You may recall how traumatic I generally find clothes shopping–and shoe shopping. I hate it. It’s so hard to find anything that fits me properly, is flattering, and is to my taste. However, Tim has found for me in the past twenty-four hours two pairs of black sandals, two pairs of shorts, and the crown jewel of his achievement, a swimsuit. That fits, is modest enough for me, and even looks good. And it didn’t take two weeks of tearing out my hair trying to find it. There was no frustration at all. I almost… enjoyed it. What a weird feeling.

A round of applause for Tim, ladies and gentlemen.

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I will drink water with my meals as much as possible, and carry a water bottle with me when out and about. If I have a drink other than water with my meal, I will supplement it with water.

I am a silly, silly person. Tim reminded me last night that he owns a Camelbak. I don’t need to carry around a water bottle; I just have to remember to sip off the water he’s already carrying.

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Vacation is coming up quickly now. Just two and a half more work days this week and three next week, and then I’m off work. While I’m looking forward to it, the part of me that’s been struggling to stick to the diet is dreading it. Vacations are a very tough time to be on a diet; I’m eating out a lot, I’m away from my usual tracking tools, and I’m in a “just relax and have fun, forget about it” sort of mindset. Which is OK as far as it goes, but then when I get back I feel awful about how much I’ve ignored all the healthy habits I’ve worked so hard to try to build.

Well, that’s rather self-defeating, isn’t it? It leads to “I know I’m going to mess up, so screw it, I’ll just eat whatever the hell I feel like”. Which leads to guilt and remorse. I’ve tried, before, to set goals about avoiding excess and deep-fried foods and whatever, but I always wind up failing. I was reading this article on SparkPeople about “Goals That Help, Goals That Hurt”, and it points out that part of my problem may simply be how I’m phrasing my goals. Negative phrasing promotes negative thinking, which leads to failure. I also suspect I’ve been too general in the past. “Eat healthier” is a lot looser and easier to slide on than “choose grilled or steamed items over deep-fried”, for example.

So I’m going to set some goals for vacation that are worded in specific, positive terms, in hopes that this will help me stick to them a little better:

• When we’re packing snacks for the road, I will be sure to include something healthy (fresh or dried fruit/veg, multigrain chips, etc.).
• I will choose grilled or steamed foods over deep-fried.
• I will drink water with my meals as much as possible, and carry a water bottle with me when out and about. If I have a drink other than water with my meal, I will supplement it with water.
• I will make a conscious effort to make food choices that involve a variety of foods and include fruits and vegetables.
• I will eat reasonably-sized portions.
• If I make an unhealthy choice, I will accept it, move on, and do better next time.

This is the sort of thing that I might normally post on my SparkPeople blog, because I sort of feel like I’m babbling too much about my diet sometimes here. I know, though, that some of the people going on this trip with me read this blog, and by posting it here I’ve told them about my intentions. Even if they never say anything about it while we’re traveling, that still gives me some sense of accountability; I’ve told people, now I have to live up to it.

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It’s time for more baby pictures! We’re doing them a little differently now, though.

Here’s where you want to go:
http://qnarf.zenfolio.com

When not logged in, you should just have to click on Natalie’s Public Gallery at the top to see the public images. We’re going to be keeping about 10-20 pictures at a time posted there. Right now, there are a few older pictures, and I just posted some from a “photo shoot” I did with Natalie on our front lawn, some miscellaneous adorable shots, and a photo of my very first Mother’s Day presents.

There are more of the newer shots, as well as a substantial archive of Natalie pictures (and, as we get them uploaded, the rest of our pictures too), in a private section that is not visible to the public. If you want access to these, what you need to do is create a free Zenfolio account (click on “Log In” to go to the place where you can do this) and then e-mail Tim or myself your username so that we can add you to the list of people allowed access to those photos. I know this is maybe a little bit inconvenient for our family and close friends, but lately we’re realizing we need to be more cautious about how much of Natalie’s pictures we put up for public consumption. This allows us to share those images with you easily over the web while still being able to exercise some control over who gets access. We hope you’ll understand.

I also hope that some of you will understand if you ask to be added and are denied. It’s nothing personal; we still like you and trust you and all that. The private area is really intended just for family and close friends, though, so we’re being kind of picky about who we give access to.

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This should’ve been blogged some time ago, and never made it. Tim and I tend to watch movies on “date night”, and not too long after the Oscars we wound up with a couple of this year’s nominees. IIRC we watched Atonement one date night and No Country For Old Men the next.

Atonement surprised me by totally living up to the hype. It was a good story, well-scripted, well-directed, well-dressed, and… ye gods, the cinematography. Visually, this thing is gorgeous, and not just because it has pretty people like Kiera Knightley and James McAvoy in it. The photography is absolutely stunning. The ending I thought worked relatively well, although I’ve heard complaints that it pales in comparison to the novel on which the movie is based.

No Country For Old Men… Sort of didn’t. It was OK, I guess, but… I suppose not to my taste. I didn’t feel like I really got it. I mean, I got it enough to tell that it was supposed to be a movie that focused on examining the characters involved. It did something, though, which drives me absolutely batshit crazy when it happens in any media. When its purpose was accomplished and it had shown us what it needed to of the characters, it just sort of dropped the plot without wrapping anything up. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you’re going to use a plotline to carry your point, you must wrap up the plot. Don’t just wad it up and throw it away when you’re done with it. Follow through. Maybe it’s just not my kind of movie, but I have a hard time seeing the Best Picture win here.

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For those of you following Joss Whedon’s new project:
First Peek at Whedon’s Killer Dolls

I have to admit, I’m kind of looking forward to this. (I was going to say, here, that it’s hard to go wrong with Eliza Dushku, and then I remembered Tru Calling, which apparently a lot of people liked but I thought was horribly stupid and contrived. OK, but that wasn’t her fault, right?) I don’t consider myself a hardcore Joss fan or anything–I’ve never managed to get beyond the fourth season of Buffy or the third of Angel (and still haven’t quite finished Firefly, but that’s lack of time rather than motivation)–but what I’ve seen, I’ve really enjoyed.

I think it was really Firefly that made Joss for me, if you want to get right down to it. Well, Serenity; I saw it first, which is out of order but had its advantages. I’d seen plenty of Buffy and Angel by that point, and liked it well enough, but just kind of in passing, I guess. Then I saw Serenity, and… it absolutely took my breath away. Which naturally led to my running off to see the series, which I also loved. And need to watch the last three episodes of, but again, time. So much to watch, so little time, and so much of it is on the DVR where it must go bye-bye if we don’t watch it, or is current TV so we’ll wind up getting spoilers if we wait too long… So it tends to win out over DVDs and such. We’ll get there eventually.

So, anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing what other stuff Joss has up his sleeve outside of the Buffyverse. I just hope it doesn’t get axed after those seven episodes (or less!) have been run through. If Fox can keep from mismanaging it the way they did Firefly, though…

(Have I already blogged Dollhouse and Joss? I can’t remember…)

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I haven’t given an update on my progress as regards my spring goals here for a while. Guess I might as well do that now.

The first one was to lose ten pounds this season (with five more left to go after that until I hit my overall goal). As detailed in my earlier post, I’ve run into a little bump in the road, but I’m dealing with it and hopefully I’ll get back on track. In the meantime, I’ve lost five of those ten pounds.

The second was putting together a basic outline for a novel that was not my big project. I surprised myself by getting this one done already, actually. I also have a longer-term plan for taking it from a bare-bones outline to, perhaps, a NaNoWriMo 2008 attempt. Maybe. If I’m still feeling insane by November. The whole thing is very blah and probably more than a bit cliche, but that’s really not the point here. The point right now is to just get a plan for something, anything, laid out, and I’m doing that.

The third involved learning Web database stuff. I’m sorry to say I haven’t really made any progress here. Too much to do, too little time.

The fourth was to read one book per month. I managed it in March, but failed utterly in April. I have a good start on May’s book, but I need to make more progress if I expect to finish it by the end of the month. In all fairness, though, my recent audiobook selections are not at all what I had in mind when I specified that audiobooks didn’t count, so I’m not too awfully worried about April’s failure or the possibility of May’s.

The fifth and final one was to find a way to deal with my low energy levels that didn’t involve caffeine. Amazingly enough, I’ve actually completed this goal as well. I spoke about it in an earlier post; I’ve got a pretty good handle on what I need to do with my diet, activity levels, and hydration in order to keep myself going through the day. Sticking to it is difficult, especially on days when I’m not just working alone at my desk all day, but I know what needs done, and that was the point of the goal.

Two out of five with a bit more than a month to go ain’t bad.

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I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while and have just never gotten around to it…

Some time ago, Sarah Kathryn pointed me toward LibriVox. At LibriVox, volunteers record public-domain works in digital audio format, which is then offered for free download. Their catalog is of course not on par with a retail site like Audible, but they do have quite a selection and a nice range. And coincidentally, there are a lot of the type of books I was talking about in my entry about Nietzsche, the kind I’ve always meant to read and never have. So I thought I’d give it a try.

The one thing that sort of worried me off the bat was that although these are technically audiobooks, being books recorded in audio format, they are not in a proper “audiobook” format. They’re MP3s. The major difference here, to me, is that audiobook-format files are bookmarkable. If I’m playing one on my iPod and I feel like going off and listening to music for a while, the Pod will be able to keep my place in the book. Not so with MP3s; I have to either just keep going to the end of the file, or lose my place. It turns out, though, that with the proper tools (and, in my case, a husband who knows how), you can convert the MP3s into one big bookmarkable file, so it’s all good.

The other thing that I was a little wary of was the way the books are recorded. There are some books that were read all the way through by the same person, but generally each reader records a chapter here and a chapter there, so you get several different voices over the course of a novel. I was afraid this might be a little jarring, but actually it’s not particularly. (At least, I haven’t found it to be so far.)

I’m also pretty excited about the poetry and shorter works that they offer. Each poem or short story is its own file–so I could make a playlist of Emily Dickinson, for example, and just put it on shuffle and let it go. I’ve already done this with a bunch of Beatrix Potter stories that I play in the car sometimes when bringing Natalie home from daycare. (The car ride is about right for one story, generally.) It’s a pretty neat concept, to me, to be able to do that, and there I think is where breaking the works up to record them and putting them in MP3 format is going to work really well. Longer stuff I’ll still get Tim to convert for me (unless he wants to show me how to do it myself, because I’ve got quite a few books downloaded and on my to-download list), but the shorter stuff I think I’ll leave just the way it is.

(Another neat feature, though I’m not personally using it: Each book has a podcast feed that will give you a chapter a day. In addition, LibriVox’s “Books” podcast is published three times a week, each installment being one chapter of whatever book they happen to be going through at the moment.)

All in all, I’m very pleased with it so far, and I have high hopes for the rest of the books I’d like to read from their catalog. Definitely go check it out.

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I’ve been having some trouble lately with keeping my weight loss going. It’s been a couple of weeks since I lost a pound, and I don’t know if I really expect it at tomorrow morning’s weigh-in or not. I’m not gaining, but I’m not losing either.

I had attributed this to the bits of “cheating on the diet” I’ve done here and there, more than usual, lately. Sweets, big portions of stuff, fatty foods instead of healthier alternatives, that kind of thing. I don’t tend to track on the weekends, and I thought there was extra in there that was catching up with me. Then I realized something.

I’ve been using SparkPeople’s recommendations for calorie intake, and I’ve noticed that it adjusts as I get lighter. I’m losing faster than it had expected me to, so I have less to lose over the same period of time, so I can eat more and still reach my goal. Except… It’s got my goal set all the way out at September 12. When I set that goal, my vision of the situation was that 9/12 was an absolute drop-dead extreme, an easy goal to reach, and that I’d probably get down to my goal weight well before that. SparkPeople, though, takes me at my word and calculates calorie intake and such to put me at 180 on 9/12 and not a week before. And that’s why my weight loss has slowed down.

I’ve reset my goal on SP to Natalie’s first birthday, July 30. Suddenly I have about 250 less calories in each day than I did before. It’ll be good to get back to losing a pound a week again, which is what I’d intended in the first place, but it’s sort of depressing to see that chunk of food intake go out the window. I’d adjusted fairly well to the higher levels, and now I have to reassess everything to make room again. Sigh.

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OK, just in this first week, the CSA is definitely living up to expectations. Here’s this week’s portion:

• One bunch asparagus (the source for this got left off the list somehow; I suspect either Heartland Family Farm or New Growth Gardens)
• One bag watercress from Heartland Family Farm
• One bag “spicy greens” mix from New Growth Gardens (no link available that I could find)
• One bunch spring garlic also from New Growth
• About half a pound of oyster mushrooms from Steve Spencer (I think that link’s right), but that’s not the bestest part:
• One pint of delicious fresh 100% pure maple syrup from Hanner Sugarbush

We’re already into “Iron Chef Our Kitchen” territory, because we have no idea what to do with most of that. But it all looks and smells so good, and we’ll figure it out. I already have a start on it; I’m having a CSA lunch! It’s my semi-regular beans-and-rice day, and I needed something to do with them beyond just plain old beans and rice. So I chopped up some of the mushrooms and a little bit of the garlic (which looks a lot like spring onions, but thinner and… garlickier) in some butter, and then tossed in some of the spicy greens long enough to wilt them. I also packed some watercress with a little light dressing of rice vinegar and sesame oil for my daily veg, just to see what it tasted like. We’ll see how all that comes out.

Outside of that, it sounds like Tim’s thinking of using the rest of the mushrooms in some pasta sauce and baking some maple cookies. I think the spicy greens we can cook up and freeze after cooking; they’re really hardy, stood up to the cooking really well, and actually I’m thinking they may be the sort of greens that have better texture cooked anyway. The garlic could be used in just about anything for flavor. The asparagus we might wind up with tonight as a side dish. I’ve got no clue on the watercress, though.

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