Mmm

Bacon and low-carb cheesecake tomorrow!

Diet and a Sock

So Scott sent me flowers for Valentine's day, and I never posted the picture, so here it is:

In the middle of my very messy office. My office is much cleaner than when I inherited it, though!

I learned how to knit a sock. I found an online tutorial and I went through it step by step. It took forever because I had to frog and start over several times. Here's the process: First, you cast onto three needles instead of just one and knit in the round instead of back and forth. Harder than it sounds until you get used to it.Next step is to make the cuff then start the heel, which is really complicated especially since I'm a beginning knitter!Eventually you do a lot of magic, etc. and you have a sock. A hideous sock. But it's the most comfortable sock I've ever worn. Scott and Mim were kind enough to say it looked great, but to my perfectionist eyes, I could only see the myriad of mistakes I had made.

And, sadly (but happily at the same time-YAY WARM), winter is coming to a close. Here is a picture of a place near Mim's house with the snow:

Gorgeous. But it's ok that it's melting. Heating this big house is so much more expensive than the apartment was so we've been trying to keep the temperature a little lower than we'd like and just wearing sweaters and blankets around the house. It works pretty well. I have a cashmere sweater on. I found it at Saver's for like seven dollars! Amazing, since cashmere is so ridiculously expensive. I found out it comes from a very rare and particularly soft and fluffy goat somewhere in the Himalayas. No wonder it's expensive.

Work today wasn't too bad. I got everything done early, so I figured to get the rest of my hours by surfing the internet. I had everything shut off and closed down when someone was like, can you run this test? At least it wasn't a hard or complicated one. It was just a little annoying to turn everything back on and set up again and the instrument has to warm up for an hour so I ended up staying for more than 8 hours, which is fine, because it means I can leave a little earlier tomorrow! YAY Friday!

So we were going to have a B-day party for me next Saturday, but Mim got asked to be the producer of the latest community theater's production of "Zombie Prom". Definitely going to see that one. Anyway, it means she didn't have that weekend free anymore, so we decided to do it this Sunday instead. That will be the first day of phase 3 of my diet, so I'll be able to eat all the stuff we grill-just not in buns. And no chips. But Em said she knew how to make a low-carb cheesecake, so I actually DO get to have birthday cake!!! I'm craving something sweet.

It will be so nice to have a change of pace with the diet. It's been more than six weeks of eating specific small amounts off of a specific list of foods, so it'll be nice to have fewer restrictions. The rules for this phase are simple: eat anything you want, as much as you want, but no sugar or starch. So all cheese and meat and eggs and most vegetables are fair game, so that opens up many many options.

I've lost 27 pounds as of this morning. Three more days and we'll see where we end up. I'm predicting about 30 pounds total when I'm through with this phase.

Then, after six weeks, I can do my second course and I will lose the rest. If I can lose another 15-20 in the second course that will bring me to my target weight, and it will be the first time since 8th grade that I will not be labeled "overweight" according to those doctor chart thingies. Then, I'll go in to the doc and have some tests run and see if my blood pressure and cholesterol are down. Hopefully losing all the weight will correct those.

I'm just so excited for all this!

Crochet Bag

So, the crochet hooks I have are mostly from when I started, a.k.a. about 15 years. They're so tired...all chipped and sad. So, I went online and found a great deal on a package with LOTS of sizes...like 15 hooks or something, all for ten bucks plus shipping. Here's the fun part: They came in a pretty bag!!! Here it is:It's so hokey and tacky, but for some reason I love it.

Also, Scott has been so awesome for Valentine's and my upcoming birthday. I got two necklaces and lots of music and movies I've been wanting :) Here are my necklaces:The blurry one is a snowflake with real diamonds. It's my new precious.

Other than that, life is pretty normal. Family drama continues, and with these pregnancy hormones I'm beside myself with emotions. I feel like I'm completely out of control. Only 5 injections or so to go, and then no more hormones, and then I will resolve once and for all to never get pregnant. EVER.

On the plus side, I've lost 26 pounds! I'm hot.

So, the library in Clearfield super sucks. I got so spoiled in Sioux Falls with a huge library just a mile away. This one is like ten miles or something away from my house, and it's so tiny. I just finished reading and/or rereading all the books in my house, and now I need more so I can have something to do at work while my stuff is reacting or being run on the instrument. So, I went online and found a list of classic literature that everyone should read, and printed it off and headed for the library after work yesterday. And what do you know: they don't have most of those books. I heard that the Bountiful library is much much better, so maybe I'll try there next time.

Craving muffins. 7 weeks until I can eat muffins.

This diet is taking longer than I thought it would, but it's worth it I suppose. It's really only hard when I see food commercials on TV or someone gets to eat something tasty in front of me. Boo.

Crochet Blogs

It has occured to me that I don't post enough. It isn't that I don't have anything to write about...there's enough drama in my life and at the very least the weird dreams I have every night, and I'm always crocheting and making new things...I think the problem is that I love posting with pictures, and I don't have a camera except on my phone. I have a Chocolate, so the cable to hook it up to the computer is expensive. So, instead, I text all my pics to my e-mail account, since I have 500 per month and I almost never use all of them. Then, I like to download them from my e-mail to my desktop at home so I have them all in one place. So far, no problem. Except I have been increasingly using Scott's lappie on the couch and I almost never get on my desktop, except to add new music to my collection and update my Zune and, of course, blog with pictures. Since I don't get new music all that often (Christmas, birthday, etc., and when a new Tori or Enya album comes out) I'm not up there anyway that often, so it just doesn't get done. Depressing. I like writing and keeping a photo journal, I'm just a lazy bum.

So I'm at work...turns out it's more of a pain to get pictures off e-mail onto the work computer. But, after my hard work, I present a new pic of puppy.

He's begging for tuna. When he's good or refuses to eat we cover his food in tuna and it tricks him into eating it. When he begs he gets that look. You know, why don't you love me? If you loved me you would give me people food. We think that before we got him he must have been a table scraps dog, because we can't make anything for ourselves without Buster following us around the kitchen with that look on his face.

You should see him frolic in the snow. It's so cute. He boings like a rabbit and then dives into it nose first. He runs around a path in the yard he made himself through the snow, then bounces right off it and grabs a mouthful of snow. Very cute.

Anyway, the reason I want to blog more is that I've been reading crochet blogs. There are people out there who crochet and/or knit as much as I do or more, and they blog about their projects, and they're really fun to read. And I have to have something to do on my downtime at work!

My diet is going really well. As of this morning I have lost 24 pounds! I can fit into my old jeans, except for zipping them up :) It's getting hard not being able to eat the stuff everyone else is eating, but I'm like a week and a half away from moving on to the next phase. In the next phase I can eat anything except starches and sugar, and that includes bacon! As much as I want. I do that for three weeks then gradually add carbs in over the next three weeks and then I can do another course if I want. I think I will do another, just the 23 day course, and lose the last 20 pounds, and then I'll be hot. And healthy, too!

Long Time and Li Again

I got so bored with having nothing interesting going on that it didn't seem worth it to post. So, here I am.

Li is here again. She just spent a few days with me and right now she is with her sister, and in a few days I will go pick her up again to take her to the airport in the morning. We watched movies and played games and made cheesecake, and went shopping down in Provo where we got to have dinner with Wil and Cate and Bill.

I am on this diet where I give myself a hormonal injection every day and eat a 500 calorie diet off a very specific list of foods. You're supposed to lose a pound every day, and it actually works! I thought it was a gimmick, but nope. I've lost 15 pounds, and I'm going to keep going. AWESOME.

The first few days of the diet you're supposed to eat as much junk as you can, so I invited Mim up to have a junk food/movie day. We watched 10th Kingdom, and she LOVED it! It was so much fun to watch something so hokey.

I was able to take a few days off of work to hang out with Li, and it was really nice. I was a little nervous to leave my boss alone for a few days, but I guess everything went off without a hitch. Very cool.

That's about it...not much else to add.