Recently in Daily Category
Back in late October, I almost bought a Nintendo Wii completely on impulse. As I was reaching for it, I decided for some reason that a video game system was not something I should buy just because I happened to feel like it that day. Instead, I randomly decided then and there that I would use the Wii as motivation to lose some weight. I set a goal weight that was 8 pounds away. Large enough that it would take effort, but small enough that it wouldn't take forever and ever to get there.
(Don't ask me why I had a sudden flash of rational thought in regards to this particular item, because I have absolutely no idea. I'm a horrible impulse buyer. I can justify almost anything!)
As I think I've alluded to already in recent months, I didn't do anything drastic. I didn't cut anything out of my diet, mainly because my willpower is just not quite that strong. That willpower IS strong enough, however, to watch portion sizes, cook at home more often, bring my lunch to work instead of eat from the cafeteria, and avoid french fries and cookies....at least avoid them most of the time. I'm still a Starbucks addict and refused to give that up, but since my drink of choice is only 130 calories, I declare that my skinny cinnamon dolce latte is acceptable!
I weigh myself every day, despite having read lots of advice over the years that says you shouldn't weight yourself more than once a week. I chalk that up as being applicable to people whose mood and opinion is greatly influenced by what they see on the scale, since weighing yourself every day means you will absolutely see fluctuations. I can be 2-3 pounds heavier one morning than I was the morning before, or will be the morning after. I know this, and it doesn't worry me, because I just monitor the overall trend.
Last week, I saw the number I've been looking for! 8 pounds down! I've now been at that number or just under for 5 or 6 of the last 8 days. I'm calling it. I did it! Woo!
Except now I'm not sure I actually want the Wii. I think I might rather have a fancy camera bag from here or here or here or here. I've been ogling them all lately as I consider getting something to replace my old Crumpler bag. (The Crumpler bag has been great, but it's slightly too small, doesn't have a good spot for "purse stuff" like my wallet and keys, and has a shoulder strap that is too bulky and stiff.)
I've also considered buying myself a sewing machine instead, but I don't think I have the time to learn how to use it right now. Perhaps that would be a good reward for later this year, since my ultimate goal -- i.e. get back to where I was 5 years ago -- is still 10-15 pounds away!
Jose has decided to try his hand at blogging again, with a focus on the subject he finds most interesting: science! If you want to talk about anything related to astronomy, biology, physics, technology, etc, I can guarantee he will be excited to discuss it with you. You can join him here:
We went to the rodeo last night, but we didn't actually see the rodeo.
We got a late start, and traffic was horrendous. By the time we finally walked through the gate, it was 8:15 and the rodeo was 3/4 done. I was really annoyed at the world while we were stuck in traffic and missing the steer roping and bull riding, etc, but after I finally accepted the idea that we were just not going to get there, it was fine. Neither of us particularly cared about the concert that followed the rodeo (Rascal Flatts), so we didn't even bother going inside the arena. Instead, we headed straight for the food and the carnival and ended up salvaging our rodeo outing -- in fact, we had a great time.
We rode the Ferris wheel...
... and enjoyed the view from on high.
Then we rode the swings, which made us dizzy...
...but that was fine, since there was no one else on the ride to witness our stumbling afterwards.
Although the fact that we got dizzy on the mere swings made us decide to forego crazier rides like this one!
These turkey legs looked tasty, but we'd already eaten brisket sandwiches.
We checked out all our options for fried desserts, which included Twinkies, Moon Pies, cheesecake, and tiramisu...
...before deciding to partake of some fried Oreos covered with powdered sugar.
So you know: fried Oreos taste like chocolate doughnuts!
Since most people were inside listening to Rascal Flatts, it wasn't crowded at all!
Jose tried to win a giant stuffed basketball, but alas, luck was not on his side.
At the end of the night, we took the carnival chair lift back to the other side of the park, and waved at the monkey and banana traveling in the other direction! I'm sure they had a fun time on the rest of the rides.
(All photos were taken with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. There are a few more on Flickr if you're interested.)
The photo above of the flower beds in front of our house was taken last July. Everything had just been planted by the builder, and it was the middle of summertime. Lots of sun, plenty of late afternoon thunderstorms to keep thirsty plants happy.
This is what they looked like by the beginning of March. Pretty ragged, right? While I don't expect everything to look as lush and green in February as it does in July, the periods of unusually cold weather have taken their toll. I expect (hope) that most of the plants will make a comeback now that the weather is warming up -- along with the stupid crunchy St. Augustine grass that turns brown in the winter -- but the large fern-like plant that was front and center was obviously a casualty of the freeze and the monkey grass looked like it had all been stomped on by an elephant. It was time for some gardening.
I know basically nothing about plants and shrubs, so we headed over to Maas Nursery in Seabrook. Multiple people had told me it was the place to go, and it was indeed awesome. We said "show us the low maintenance section" and then picked out a couple different plants to start our experiment. We decided to address the front row of the beds for now, since it looked the worst. (Plus, we think the stuff in the back rows will perk up over the next couple months.) Our main criteria was anything that looked nice, was reasonably drought-tolerant, and liked full sun, since our front yard bears the brunt of the afternoon summer sun. We bought:
(Side note: when I googled yaupon holly, I discovered that the scientific name is ilex vomitoria. Yes, vomitoria. What a pleasant name for a plant.)
This past Saturday was an absolutely beautiful spring Houston day, so we spent two hours outside planting all of the new stuff. It was surprising hard work and we were both sore the next day. But the beds look better already!
We replaced the dead fern thing with the big viburnum. The bright green color is really nice, and it should produce flowers at some point. We also dug out most of the monkeygrass and replaced them with alternating holly and sage bushes. Those can grow pretty big if you let them, so we'll have to prune them occasionally, but that's sufficiently "low maintenance" for me.
Before
After
We do still need a new batch of mulch to put down over the whole bed. Any of my truck-owning friends want to volunteer?
Before
After
I still don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to gardening, so who knows, we may be replacing some of these again next year. It's a learning experience!
Today is my brother's 30th birthday. Happy Birthday David!
I finally got the final DVD full of the high-resolution scans of the 1000+ old slides I sent off to be digitized. They are pretty awesome.
In honor of David's birthday, here are 3 pictures of him. I snuck myself into the last one because hey -- it's MY blog. Haha.
We are dog-sitting Gizmo for a few days while Kelly and John are out of town. She is small and cute, and though she knows us, she seemed absolutely terrified when we went over to pick her up on Wednesday evening. She calmed down pretty quickly though and is now being thoroughly spoiled by Jose's mom, who took her on at least 3 walks yesterday.
She follows us around the house and watches whatever we are doing. Making dinner, folding laundry, working on the computer...it's pretty cute. Jose has already announced that he wants a dog. (He announced that a couple months ago; dog-sitting for Gizmo just reminded him.) So we'll see.
Jose's mom is visiting us for the week. Tickets from Corpus Christi to Houston get so cheap on Southwest that if you wait for the right time, you can fly round trip for $78. That's within a few bucks of what we pay for gas each time we drive down there -- one tank there, one tank back. Anyway, the cheap ticket prices let her come for a longer visit than usual, so she flew in on Saturday and leaves next Monday.
We can't take the week off work, so she's been hanging out at the house during the day. Yesterday I came home and she had made cupcakes. Yum! Then while I went for a run, she started making dinner and it was ready right when Jose got home from class at 7:00.
Just like I say whenever my own mom comes to visit and does my laundry: I could get used to this!
In other news, last night we finally went live with two websites I've been spending every free moment working on since mid-January. (They're paying me, so the comment about spending all my free time on it is not a complaint in any way, but merely a statement of fact.) After spending so much time on them, I find myself looking at them now and thinking that they don't look like they should have taken so much work. Hmph.
Anyway, if you are curious, here they are: misshoustonpageant.com and missbayareapageant.com. I've been working with the pageant producer for a couple years now; you may remember a mention here or there of creating the program book each year since early 2008. This time around they wanted a refresh of their very stale old site. They seem really happy with the result, so I'm happy too.
It's been a rough week. There were plenty of bright spots, like our dinner with Meryl and James last Saturday, birthday dinner for Becca on Tuesday, lots of Olympics on TV, and getting paid for all the work I've done on a website. But other events have left me feeling frustrated, beaten down, and tired. I will spare you the details, mainly because this blog is not an appropriate place for the details, but suffice it to say that I am VERY glad that Friday has arrived.
Instead, here are some photos I took last month when I went to California for a day. The weather was brilliantly sunny on the return leg from Ontario, CA to Phoenix, and I had a lot of fun taking photos out the window.
It's always interesting to see the land use patterns in the desert. The contrast of bright green and surrounding tan and brown is striking, especially when it's as bright and sunny as it was that day.
When we flew over this cloud, and the view was really strange! You could see the blurry shadow of our airplane, surrounded by a halo. No tricks -- this photo captures exactly what it looked like. I'd never seen this phenomenon before.
As we neared Phoenix, I noticed we were basically paralleling I-10! I watched the tiny cars move along for quite a while.
Hello, Phoenix. I enjoyed my half hour in your airport.
My last dentist appointment was scheduled for the week after Hurricane Ike plowed through this area, and the appointment never happened because the dentist's office flooded. They moved, but I never rescheduled, etc etc etc, and that's why suddenly two years had passed since my last visit to the dentist. I walked in this morning with no small amount of trepidation. Prior to the past couple years, I was very diligent about going in every 6 months, but after two years, surely they would have to scrape -- and scrape and scrape -- my teeth raw to remove all the plaque and tartar. NOT. FUN.
If my fears had been realized, I would have never dedicated a blog post to something as boring as the dentist. However, much to my surprise, my trip to the dentist this morning turned out to be quite the revelation. I was fascinated by two things in particular.
First, of course I had lots of tartar on my teeth, as I expected. But my dentist now has some kind of crazy ultrasonic pick thingy that acts like a tiny hammer (at least that's how the hygienist described it) and knocks/vibrates all the tartar off your teeth. Which means basically NO scraping. Which means basically no pain or discomfort. Which means it's about 1000 times less unpleasant. Which is awesome.
Second, they told me that a couple areas where my gums have receded are NOT because I brush too hard, in a reversal of what a dentist told me years ago. For years, I've thought it was my fault, and despite brushing carefully and softly, the couple spots still got worse. Today they told me it's because of my bite! There are two spots where my bottom teeth go over my top teeth, and one spot where my teeth meet edge on, and that produces a lot of pressure, to which my gums are just reacting.
(Despite 4+ years of braces from about ages 11-15, my teeth have continued to shift over the years. The hygienist said they don't tend to put braces on people as young as they used to. Sorry Mom & Dad. Though my teeth are still way straighter than they were before.)
So a couple teeth with a receding gum line? Not my fault! No more guilt complex about how brushing my teeth was somehow actually hurting them! This is big news.
Anyway, that's way more than you probably wanted to hear about 1) the dentist or 2) my gums. So I will end this "ode to my newfound love for my dentist" here and you can all carry on with your days.
Book club this month was at my house. This turned out to be the perfect incentive for us to finish up a couple lingering projects and give the main living area (family room/kitchen/dining room) a much-needed decluttering. Although I'm not sure it counts as decluttering if you just move all the stuff to another room... Still, the main living area looks awesome. Hopefully we can do a good job of keeping it that way.
I posted a couple days ago about how we finally painted the breakfast room. That was definitely motivated by knowing all the girls would be hanging out there for wine and snacks.
Another thing that has been on our list for quite some time is some kind of artwork for the large wall in our family room. Though we may replace the Ikea TV stand, we don't have plans to get a giant entertainment center anytime soon, so the TV sits pretty low. This wouldn't be as odd-looking in a lot of homes, but our ceilings in there are 12 feet tall. The large, emtpy wall was begging for something fairly big.
We've come up with a lot of ideas over the past 6 months. The first was to simply buy a large piece of art, but after extensive browsing at the Art Festival last fall, we quickly discovered that option would cost $1000 at minimum. So we started thinking of ideas for art we could make ourselves. I thought about a photo collage. I also thought about framing fabric, paper, or wallpaper. But then a couple weeks ago, Jose happened to be surfing hubblesite.org. I knew they had high-resolution images available for download and public use, since all the Hubble images qualify as public domain. What I didn't realize is that they also had one image, an awesome photo of the Carina Nebula, available in MURAL size.
They offered the download in either one large 40" x 80" file, or in 8 20" x 20" squares meant for hanging together. We used painter's tape to mask out the area on our wall, and the full 40x80 size just looked too much like a billboard to me. "Let's make it the same length, but not quite as tall," I suggested, "and just hang 4 vertical panels."
I downloaded the single image file, used Photoshop to crop 5 inches off the top and 5 inches off the bottom, and divided it into four 20" x 30" panels. I sent the files off to mpix.com, who I've used occasionally in the past for high quality prints. A few days later, they arrived and I stopped by the frame shop for some nice, thin wooden frames. And voila!
All in all, I guess it's pretty geeky that we now have a huge astrophoto on our living room wall. But hey, that's who we are.
This weekend we're going to try to continue the progress with some work in the bonus room upstairs...
