back to real life

It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve been home alone with the kids while Jason worked.

 Jag had half a day on the 14th, which also happened to be the day his Aunt Sara came into town for a weekend visit.  At the last minute, the kids and I hopped into the car and followed her home to Orlando to surprise my Mom.  Poor Mom had been so down about not seeing the kids since April, and especially not seeing them around the holidays.  The surprise was awesome.  There’s video of it on my dropshots account, if you have that link.  I think it’s on my Elsewhere page, if not I’ll come back and link it in the comments of this entry.

So anyway, we were in Orlando for the whole week.  Got home Friday night (drove the entire 9.5 hours with 2 kids all by myself - go me!!), then Saturday morning Jason’s Dad came in for a weekend visit.  Jason was off work Sat, Sun, Mon, Tue and Wednesday.  So today is his first day back to work, and therefore my first day back to real life in *counting on fingers* two weeks!  Eeep!

So far so good, Jag’s only been sent to his room once so far, and Kat’s already down for her nap.

For those of you who watch my flickr stream, I’ve mentioned briefly in my private photos but I’ll mention it here as well for those who don’t have access - I took all my kids and family photos private last week.  Honestly, the orkut thing never really bothered me much.  It was just annoying.  But then I had a large, nationwide builder steal my photos, make and frame prints, and hang them in their model homes - all without asking and without paying for them.  They were my personal, family photos - photos of the kids, of me and Jason, even of my Mom and her husband.  That really upset me.  I’m still dealing with that.  And then I was alerted to a flickr account last week where someone had stolen and used pics of Jag in their stream.  That was pretty much the last straw.  All along I’ve been very aware that this sort of thing could happen, and I took the orkut stuff in stride.  But I just got tired of worrying about it.  Tired of wondering who else was stealing my pictures that hadn’t been caught yet.  Flickr’s not as much fun when you keep everything private, but I feel good about my decision.  Maybe later down the road when there’s not much activity on my stream, I can start sharing publicly again and keep a low profile so as to not attract the thieves.

In the meantime, I will still share some here because the general public on flickr does not know about this blog.  I’ve got a smaller number of people checking in, and yes I’m googable, but I’m just not as easily found here.  However, there will always be more shared for family and friends on flickr.  If you are reading and would like access, and you aren’t a weirdo thief, then leave a comment here with the link to your flickr stream and I’ll add you as a friend.  (or you can flickr mail me if you’d feel more comfortable)

Moving on… lots of other stuff going on too.  For instance, we cancelled our Costa Rica trip.  No fun, eh?  Two reasons.  One, Kat is still nursing, and recently she’s picked up the nursing a good bit (not really sure why)… we don’t feel good about the idea of weaning her for a vacation since she’s only 19 months old.  And two, we decided that although we’d love to go to Costa Rica one day, we’d rather go to Peru first.  And March isn’t the time to go to Peru.  We’ll have to schedule that for another time, maybe next year during the summer months.  So now we’re trying to figure out what we’ll do with our March time.  Jag has 3 weeks off school for spring break, and I refuse to sit home those entire three weeks.  I’m thinking of maybe renting a cabin in Maggie Valley for a week and inviting my family to come stay with us (hopefully Jason could make it too, but we recently found out that one of his employees might be leaving soon so we’re not counting on it - I guess another good reason we decided against Costa Rica, eh?)

This is getting long.  I still have plenty more to say but I’m sure nobody wants to read it all in one entry, so hopefully I’ll remember to post more later.  Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and you have a Happy New Year!

Oh, a couple of pics!

 

maybe protein is the answer

Last week, I fired up the old SparkPeople account and started logging my food and exercise again (I started way back when I was trying to lose the weight from Kat’s pregnancy).  As I’ve mentioned before, my exercise routine isn’t about losing weight, but I thought maybe it would help to get a good look at the food I’m using the fuel my body.

All I can say is, bleh.  My eating has really gotten out of hand.  I think my biggest problem is that I’m not consistent.  I don’t always eat 3 meals a day.  Sometimes I get busy and let myself skip a meal.  Sometimes I eat way too much (like the two full bowls of cereal I had for a snack yesterday) and sometimes I don’t eat enough.  Sometimes I don’t drink enough water.  Sometimes I drink one too many beers in the evenings.  Lots of things I can see wrong with my eating habits. 

One thing I noticed over the last several days is that I’m not getting enough protein.  I know protein is an important fuel.  I wonder if this is part of the reason I’m sluggish during the day.  Yesterday, for the first time since I’ve started tracking food again, I finally fell into the appropriate range for protein (the days before I was way below) and today?  I feel great!  Maybe it’s in my head?  Hehe.

I think I’ll start making an effort to eat more protein and see if this continues.  I’m already in the appropriate range for today after having scrambled eggs for breakfast and leftover pork chops for lunch.  I need to do some research and see what other high protein foods I can have on hand, because I know that after about a week I’ll be sick of eggs.  Hrm, maybe sausage!

In other news, I DVR’ed Kathy Griffin on Larry King last night.  For those who don’t know, I’m a huge Kathy Griffin fan.  I watch all her D List episodes, I DVR all her comedy specials.  I love that she’s outrageous and outspoken… Jason’s so surprised at my love for her, considering how crude she is, and how I’m so NOT like that.  Maybe that’s why I like her so much, she says all the things I wish deep down I could.  ANYWAY, I think it rocks she got an Emmy and all that - but the exciting part is that she’s on tour and she’s going to be at the Bob Carr in Orlando in January.  I MUST GO!!  I’m emailing with Jason right now trying to work it out.  I need someone to go with me - anyone in Orlando want to go see Kathy Griffin??  Email me! 

this blog and some other stuff

So I made a blog change.  It’s not huge, in fact it shouldn’t really be too noticeable to most (especially since there are only like 3 people reading - hullo, 3 readers!).  I had set up a WordPress blog through my host, and honestly?  It sucked.  I had very limited customizing options and I had limited access to stats.  SO, I switched to a WordPress hosted blog with a much more feature-rich version of the interface and just forwarded my domain to here for now.  You three readers can change your bookmarks, or not.  I’m not getting rid of the domain name so I’ll keep it forwarded, I hope to eventually install something on my own server myself, but until I find the time, this will work.  (NOTE:  I just realized that if you read me through something like Google reader, you will have to switch to the new url - sorry ’bout that!)

Not totally crazy about the template but I haven’t taken the time to look through them all yet or see about the customizable ones so it’ll do.  It’s SO MUCH better than the last one though!

I seem to have lost my blogroll in the move though, and didn’t think to save it all before deleting the old blog, so I’ll need to make some time to sit down and redo it.

On to other news…

We spent Labor Day weekend in Atlanta.  We got it in our heads that we needed to get away, so we sat down at the last minute and booked it all.  It was a really fun time, but completely exhausting.  I learned after the first full day that while I’m okay weight-wise, I’m not exactly fit.  My endurance sucks and if I don’t start working on it soon, I’m going to be in a world of hurt for our big vacatoin next spring.

Did I mention our big vacation next spring?  I think I might have said we were thinking about it, but it’s pretty definite now… Costa Rica!  Kid-free!  Woohoo!!  Lots of hiking, kayaking, zip-lining, etc, so I really need to get in shape!  I’m going to have Jason drag the elliptical machine back in from the garage as soon as he has a few free minutes (the poor man is non-stop lately) and when the weather starts to cool off, I’ll be able to do bike-rides and walks with Kat.  That’s the start of my plan.  I’ll do that for a couple of months and see how it goes before I take it any further.  I’ll try to keep note of my progress here as I go.  In fact, I’ll add a new catagory for it.  Oh, and one for my travel notes too.

I’ll close with a few of my Atlanta shots.  I rented the Canon 10-22 for a week.  Love love love that lens.

    

    

    

Not finished processing yet, but this is the bulk of what I’m putting online.  You can see the rest here:  Atlanta - Labor Day Weekend 2007.