house 3 Comments

Grown-Up Toys

Yesterday, Aaron and I spent our tax return on a new Whirlpool washer from Appliance Center. It was delivered today, and is now swishing happily next to our 20-year-old Maytag dryer.

No more trips to the Reynolds Laundromat on Sunday evenings! Not that I didn’t enjoy my times there — the staff were always friendly, and the washers always worked as expected (as long as I didn’t overfill them), and there was only one time in the past year that the place was too busy for me to comfortably do my laundry.

So, thanks, Reynolds Laundromat, for hosting my weekly washings… but I’m good to go from now on.

I feel all domestic.

weight loss 1 Comment

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #10

Good news! I’m continuing my weight-loss trend. I’m down one more pound this week, to 208.5! This is my lowest weight since… *checks Excel chart* …well, since Thanksgiving. Holy crap.

Did two of my three PUSH workouts so far this week. I’ve still got today, though. Starting next week, I move on to Workout #2. Yay! I still haven’t managed to get my 100 minutes of cardio in, and I know that’s a major part of why I haven’t had quicker results. I do still walk every day for 30-40 minutes during my lunch break, although that doesn’t really count as cardio.

Last weekend, Aaron and I found the motherlode of low-carb goodies at Big Lots, so I’ve been incorporating shakes and bars into my diet. I still haven’t been getting up early enough to make that breakfast burrito that’s been calling my name (although I have managed to get to work on time two out of five days this week). So, breakfast continues to be oatmeal, because I can toss the ingredients into a Rubbermaid container, then add water and nuke at work. Morning snackie is one Slim-Fast low-carb shake. Lunch is pasta (yes, reduced-carb, but not always “low-carb,” and never that soy crap) and chicken or tuna. Afternoon snackie is a Slim-Fast low-carb meal replacement bar (and sometimes a CarboRite peanut butter cup right after my walk). Dinner is baked chicken and a salad, usually, or a couple of wraps with ham and lettuce and reduced-fat Hellmann’s (we ran out of Vegenaise).

This weekend, I’m hoping to make a pilgrimage to Claudia’s Whole Foods store to get some yummy health food. Almonds (OMG, those are hard to find with no oil in them!), whole-wheat English muffins (those would be yummy with some natural PB in the morning), crunchy natural PB (because the cheap brand of smooth PB I got last time isn’t all that), vanilla whey protein (for making my *own* shakes), Vegenaise, Annie’s Naturals salad dressings, maybe some more cold cereal, stuff like that.

Adam from Burning Twenty had a recipe early on in his podcast for an apple-flavored protein shake, so I’m hoping to get the ingredients for that this weekend. Sounds yummy.

What’s the next step? I WANT MY BREAKFAST BURRITO, GODDAMMIT! I *will* wake up early enough at least *once* this week to make myself a damn breakfast burrito. Scrambled eggs (one whole, one white), a little Colby-Jack cheese, maybe some ham, maybe a little lettuce, definitely some salsa, and a wheat tortilla. Gonna be so good. Mmm.

Apart from that, I’m looking forward to moving on to the next workout on my PUSH DVD, and I’ll try the cardio workout again. Maybe I was just in a mood the one day I tried it last week.

Next weekend is the Anime Punch convention in Columbus. I need to plan ahead for potential evil eating. Maybe I’ll bring a resistance band and do some working out in the hotel room, or maybe I’ll make a concerted effort to step up the cardio this week. No matter how I deal with it, I will NOT let this weekend screw up my progress thus far.

gardening

Germination, Continued

I’ll spare you the continued pictorial of the baby plantlings, but I did want to share their ongoing march toward being full-fledged seedlings.

The score so far: Hollyhocks have two tallish sprouts, and two are just starting to pop. Lemon Basil is slow going, with two seeds just barely starting to grow. Sweet Basil has had the lead until today, with all six pellets having good (if still small) growth, and two pots having two sprouts apiece. Parsley isn’t budging yet; that’s OK, though, because it still has to make a few more visits to hell before it’ll start to grow for real. The catnip has been the come-from-behind sleeper hit, though, with five of the six pellets having at least one plant, and most having two or three. This is a recent development — as in, the catnip grew a quarter inch *today*.

I’ve propped open one corner of the lid of my mini-greenhouse, to improve circulation amongst the almost-seedlings. Some of my hollyhocks have a white fungus starting to grow, which I understand is commonly known as damping-off disease. Supposedly, improving circulation should help, as should misting the seedlings with a peroxide solution. We’ll see how that goes. For now, I’m just propping the lid to see if that makes any improvement.

I’m documenting all of this mainly so I can look back later this spring and summer and remember that there was a point at which I was actually growing things, instead of just neglecting and killing them.

[Andrea? Do you have any hippie gardening nuggets of wisdom to share?]

memories 3 Comments

The Joys of Home Ownership

Granted, this particular joy isn’t limited to only homeowners, but… I just got to clean up after my very first completely overflowing toilet! Yaye! 😛

I mean, I knew I had taken a pretty dense crap, but jeez.

I’d never actually experienced the kind of clogged toilet that actually overflows onto the bathroom tile. It’s like one of those slow-motion “Ohhhhh nooooo…” moments. I managed to keep the rug from getting completely soaked, and the overflow was luckily *not* completely nasty toilet water.

Still, though… spending quality time re-mopping the bathroom floor was not fun.

(As a side note, I had a particularly memorable bad dream when I was maybe four or five years old about the toilet overflowing and filling up the bathroom to my armpits. While I mopped this evening, I recalled that bizarre nightmare, and how I and my dream-friend saved ourselves from being swept away or drowned by pulling out straws and drinking the overflow water. I was a weird kid.)

gardening, photos 1 Comment

Growing Things

This weekend, I drug Aaron out with me to purchase some planting supplies — most notably, a seed starting kit. I’d purchased several packets of seeds last year, and decided that this is the year I start my own plants from seed.

I ended up starting five plants each of hollyhocks, lemon basil, sweet basil, parsley, and catnip. Well, each peat pellet pot has two or three seeds in it, but they’ll be thinned to one per pot, so we’ll just say it’s five plants apiece.

I’ve never done this before, so I had no idea how peat pellets worked. It is SO COOL. They start out as little flat discs. You water them with warm water, and poof! They become little miniature biodegradable pots! How cool is that?

And what’s cooler? My hollyhocks and my basil are already starting to germinate, after only two days. There are little, pale green stems curling up out of the soil. I opened up the lid of my mini-greenhouse, and it smells like those bean sprouts we planted in first grade. *squee*

So, what’s my diabolical plan? Well, I’m planning to plant the hollyhocks close to the fence that borders the neighbors. This will hopefully act as a bit of a privacy screen, as I understand that hollyhocks can grow pretty tall. Beside the hollyhocks, farther away from the fence, I’m hoping to plant one or two of the potted Rose of Sharon bushes/twigs I’ve been trying not to kill for the past two years. I’m hoping to manage this in a way that doesn’t complicate Aaron’s lawn-mowing mojo.

In the NE corner of the backyard, I’m planning to plant a little herb garden, with my basil and catnip and parsley and maybe some store-bought plants. There’s a decent little patch of sunshine by the fence and the gate, so hopefully I can nestle a little corner of herbalicious goodness there — and, again, not complicate Aaron’s lawn-mowing mojo. I’m hoping that my strategy will reduce the amount of edging for me to neglect.

As much as I’m tempted to go buy myself a nice climbing rose, I know I should hold off. I’ve already just about killed one rosebush from neglect; I don’t need to continue my murderous rampage of flora until I can take care of what I’ve already planted. Plus, goodness knows how much I’ll be able to take care of any of this once we pop out a kid. I can’t help but assume that infant care and gardening are not particularly compatible.

But that’s not for some time yet. For now, I’ll be content in watching my baby plants germinate and make condensation inside their little greenhouse.