forwards, I don't do chain letters and I don't care if I don't get rich in the next ten minutes because I didn't hit send. I'm a killjoy, make that thing number 8. It's damn hard thinking of 7 things you, as a blogger and professional narcissist, haven't already told the world. It's a mission to all those who choose to accept it.

Ignore the grilled cheese

Check out that salad! The Whale isn't all bud light and golden fried.

"Ain't no use running fool, I know where your mama parks your house."

Lauren, a true Mainer, was going to suggest a generator. Matt, a true whatever he is, is building a windmill. Maybe Dutch, he could be truly Dutch. He's always wanted a windmill. Every windstorm that passes makes him a little more determined. He's been channelling his inner Tesla for awhile now. Originally he wanted to rig the generator to be bio-diesel and back feed so the Hydro would have to pay us to burn vegetable oil, but now he's into the windmill thing...mostly because it will piss off the town. He's got this need to build everything he ever wanted before the state makes it all illegal, like our boiler. They want to make it illegal to burn recycled oil for heat because...uhm it's better for the earth...it makes us independent of the oil company...oh yeah, it doesn't make the state any money. Lucky we're grandfathered. Not that I'm bitter.

What I am bitter about is that I ate three cupcakes yesterday. Three. And since I can't blame the state for that, I'm blaming daylight savings time. How am I supposed to know what it's feeding time at the zoo when they change the damn clocks. It couldn't possibly be my fault. I'm a cupcake victim here. A frosting martyr.

I used to be so good at the intuitive thing. Hungry? eat something appropriate. I think the minute I tell myself I can wait, I don't need to eat right now is the minute my plan goes to hell. I've been bouncing between "eat at regular intervals as told by clock" and "eat as needed" and you really can't operate both systems at once with success. I don't think the clock way is ever successful and yet I am always using it as a guide. Is the clock omniscient? Does it think I need more iron?

I thought I was doing really well. My thing as of late is to stuff myself with vegetables and fruit whenever I'm hungry. The cupcake three came out of left field on a sort of wacky day and I'm dissapointed at how dissapointed I am. They're just cupcakes, sure you didn't need three but...but that's the attitude that keeps me where I don't want to be. No one needs three cupcakes in a day, not ever. Next time if I'm still hungry after my lunch, I'm taking my three bucks to Subway and getting a sandwich. Atleast there'd be vegetables in it, even iceburg lettuce has a better reputation than three cupcakes.

"Careful, you don't want to train them to eat flesh"

My boyfriend is broken. One of the many manly things he did yesterday caused a very bad thing to happen to his back. Which is bad for him, but good for me. How? How could I be glad that he's broken? because he wants to take up Pilates. He says "I want to strengthen the muscles in my lower back, Pilates does that right?". Another convert, I'm so pleased. I'll have to get him a tall person mat...when he can walk again.

Everyone is griping about daylight savings time. It was strangely light when we drove to work today and Matt is all kinds of pissed that it will be dark while we're driving home. He won't be able to do any of his body breaking things, the horror. I hate the dark too but pretty much this is Maine, it's dark and it's cold and soon it will be even darker and colder. I'm pretty much grumpy about the disruption of my snack schedule. My stomach says it's snack o'clock and my brain says it's almost lunch time so just wait you won't die o'clock. Damn you daylight savings.

I missed out on the novelty of having a whole extra hour of sunday because the power was out. I still had that hour, but there was no music to listen to or movies to watch, or, you know, heat in which to enjoy it. I was just deciding how I could cook 2 tuna steaks, some salmon, cod, an entire chicken and some beef tips before the entire freezer got it's rot on, when the power came back on around dinner. If it was January I'd just take it all outside but damn, it's not that cold and I was just thinking there's no way I could cook the Noah's Ark of freezer contents in one night let alone get it eaten. And then Matt says "Oh, if you were worried about it we could put the generator on". Forget the expensive ass Trader Joe's meat products, I could have lost my Haagen Dasz Coconut Sorbet! I haven't tried it yet but I know it's delicious. There are somethings you just know, with your soul, ya' know? And with 100 less calories per serving than their ice cream. I should be glad that the worst wasn't realized and I didn't spend my evening eating sorbet surrounded by rotting meat in the dark. The sorbet part doesn't sound so bad though.

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ye ancient fruit pyramid

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Ready for her close-up.

Speaking of addiction

Skinny Matt asked for cupcakes! How could I refuse?

Twinkie Math

Have you ever noticed that in every shopping center with a Weight Watchers store front there's also a bakery? When I was growing up we didn't have a bakery exactly, we had a Hostess factory outlet next to a Jenny Craig. The Hostess outlet was next to the corner store and was a three minute walk from my house. So was the Jenny Craig, not that that ever made a difference to anyone in my family. My brother Matthew had a serious Hostess addiction when we were growing up. Even though the outlet is gone now junkfood is still the one thing he gets for Christmas from my dad, a box of something dipped in wax chocolate and wrapped in plastic. My dad would say it's the only thing Matthew really likes and he's not exactly wrong.

Back in the day when Matthew announced a Twinkie run someone else would cough up for a Snowball or something. This is where I go off on a tangent but does anyone remember Steve Martin's scene in Father of the Bride where he's tearing open bags of hot dog rolls to remove the superfluous buns? Placing a Twinkie order with Matthew was a little like that. If you asked for a Twinkie and you gave him a dollar, he'd open the pack of two Twinkies and give you one. The other was for shipping, I guess. In order to get your dollar's worth of Twinkie you had to play his game, we called it Matthew math. If you wanted a package of Twinkies, you had to ask for two. When Hostess had some anniversary in the early nineties every pack had three snacks, that really complicated the system....one equals two except for when one equals three. I sometimes forget how much junk we ate when my mom was at work.

The Matthew math thing keeps popping into my head randomly due to my scale. I thought I would want to kill the old scale when I got the new one and now I'm using both of them and it's really not healthy. If scale a is this and scale b is that...how much does the self-loathing weigh? There's this thing in the back of my head that if I never got the new scale I would think I weighed 165 right now. That wouldn't be so bad. That would be damn awesome. And exactly now in real time a customer just told me I'm wasting away to nothing and all I could say was "not really". Not really, I could make a graph and a power point presentation and a musical with a cast of hundreds for all the data I have to the contrary of not really. "Not really", that was just lame.

And yet still

That last post was mostly written yesterday afternoon. I finished it up this morning and I totally lost some of my grump in the process. Yay! I sometimes need to remember that I can't control other people and I can't control what other people think of me and wow it really doesn't matter anyway because except for my inability to lay off the Halloween candy I'm really very happy right now. Long ass sentence. I haven't had any candy at all today and it has nothing to do with the fact that there isn't anything good left. I genuinely don't want it today. Score!

I got some good computer news this morning. Mr. Nick has shared with me that the upgrade to the MacBook has come out so now I really do feel free to click buy on my next jaunt home. I might buy a baby Ipod too while I'm at it. Because I can. I'm going wild and crazy with my dispensable income, off the reservation with a tax free shopping high. I could get a Chihuahua and be Paris Hilton by next tuesday.

Not hard enough

So I said before that I get a lot of email about money, more than I get about weight. Which I guess makes sense considering how things turned out. It would seem to the casual observer that I'm better at one than the other. I think the thing is that I'm a tight ass about money and not about snacks. I'm realizing that I give myself no slack when it comes to going over-budget but when it comes to over-eating and under-excercising I rationalize like it's my job.

So, emails about money. I feel like I'm talking a lot about email lately. Which is ironic because the emails say all I talk about is shopping. I'd like to talk about shopping more actually. I'd like to say that I went to Gap.com and bought a bunch of warm wool pants but I can't say that. I did go and I wanted to buy, oh yes, but my choices were: full price and cuffed (difficult to hem), sale price and pleated (blech) or sale price and available only in size 8 ankle. Please, if I'm going to use my vaulable hoard of coupons and giftcards I'm not wasting it on pleated pants. See that there, where I mention the coupons? I don't like to pay full price for anything, toothpaste, cd's, food, and definitely not clothes.

I try to keep myself in check on the talking about coupons thing. I'm not jaded enough to think that my getting 10 Taco Bell Seasoning packets and two boxes of taco shells for fifty cents is as exciting for anyone else as it is for me, but that was a seriously awesome day for me and my tiny, tiny life. I suppose if you read only bits and pieces of the site you might think that I spend all my time shopping, just don't ever accuse me of spending all my money. I have a budget for clothes like anything else. When I underspend it gets added to the next month and ditto the other way around. It's called managing your money.

I wish someone had told me what to do when I was drowning in my debt. I was too ashamed of the mistakes I made to ask for help when I needed it. I was very lucky that I was able to fix it on my own. Unbelievably lucky. The kind of lucky that makes me want to send CapitalOne flowers and my first born. You'd feel like that too if they offered you 1.99% for life when you thought you might have to declare bankruptcy*. It wasn't all luck though, I made some smart decisions on my own.

This October marked the fourth year that I have lived on my own in Maine. That's 48 months exactly. I have not had cable or any kind of tv service in all that time. If tv service costs a conservative $30 a month, I'd still owe $1440. If I had a home phone line that whole time at roughly the same cost I would still be in debt by $2880. Internet service via crappy Juno is $10 a month, add another $480 for a total debt of $3360. Netflix was the one expense I kept even when in my heart I knew I didn't need it to live. I recently upped it, but for most of that time I had the tradional menage a trois plan at $18 a month. If I hadn't kept Netflix, I'd have been free and clear two months early with a bonus of almost $900.

It's not that much fun living without all that stuff, which is why I'm setting up phone service at the new house, but none of those things are necessary to live. If I had looked ahead four years I would have cancelled Netflix for two more months of financial freedom. Why am I putting all this out there again? I guess I still have my bitch on from earlier this week. Don't tell me you admire me and ask for my help and then criticize me for wanting to buy clothes to keep warm. I've made sacrifices, maybe not as many as I should have, but I'm free after my next paycheck and it has nothing to do with the budget I set for clothing. If you'd rather have your cable tv than a savings account, rock on. If you think the internet is more important than paying down your credit cards, fine. I just don't want to hear about it anymore. You can't fix anything if you're not willing to work hard enough.



*Little did I realize that I couldn't have afforded to declare bankruptcy. Can you hire a lawyer with plastic?

"Sure.We can work out after school. You know... If you're not too busy having sex with my mother."

It seems to have taken forever but I've finally gotten down to 170 on the new scale. This new scale business has really thrown off my reality, not that it matters I suppose. I'm still fatter than I want to be so why worry about the actual number. It's sort of blowing my mind lately how little I know my body. I'm the same size I was in college but all my rings are too big and so are my shoes. Of all the places I want to lose weight, fingers and toes aren't on the top of my list but what can you do.

In the great closet clean-out of yesterday I found some pants I wore in highschool. They're Limited size twelves from ten years ago. They fit me through most of college if you count fitting as zippering and buttoning 80% of the time. I tried them on last night and lo they fit exactly the same as when I bought them, badly. First and foremost they're too long for me. I'm just not tall enough, or long-legged enough to wear pants that aren't short. Why I didn't have that clarity in highschool I don't know, it's not like I got shorter since. Second, the waist is distinctly too small for the size. I know, I know, that's what all fat people say but really the cut is just all wrong. Unless it's supposed to be pouffy around the rear and thighs and fit at the unnaturally high waist, it's a bad cut. I've been carting these damn pants around for ten years for no reason.

The really bad part is that they were one of my grail items. They were the pants that I loved that I really wanted to fit into again. Why did I love them in the first place? They were expensive, atleast for a highschooler, they're a relatively swank brand but not that special, not anymore anyway. I think what I liked the best about them was that they were small, wearing them must have made me feel good. I've been carrying them around like they're gold, ten year old corduruoys that are too long, too tight, too pouffy and genuinely out of style this many years later just because they were the smallest pants I ever fit into. What a waste of energy.

On being the bank's bitch

I read a lot of websites about money, and debt and just general finance. I spend more time researching personal finance now than when I was my most indebted, ironic. Anyway, I guess I wandered into the right job because finance really does fascinate me. Reading about banks, what people think of banks and what their experiences are is fascinating. Fascinating and frustrating and sometimes downright infuriating.

I might have a chip on my shoulder about this because I work in a bank and I hear a lot about fees and how unfair the bank is and all that jazz. Last week my boss wandered into an article titled: "Banks to customers: Drop Dead". Now that's just silly. If our customers were dead who'd pay our salaries? The first line is my favorite though: Who's coming to the rescue? The rescue? Sure, it sucks that you signed a variable rate mortgage for a house you couldn't afford but it's not the bank's fault. The bank didn't make you buy a house you couldn't afford, you made that choice for yourself.

Banking is one of America's most regulated industries but what does that mean to a customer? It means that the bank has to give you fine print details on any potential way they can screw you. If I don't hand out the right papers when I open an account for someone it means the bank is in violation of the law and then I get fired. I can agree with people who complain about service and ineptitude at their bank, mediocrity is everywhere but you're the customer. There is no shortage of banks and no reason not to shop around, you don't have to do business anywhere that doesn't meet your standards and needs. I'm worn out over hearing people complain about things they can control and choose not to, atleast financially.

Why am I on this today all of a sudden, because I read this amazing article, blurb, whatever about the housing "crisis" this morning. Can you call whiplash consumerism a crisis? Losing your house to a fire is a crisis. A flood is a crisis, a never ending war with an increasing death toll...that's a crisis. Wanting more than you have and leveraging your future to get it is dangerous and foolish, but it's not a crisis.

There are some other great money articles on that site, one about going homeless to pay off debt. That may be extreme for most, but it worked and I admire the dedication. I've gotten to the point where when I hear that someone is in debt over their heads but they still have the Tivo and the internet and a shiny new car and eat out all week...I just have no sympathy anymore. If that's the life you want and you're willing to pay for it from beyond the grave, go for it. Just don't blame the bank, it's not the banks fault, no more than it's McDonald's fault that people who eat there three meals a day get fat. Forget flouride, they should put personal responsibility in the water.

Does it get cold in California?

That would be snow, on my car, this morning. I'm not best pleased. It's only October and I need to grow some because 30 degrees is nothing. It's balmy. January and the survival panic inducing cold that comes with it is going to kick my ass if I don't get over it. It occurs to me that it might help if I bought warm clothes, you know, like wool. All of my skinny pants that fit best right now were bought in the spring and summer and are decidedly not made of wool. As much as I don't want to buy more clothes in this size it's not reasonable to wear cotton all year. Not here anyway. It's time to get some new winter duds.

The questions is what to do with the old ones? I've got limited space and a desire to not be a twelve come spring, so I'm going to donate my current warm weather stuff. Normally, I'd take it down to the SPCA box and do a dump and run. We have a little disagreement over whether bags are yardsale items or not, I say not, so I'm always in fear they'll yell at me for donating. The horror! Instead of running from my charity this time, I think I'll pack some things up for this organization pointed out on Fat Chic.

They're collecting clothing for victims of the fires in California. They're also collecting bags and belts and all the other things you might need to, you know, live a normal life. Oh, and money too if that's your thing. They're particularly in need of plus size clothes. We all know it's hard enough to find plus sized clothes when you aren't in an emergency. If you've got clothes in good condition and you don't need 'em, send them along. You'll do more than just make someone's day.

Halloween Candy Bitch-fest 2007

If Trader Joe's made a better can of black bean soup, I wouldn't have had a lunch of mini Snickers. It is totally their fault. The vegetarian chili is good, why not the black bean soup? I'm at the end of the line with convenience style black bean soup. The canned version stinks, the dry add hot water version really stinks. It looks like I'm going to have to actually cook it myself, which I'm sure is a violation of my bean soup civil rights. I'm certain of it. I'm so calling my lawyer.

This morning was rough, but this afternoon rocks. The best thing about having a long complicated morning is that the afternoon flies by comparison. I've had time to take a look back at Halloween last year and think about this eating candy all the time malarky. Last year I wanted to be the person who doesn't buy a bunch of cheap candy just because it's cheap. I wanted that crap off my radar. Reading that puts into very sharp focus how much I haven't achieved lately. Instead of thinking "cheap over-marketed processed crap" whenever I see a pile of Halloween candy I've been thinking "yum". That is not ok. I guess I've been glossing over how I feel about these little things because I don't feel good about them and I don't want to think about it. Way to lead a healthy life.

It's not the specific foods that are a problem for me. Anything in moderation is ok, even Halloween candy. Things haven't been in moderation and I haven't been really thinking my decisions through. The last two weeks I've been making an effort to buy the right food and enough of it so that I don't get home and have to think about what's for dinner. This weekend we went to Freeport to pick up a dresser, I didn't do any outlet shopping because I didn't need to. I didn't need to and I really want to get out of debt and order my new computer more than I want to shop sales at Banana Republic. So why did we stop at Chili's for lunch when we could've gone home and had lunch at a perfectly reasonable hour? No one would've starved to death. It wasn't a particularly special place, or special meal. It was just lazy and there is no way that I can exercise enough to make up for lazy food decisions and still lose weight. I can't do both and it's getting old. I used to be so good at thinking "do I really want this" before sitting around to watch tv or eating a piece of bad candy. Time to flex the most important weight loss muscle, the brain.

"His blood sugar must be low. Carl, eat an orange!!!"

Something is up with me today because the only thing I can get excited about is hatchet murder. And it's very cold. And starting next week the sun will rise while I'm driving to work, and set while I'm driving home and why wait to be pissed off about that when I have all this free time today? I guess I'm a little grumpy today, I'm drinking some instant breakfast right now so if I'm writing puppies and sunshine by the end of this post we'll all know why. But what, it's only monday and a lot of things have gone wrong. In bullet form:

*It's not my fault you overdrew by 5000 dollars and got charged a load of fees. The bank sent you a letter on thursday that you overdrew. You got the letter friday. How can I get the letters out sooner, I dunno, I'm not psychic. Next time overdraw on wednesday, you'll get your letter sooner.

*"We can't change the date on this form, we have to go by this date and it's the wrong date, can you edit the date and make it the right date, I know I just said you can't but can you because then it would be fixed, you know, the dates have to be right."

*In a letter from Capital One: Dear Customer, you asked for more money and we won't give it to, sorry. Only I didn't ask for more money and when I called to see who was making requests on my behalf and how screwed up my account was you said it was a glitch. It's very bad for your credit score to be denied credit, especially if you didn't ask for it in the first place. This is where the hatchet murder comes in.

*Did I mention it's cold, I've been shaking all morning and the heat is at 11.

*Today was supposed to be a no candy day. It only took about twenty minutes of this, dare I say, crap to tempt me into one shiny wrapper and then another. Bite sized frozen Twix suck, and are no proper replacement for therapy or drunkenness.

"Haven't you figured it all out yet, with your enormous squishy frontal lobes?"

I should know better than to go grocery shopping without my list. I should really turn around and leave the second I realize I don't have it because no matter how hard I try, I will not remember what was on it. I will get home with no chicken and no onions but with Pepperidge Farm cookies because they were on sale. They're damn good cookies, but they just don't work as well in stir-fry as you'd think. So now I have to face the grocery gauntlet again in order to cook dinner. Aargh! I'm extra bummed about it because I made up my meal plan in advance and everything. I've been slacking on that lately and it's never good. That's how you end up at Pizza Hut crying into your pitcher of soda.

It's been a really long day. A long week. I'm so glad it's over. I'm looking forward to the weekend so I can go for a run, or atleast a walk. It's officially too dark to run before work and after work. Only three more dark ass months to go! It really does creep up on you, the shortening of the days. I don't mind so much when it's warm out, but when it's cold and dark it's just depressing. Matt has this lamp that's supposed to generate happy sunshine in your living room. We always have it on, it's great for facials if nothing else. Not that staring at the dirt in your pores is that great for the morale. I think it's time for a make your own fun weekend. Maybe I'll hide the magnifying mirror and the scale and put it all aside until Monday. And I'll do Pilates while I watch Pride and Prejudice. I spent my evening re-arranging my living room so I can watch the computer and the tv at the same time. I'm sure it defeats the point of Pilates to do it while watching Colin Firth's dive into the pond strip show but it's better than sitting still and breathing heavy.

Not so deceptively delicious

Matt's mom and I have long conversations about the care and feeding of a Matt in his native habitat. She's put a lot of effort into making sure he didn't literally starve to death when he was younger and very, very sick with Chron's. He's not as sick now, thankfully, but feeding him is still tricky. Mostly it's tricky because both his mom and I make a habit of sneaking things into his food. I almost never tell him what he's eating. It's just easier. "Oh, you don't like cheese? Have some Tiramisu. You'll like it!" and ofcourse he does. I did eventually tell him that the main ingredient is Mascarpone and maybe he should stop saying he doesn't like cheese when he eats it everytime I serve it, but it's more fun to fool him.

This week I finished up an experiment in whole wheat baking. I've been slowly incorporating whole wheat flour into some of his favorite cookie recipes. I finished up with completely whole wheat peanut butter cookies. Most of the recipes need more work but not the peanut butter, peanut butter is perfect as a whole wheat cookie. The only downside is that I got caught. He noticed the difference this time. He asked what I did differently...because he liked them better than usual.

I really shouldn't have been worried because I'm the one with the hang-up about whole wheat, not him. I really hate whole wheat bread. I know it's supposed to be better for me and all that, but instead of switching I just stopped eating white bread. I never bothered to do the research or compare labels. Earlier this summer I picked up some King Arthur Whole Wheat and White Whole Wheat flours to experiment with for baking for sale purposes. I never really got around to that for, uhm, a few reasons but I still had all this flour and there was no sense in letting it go to waste. I started out using it just to get rid of it, and then I found this table.

I couldn't believe it, it's almost 10 more grams of fiber in the whole wheat per cup. That means that two whole wheat peanut butter cookies have a gram of fiber while the white would have .2 grams. It makes me feel that much better about feeding him cookies every day, and better about stealing one or two for myself. So, I'm a convert. I still hate the bread and I'm not sure how the switch would work for a cake, but it's great with cookies. I can't believe it's been almost two years of trying to live a healthier life and I just got around to whole wheat cookies. Next epiphany: Jazzercise!

Well duh...

This is an article about, well, a lot of things. Education, youth, government, and randomly junkfood. I'm in accord with most of it, I'm sure we'll be living a real life Idiocracy soon if not already. I'm not sure what point they're trying to prove with the word junkfood here and there. Kids don't get enough exercise, no one does. There's too much tv watching and too much standardized testing. The junkfood though: do we eat it because we're stupid, or stupid because we eat it. I'm not sure what they're trying to say there.

Mrrow

Chairman Meow is a big cat. She's a Maine Coon, a breed reknowned for their largess. They're meant to be big, it's their job, and the Chairman is no slouch. My friends in Maryland both have cats, tiny little delicate creatures with sleek coats. Those three cats take up the space of my one cat, less when her fur is ruffled. They're always asking after my "big fat cat" and I always say "she's not fat, she's big furred". I used to think that I had a large frame and I'd never be smaller than a twelve, no matter how skinny I was. The dread big bones excuse.

It turns out I have itty bitty bones, they're just covered in fat. And muscle, I know there's a lot of muscle too, but mostly the fat. Remember that time I said I'd never be a size 8? I really believed it then, that my bones were huge and unwieldy and not fit for such a small size. I need to spend less time thinking because I'm not that far from becoming a size 8. There are no Mammoth genes hidden in my DNA. Just about 20 pounds of fat to burn off. I almost wish I could keep deluding myself that my bones are huge and my body is meant to be big and it's ok to eat all the time because I have to keep up my strength.

I can't believe it's only thursday and my big "eat the fruit!" challenge is almost over. I'm not sure how well it's going. Does eating three bananas and a pomegranate on friday night count as success? It's been sort of a weird week weight wise and I'm not sure how to categorize it. I wanted to have glowing success by tomorrow but I've had some bumps in my road. On monday my bestfriend's sister was here to visit for a possible move, so we had lunch out. I had to take her somewhere good, it would be excellent if they moved here. But that's nothing to last night's dinner at Pizza Hut.

Yes, Pizza Hut, I'm deeply shamed. We each had sort of a horrible day yesterday. I spilled the milk for my healthy Carnation Instant Lunch all over my new suede bag. I was out my lunch, all my stuff, and my new $8 dollar bag. Can you get milk stains out of suede? it seems not. You really can't get it out of mail or checkbooks either, Matt's bills got trashed...but I'm totally reusing the stamps, those bastards are expensive. And then home to no salmon defrosted for dinner. We didn't need pizza, particularly Pizza Hut pizza, but it felt right at the time. We had fun...and breadsticks, it was awesome. Sometimes it's nice to just let go, it's not a setback...it's just a pizza.

Good enough

I had something way less random in mind for a post and then all of a sudden it was time to go home. Somedays just fly, even when there is nothing interesting about them. Just time passing quickly while I stuff myself with mini Halloween chocolates. I'm supposed to have a healthy salmon filet for dinner. Odds on I make macaroni and cheese instead. It's definitely a mac and cheese kind of day.

New and improved

Just as an FYI, I've changed the contact email on the sidebar. It has come to my attention that Juno bites. I've had that email address forever. Forever like since my parents upgraded our Apple2E to a Dell and I found out there was more to computers than green and black pixels the size of dogs. I set it up when I was 14 or so and defined myself by being an Ani Difranco fan. I was the coolest with my fan addled email addy. It's been good to me, lo these years...mostly. I never got spam. Increase your penis size? not me. Letters from billionaires trapped in Nigeria? pas moi. Little did I know it's been systematically deleting my email. All this time, whenever I couldn't find an email, I just assumed I deleted it. Whoops, I'm a scatterbrain! Is scatterbrained the right word for losing ten years of email? No, I need something with more syllables to really grasp the stupidity there.

Not that I need every email I've written since I was 14. "Ani is cool, so is DMB" "Yeah!" no, I really don't need those emails. But there were somethings that were important and are now gone. I was supposed to mail Jennette some clothes two sizes ago. Only my sister took a long time deciding what she wanted and not only did J-dog slim out of that size during the hemming and hawing, I lost the email I needed to close the deal. It seems that even without the spam, Juno can't handle my e-load. Never could, only I'm just now realizing it. So I've moved everything over to Gmail. The grass is greener and full of storage space.

I've made another change too, as both of the old blog readers will have noticed.

Dear Readers in Dublin and Lynn, Massachusetts: Thanks for sticking around the old digs. I didn't want to delete it and I didn't want to keep it, so I've made it authors only. Sorry. It's at once too embarrassing and too dead to revive, so Athena is now the only game in, err, my town. Welcome!

"I shot J.R."

I spent approximately one million dollars at the grocery store last night. Or maybe only $55. Being over-budget grates on my nerves, even if it's only 5 dollars. I bought a lot of great stuff though, the fresh and expensive kind of food that health conscious people buy. I picked up a pomegranate and a minneola, grapes and bananas, organic fat free milk and these painfully overpriced snap pea snack packs. 'Course just getting to say "snap pea snack pack" makes it worth the money.

You know how the "experts" or whoever say you should only shop the outside of the store because that is where all the fresh food is, they're completely right. The best stuff is on the outskirts of the store, but it's a serious budget breaker. It's going to be my challenge to get it all eaten while it's fresh, so this week I'll have no choice but to fill up on fresh food. It's amazing to me how I can make such a luxury into a hardship. Poor me, have to eat these grapes and that organic yogurt, so tragic.

Budgeting has been on my mind, like a vice grip, more than usual because I really want that new computer. Using my Discover card for everything is great and I really like earning the cashback, but it's hard to be on a budget and use plastic. Every budgeter knows you use cash because it gives you a better sense of the money actually being spent. This month I started using a register for my card, like the register for a checkbook. That is an eye-opening experience. Adding it all up yourself allows for no disillusion at all. Those three sets of Flight of the Conchords I bought for Christmas presents, oh yeah, no forgetting about that until the bill comes in the mail.

I get a lot of email about money questions, well, debt questions. It doesn't always occur to me how much I write about that stuff here. I can't deny it's a huge part of my life. I wonder what it will be like in a month or so when that's all over and all of my energy is spent on my other project...you know...those last twenty pounds. Maybe I'll have a calorie checkbook...banana credit 172...30 minutes of pilates debit 200. And then maybe I'll have an intervention.

Inches away...

I almost bought a new Macbook this weekend. Maybe not even inches, maybe it was centimeters. I was a click away from free shipping and Apple goodness at my fingertips. I pulled away at the last second, it would not be a responsible decision to buy a new computer right now. Next time though, the next time I'm home in tax free NH I'm buying one. So I'd better get my saving on between now and then. I was a very responsible shopper this weekend, I only splurged on a pair of clearance jeans at the Gap in a size 10A. A for Ankle, or Amy is short. But damn, a 10. I can honestly say that I never thought that would happen. Ever.

It's a little anti-climactic because while they fit better than my 12's, they don't look that great. No, that's not true. The jeans look great, it's the flesh that is not contained by the jeans that looks awful. I need a full-body jean, a jean jumpsuit. Or a girdle. Or more sit-ups. A lot more sit-ups. It occurs to me that I'm not going to be really happy with my body for a long time. I get to a point and I feel better than I ever have and then I move down a size and I feel like crap again. I am always reading my archives to keep some perspective, to remember what I could be going through. Last year, tomorrow, I was buying new jeans in a size 14 and worrying about taking my diet control too far. This year I don't think I'm being careful enough about the food I'm eating (see fastfood entry below) and I'm hating on my size 10 body. Maybe next October I'll have some balance to reflect on.

Multimedia message

this is what you get at mcdonalds when you ask for no meat: a meat salad.

Kinky

I'm not going away after all so I'll be trying out my ice cream maker tonight. I'm assuming it's going to be like trying out crack, or Netflix, and I won't be able to stop once I start. I'm very bummed that I won't be seeing my nearest and dearest this weekend but I am glad to have a day off for no good reason. The last two weeks have been full of bizarre happenings, and stress, and too much cold medicine.

The post I erased, if you saw it, was full of the bizarre. Matt and company are completely serious about the do-it-yourself demolition of some boulders in his brother's yard. I, being that I'll be visiting Nashua instead of Maryland, am completely serious about looking for a bridesmaid's dress for Holly's wedding. Her sister found something perfect in the right color on a clearance rack so I'm going to start looking for my own bargain. She asks only that it be Peridot, and long, the rest is up to me. The wedding's not till October of next year but if I can find a forty dollar dress like her sister did I'm buying it. If it doesn't work I'll just sell it on E-bay, or make it part of her wedding quilt, the options are endless.

I've been trying really hard not to think about all the weight I want to lose before she gets married. It's a guaranteed 10 pound gain to plan like that, so I'm forcing myself to roll with it. She says with gritted teeth. I have plenty of time to keep exercising and eat lots of veggies and take care of myself. Mantra, mantra, mantra. I've never had to fit in to a dress for anything before, geex it's not ever my wedding and I'm thinking like that. If I buy large they can take it in till the cows come home...can't they? It's a shame you can't stuff silk and taffeta in a dryer.

There's a feeling in my gut that I'll be shopping and eating all weekend with my family. There's also a feeling that I'll be dragging my sister Mac shopping to take her educator discount for a test drive. That would be bad for my getting out of debt plan, but good for my soul. All of a sudden I'm completely out of the patience I thought I had honed getting out of debt in the first place. I got the forms for setting up a phoneline today and I just can't wait to have internet at home. You know you're desperate when dial-up turns you on. Cross your fingers we get hooked up next week.

And last but not least, there were some kinks in what I thought was a very easy upgrade. I'm working on it it but if I've screwed up your link, let me know.

A life in three words

I can't decide if I want to be happier about finally shifting the scale to 173.6 or making my second to last debt payment. I should probably not put this in writing, as surely a tree will fall on my car when I do, but it's sort of weird to me that I'm going to be out of debt before I'm at a reasonable goal weight. At the start both, uhm, problems were equally severe but I sort of thought I'd fix the weight thing first. I guess two years ago I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be solvent. Or maybe I just thought it would be easier to lose 50 pounds than pay off thousands of dollars in debt. I imagined I'd always be pushing a rock up a hill on that one.

Have I ever mentioned exactly how much debt I had? No. I'd much rather tell strangers about my flesh rolls than leave that number to posterity. I suppose your weight is a more difficult secret to keep. When you're broke it's easy to pretend you're not, no one knows but you and your creditors. It comes to the same of ignoring a problem and having it snowball and then getting lost in an avalanche. Looking back, I don't know how I survived. I just don't know how I got through the days.

I've been doing a lot of taking stock lately, trying to appreciate what I have. All of my frustrations seem to be coming to a head at a very bad time. I suppose that's a little redundant because there is no good time for your frustrations to come to a head. "Frustrations" are by definition "frustrating". Otherwise they would be called "good times" and there would be ponies and mixed drinks and balloon animals. I like to think I've learned that you have to go through hard times to have good times but the concept is an easier sell when everything goes right.

This morning there was this thing on the radio about summing up your life in three words. We never listen to the radio. We usually listen to books on the morning commute but we just finished Harry Potter number four (Matt is very concerned about the return of this Voldemort character!) and there wasn't enough time to start something new. One of the radio examples was "running is prozac", which really resonated with me and how I'm feeling lately. I keep telling myself I'm not supposed to be running and yet I can't seem to stop. I've gone out every day since Sunday. There is some part of me that wants to be outside and running and it's screaming louder than my injury. I think I was supposed to hear the radio this morning and get some validation on my needs.

My three words: Meant to be.

What are yours?

"That's disturbing. You're emotionally scarred and will end up badly."

It's been taking me forever to write posts lately. I've become the perfectionist editor that I hate. You'd think that if I know it makes me nervous to check my statcounter I wouldn't do it. But I do, just like the damn scale (174.2, again.), and then I feel a little smothered when I try to post. I didn't want to write that. I still want to delete it. It's the truth and that's what this place is supposed to be. The place where I come and tell the truth of my life, whether I like it or not. I felt a similar need to edit and re-edit after the Wall Street Journal blurb. I hate editing because I hate re-reading things I've written, there is always room for improvement. If I dwell too long on perfection nothing would ever get posted. The more time you spend editing the truth the less there is and then what's the point?

I'm used to this being a dance like no one is watching kind of place. There are a lot of eyes lately. Fancy decision making eyes. Many of which belong to Blogher and their ads department. Noticed that did you? The ads? Matt and I talked a lot about that. Talking about blog business with him is fascinating because it's not his world at all. Explaining the intricacies and talking them through with him makes him a really good sounding board. He asks questions I would never consider, he has a very different perspective on it. He thought it was a good idea to go forward with the ads, and so did I. I thought it was going to take a lot longer and it didn't, I'm still getting used to it. They're snappy at BlogherAds! Women on a mission. Since I'm a woman on a mission too it seemed a good idea to join up.

I just have to work through the feeling of being watched. That is sort of the point of a blog, the audience. If we didn't want an audience we'd all have the diaries with the little padlocks littering our bedrooms. There is a certain thing about being a weightloss blogger and then putting yourself out in the world. The thing that everyone you meet, talk to, email with knows the exact digits of your weight. Because you told them. On the internet. I have to remind myself of that all the time when I'm not sure about revealing something. If you can post your weight, you can say you ate a brownie in a ramekin. Is that sabotage for other people (and I got the e-mails and I'm sorry it bothered folks) or is a part of my truth? I say it's a part of my truth, I do pilates and I eat brownies and obviously I'm not losing any weight. So you don't have to tell me I'm never going to lose weight that way, I know. Thanks for the thoughts, but I can only do my best. Don't we all?

"And I never stepped on the cracks 'cause i thought i'd hurt my mother"

In the things I didn't expect to do department, this weekend was chock full. I bought myself an ice cream maker on clearance at Target. Do I need more reasons to eat ice cream, no. I bought it anyway. It's a lot of work so I won't be making ice cream all day/every day, probably. Although really it would be perfect if you had to make all your ice cream yourself and have like a waiting period...like with buying a gun. Safety first and all. Oh, and then Matt and I taste-tested the new (ish) pub in Bangor...and we tried a fried mars bar. The food was excellent, the fried candy was bizarre. We each had a bite and then finished off the whipped cream it came with. Fried chocolate! I dunno. I guess I expected the inner fat girl part of me to enjoy it more, like finding the holy grail of sumptuous foods.

The MDI marathon was this weekend. I thought about coming to town to see it, runner solidarity or something. But running, it's not really a spectator sport unless you're cheering on a friend. One of my sisters lived in Japan for the Olympics and the only tickets she could afford were for the cross country skiing event. She didn't go because pretty much you're paying to see people ski for about ten seconds until they're past you in the crowd. She spent her money in the bar after the events instead, a more worthy cause. I did, however, go for a very ill-advised run this weekend and it was awesome.

I am forever giving myself hell, in my head, about calling myself a runner. It's one of the many arenas in which I just can't seem to give myself the credit I am due. This weekend the weather was beautiful and crisp and I just wanted to run, so I did. I was careful of my knee and I walked the hardest hills. I'd say I ran about 2 miles of flat stretches. How many miles do you have to run to be a runner? I've given myself a glass ceiling on the subject. If anyone else said they ran for pure joy, I would call them a runner. Why not me? I need "give yourself a break" tattoed on my forehead.

Gin and tonic with a straw

Cheesecake for breakfast and pizza for lunch because I am dedicated to the healthy life. I'll be prostrating myself to the gods of the raised heart rate as soon as I get home tonight. Indoors, as it's pouring today and praise the lord for that. I need some water in the well so I can do some laundry and wash some dishes and run a bath without the devil on my shoulder. Everyone I know in the flesh remarks that Matt and I live a pioneer life. No cable, no phone, no internet, we are a modern day little house on the prairie. I made all those choices and took the distancing myself from the world in my stride, for the most part, but I just don't want to live without water. It's getting cold for the outhouse and it's a serious drag taking the laundry into town to wash. That would be the line right there, driving half an hour to do laundry. The line when crossed means that I lose my grip on sanity. Just so y'all know when I'm gone one day never to return it's because I had to take the towels on a joy ride to Ellsworth.

I've been thinking more and more that I need to do something about my un-interneted (un-internote?) state at home. Funny enough it was a topic of discussion at dinner with the SugarCrook. Funny because it's hilarious that I live the bulk of my life on-line and have no internet access at home. Hilarious as in not very smart and also a little bit ridiculous. So, ofcourse, I'm putting the cart before the horse and am shopping for computers. I don't have the ready cash for said purchase but there's no harm in looking. And drooling. And panting slightly if I were to be completely honest. I've got to learn all about wireless and Mac's and Air ports (do I even need one of those? I don't know, that's where the learning comes in). It would be good to figure all that stuff out before I go and make investments. It would also be good just to get dial-up and be satisfied for the short term, but that would be way too easy.

Another hilarious topic at dinner was the State of Maine and its' many eccentricities. It's such a card, the State of Maine. One of our favorite discussions is our lack of address and the unlikelihood of our getting one. I, being not on the deeds for the property, have less information about the address thing than Matt does. I hadn't thought about it for awhile but it does impact our ability to get trash picked up, saved in an emergency, and obtaining services like a phone line. I suppose if there was a fire they could follow the smoke, but why leave that up to chance? Like the guido death mobile parked on the back road. We don't have proof there is a body in the car so the police won't come and take it away (my imagination isn't proof enough, apparently). We'd have to pay to have it towed. Except we can't, because it's not technically on our property. So the mystery death car has property rights and we don't. And no one seems to know who makes the decision on what our address is. The state doesn't know, the town doesn't know. They're very close to having "Kiss our Asses Lane" coming off their state highway and then we'll see who knows what. Ahem.

Oh, and the scale...a whole pound down. It's a tenuous relationship we have. I have the feeling it's more accurate than I want, considering the number of brownies I ate this week. Still dropping though so that's something. Patience is a virtue, patience is a virtue...

"Send whips of opinion down my back"

I keep reading posts about de-lurking day and I'm ashamed to say that I completely forgot about it. It occurs to me that I'm a terrible commenter in general, I don't give good feedback as in I give no feedback at all most of the time. I was just talking to Holly (best friend, getting married, bridesmaid dress decision of doom) about the colors for her wedding and she remarked that the groom's mother was sort of ambivalent about it. Holly has a big greek family unto which ambivalence has never fallen. Nothing passes in her family without fanfare and hand gestures and much discussion at loud volume. I've always thought it was sort of wonderful to visit her family and be a part of it, it's like living in technicolor after stepping out of Pleasantville. So to her receiving a shades of gray response is automatically equivalent to negative.

Holly is one of those people who squeal with delight and gasp with horror and it's completely her natural state of being. I love the drama of her responses to things. I spent most of my youth honing my skills to elicit those responses, but I never learned to be that way myself. I know Holly very well, so well that I've adjusted my Pleasantville demeanor up a notch to almost pastel over a period of years whenever I'm with her. But my natural state of being is not effusive, more defused. I'm pretty much the same way with blogs and emails and comments. Is that too much like a bad break up? It's not you, it's me...and give me back my black t-shirt.

What I'm really trying to say here is Hello Lurkers! Did that come through before, with the rambling? No, you say? So I'm cold and obscure? Excellent. I know there is something special about each of the blogs I visit every day, something that brings me back click after click. When I check my stats and see so many of you who come here day after day I flatter myself you see something special here and whether or not I know you by email or in comments I want to thank you for stopping by and encouraging me to blog on. Happy lurking day to you all.

And in fat news, which you may have noticed I've been avoiding as if it were contagious, I hate my new scale. 170 freaking 5. I know it says you have to wait a few hours after you get up and have an empty stomach and be naked and apparently the moon has to be in line with the seventh house because that number is b.s. I hate it. I'm not getting up at 3 just so I can sit awake and not eat or drink and wait till I'm about to leave the house at six and then strip and weigh for an accurate reading. That's just not going to happen. I know I'm still losing, my damn pants are all falling off. I've had to shrink every pair of jeans and then I get one good hour of proper fit. I know it could be lean muscle and not fat and blah blah blah but mostly i'm embracing the irrational. If anyone has suggestions regarding their tanita scale I'm all over hearing them. Tell me I'm not alone, I'll wax rhapsodic for you I swear!