Something clicked this past week.  I’ve been complaining about how I’ve gained so much weight since my wedding (about 60 lbs in 15 months - OMG!) but I haven’t really been doing anything about it.  I half-heartedly worked with Dodi and a Personal Trainer for the month and a half leading up to her Wedding in September, but my heart wasn’t really in it and I didn’t make much progress… and any progress that I did make that that time has since been reversed.  I was my most terrible around Halloween - scarfing down candy all day long at work with no regard for the fact that the scale was heading in the wrong direction.

So I don’t know what did it, but something finally clicked.  I woke up on Monday morning and got on the Wii Fit right away and then was awesome all day recording everything that I ate and managed to stay within my calorie goals.  I’ve been using Gyminee off and on since January since it’s got a great iPhone optimized interface that allows me to look up nutritional info and exercises (and even view video demos!) on the go - and it’s free.  Yesterday, I got back on the Wii Fit in the morning and recorded my weight again - and I was down four pounds since Monday!  Now, being a former Weight Watchers girl, the four pound loss doesn’t “count” for me until I see that on Monday - it’s got to be a once a week weigh-in.  But I’m still excited.

Gyminee recently started challanges on their site.  I joined a “lose 15% weight by Thanksgiving” challange back in August, but, like I said, my heart just wasn’t in it.  Today, I started my own challange: Thin By 30.  I want to get back to my goal weight before my thirtieth birthday.  I’ve got 8 months to go and I need to lose 25% of my body weight to get back to my goal.  That’s about 1.7 lbs per week… which is ambitious but completely within the healthy range of 1 to 2 lbs a week.  So far, I’m the only one participating in my challange, but I encourage others to join!  The winner will get the “Vanquisher of Pounds” award for the most percentage of weight lost by my 30th birthday.

I’ve got a widget on a sidebar of my blog that will show my progress.  I’m feeling great that I’m finally getting back on track and I really hope that it sticks!

I put a new design on my site today.  Decided to take a simple DIY Wordpress Theme (created by the girl who did the bluebird blog template I was using before) and customize it a bit.  The Firebug Firefox add-on made playing around with the basic edits I did really simple, but I still ended up killing a few hours going back and forth on a few different designs.  I love the colors and the header image and the overall simplicity of the look.  I also love that it sort of reminds me of Christmas (the orbs in the header sort of look like ornaments to me) but then it also reminds me of nesting and spring, so this design might stick around for a while.  Weeee…

Alex thinks I’m crazy for spending hours doing crap like that.  I guess it looks like work to him.  Doesn’t feel like it to me.  It’s oddly fun.

Oh, and while I’m talking about fun little projects, I just have to share the Photoshop job I did for the “overview webinar” at work that incorporates our new logo:

I found a stock image of a magnifying glass and cut out the glass part of it into a new image.  I took our logo and spherized it and inserted it as a layer into the original magnifying glass.  Then, I brought back in the glass of the magnifying glass as a new layer that I made less opaque.  I think it looks awesome for a 10 minute Photoshop (much better than most of the graphics on our site ;)).  Well, actually, I wish that I’d spherized the logo more.  Ah well.  I wish I could find more excuses to do fun little projects like that at work instead of stupid boring managerial stuff. 

I get these “Playbill Club” emails with discount Broadway ticket offers and this morning I got one for Irving Berlin’s White Christmas on Broadway! I love the movie White Christmas, and so does my Wham so I forwarded her the email right away saying that we should totally go see it while she’s home. She emailed me back saying that she’s going to bug Dad to get them to come home early. Alex is even on board with going - he suggested that they spend the night in NYC when they fly in and we’ll come meet them the next day to walk around the city and see the show. I’m SO excited! I hope it works out!!!

We were walking down the stairs when suddenly my heel caught in the cuff of my jeans. I started to fall forward and thought that I’d catch myself, but that didn’t happen. Apparently, Larry thought that he’d catch me too, but unfortunately that didn’t work out either. Instead we both came crashing down the last three stairs to the middle landing. I landed on my left knee hard and Larry sort of landed on top of me. I say sort if because I think that he somehow cushioned the impact of my upper body because the only pain that I felt was in my left knee - and it HURT.

Larry immediately righted himself while I struggled to a sitting position. “Oh my God!” he yelled, “I tried to catch you and I fell on top of you!” I clutched at my knee and was doubled over laughing. In between crazy, Joker-like laughs and deep breathes to try and ward off the searing pain in my knee I tried to figure out if Larry was ok. It’s embarrassing enough to fall down the stairs, but to take someone with you? Horrific! Larry assured me that he was generally fine, but he’d crushed a finger and hit his shoulder. “Oh my God it hurst on the INSIDE” he exclaimed while gripping his finger. Which made me laugh more.

I laughed until the initial shock at falling wore off and I realized that I wasn’t seriously hurt or dead. But once that thought crossed my mind, I was overcome with a mild case of that other kind of shock. I got all pale and lightheaded and was pretty sure I’d faint. Larry brought me Advil and water and stayed sitting with me in the stairwell until reinforcements came.

Alex was working with Clifton Park ambulance and must have been on a call because he didn’t answer his phone or a text. Foster fortunately was able to drive me to the hospital and stay with me and get me home. He also was able to get in touch with Alex, who was super worried when he received my text that said I was going to the hospital.

Turns out I just bruised my knee very badly - nothing was broken, thank God. They wrapped my knee and gave me crutches and sent me home (after a few hours of waiting - it was busy there today!). I’ve kept it elevated, wrapped, and iced on and off tonight. It’s throbbing in pain again and I hope that the Advil PM Alex gave me not long ago kicks in soon. The bruising doesn’t look that bad right now, but then I always seem to be a late bloomer with bruises. I suck at walking with the crutches so I think I’ll just wrap it tight and pump the painkillers tomorrow so I can hobble around without the crutches tomorrow. Oh, and I’m totally going to use the creepy old elevator tomorrow at work.

I spent about an hour when I got home searching for a high res Wonder Woman logo and cutting it out in Pixelmator so that I had just the logo and no background. Then I went to Target and tried on every red tshirt I could find until I settled on one from the clearance rack (score!). Then I found big gold bangles to represent her wrist cuffs and a gold headband to stand in for her tiara (all of which were also on clearance (double score!)). I also was able to buy iron on paper at Target, but unfortunately, they only had iron on paper for light colored shirts. I bought it anyway, figuring that it couldn’t make that big of a difference.

I got home and printed out the logo I’d worked on earlier on plain paper first to test the color (needed to be brightened to stand up to the red shirt) and then printed it out on the iron on transfer paper. I very carefully cut the design out of the paper and the set up a workspace as dictated by the directions: no ironing boards, the tshirt laid out on a pillowcase on a hard flat surface at waist height. I lined up the logo on the top center of the tshirt and then thouroghly ironed it on. When the shirt was cooled down, I peeled off the backing.

The design stuck well on the tshirt, but since I could only find the transfer paper for light shirts and I was working with a red shirt, it didn’t look right. It looks vert faded, like I’ve had the shirt for years. I still like it, but I don’t know if it makes sense as a halloween costume now, since it’s not dramatic looking and looks like a regular tshirt. I don’t think that I’ll be able to find the dark tshirt iron-on paper anywhere around here before Friday and I’m pretty sure I have the last red shirt from the clearance rack, so I probably won’t be able to do it over and I’ll probably just wear it on friday anyway. Why not?

Also, creating my own custom shirt with an iron-on was hella easy and fun.

I’m not sure that Alex completely understands that about me yet. He gets frustrated that I “obsess” over things (ahem, baby) and I guess I’m not communicating to him what I need. I don’t NEED to get pregnant RIGHT NOW, but what I NEED is a PLAN to make sure that happens in a reasonable time frame. I unfortunately am not a person who can be content with a “someday” answer. “Someday” to me always sounds like a “No”. (It’s like that Jack Johnston song, Flake: “It seems to me that maybe, pretty much always means ‘no’.”) So when I get a “Someday” type answer, I tend to keep bringing the issue up until I’m content that we’ve established a plan to make the goal a reality.

I love to plan and to have something to look forward to (like, right now, it’s killing me to not have a countdown ticker to something on the side of my blog) and I tend to apply goals and plans to every aspect of my life. When I come into work, I always sit down first thing and figure out my goals and priorities for the day. Even on weekends, I sit down at my computer and figure out everything that I’d like to get done - all the chores and fun things - and create a to-do list for the weekend. I feel lost without a plan - chaotic.

Actually, I’m not sure that I even completely understood that about myself before I started writing this. I mean, I knew that I need a plan at work and when I sat down on weekends and wrote out a to-do list for myself I realized that it was not necessarily a normal action. But I didn’t ever apply that to why I obsess over bigger things, like our debt, getting a house, and having a baby. These are all things that we’ve had discussions over and that I’ve always found myself exclaiming at one point or another, “things don’t just happen, you have to make them happen!” So even though we’d have discussions about the big, important things and talk about what we wanted to do, I’d still leave the discussion feeling a bit dissatisfied. So that’s it. I guess I figured out what I need in life to be happy - a plan.

Oh goody. Now I get to go home and talk to Alex about all those lovely fun subjects again and harass a plan out of him. He probably deserves sainthood for putting up with me.

Just a little bored at work.

Ok, and a little obsessed.

Definitely creepy that the eyes move and the bottom lip is a little weird, but actually kind of cute…
Somehow less creepy than the kids that MakeMeBabies.com made for us:

Creepy, serious children.

Yeah….. back to work.