Holidays are over for another year...

And I just ain't that sad. I so overcommitted this year, to the extent that I had not one minute to myself, I shit you not. It was exhausting and not very fun... Carol and I baked over 600 cookies by the time we were done, and yes, they were a big hit and everybody loved them, but I had no life. I spent almost every day either driving Elise somewhere, or late to something, or not having wrapped something, or not having cooked something... You get the picture. I haven't put fingers to keyboard for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I'm starting to have withdrawal symptoms.

There were one or two fun things we got to do: We got to go see Walking With Dinosaurs:





Which was crazy cool! This was courtesy of Carol, who bought the tickets for Elise and I as our combined Christmas present!

And even better, here's a quick piece on how they made the dinosaurs - REALLY incredible...





With the holidays over, now it's back to Weightwatchers, which has been a bit tricky - losing weight is SO not about the food I'm eating, but about the thoughts I'm thinking, and my head has been sabotaging me right and left. Christmas was fine - I didn't lose any weight, but I didn't gain any either, but now suddenly I've gained back three pounds, AFTER all the candy and crap are gone. Weird. I've gotten recommitted to my diet, and I'm hoping this next week will be better, but we'll have to see.

I think it's because I'm a bit insecure right now. I'm looking at making changes to my life, which always make me a bit panicky - Carol is starting her own company and the process of incorporation is making her crazy. I've volunteered to learn grant-writing so I can get her some funding, and I'm seriously considering this as a career change, which is always a scary thing to do. Understanding that THAT's why I'm eating like crazy is more than half the battle.

This is a bit of a nonsequitr, but...

One of the publishers I support at work sent me a very nice Christmas gift: a Flip Video Ultra Series CamCorder. This thing is so cool! Today I recorded highlights from my Weightwatchers meeting, and I'm going to post it for everybody to share. I'm still learning all the ins and outs, not only of how to take videos, but of how to edit them and make them available and all that. I'm sure my first bits are going to be very rough.

Okay, gotta go now. I've been at my computer almost since I got off work on Friday, and I'm sick and tired of it. I'm going to play for a bit!



more funny pictures

Havin' Trouble

My husband had a long-time server space to store stuff - gone now, as the guy who was paying the bills decided not to renew, only he didn't tell anyone. We just got up one morning and codevermillion was gone. You can try it yourself if you don't believe me.

All my archived photos. Years worth of carefully sorted stuff... Blah! I'm pissed, and Jeff doesn't want to pursue it, which means I'm stuck with the situation, and that makes me even more mad.

So all my grand plans of moving my Yahoo 360 blog over here are shelved until I have space for my pictures.

Well, not to mention time.

Yesterday my mother-in-law and I baked - I shit you not - 470 + cookies. This is our annual Christmas "Give-cookies-as-presents" cookie blowout, where the spatula meets the bowl, where the going gets tough and the tough warm up their fuel-injected, turbo KitchenAid stand mixers...

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your mixers. Seriously, you DO NOT want to mix dough for 400 cookies without some kind of mechanical aid. Nobody has arms that butch, and if they did, they'd wish they didn't.

Work has just been getting more and more busy - my boss came into my cube the other day and said, "I'm assigning you as account manager to two new publishers. I also want you to help out one of the other ladies with two of her accounts. Oh, and this won't add to your workload."

She didn't even have the decency to frame it as a question: "Oh, Ericka, I'm not inconveniencing you, am I? This won't unduly burden you, will it?"

I don't hate my job. I really don't. I'm still okay with Mondays. The commute is livable. I like everyone I work with - well, all the regular everyday joe's, anyway.

My days are overall tolerable; it's the crushing burden of way too much work for way too few people that depresses the snot out of me and makes me want to run screaming. It's the fact that we need five more people and we're only getting three. It's the fact that we just keep contracting with more and more publishers without the corresponding benefit of adding more people to do the work.

But on the positive side, I can take the light rail to work, and with a little fortitude, I can tell my boss that I'm not her, I don't know what she knows, and it takes me much longer to do the work than it takes her. Which I did, and got her to understand that I needed more time on a project I got committed to do. I know most of my co-workers can't do this, though, and I shudder to think of the amounts of stress they're dealing with. I have medical benefits, my family and I have a roof over our heads, we have food on the table, etc etc etc... Lots of etc's. I guess I'm stuck here for a while.

So, gotta do the Christmas cards today, and I have 100 gingerbread men to bake. The dough for THOSE almost burnt out my commercial-strength KitchenAid - should've used the dough hook. Gingerbread is easily one of the heaviest doughs going.

Laundry is in progress, I need to clear off the kitchen table to roll out the dough, and I have to make dinner. I've got to plan for tomorrow, get Elise a bath, and probably, before it gets dark, I have to go grocery shopping.

And just thinking about all that is exhausting.

Gotta go - duty calls, or perhaps more accurately, a sense of appalling urgency calls... You know, that dreadful spine-tingly feeling you get when you can sense all kinds of hell breathing down your neck, and you know it's already too late to run? Yah. That feeling. I leave you with one of my favorite "I Can Has Cheezburger" pictures:


More I Can Has Cheezburger

Happy November

So if you've read my stuff for any length of time, you know that I'm overweight, disorganized, messy... oh, the list goes on and on.

I've put a lot of time and effort into changing those things about myself that I don't like, and you know what? It looks like I'm making some progress.

Weightwatchers is the best thing that I've ever done for myself. It's not a diet, it's all about lifestyle change, and it's been a good way to do it for me. I've lost 26 pounds over the last six months. Doesn't sound like much? Most of the people in my group don't have that much to lose for their entire goal, and I'm still almost 100 pounds overweight. That's thing #1. Thing #2 - it's been proven that slow and steady weight loss is the only kind that lasts. I fell and hurt my knee and couldn't walk any appreciable distance for several months, and yet I didn't gain a pound back. That tells me that I've accomplished a permanent change. I know how to keep the weight off for the rest of my life. Knowing that, I don't care if it takes me three years to lose the remaining 100 lbs. All I have to know is that I can lose the next ten, and just keep doing that until I'm down to where I want to be. Yay me!

Along with that comes my gripe with my eating habits. When I don't plan meals, we eat out pretty much every single night. In the last few weeks, I've been trying to plan a week's worth of dinners. It's hard to do - I don't need to tell those of you who work how hard it is - you get home and that's it, you have no desire to get up off the couch. I've been using pre-made menus and shopping lists from Saving Dinner. The idea is to shop once a week, bring home the stuff, do all the chopping and preparing then, and just have everything ready to go so that when you come home, you can make a healthy, yummy dinner without too much work.

Last week I made dinner every night, and I ate till I was stuffed, but because I made dinners that had almost no fat in them, I actually lost weight, and had leftovers to take to work the next day.

Example - Salmon with pineapple salsa and brown rice. Now, the original recipe called for a thick spread of mayonnaise over the salmon, then a layer of ketchup, then bacon strips. That just blew my mind - who the hell takes a yummy fish like salmon and drowns it in fat?? So I took some chunky fresh salsa, added a can of crushed pineapple, some teriyaki sauce, and marinated overnight. Yum-ola! I made brown rice to go with it, and it was to die for... And all I had to do was come home, put the salmon into packets, get the rice going, bake the salmon, and it was done.

I'm planning next week's menu now. In case you're interested, here's a week's sample menu.

Madonna, Star Trek, and MirrorMask

Okay, REALLY needed to share this - this is one of my favorite "YouTube" offerings, found some time ago... In fact, I actually think Jeff found it. He also pointed out that the director, Guy Ritchie, is Madonna's husband. Didn't know that, myself. He just seems to know these things.

Just like he knows what's happening with the casting for the new Star Trek movie. We're long-time Star Trek fans - although if you're like me, you got a bit put off by years and years of the stilted, nobody-ever-gets-to-really-change writing of most of the series. I loved Deep Space Nine precisely because the characters got to change, they got to have a life.

So, Mr. Scott is going to be played by Simon Pegg, Mr. "Shaun of the Dead" himself. Tell me you don't want to see that characterization. Go on. Lie if you need to.

Jeff came into the kitchen a few minutes ago to tell me "Guess who's going to play Dr. McCoy. Go on, guess. You'll never get it in a million years."

I said I had no idea. Jeff got this gleeful look in his eyes and said, "Karl Urban".

Yup, that's right. Karl "Eomer" Urban. Karl "I-can-swing-a-sword-better-than-anybody" Urban.

It took me some time to get over that one. I'm willing to believe it, being a Karl Urban fan, but it's going to be a bit of a hard sell. I mean, talk about your serious sneakers to try and fill... We'll just have to see.

On the quick, how-the-heck-are-things front, today was okay. I got the stuff done at work that I had to get done. No one bugged me. I got out on time, came home and now I'm cooking dinner. Really, you can't ask for too much more than that. Tomorrow, I'm going to call the DMV to find out what I need to do to get my license back. This weekend, we're going to my new sister-in-law's baby shower, and it's looking like I'll be able to drive myself, ya-freakin'-hoo.

I think I'll celebrate by going to watch MirrorMask again...

Another great day at Weightwatchers

Note the bottle of Pepsi, prominently displayed on Fashion Chickie's bedside table. Guess this was before the days when advertisers got caught in bald-faced lies: "Yup, we guarantee it - drink a Pepsi a day and you too can look like Anorexia Girl here..."

So, I have my Weightwatchers' meeting on Sunday mornings. I started in April (sorry, still working on transferring my blog, so you'd have to go HERE to go to my April 6th entry where I talked about joining Weightwatchers again.)

I started at 246 pounds, which means my 10% weight goal (the first big goal you have to get to) was 24 pounds. It took me freakin' MONTHS to lose this weight - first because I hurt my knee and couldn't exercise, then because I had a lot of problems with my own thinking, that kept me from losing the weight, and finally because I've been sick for several weeks, but today, after a lot of hard work and worrying, I FINALLY made my 10% weight goal, plus a bit more. I've now lost 26.8 pounds total, and I weigh 219.6. My goal is 120 pounds, so that's about 100lbs left to go.

Just to clarify, during the time I wasn't losing weight, I wasn't gaining it either - I just hung around the same weight for a really long time. The nice thing about that is that I've already proved to myself I can maintain my weight loss, when I DO lose the 100lbs.

It's a bit intimidating to say it out like that, 100 lbs, which is why I generally don't. I just think of it as 2 pounds a week, or thereabouts, which is a lot more palatable thought. So today, I got two awards - the 10% keychain, and the 25 pound award. This may sound cheezy, but they're actually pretty cool, because I can look at them to remind myself that I can do it, that I've already lost as much weight as most people need to lose, and that I can keep going all the way.

Today is laundry day. Gotta go be laundry girl.

Toodles!