Friday, April 30, 2010

I Got All Excited And Cleaned and Organized

Unfortunately it was at a friends house. We worked hard, we moved furniture, we reinvisioned and recreated some of the rooms of her house. Meanwhile, I still have an empty and lonely vacuum sitting in the middle of my kitchen and crap ALL OVER. It's not that I did nothing here - I have a mostly crossed off to do list to show for my week, but when I get these bursts of organizational energy, I would love it if they happened in my own house occasionally.

Please.

Thank you for listening oh gods of the vacuum.

Oh, and the eat at home challenge continues - I haven't touched a restaurant - but when I went to the friends house who is SUPPOSED to be doing this with me, I was quite shocked to see a Panera Bread cup full of apparently fresh lemonade, which isn't proof of cheating but is highly suspicious. But weight actually went UP half a pound, which sucked. I am considering joining a gym. Preferably one I would actually go to this time.

So my weight is at 1*0 - a number which looks quite a lot better on a blog with that little asterisk to sanitize and privatize it than it looks hanging out on MY ASS.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Eat at home doesn't mean eat crap?


So I have been successful so far in resisting the allure of the local Dunkin Donuts, but not in losing any weight. I remember (well do I remember) being told that the day to day fluctuations of the scale don't matter - Weight Watchers recommends only being weighed once a week. On their scales, no less, so I am forced to toss out their conclusions as somewhat biased. At any rate, if I can move the scales drastically just by moving my bowels, it may not be a 100% accurate number.

Still, I was hoping to also lose some weight here on the Eat At Home challenge, and here we are 36 hours in and I'm up .5 pounds. True, that was before I went potty (I have a toddler, excuse me) and 36 hours isn't very much of a benchmark but I am still somewhat bummed.

Perhaps I shouldn't have attempted to keep myself out of restaurants by making myself theirresistible homemade chex mix . I love it, and am helpless before it. The shitty thing is that I knew that before I made the damn stuff.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Big Guns in the Dirty South


So the V family took a trip to Fort DeSoto today. It's a beautiful beach, voted best in the country in 2005 by Dr Beach, and best beach in the country by Trip Advisor in 2008 and 2009...



And that was on a cloudy day. There is also a historic fort there, one that was scouted by Robert E Lee, used as a Union encampment, and actually constructed in 1898 to guard the harbor from invasion. Since Tampa has never been invadedthese guns were only fired when shooting practice rounds.



But that is a lot of heavy artillery and some special rules will have to be set:


But the people of Florida say screw you:Let there be gun climbing!

Actually, some representatives of the people of Florida were a bit more scary than that:



Or there was this:



The most frightening thing there was probably the unzipped fly, which leads us to the most important rule of all....


Oh, and the eat at home challenge begins TOMORROW. Right now my weight is unchanged - 1*9.5 (* is # of shame and privacy again....)

Saturday, April 24, 2010

The eat at home challenge begins on Monday!


I went and hung out with a friend of mine on Thursday and we were both complaining about our weight and our finances. Pretty typical day, I guess. I had just gotten a glimpse at my account on Mint.comand was a bit shocked at how much money went to Restaurants and Fast food. If you haven't checked out that budgeting software, I recommend it and it's free and I'm not being compensated in any way for saying so. But since as far as I can tell no one is reading this yet :(, I'm not sure why I'm worried about what people think.

At any rate, she and I are both supposed to be advocates of eating at home because of our side businesses but neither of us do it nearly enough because of myriad reasons including but not limited to; time constraints, laziness, lack of imagination, possession of toddlers, possession of food fussy spouses, having cash in our pockets, laziness, not having run the dishwasher yet today, and Big Mac Attacks. But we had been to a meeting and were more fired up about our responsibilities than usual, plus we felt poor and fat (at least me on the weight thing because she may be poor but she is super hot) so we devised this challenge.

For two weeks, we will not eat in restaurants. At all. We will plan, cook at home, buy convenience foods at the grocery store for times when that is harder and plan ahead and DO IT. Chances are that we will make smarter food choices, and that we will also save $ and lose weight as a result. Feel free to come along with us.

As of right now, my weight stands at 1*9.5 (the * represents a number indicating shame and privacy). I will put my daily weight in each post until the challenge is done. Anyone want to play along? Leave a comment if you want to try it!

Friday, April 23, 2010

I don't want your nasty friends in my house!


There is one member of our family that is not allowed to bring friends home. I don't mean to discriminate, but I don't like the friends she chooses and I don't want to share my home with them - even for a little while. She's very insistent, however, and keeps sneaking them in. Especially in the middle of the night. And this isn't the friend I want to see, or to step on, in the morning before I've had coffee.


Image Citation: Johnny N. Dell, , Bugwood.org

Shelby's "friends" aren't welcome. Shelby is the dog, and she's very cute and sweet and all, but she keeps digging ankle killing holes in the yard just to unearth one of these suckers so that she can gently take it in her mouth, relocate it to the rug inside the house, and spit it out. Then sometimes she will bark at it - because she has carefully preserved its life...and these things will start to move after playing dead for a while and the family must be alerted that there is an intruder in the house at 2:37 in the morning.

They first started to appear last year and after the 4th or 5th one came inside via my dog, I stopped obsessively smooshing and flushing and finally wondered what the hell it was. So I scooped it into a yogurt container and took it to Home Depot, to the nearest pimply or crotchety person wearing an orange apron in the Lawn and Garden department. The conversation, to the best of my recollection, went as follows:

"What the hell is this?"
chuckling. "Is your grass dead yet?"
"It's been more weeds than grass for a while. But what the hell is it?"
"That is a Mole-Cricket"
"Is there any way I can get the dog to stop digging them up and bringing them inside?"
"You could kill them."
"Okay, we'll go with that. Where do you keep the mole-cricket poison?"
"Oh, it's too late for a poison now. That's an adult - you have to poison the nymphs. Early April."
"Well, I'll just buy the poison now and give it a try anyway."
"You can't. We don't sell that poison."

I'm still not sure what sort of who's on first thing was going on at the Home Depot that day, but I ended up leaving and frustrated and certainly never using that container again. So this month Shelby started again with the "friends" and I promptly got online and ordered some heavy duty mole-cricket ass kicking poison, thereby getting myself on several federal watch lists I'm sure, and have started going out into the middle of the night, cackling and killing.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

While vacuuming....



Hmm, what a strange name for a blog. Why should you care about vacuuming? Why do I care enough about it to start a blog, for the love of God? What kind of stupid crap is this?

Okay, those of you who know me, or get to know me, will realize that I don't give a crap about vacuuming. Or general housekeeping, if you listen to my mom. But the word, the act itself fascinates me. The word is a lovely scrabble winner - it's perennially misspelled. The definition of the word vacuum: to draw or take in by or as if by suction. As I'm hoping readers will be eventually drawn to me and this blog.

I use vacuum time to think - I can't watch tv, talk to my kid, listen to music, or have any input at all while vacuuming. That makes it a rare time for me, because I'm always doing around 5 things at once. And when I went to do a bit of research about blogging and what to do to keep posts coming, I thought - I can always come up with new posts while vacuuming.

And here we are.