T minus 47.2 Pounds

I LOST 1.2 POUNDS THIS WEEK!!!

Bringing the Grand Total of Weight Loss in my QUEST to LOSE 52 POUNDS to....

4.6 pounds in 3 weeks. I am very pleased.

In other good news, we began a Weight Watchers at Work program in my building today. I think the meeting is going to be really helpful to me in achieving this goal.

One pound per week remains my mantra.

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The other good thing about this weight loss goal is how much Mad Men I am getting to watch while walking on the treadmill. So very well done, the attention to detail is remarkable.

In the episode I just watched, Roger Sterling gets on the elevator with Don Draper and says something like, "Fifth Avenue is a mess, in BOTH directions!"

Such a little, throw away line, right?

That's what makes this show so interesting - FIFTH AVENUE is a one way street, TODAY. But at the time the show is set, it went both ways. These are the little things I love about this show!

Anguish

This morning a child was hit by a car and killed in front of my children's school.

She was 15 years old, crossing the street to get on the bus.

The bus had its stop sign extended and its red lights were flashing, but the driver did not stop.

I put my children on their bus this morning, wondering why the bus was a few minutes late. I put the breakfast dishes in the dish washer and brushed my teeth and got in my car to drive to work.

The road in front of my children's school was closed to all traffic. There were many, many police cars. The police officer motioned for me to turn my car around, and my hands shook against the steering wheel as I did so.

I was terrified, terrified that something had happened at the elementary school, and I am ashamed by my own immediate feeling of unbelievable relief when I was told that the victim of the accident was fifteen.

"Not one of mine, not one of mine, not one of mine," spun in my head for a few seconds.

And then I was filled with horror and sadness.

I cannot imagine the anguish this child's parents must be feeling. I am angry with the driver, and I want to know...why didn't she stop? Why didn't she stop?

I am worried about what my children saw when their bus drove them past the accident. (They were allowing school buses to go through the police barricade.)

The collective grief of my pleasant little suburb is heavy on my heart.

T-Minus 48.4 Pounds

I am down .8 pounds this week. And while I am still 2/10's of a pound away from my goal for the week, I am still down, overall, by 3.6 lbs after 3 weeks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had movie theater popcorn TWICE in the last three days and also at restaurant food on Saturday night and Sunday lunch, AND I made a decadent cheese and prosciutto and potato dish on Sunday for dinner. So, truly, the fact that I lost any weight at all this week is kind of amazing.

What am I doing?

Well....basically making an effort to follow Weight Watchers, but I don't have the benefit of a meeting, which is hard. (I am trying to get a Weight Watchers at Work meeting started in my building.)

1. Writing everything down. If I eat it, I write it my notebook. I had a really nice, leather bound notebook that I got as a Christmas gift from a client last year (2008), and it was just sitting here, on my desk, doing nothing. So, I started using it as my food journal. It is too big to lug around so I got a small notepad for my purse for weekends.

2. Drinking lots and lots and lots of water and caffeine free herbal tea. I am going to float away. At least 6 glasses a day. My favorites right now are Celestial Seasonings True Blueberry and Celestial Seasonings Very Berry Cherry. If I just can't stomach the thought of any more water or tea, I am drinking Raspberry Lemonade Crystal Light or Pomegranate Cherry Crystal Light.

3. Eating fruits and vegetables with every meal, and trying to remember to eat them FIRST. (I am not eating a vegetable at breakfast. I cannot face broccoli that early in the day.)

4. Eating lots of high fiber foods.

Anyway, please keep cheering me on!

LM

Any Gamer Geek(ettes) Want to Give Me Recommendations?

I'm releasing my inner geek to make a confession and hopefully get some recommendations.

Husband and I got a Playstation 3 for Christmas. We have one game at the moment, Assasin's Creed, which I like, but I am looking for something...else.

In previous game systems (N64 and Gamecube and also some PC games), I have loved "platform" style cartoon games - such as:

Mario 64
Banjo Kazooie
Banjo Tooie
Rayman 2
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
Phantsmagoria

So, any thoughts on a game for PS3 that would be perfect for a girl who loves old school games?

LM

T-Minus 49.2 Pounds*

I lost 2.8 pounds this week.

I am actually quite surprised by this number, since it is considerably over my goal of 1 lb per week.

I think this was probably due to my dramatic shift from "holiday eating" to "healthy eating" - so my goal for this coming week is to be able to come back next Tuesday and tell you that I lost 1 lb.

1 POUND is still my mantra, as I eat my fruits and veggies and drink (and drink and drink and frigging drink) my water. But I feel good, very good, right this moment, about what I accomplished this week.

LM

*Last week I announced a goal for 2010 to lose 1 pound per week, a post I entitled T-Minus 52 Pounds...

Happy Familiversary to Us!

Three years ago, today, in a courtroom in DaNang:

Lana became our daughter. We took her back to the hotel room for a nap. She was so sad:



They had a going away party for us at the ophanage. Lana was shy and terribly sad. (Michelle! That is Bronte sitting next to Lana in these photos!)

We've come a long way, baby!

One Less Creepy Song?

I am the only one, upon hearing the song "One Less Lonely Girl" who thought, "Hmmm...this is going to be the biggest Sapphic love song since the Indigo Girls covered Dire Strait's* 'Romeo and Juliet'"?

And then I thought, "This Colbie-Caillait-sounding-chick who is singing this song really should have called it 'Two Less Lonely Girls' because, really, they would be together, and then it would TWO less lonely girls, since they found eachother and all."

I kind of liked the song, and I heard it about fourteen times a day for the last few weeks on the radio.

And then, to my HORROR, I realized it is being sung by a tiny little boy who appears to be about 12, and FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, is he TRYING to seduce a broken-hearted-35-year-old divorcee?

(I mean, seriously, the lyrics, "Christmas wasn't Merry, 14th of February/ Not one of them spent with you/ How many dinner dates, set dinner plates/ And he didn't even touch his food?" These are not lyrics aimed at 14 year old girls. How many fourteen year old girls do you know who could even relate to this stanza? NONE, I tell you! None! ")

Now I cannot listen to the song. It just creeps me out and makes me think about Mary Kay LeTourneau...

Maybe someday Melissa Etheridge (or, you know, an actual adult male) will do a cover of this and make it okay, but for right now? I am creeped out.

LM

* Speaking of Dire Straits, Husband and I have tickets to see Mark Knopfler in April and I am VERY excited.

T-Minus 52 Pounds and Who Let The Dogs Out*

I arrived at work yesterday morning with five healthy lunches. (We are fortunate in that we have a nice kitchen in our office so I could do this every week. It's just that in the past I have been bad about remembering to bring healthy lunches.)

I gained a lot of weight after my surgery in May. I have since lost a little bit. I don't even want to tell you the number on the scale back in July after 6 weeks of bed rest. It made me cry. Hard.

Actually, I don't want to tell you what the number was on the scale yesterday, because it still makes me upset. What I do want to tell you is that I have a goal of losing 1 pound per week this year. If I accomplish it, I will back down to the number I was at when Husband and I got married. Which would make me a size 10 or 12. (I have no delusions that I will ever be a size 6 again, but I would like to fit into the Hello Kitty jammies my daughter gave me for Christmas.)

I have recently looked at wedding pictures. I think that was a good weight/size for me. (I was thinner a year later, when Husband and I had been living in Japan for a year and I walked several miles every day to get to and from work. But I don't think that weight is a reasonable goal for me right now.)

At any rate, my goal is lose a pound a week this year. Healthy lunches, lots of water, and exercising again. (I started last night, back on my treadmill, with the company of Don Draper and the rest of the Mad Men. I think Mad Men will keep me coming back to the treadmill for a while. After I burn through the rest of Mad Men, well, Husband gave me Season 1 of the X-Files for Christmas (or X-mas!) so that should work as my treadmill companion as well. I'll keep you informed. Cheer me on, okay?

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My niece got a dog for her birthday on Sunday. It's an adorable little French Bulldog and Beagle mix, very cute. (I find this whole scenario peculiar because, of all my siblings, my youngest sister, the mother of the child who received the dog, has never liked dogs.)

My sister is lamenting that the dog doesn't like to sleep in her crate.

I am confused by this and I am wondering if I am the only one.

We had two dogs growing up, one a beagle/basset hound who lived until I was 11, and then what was, apparently, the bastard love child of a small shepherd mutt and a coyote. (We did know he was part coyote until we took him a new vet, when he was about a year old, and the vet said, "Who the hell sold you a coyote???" Upon further examination, the vet decided he was only half coyote. Probably.)

He was a good watch dog. Kind of terrifying to the mail man, though.

Anyway, neither of my dogs had a crate. The dogs slept with me, either under my bed or at the foot of it, actually on the bed. When I left for college, the half-coyote took to sleeping in my brothers' bedroom. (I guess we were not a typical family, though. I mean, what with the wild pack animal for a pet and all.)

I will accept that my family had unusual pet rearing techniques, but I do recall that many of my friends had dogs, and I don't remember those dogs sleeping in crates, either. I don't know that they actually slept with their owners, but I remember dog beds, and I remember dogs roaming freely through my friends houses when we got home from school.

We don't have a dog now, being cat people by chance and circumstance. (After college, I adopted a cat, because my apartment complex in Tucson didn't allow me to have a dog. That cat is still with me (barely hanging on) and his companion, the small auxiliary cat, is our other pet. They sleep wherever they want to sleep, with the exception of Lana's bedroom. (She has a strict 'no cats sleep in here' policy that drives the small auxiliary cat to distraction, attempting to sleep in her room in stealth.))

So...back to this crate concept? Is it new? Or have I just encountered bizarre dog rearing techniques in my life and the idea that the dog should sleep in a crate is entirely typical?

I'm truly curious.

LM

*Doggie (Who Let the Dogs Out) is interesting in that a legal battle ensued over who actually wrote the song, and I believe (I could be wrong) that the actual rights to the song are now owned by a Canadian ad agency. The song was made popular in the US by the Baha Men, although they were doing a cover of a song recorded by a Caribbean singer named Anslem Douglas. Frankly, I think the Caribbean version (difficult to find) is superior to the Baha Men version.

So Take These Words, and Sing Out Loud, 'Cause Everyone's Forgiven Now, Tonight's The Night The World Begins Again

On this, the first day of a new decade, I am humbled when I read about the actions of others.

I hope that the actions of E's young adults are an example of good and kind things - a symptom, dare I hope, of a decade of compassion and thoughtfulness?

I will strive for these things in my little corner of the world.

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We spent last night in the company of good friends - the same friends with whom we bid goodbye to 1999.

(On December 31, 1999, I was hugely pregnant with Gabriel, and slightly depressed that I didn't own Prince's 1999 CD, an album I only ever had on cassette, which by 1999 was long gone. For obvious reasons, I wanted to party like it was 1999, and without the music, how could I? It was the low point of the 90s for me, those last few hours I spent Prince-less. YouTube has brought us such a long way in these last few years, where almost any song you can think of is only a few key clicks away.)

Last night we said goodbye to The Aughts with good friends, good steak, good rum, and good chocolate. Who could ask for more?

* Goo Goo Dolls, Better Days - we all need to go and listen to the words of this song - you can find the video here.