Look Great in 2008 (Week 1)

I haven't been posting (or even paying that much to my diet) recently because I've just had some really horrendous things happen in my personal life. The Kid has been exhibiting some significant behavioral problems which are driving us crazy. Some is "normal kid stuff" for her age, but some is just so over-the-top it is not to be believed.

Then one of our birds died.

Then things at work started to go crazy.

Then another of our birds got sick, and our new vet (we had to fire the old one because she was so overbooked we could never get an appointment) tells us that she might have something lethal and contagious, and all the rest of our flock in our house might die of this disease. Fortunately, this isn't something humans can catch, but it's quite upsetting.

Of course the key word is might. This vet might be one of those doctors that always assumes it's the worst possible scenario until he rules it out. The state of avian medicine is not nearly as advanced as it is for dogs and cats, so we are dealing with a big unknown at the moment.

But the stress is just unimaginable. I have several large and intelligent parrots, and the idea of losing them is just overwhelming.

My weight this morning was 233.6. That's up almost five pounds from my lowest weight, but since I've never been able to reproduce that weight, I think it was a fluke. My scale has a history of malfunctioning periodically and showing weights that are 5, 10, and even 15 pounds lighter than the actual weight of the person standing there. My weight is up 1.4 lbs from my last known reliable weight, but truthfully I really don't care right now. I feel like I have much bigger fish to fry than worrying about what my stupid scale tells me.

Still Struggling

I'm hanging in here. My scale keeps malfunctioning. My last believable weight was two days ago at 232.2. I can live with that.

One of our pets suddenly died of an undiscovered, but terminal illness. We had a necropsy done, and at least we can take comfort in the fact that there was nothing we could have done for her. Nevertheless, we are heartbroken. I miss her terribly.

The Kid has been acting out in all kinds of difficult and annoying ways. She's been so rotten that even the surviving critters have all found legitimate reasons to nip her, hard. Among other reasons, she's been antagonizing them.

I feel like I am about to implode under all the stress.

Ok Woman, Where Are You?

This post is a direct response to Shannon, who asked:

OK WOMAN. WHERE ARE YOU?!?!?!

:-)

Actually, that's a good question.

I've disappeared from the blogosphere because things in my personal life got, well, a little out of control. We've been dealing with some behavioral problems with The Kid lately, which has sapped a lot of my motivation for just about everything. By the time we are done with her passive-aggressive and obstinate tendencies for the day, I feel like a shriveled up husk with nothing left. Add to that two days of yom tov (the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah), one day of shabbat (the sabbath), plus several days' worth of client melt-downs because I was out of the office on Thursday and Friday, and it creates a situation where I completely fell off the face of the earth for a few days.

It's been a tough week, and I'm expecting things to get tougher before they get easier. Another couple we know, who finalized an adoption on two kids just a few months ago, also struggling with their oldest adopted child as well. Maybe it's in the water, or maybe it's just the time of year where pre- and post-adoptive kids start melting down in a big way.

The Kid's birthday is coming up, and I expect some more challenging behaviors around that. Her birthday wish list includes such inexpensive items like a cell phone, an iPod (and no, a Nano or Shuffle just won't do), and a trip to a very distant, pricey and rodent-infested West-Coast amusement park. She's going to be mightily disappointed, because my budget for this birthday wasn't all that big to begin with, and all her recent behavior struggles haven't left me in the mood to open the tap to the Gift Shower very wide.

Yeah, I know, color me bloody selfish, but when The Kid is acting like a Royal Pain in my A$$, I'm just not inclined to spend a lot of hard-earned cash to feed her Royal case of The Gimmes.

Anybody want a kid? I'll rent her to you cheap. (Okay, well maybe not, but it's fun to think about, sometimes)

Diet-wise, I'm not sure where I am. I've been so busy running around like a crazy person that I suspect the news isn't good, and I'm kicking myself for missing the last weigh-in for the May Day Weight Loss Challenge. I've pretty much avoided Mr. Scale for the past week or so, because I just don't feel like I have the emotional bandwidth to deal with more challenging news.

It's been a tough week, and I'm wishing I could pack my kid, my job, and my scale into three separate boxes and ship them off to parts unknown.

But I do know my stress level is over the top. When I wake up in the morning, my jaw is clenched so tight I can barely open it. Too bad it won't get stuck that way -- then I'd really lose some weight!

Eight Random Things About Me

So it seems that Lady T. has tagged me with the Eight Random Things About Me meme, so now I'm stuck having to answer.

This is a stretch here, so forgive me for being boring:

1. Last summer, I was bitten by the "car bug." I've owned a variety of cars over the years, but always looked at them as a tool to be taken care of, but basically used up and thrown away after a number of years. I looked at people who bought rims, bras and fancy stereos as essentially a weird flavor of nut bar. But, last summer I bought a new car that has a bit of a following, and people have created car clubs that revolve around the modifying, driving and showing of these cars. Suddenly I understand why someone might need rims, a car bra, a fancy sub-woofer so they can bump their music, an under body lighting kit or a set of vertical doors. (And yes, my car has a bra, under body lighting kit, fancy vinyl graphics, and an under-dash LED lighting kit. I'm still working on rims, and stereo upgrades.)
   
   
2. I'm fluent in American Sign Language.
   
   
3. I love sushi. If it's fish and it's raw, I'll eat it. I'll pass on the squiggly stuff like raw crab and shrimp, though.
   
   
4. I used to hate rap and hip-hop. Then I bought my car, and everyone was playing it at car shows. I've learned to actually like it. I still hate country music, though.
   
   
5. I write with a fountain pen because it's cool.
   
   
6. I give a free concert (I play guitar and sing) at the local convalescent care center once a month.
   
   
7. I have a houseful of parrots.
   
   
8. In my younger days, I used to go camping roughly once a month with a group of guys whose main objective was to get as drunk as possible for the weekend. We'd pretend we were pirates, drink beer, and give our motor homes and travel trailers piratey-sounding names. We even had a pirate flag that measured 3' x 5' that we'd fly off the top of a flagpole constructed out of recycled tent poles.
   

Since Lady T. pretty much tagged all the bloggers I normally would have tagged, I'll leave it up to you to tag yourself. If you decide to participate in this meme, just leave a comment so I can stop by your blog and check it out.

May Day Weight Loss Challenge Weigh-In #18

I haven't been blogging very much lately because we've had a lot of things going on at home. This weekend was insanely busy. We had two car club events to attend, and got stuck babysitting three kids on Saturday because a friend had to be out of town on business and came up short at the last minute for childcare.

The weekend was a mixed bag. The car club events were fun, but dealing with four kids in the house wasn't particularly enjoyable. They were squabbling, tattling, and fighting, and I can honestly say I was never more glad to be rid of a group of kids than I was when our turn to babysit was over.

Diet-wise, it's becoming more and more evident that the uber-low reading I got on my scale two weeks ago was most definitely a scale malfunction.

This morning's weight: 231.8, which strikes me as just a normal weight fluctuation from what I weighed last Friday. On Sunday, we attended a carnival that was part of the car club event, and they had all sorts of terrible things to eat. I had a hamburger, chips, diet soft drink, some cotton candy, and a snow cone, but that was all I ate for the entire day. I skipped breakfast, because we had to get up early in the morning and drive for three hours to get to the event, and I wanted to maximize sleep time and minimize bathroom stops. I skipped dinner, because I was bone tired when I got home and went straight to bed.

But the cotton candy sure tasted good. I used to love the stuff as a kid, and I can't remember the last time I'd had any. I think it tasted even better because it was given to me free. I doubt I would have eaten it if I'd had to pay $3.00 for it.

According to the May Day Weight Loss Challenge blog, today marks the last day of the contest. I'd thought, however, that the contest was supposed to end next Tuesday, September 18, and not today. Maybe I am hallucinating, but when I checked the original announcement page this morning, it clearly said September 18 was the ending date.

In the event that I'm suffering from some sort of weird hallucination, I'll post my results anyway:

             Today's Weight: 231.8
Weight Lost During Challenge: 18.0 lbs
          Total Weight Lost: 25.2 lbs

Although I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't able to average a 2-lb loss per week during the challenge, I think it's a flipping miracle that I lost anything at all. I figure 18 pounds is 18 pounds, and in this case less is more.

If this does turn out to be the last week of the challenge, I'd like to wave a fond farewell to all the other challenge participants, and invite people to come back and visit once in a while. My blog is set up with an RSS feed, so I definitely welcome people to keep visiting.

Weight Loss Challenge or no, I'll still be here.

Peace out, everyone.

Back on Track

Surprisingly, yesterday's corn binge for dinner actually didn't do any harm. My weight was down a bit from the day before, and I'm slowing starting to sink back to the weight I was last Friday, before my Labor Day Diet Holiday.

John wanted me to come clean and admit to the number of ears I consumed, but the truth is, I lost count. I'm thinking it was at least six ears of corn, maybe more. It was disgusting. In my defense, the ears were on the small side, since our corn didn't pollinate very well and there were plenty of blank areas on each cob where the kernels didn't grow.

But it was a lot of corn.

In retrospect, I think the corn wasn't as damaging as I thought. I just checked, and realized that an ear of corn with no butter or salt is only 63 calories. Assuming that I did stop at six ears, that's only 378 calories, which is about what I would have eaten for dinner on a normal day, anyway. Even if I was completely gross and had ten ears (which I know is more than I possibly could have eaten) that would have been only 630 calories, which isn't all that terrible considering I didn't eat all that much else during the day.

I suspect tonight I'll be having another corn fest as our small field of corn is all ready, and has to be eaten. The good(?) news is that we won't have as much edible corn as we'd originally thought. Our plot was too small, and about 25% of the ears didn't germinate at all. Next year, we'll have to plant more.

Yum.

There really isn't much to blog about in diet land at the moment. I'm doing my best not to eat, and waiting to see the results on the scale.

I Ate My Weight In Corn

For breakfast: Carnation Instant Breakfast
For lunch: A bean, rice and cheese burrito
For dinner: Corn on the cob

I hate to think what damage I'm going to see on the scale in the morning, because I think I must have eaten my weight in fresh corn on the cob.

Last spring, we planted a vegetable garden. We are now harvesting corn.

The corn is really good. Unfortunately, our small field of corn is all ready to harvest at exactly the same time.

So of course we gotta eat it, right?

In my defense, I ate corn without butter or salt. It was delicious and so sweet it didn't need butter or salt. But I ate a lot of it.

A lot.

May Day Weight Loss Challenge Weigh-In #17

Over the weekend, I gave myself permission to go on a "diet holiday." I didn't count calories, make good choices, or worry about anything. I just ate what I felt like eating, and drank what I felt like drinking. We hung out with some friends and I had beer, chips, BBQ, and ice cream.

It was a nice break.

My diet vacation was certainly visible on the scale, but I'm not going to post my weight this morning because I'm not sure that the readings my scale is giving me are even accurate. It's like watching a ping pong ball bounce all over the place.

So, I'm just not going to worry about it. Vacation is over, now I have to get back to work.

Now that summer is semi-officially over, I've got a lot of stressful stuff on my plate. This is the season of crunch-time at work, and I expect I'll be putting in some major overtime between now and the end of the year. I also expect we'll be running into more school-related challenges with The Kid, simply because she really doesn't like school, and would much rather sit and vegetate in front of the television than do anything else.

Wickedly, I solved the TV problem last month. We called our satellite TV supplier and cut the thing off. They couldn't believe it. I'd been a "good customer" for several years, and they wanted to know if we were switching to another satellite TV vendor, or going back to cable. When we told them we were just disconnecting all TV, the customer service representative didn't know what to say. Apparently, her script had no instructions for keeping customers who have decided to unplug themselves from the media world.

Anyway, I'm still here, still part of the challenge, and still moving forward. We'll see what happens next week.