I kept going back to the first picture on the last post and thinking about what people might see in that picture. 
So I went through and made notes about what I see.
You might need to click on it to make it big enough to read
What do you think? Did I miss something that you noticed?
Hi! I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on!
I've been baking!
My church is doing a ministry this month with Kairos Prison Ministry. We’re making cookies to give to the inmates.
Kairos Cookies
See? They do cookies. And hey! I love to make cookies! So I’m making a double batch of the easiest recipe for peanut butter cookies I could find. There isn’t even any flour. It’s just peanut butter, sugar, and eggs, really. But OH. GOOD.
Delicious cookie
I think I’m going to have about 5 dozen of these to send to the prison.
Wrapped up and ready to go
And I’ve only eaten . . . 3 of them. But I’m on the 4th one of these:
20 oz each time
Edited to add: Erica asked a question about the water bottle.
Close of the front
Pop the top
From the inside
No filter. I got it at Target for $10, I think. The metal ring around the top of the gray button on the front locks it shut so I can toss it into my purse and it won’t pop open. There’s a seal along the top of the spout that holds the water in, too. And there’s a ring that counts up to 6 so I can keep track of how many times I’ve filled it today. I *love* it. It’s the perfect size to get in and wash it with my sponge, too. Dishwasher safe. I’ve smacked it around a few times, too, and it’s got a few dents on the clear plastic top, but it hasn’t broken yet. I. Love. It.
Wow — time has been going by really quickly lately. How is it already April 20th?
Justin and I went for a bike ride this evening. We rode all the way to the end of our road, ordered a pizza, ate it at a table outside, and rode home. It was fantastic! It took up most of our evening, but I can’t think of a better way to have spent the time. Over an hour and a half of dedicated time to spend with Justin? WIN!
Plus I love riding my bike, but I don’t do it nearly often enough. My backside, unfortunately, is reminding me why that is the case. So much pain!
I took 9 pills just now as I’m getting ready to go to sleep: 3 calcium, 2 fish oil, 1 multivitamin, 1 for RLS, and 2 Advil. I remember being so excited when I got off all my asthma medications. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t medicated! But I’m pretty sure I’m more healthy now, taking all these pills, than I was then.
I had a difficult brain day on Sunday. Do you know what I’m talking about? Where you spent most of the day feeling like you need to cry, but no idea why? I cried because I didn’t know why I felt like crying. I cried because Justin’s office was messy. I nearly cried at church when friends mentioned maybe having people over for dinner. I nearly cried in the middle of my massage.
Ooooooh. Massage. My massage was wonderful. I hadn’t had one in such a long time and my muscles are so tense. She was able to rub a lot of that out, but I know that most of it will need more work than that to get them loosened up. My shoulder-blades are still tender from the work she did on them. But it was totally worth it!
And then I went home and listened to laundry washing and thought that I should be doing something other than laying on the bed feeling like crying.
I cried on Saturday, too. We stopped at Lowe’s so we could pick up a few things and I put my foot into knee-high mud boot. The kind like we used to have as kids, remember? Except this one was white and cute and I wanted to see if it would fit.
No. It didn’t fit. I got my calf most of the way into it and then it suctioned onto my leg. My calf formed a seal with the plastic material of the boot and created suction. I couldn’t get it off. Justin was nearby and I called out to him: “I have a problem.” “You sure do,” he said and came over to help me. And the guy at the key cutting counter just laughed at us because we couldn’t pull the boot off.
I found a rolling stair-step ladder to sit on so I could try to pry the boot off, and then the panic started to set in. I couldn’t get it off! My foot was trapped! The air was going to push out from the boot and my foot was going to turn black and fall off! (Did you know I’m a tiny bit claustrophobic?) Justin assures me that we would have cut the boot off my leg before that would have happened, but I still sat there on the step *freaking out* about the boot stuck on my foot.
And eventually we were able to get it off just by pulling at it and loosening the top away from my leg and just plain persistence. And I sat there with tears running down my face because I had been so worried about it. A woman came down the aisle and turned to look at us and gave a really worried look before backing away. “We’re okay,” I said, but I’m not sure she heard me.
No more trying on boots for a while.
But we’re doing good today! I wore my engagement ring for the first time in a very long time. It finally fits without cutting off circulation! The wedding band is still slightly too small, but I got to wear my sapphire today! It makes me really happy that I can wear that again.
And that’s a rough idea of what it’s like in my brain lately. Now, I’m going to sleep.
Before -- Christmas 2009
Current -- April 2010
Okay, so anyone who doesn’t want to hear about diet stuff can skip this post and go back to admiring our work on the lawn.
As you can hopefully tell from the pictures, I’ve lost about 20 pounds. This is crazy amazing to me because I’ve only been seriously working at this since the beginning of March. To lose 20 pounds in a month is insane! I’ve slowed down to about 2 or 3 pounds a week now, but those first couple weeks were crazy!
What I’ve been doing is logging every single thing that I eat through MyFoodDiary.com, which I resisted for a long time because of the time commitment involved. It’s frustrating, sometimes, having to keep track of every little thing and write it down and figure out how big of a serving it was and how many calories were involved and blah, blah, blah. But ho-ly cow. There’s no denying the cold, hard truth of nutritional information when it’s all written down and telling you that you just put more than 2000 calories in your body today. And half of that was sugar. And you didn’t exercise.
I’ve had to make some adjustments to what I eat and how often and all of that, and it’s been interesting to notice how my appetite has started to change. If I eat healthy foods, which look more and more appetizing, then I don’t get hungry as often, and I can eat less. I have more energy to get up and exercise when I’m not so weighed down by a full stomach and it’s easier to sleep when my stomach isn’t bloated with food.
I set a goal for myself to log my food for 30 days straight. The reward for achieving that was to get an hour-long massage. I met that goal last week and my massage is scheduled for Sunday afternoon! I’m on my way to 60 days, now.
Exercise-wise, I’ve been hitting Zumba classes on Monday and Wednesday evening and yoga class on Saturday morning. Besides that, I try to exercise for about an hour on my own enough times so I maintain a consistent 5 out of 7 days where I’ve exercised. Not that any day in particular is a “non-exercising” day. Every day is a day when I should exercise, but some days are too busy and I don’t beat myself up if I can’t get in a workout between work and band practice.
Other than that, I haven’t done anything in particular to work on this. I try to drink my 64 oz of water or more each day. If I REALLY need a cookie, and if I can afford the calories, I’ll have a cookie. But not a handful of cookies followed by a handful of chocolate and ice cream with syrup on top. If we’re going to a restaurant for dinner, I try to get a hold of the menu online before hand so I can look at the options and find something healthy – like grilled fish instead of breaded and fried fish. And that’s pretty much the whole story – eating foods that are healthy, in appropriate amounts, and logging it all, while exercising for an hour, 5 days a week, doing something that I really enjoy.
I’m very pleased with my progress so far. I have a long way to go – I figure I’m just under a quarter of the way to where I’d like to be. I figure, at my current rate of weight-loss, I should be in the 100s by late May. And I should be down about 40 pounds by the 4th of July. My goal when I started was to be down by 50 pounds by the time I went back to my doctor appointment in early September. I’m hoping to blow her socks off when I get there.
Even better, by Christmas of this year I hope to be almost to my goal weight. And that makes me a very happy girl!
So, obviously the rest of last week didn’t treat me very well. And today I actually left work at lunch time to come home and sleep because I was that tired. Allergies are awful.
Anyway, I’ve mentioned to several people that we’ve been doing yardwork. So! Since I’m still really tired, but I wanted to put up something here for Mom to see when she checks (I love you, Mom!), I figured I’d do a picture-heavy recap of what we’ve been doing to the yard.
The back of our yard butts up to a protected marchland, so we’re not supposed to do anything to it. But the marshland was encroaching onto our yard. This massive thicket of vines was slowly taking over the bushes and trees at the back of the property. Last year, we cleared a section so we could actually see through to the marsh. This year, we figured we’d try to get even further.
This is what it looked like before we started.
A broad view of the vines in the backyard, before trimming
A closer view of the vines problem
We spent a couple hours one afternoon pulling and piling and wrenching those things out of the ground. Some of them are really nasty things with stickers a good 1/2 inch long. I completely failed on planning and wore cropped pants, so I came away from the process with scratches all over my legs. Justin walked away with a concussion, which was when we stopped for the day. But that’s a story for another time…. Our friendly neighbor helped us the next day to pile them all into his pick-up truck and drop them off at the dump, even though it was raining.
This is what it looked like a few days ago:
A stunning lack of vines
Clear to the marsh
There’s still more to be done, obviously, but we’ve made some excellent progress! We can see all the way through to the marsh! To the coffee bin that someone dumped….
We noticed that a few of the vines climbing up the trees have died because we apparently cut them at the bottom. So we have to go see if we can pull them down. And there’s more to clear and rake up and clean up. And then things like ferns will start to grow up and the trees will fill out more and it’s going to look amazing. Much better than that awful thicket.
The other big project we did was to transform the landscaping along the side of the house. This is what it used to look like:
Beside the house
And that’s the only picture I have of it. It was pine straw mulch up to a trim of pine bark mulch that has a couple crepe myrtle trees and a couple evergreen trees that I don’t know how to explain. It was awful. Cats were using it as a sandbox. Weeds were coming through. The trees needed help. The whole thing was a mess.
This is what it looked like a few days ago:
New and improved sideyard
Justin raked out all that awful mulch. We brought the whole thing in about 6 inches closer to the house, the empty space will fill with grass before the end of the summer, and Justin dug a trench about 6-inches deep all the way along the side of the house to define that area and filled it in with stones. One end is right at the end of a rain gutter, so it’s going to keep the rain from washing the mulch away as badly as it used to. It took a lot more rocks that we expected and those rocks are REALLY heavy. Justin was very tired from moving all those rocks. Under the rocks is a weed-blocking material that should keep weeds from growing up in that area. Justin put in edging while I planted some flowers and bushes. And the whole thing is filled with cypress mulch. Oh, and the myrtles got their spring trimming, so they’re much happier.
Bushes on the side yard
I think these are a phlox or something
I have no idea what these are called but I love the color
These are beautiful - I think they're columbines
A jasmine of some sort, I think
This tree was so crooked, but hopefully it'll do better now
View from the front
And there’s more that we did, but I’m really tired, so I’m going to wrap it up there and come back another time. But what do you think so far? Amazed at our landscaping prowess? I know I am! This place looks awesome!