victoriagirl's Journal

Happy Friday! Pinata is on the road!
Aug 21 2009 11:06

Wow, busy day, I was not able to login to CC until 11 am! lol

The pinata is complete, and looks REALLY good. All the gimpiness is covered by a fluffy layer of very forgiving fringe. Thank goodness for dollar-store crepe paper streamers! They were a dream to work with, thin enough to fold up to cut multiple layers of fringe at once, and yet sturdy enough that it didn't rip when i was gluing and wrapping, it was great. After all the trouble the frame gave me, I was really grateful for a problem-free part, and for nice looking results! I just hope the string doesn't pull out. If it does, tough luck, the engineers (my dad and sister) can figure that one out, I am lucky I got it to hold at all! I am an artiste, not an engineer ;).

So for some weird reason I decided I wanted to wear heels with my casual-Friday jeans today. Geez. I have a huge suitcase to carry my clothes, shoes, and nephew gifts, a separate bag for the pinata, and my lunch bag and purse. And had to haul all that on the bus. Of course the bus came early (or I was late, I dunno) and I had to stop traffic to run across the street while the bus waited for me. That was nice, but I must have been quite a sight doing the high-heels shuffle-run with all my bags in tow. Heh.  

As it was a bit of a rush this morning, I didn't have time to pack a proper lunch or breakfast, just grabbed some fruit and fibre 1 bars and leftover soup. May have to supplement and buy a sandwich or something. Sigh. Well at least it's not next week yet so I don't have to count it for the budget challenge.

Still holding at 233. I am glad the mini-chocolate bars are sealed in the pinata and leaving my house. They have destroyed my calorie deficit this week.

Dodged the Starbucks bullet!
Aug 20 2009 16:36

I have two things to say about today.

One, the blouse I am wearing is ugly and I never want to wear it again. It looks hideous and baggy and matronly. I really should have tried it on before packing it. I thought it still fit but clearly not. Yuck.

Two, I managed to avoid the late afternoon Starbucks run, woo hoo! I didn't want to spend the money, so I didn't bring my wallet and just went for the walk. The whole time my coworker was raving about how delicious her cookie was....I just reminded myself of the pants in my closet that just barely fit. They were part of the clothes my friend gave me last year (so was the ugly shirt) and still have the tags on them, clearly she had bought them without trying them on and they were missized because they were WAY smaller than the other size 20 stuff she gave me. I am comfortably wearing 18's and these pants still barely fit, so they are more like a 16 I think. I actually got them on for the first time on Monday and I really want to get hem fitting nicely before fall weather makes me put away all my capri pants.  So yeah...successful avoidance of the evil money-sucking calorie-loading SB!

More on blackberries and pinatas! Yay!
Aug 20 2009 09:23

Well the overwhelming consensus seems to be that I should continue picking berries and the cycle of abuse....shame on you all LOL

I think I have some ladies garden gloves, in fact I am wearing them in one of my pics,  from the trash blitz we did last year. I will try them out! It's been pretty awesome having berries with my yogurt. YUM. And they taste better cuz they were free.

Unfortunately curduroy's good idea about clipping some branches to take with me won't fly. Here in Victoria and Vancouver, we have laws prohibiting picking flowers or foliage. I'd probably get arrested and hauled off to jail and end up losing my job cuz I work for Corrections and can't have a criminal record or do anything to bring shame upon the government....I took an oath. Heh.

The pinata is coming along  but not without much angst. It's taking forever for each layer to dry...I took out the frame without realizing the paper mache was still a little damp and it all started collapising in on itself, ACK!!! Emergency balloon re-insertion and some blow-drying later, it's mostly recovered....but let's just say I am really glad it's for 3-year-olds who won't notice how gimpy-looking it is. I've got it sitting in front of a fan to dry faster, but it's still slow-going....this morning I had to do some paper mache-ing before work to get the bottom and string to hang it from on there. I have no confidence it will be dry enough to decorate by tonite. Apparently three days is not enough time for paper mache-ing a pinata. Live and learn.

Still sitting at 232.5-233. The weekend will be difficult to be strict, calorie-wise, so i expect it to stay around that number until next week. Then next week is the budget challenge with Sara! In anticipation, yesterday I bought some really nice-looking red and brown Jasmine rice, a kg for just $2.99, and a huge jug of salsa because it was on sale for $6, that should last a good long time but I think I better freeze some so it doesn't go bad before I finish it. And a bought a couple of tubs of yogurt on sale, but I only bought two and think I better go back today for more, I go through a lOT of yogurt, especially now while I am on antibiotics. And some sale blueberries and a few other sale items but not too much since I have to bike it home. As it was, the stuff I bought was SO heavy to carry on my bike. My shoulders were killing me. When I got home I got on the scale to see how much extra weight there was....30 lbs. Yikes! Funny thing is, last year I weighed that much on my own. Funny how you adjust to weighing less....I was really struggling up the hill with that extra weight, yet I used to do it every day!

Hope everyone has a fabulous Friday-eve!

Blackberries
Aug 19 2009 13:45

I loves them.

Not the communication devices, those seem evil...REAL ones. They are usually about $4.99 at the grocery store for those tiny plastic trays, works out to about 50 cents per berry, pretty much! So I never buy them, ever. But the bike trail I ride on every day has scads of blackberry brambles. I have been waiting and waiting for them to ripen, and they are finally starting! Yesterday I pulled over my bike and checked em out...they are much much smaller than store berries, but some were ripe enough to pick, yay! So I grabbed a baggie from my lunch bag and started picking.

Well you want to know why they are so rediculously expensive at the store? It's because they are a BITCH to pick. They are protected by extremely thorny branches that catch on your clothes and skin and tear the heck out of your hands. God forbid you ever fall into one, I can't even imagine the damage and pain. Which is what I was thinking about as I was precariously balanced on a rock to access the bigger berries hiding further inside the brambles. I picked a full sandwich bag's worth, maybe $10 or $15 worth or free!! But not totally free, I paid for it in scratches that itch and a few slivers, one in my finger refused to be tweezed out and was causing a really amazing amount of pain for just one teeny tiny sliver and when it finally came out I swore to never blackberry-pick again. Until this morning when I had some for breakfast. Yum. I am so blackberry picking again. I remember going through this exact same thing last year. Next time I will try gloves....but they'd have to be pretty thick gloves that still allow a high level of dexterity. Hmm. And maybe some kind of poker-thing to pull the high/far branches closer. The brambles are really deep and dense, it's sad to see all those berries going to waste!

Today is a hungry day. I did not bring enough for breakfast, I just didn't have anything to bring besides fruit (blackberries and a banana) and a fibre 1 bar, so I was way low on protein and starving long before lunch. Lunch was a tuna pita with tomato and carrots, and a peach and grapes....should have been enough but due to extreme morning hunger, I am still not satisfied. Sigh. So tonite will be a struggle to not over-eat, I really want to keep my cals lower today....I want to see 229 soon! I have chicken enchiladas and a caesar salad planned, which will bring me to 1750, perfect...just have to figure out how to avoid the after-work snack and dessert!

Secrets revealed
Aug 18 2009 09:06

After much ruminating, I decided to talk about the chicken in my email to Joel yesterday (I usually send him one and talk about what i did the night before etc so it was normal to mention it then) and he said he knows exactly what I mean as he did some comfort eating of his own. LOL we are two peas in a pod. I am glad I mentioned it and took away it's power to make me feel ashamed. Times like this I realize this is an ongoing battle, I will likely never be "fixed", it's just learning to deal with my weaknesses and foibles rather than eliminate them. In a way it's depessing, but in another way it's kind of empowering...to realize I have (and am developing) the tools to deal with them, so they can't ever rear their ugly heads to overpower me...I am aware of them. The closet is wide open, I have a big stick so you monsters just settle down and play nice.

I went to a dollar store and found crepe paper streamers to make the pinata fringe, yay! That should make things easier. I didn't work on it though. I also bought more crap to put in it, since there are more kids than I thought, if you count two $1 items for each child that's like $40 right there! And that's being cheap! If I had known it would be so expensive I may not have decided to stuff it with "good" stuff rather than the $5 bag of serious crap you can get at Walmart....but the stuff was SO lame, and the candy was gross kinds, so instead I bought boxes of individual-size bear paw cookies, fun-size candy bars, stickers, hot wheels cars, barbie necklaces, little plastic glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs, and flower hair clips. But, most of the kids are 3 years old, and probably wouldn't know the difference between quality crap and crap crap lol...oh well.

Sucks that it's only Teusday. Wish I were going to Peru!!

Pinata and aliens and secrets I don't want to keep
Aug 17 2009 09:18

I look forward to the weekends SO much, not just because of not working but also (mainly) because I get to see Joel. But it seems I am falling into a pattern - on Mondays I am sad he's gone again and regretful of what I ate on the weekend. It's not like I go hog-wild or anything...in fact last weekend was really perfect - but mostly I just go over by a few hundred calories, eliminating any deficit and sometimes going over maintenance by a bit too. It's not horrible, just a little disappointing when I do so well during the week.

There is one part that's a little concerning, which is my tendency to comfort eat after he leaves. It's dangerous ground for me....last night after I walked him to the bus stop, I stopped at Save On for some fruits and veggies for the week, and then unexpectedly went to the deli and bought two peices of fried chicken to eat when I got home. We'd already had dinner, I wasn't even hungry, I just wanted it. And the whole time I was thinking "well I can't tell Joel I ate fried chicken after dinner, this is so lame". Whisperings of secret eating...VERY dangerous ground. I doubt it would come up in conversation anyway, so it's not like NOT saying anything would be secretive, but I am so worried about any hint of secret eating that I feel like I need to confess what I ate whether it comes up or not. It's been incredibly freeing to not have the shame of that weighing on me anymore, and Joel was a big part of that, so I certainly don't want to start keeping things from him, he's my sounding board and main support so that would be incredibly self-destructive. But I don't want to blurt out randomly  "I ate chicken!!" like some kind of freak either. Maybe I am just over-thinking it all.

Just wanted to get that all out, as it doesn't feel very good inside me. Even with the chicken and two mini-chocolate bars I took from the pinata-stuffers I bought, I was still at maintenance calories, so not disastrous.....just a little concerning about HOW it came about. The scale did not punish me this morning though, weekly weigh-in was another pound down, I am getting so close to the 220's! Just two and a half more pounds to go....

Next weekend is my nephew's 3rd birthday party and the Dead Weather concert, both on Saturday but the b-day party is 11 am-2 pm or so. Apparently they've invited about 20 children and their parents and siblings. Why anyone would voluntarily take on that kind of insanity I really don't get. Seriously I think it's INSANE. Last year there were about a dozen kids and that was more than enough...it was SO unfun as the choices of activity were wrangling 2-year-olds or standing around listening to mommy-talk, and believe me they are not very receptive to any other kinds of conversation so if you don't have a child you pretty much just have to smile and nod and feel stupid and left out. Thank god this year Joel is coming with me. We can go make out in the bedroom or something LOL. I started the pinata last night, I think it's going to look great! I finished the base shape, I made it with a balloon for the round upper part of the fire hydrant and nested it in a cylinder of construction paper. I coated that in saran wrap so I can peel out the construction paper after the paper mache dries....I just hope the paper mache sticks to saran wrap. Also made the bolts and hose-attachement thingies out of construction paper which I will attach after the first layer of paper mache. It's going to look great! I could not find crepe paper to make pinata fringe for it though, so I will have to make do with red tissue paper, it will likely take a LONG time but I have 3 evenings to work on it so it should be fine.

We've been looking forward to the concert for months now, I am so excited it's here! I have no idea what to wear. I want to look cute and cool, but not like I am trying too hard, not too dressy but not shmoey either, and something comfortable as there will be a lot of standing and walking. It's a tough decision, especially since all my old "going out" clothes are long gone to goodwill and whatever's left is too big. So I have to figure that all out and shoe decision is even harder. Yikes.

We saw District 9 on Saturday. It was really disturbing, I wasn't expecting a socio-political commentary, I just thought it was a fun alien/ action film. Ha. About the first half hour into it, I was quite upset, thought I might embarass myself and cry. I find opression and genocide and the horrors of abuse of power just incredibly upsetting, even when it's a fictional movie about aliens....just seems so likely that it's exactly what would happen in that situation, because people suck. ALso it took me by suprise, I hadn't prepared myself for that. So yeah if you go see it (it was really an excellent movie), be prepared. And under no circumstances bring a child to see it. The violence was bad enough, but the portayal of human nature was truly ugly. Even the "hero" was completely unlikable. I hope they make a District 10 though! It was such a compelling story, I want to know what happens next.

Well here we go into another week. Five days till the weekend!

Good times, bad times, you know I've had my share
Aug 14 2009 10:48

In the interests of sounding less woeful, I changed my journal title from the one about woe. I really am pretty happy these days, despite my complaining.

I had a rather frightening coughing fit yesterday, I was coughing so hard I was choking and couldn't breathe, and when you live alone that's especially scary....what if I had an aneurism or something? No one to call 911 and because of a certain episode of Sex in the City I have a fear of my cat chowing down on my corpse before my body is found. SO I gobbled down the antibiotics LOL....also took the steroid puffer thingie. Because i am allergic to penicillan I had to take Clarithromycin which has some rather violent side effects, I was not to pleased to discover. During the night I was having one of those dreams where I really have to go to the bathroom but can't find anything but filthy, unusable bathrooms, it was particularly vivid because my guts were churning so badly, and of course they actually were in real life. I woke up and spent some time in the bathroom LOL....geez kill or cure eh. Gotta make sure to stuff myself with lots of yogurt to replace all the bacteria being killed in me, yikes. But my lungs do feel considerably better already.

I have to meet with my boss in 5 minutes about plans for the next 12 months. Bleh. How about "keep up with current projects that threaten to completely overwhelm me", how about that? Lame.

I forgot to pack a key peice of my outfit in my backpack today - the camisole that goes under my too-low top. So I look like a hoochie mama. At least I found a pin so it's not totally open to my waist lol.

I am so glad it's Friday. Yay for the weekend!

ALso I keep forgetting to mention we saw Julie and Julia last weekend, it was really good. THe opening scene was in France and totally reminded me of being there....and there was an early scene of Julia in a Frech resaurant nearly moved to tears at the deliciousness of the French food, that was SO me!! I still rave about how the food is so different in France, it's like AHHH this is what food is supposed to taste like!! SO yeah they had me right from square one.

AND one last tidbit...last night I pulled out my old jewellery box on a lark, I have some old rings and bangles from when I was a kid that haven't fit since I was a teenager. I really never figured they'd ever fit again. But they do, already!! Crazy eh! They are slid gold stuff from when we lived in Saudi Arabia, so really nice jewellery, thoug hthe ring I love the most (a sapphire with two little diamonds on each side) is a bit too delicate looking on my hand. Maybe just perception as I am used to clunkier jewellery I get to make my hands look smaller.

Home sick. Bleh.
Aug 13 2009 12:25

I stayed home from work today....really more exhausted than sick, I suppose. I was up all night coughing and woke up super-tired and with a headache from all the coughing. My chest feels heavy. I went to the clinic and the doctor prescribed me some drugs, holy crap even with my plan they still came to like $50, crazy. I don't really WANT to take antibiotics in addition to the steroid-puffer thingie, I am undecided about taking them. I dunno. Last time I took antibiotics was probably a year or more ago, I think...maybe I will just do the puffer alone and see how it goes.

On the up side, I went back to bed and didn' t wake up until 11, so sleep hydration put me at 231 lbs. What a cool number to see, even temporarily!

I arranged some holiday time for the labour day weekend and also arranged things so Joel and I can be here this weekend, yay! Hopefully we can get started on the fire hydrant pinata. I am excited!

Well we've got torrential rain happning, and a thunder storm on the way....I got home from the clinic just as it was starting, had to really rush to not get soaked! Fun!

Like my bunnies?
Aug 12 2009 14:17

Aren't the bunnies in my avatar photo cute?? They are very prolific on the UVic campus, we went a few weeks ago to see them and I just figured out how to get the pictures from my phone. Maybe it's not a totally useless peice of carp after all. I like this picture, for the bunnies of course, but also because of the way I am sitting. It wasn't that long ago that I could not sit this way, there was too much fat on the backs of my legs and butt to manage it, I would just look like I was raised on my knees and it would hurt like heck too. Now I can sit flat (mostly!) and it's quite comfy. ANd OMG you can't even see my tummy, just lap! A miracle!

Still coughy today, one more day and I am starting the steroid puffer. I hate feeling congested, I feel like I can't get enough air when I bike.

Looks like I will be heading into Van this weekend. J was supposed to come here since I have to go there the following two weekends, but my sister wants to bottle the wine we made this Saturday, bleh. I haven't responded yet, but I don't know how to get out of it, if we don't do it Saturday it will have to wait for another month or so. So I guess I will be going there three weekends in a row, which I hate. It's a lot of ferry time.

I backed out of making the firetruck cake for my nephew's b-day next-next weekend. I just could not see how I'd be able to get it done between Fri evening when I arrive at J's and Sat morning for the party....or make it here and carry it on the bus and ferry...just not feasible. So I am sitting it out, too bad, I am proud of being the Cake Genius in the family. Oh well, just as well, I always feel gross from licking too much icing off my fingers anyway. Instead I will make a pinata, that's a little more transportable, fun! Torn between a firetruck and a fire hydrant (it's a fireman-themed party).

This week I made Moroccan Soup for lunches. I had it today with just some cucumbers and cherries. Unfortunately it's only 2:30 and I am already hungry, so I don't think it's as brilliant as last week's Asian Soup, despite being loaded with high-fibre lentils and garbonzo beans. Hmph. I even put chicken in to boost the protein. Maybe it's just my period causing the hunger.

Today's annoyance: why do people feel compelled to offer weight loss tips when you don't ask for them? Yesterday my sister was all excited to tell me about a program she saw. She was all "Have you ever seen a nutritionist? Well maybe you should...I saw a show that was all about how certain nutrient deficiencies can prevent weight loss, and a nutritionist can diagnose you". I told her I am doing well with my own methods, thankyouverymuch. Like seeing a nutritionist would somehow be the magic key that unlocks the secret to effortless weight loss. IT TAKES EFFORT, period. THAT"S the freakin secret.

Tired. Sick. Bloaty. Hmph.
Aug 11 2009 09:23

I am tired. The weekend was great, Joel came to my place and we had a nice low-key couple of days, but by Sunday night I was feeling very off. And I'd been coughing all week. So I was scared of what might hit...especially when I learned my little nephew has a bronchial infection, and I am prone to those, and apparently eveyone else had been coughy last week too. Great. Well the good news is I don't feel nearly as sick as I was afraid I might, not yet anyway. And I have an old steroid inhaler-thingie if my lungs don't clear up, though I am not sure how long to wait before resorting to that. Hopefully I just get better on my own.

So that coupled with first day of my period made the ride into work today very painful. I just feel very tired. And sad. No one to take care of me.

Yesterday was my flex day, so I spent it alone as Joel had to go home Sunday night. OMG loneliness, feeling a bit sick and very PMSy and having time and access to cookie-making ingredients is a dangerous combination. I ended up eating 4 cookies plus some ice cream, in addition to having comfort-food perogies for lunch, went over maintenance calories, so high it's going to screw up my weekly average no matter how well I do the rest of the week. Oh well, last week was brilliant so I am allowed one off day.

My boss is back from her medical leave. I am glad, we need her here, but I am feeling pressure...I got like 10 emails from her this morning already. I just don't feel up to it. I don't really feel up to anything, but don't really want to go home either, it's too boring and lonely and dangerous what with all the food there. So, I am grumpy and just wish this day were over.