Long time, no see!

Welcome, Marie! (And congratulations Ben and Kerry Lee!)

I am still trying to figure out how to balance my work schedule with all of the other things I am trying to do. Like update my blog regularly. I may be trying to do too much, but all of the things I am trying to do are important to me, and I want to add one more on top! I am trying to go to work, go to the gym, play my guitar, not eat out ALL the time, and not live in a very messy house. I'd like to add spending some time drawing or painting regularly, but right now I have my hands full. Going to the gym like every day really chews up a lot of time.

I have got my wedding dress. For those who are curious, you can see it here: Michael, don't look!. Although, you can barely see it in that picture. It has massive beading on the bust and on the back. I took possesion of it on Friday, and brought it up to Maine for Anne's wedding, to show off. Christine and Barb and I found good jewelry to go with it at Marden's.

Last weekend, we went apple picking. We were trying to go on a field trip with my company, but we couldn't find anyone. So, we just picked our 20 pounds of apples in the pouring rain and went home. Then, when we got home, I made my first apple pie ever. I was anxious about the crust. Making yummy apple filling is a piece of cake (ha ha!). My mother always tried to make pie crust with whole wheat flour to make it more "nutritious" and I really hated it. (Sorry, mom.) But, my crust turned out great! And it got rave reviews from Mike, and our landlord's son who came down to eat pie and watch football.

The marketing ploy of fantasy football has TOTALLY worked on me. Not only have I been looking at that dumb website all the time, I have actually become INTERESTED in seeing certain games. I have also become much more sympathetic when Mike wants to watch football.

My last bit of news, I feel a bit sheepish about. I have gotten myself a personal trainer at the gym. Yes, I know. Her name is Katrina, and she is a perky blonde. We have found out that I can do a lot of things that many of her other clients can't. For example, I can do like 60 of those evil bicycle crunches.

I am just trying to get my scale un-stuck. My scale has been mostly stuck since the end of July. A few weeks ago, I took the drastic step of making rules against bread to try to get it unstuck, but it wasn't working! (For those of you who don't know, I already had rules about fried food and sweets.) So, this week, I put myself on this radical new diet : going to bed an hour earlier, taking a vitamin pill, making sure to get my liter of water, and ditching the diet soda (mostly). Preliminary results suggest that this might have done the trick.

The rationale for kicking the diet soda is interesting. I read on the internet that diet soda makes you hungry. It does this because when you have a sweet taste in your mouth, your body tries to get ready for the incoming sugar with extra insulin. But, with diet soda, the sugar never comes, and so the insulin response only serves to lower your blood sugar, making you hungry and tired. This pretty much described how I was feeling in the afternoon, so I decided to give it a try, and I have felt better.

Getting more sleep might be the most important part of the whole equation. Like I said, I am still having some trouble balancing all of the things I want to do. I figured out that I would rather get to work a little earlier, than leave a little later. So, I had been getting up around 7:30, and going to bed around midnight. Now, those of you with kids might scoff at me, but I have still been feeling tired and dragging in the morning. I got to thinking that maybe that tired, dragging feeling was the feeling of my metabolism in low gear. So, I have been going to bed earlier and feeling better, and maybe my scale is unstuck.

Last time I saw Katrina, on Thursday, we started by doing some boxing (sorta.) Now, coming from the do-jang, gym boxing is anything but. (And when I watch the "kick-boxing" classes, all I can think about is how people would sprain their toes and ankles if they actually made contact with anything, kicking like that.) Katrina was telling me to do straight punches across my body, going left and then right. And I was like "What scenario would cause you to ever do this??" I could see hook punches, but straight punches??!? But, that's not the point. And its not the point of my story. The point was that after I did all that hitting, my shoulder(s) felt fine. And, I did a couple lines of various kicks (crescent kicks in particular, which really make you stabilize on your post foot), and my knees were fine too. (As fine as they are liable to be.) If I could do a couple lines of roundhouse and side kicks, and have my knees be fine ... This has me thinking that maybe I could start going to Tae Kwon Do again. That would make me happy.