I DID IT!!!

See my winner's medallion on the right to find out what I'm talking about.

I'm exhausted - can I go to bed now, please?

Mixed emotions

I came to work this morning expecting to face a crisis - I broke our web server at the end of the day last Wednesday, which is pretty much the last thing you want to do before a holiday. Luckily, we were closed on Friday, and no one came in early this morning, so I got things fixed with no effect on staff. No harm, no foul, no crisis to face.

What I faced instead was an email in my Inbox: my 5-year certificate.

I turned 40 within a couple of weeks of starting here, so knowing that I'm about to turn 45 in a couple of weeks, you would think that I could do the math and figure out that my 5th anniversary had to be coming soon. But it took me totally by surprise.

Both a good surprise, and a not-so-good one.

I've done a lot of good work here in the past 5 years, and without any arrogance at all, I can say that the processes that work under the software I manage work better now than they did before I came. Things are more stable, and we have very little unscheduled downtime, like this morning when I had to fix the web server.

But my name still isn't on my door - and I'm still determined to leave before it gets posted there, if it ever does. My boss was totally not ready when I came 5 years ago, so the call never got made to put my name up. No one but me seems to notice.

It's emblematic of my tenure here - I am both essential and invisible.

The time has come to move on, if I can only figure out what I want to do next.

Welcome to my Monday.

Exhaustion

If you peer over at my NaNoWriMo widget, you'll see that I'm just a hint past the halfway mark for word count. I have 4 days left, and 25,000 more words to write.

Lucky for me that I have Friday off from work, and thus can write Thursday night until 11:59:59, if need be.

I still have no illusions that I will pull this off, but for the first time I have a faint hint of hope.

I'm exhausted, and my shoulders and forearms are stiff as hell (no worries, I've been stopping for stretch breaks), but I feel wonderful.

Plugging away

I went to the doctor on Wednesday for a checkup, and was thrilled to find that this Eat to Live thing is working. I weighed in at 188 in full clothing, including sneakers. That's the same weight I weighed in at on Monday morning, buck naked. Clearly I've made progress.

My blood pressure is also down significantly, down almost to a normal level.

So even though I've taken a detour for Thanksgiving and leftovers, I'm still doing my best to stick with the plan.

I'm also still working on NaNoWriMo, even though I managed to take over a week off, without really realizing it. That's not good. But as I type, I'm up to over 14,000 words, and I'm still going, so who knows? Maybe I'll make the deadline even so.

Detox is the pits ...

That's my only comment so far on Eat to Live. I know it's working, at least at some level, because I feel *off*. At least this headache isn't as bad as the caffeine detox one was ...

I feel blechy.

I'm sure my marriage vows didn't entail this ...

Hubby's been sick for about two weeks now, with a nasty ear infection and related miseries. I commented to him that it looks like he's lost some weight. His pants are definitely fitting more loosely.

I suggested to him that with a little bit of actual exercise, he could pretty easily get himself into decent shape.

This elicited a patented Hubby Eye Roll (tm), and he commented that since I was exercising now, and since we are still quite married, that he should get the benefit of half of my exercise.

Exercise averaging - funny, I don't remember that in my wedding vows ...

Jumping for joy

Yay! My copy of Vegan Lunch Box the cookbook arrived moments ago!

I've long since become addicted to VLB the blog, so when I found out Jennifer was selling a cookbook, I ran right over to buy a copy. What a treasure trove of good-for-you recipes - I can't wait to dig in!

Command center

This is where all the diet changes will happen:


The blender is for making smoothies for breakfast, taking care of some of my fruit servings for the day. The Magic Bullet (yes, I actually bought something from an infomercial - shhhh, don't tell anyone) is for making hummus, salsa, and salad dressings. The steamer is for veggies and for brown rice.

I know I've talked about this somewhere before, but I'm feeling a great urge to let some creativity out in the kitchen. I'm not a great cook; give me a good recipe, and I can make something acceptable. What's appealing to me in this diet is that if I want to (and I do), I can take total control over what I eat. I can know what went into each bite that goes into my mouth.

It's very empowering.

NaNoWriMo update

I'm making slow progress, as you can see from the widget on the right. So even though I'm waaaaay behind, I am making progress.

Tonight I dug through what remains of my writing files from 10 years ago, and found that my previous longest piece had been 25 pages and 5,700 words. So this novel is my personal best length ever.

See me, doing a little victory dance ... :)

Sea change

Where I work, there is a wonderful cafeteria, with an amazing variety of food choices. It's rare that I can't find something there that appeals to me.

The problem is that even though there are almost always very healthy choices to be had, I often get distracted by the choices that are not so good. I go in for oatmeal, and come out with a doughnut, or end up with a grilled cheese when I went in for salad and veggie chili.

The longer and harder I thought about it, the more I realized that if I'm going to make a go of eating healthily and finally losing all this weight, I was going to have to bring all my food with me everyday.

Having made this realization, and having read the amazing Eat to Live success story over at full of veggies, I've decided to gear up to really do EtL. As a start tonight, I roasted a head of cauliflower (recipe from A Veggie Venture). I tossed it in some Masala Simmer Sauce from Trader Joe's. Oh my, but that was good.

I'm going to spend this week doing some practice cooking and playing around with some recipes, and then I'll start on Sunday 11/19.

I know you all are probably sick of hearing me talk about starting diets, and I almost didn't post this because I'm sick of hearing myself on this subject. I don't know whether I'll keep posting about my progress, if any. But as the year draws near to a close, and I've made no progress at all on this front, I'm feeling the need to move forward.

Even if it is just so I stop repeating myself ...

I'm a-pickin' - but he ain't grinnin'

Recently for some reason I've been thinking a lot about family rituals.

Most of the rituals with my parents related to food or TV.

We used to take a Sunday drive, often in the rural parts of PG County, just to see what was there.

We also used to often go out to dinner on Sunday, and sometimes combined the drive with the dinner. One of our favorite places to go was the long-defunct Moon Palace restaurant in DC. I think it was on Wisconsin Ave. somewhere, but I don't remember for sure. My favorite memories of driving there were during the late 60s when there were still hippies roaming in DC. We would often drive through Georgetown to get to the restaurant, and the hippie guys used to infuriate my dad. "Are you a little boy or are you a little girl?" That sarcastic chant accompanied many of our trips.

But most of our rituals revolved around TV. We watched golf and 60 Minutes on Sundays. We watched Star Trek re-runs during the week during dinner. God help me, we watched Hee Haw.

This latter fact was something Hubby had apparently never managed find out about me, until this summer. One evening I was in my usual position on the living room sofa, channel surfing, and he happened to sit down as I passed some station that was showing Hee Haw reruns. "What was that?" he asked as I zipped past the station. Without thinking, and without even taking a moment to act like I wasn't sure, I replied, "Oh, that was Hee Haw." He glanced over at me with a look of horror.

How awful it must be to discover after nearly 21 years of marriage that you're married to a woman who can identify Hee Haw in one note. Poor guy. Who knew that an innocent family ritual could wreak such havoc down through the years ...

The strength of internal voices

Here it is, only the 5th day of NaNoWriMo, and already I'm fighting my internal editor.

I was careful to sit her down well in advance of this month to tell her how this was going to go, and to remind her that there were no polished gems going to drop from my fingers onto the page. Not this month. We could get to that later, and she could have her fun when the month was over.

Oh, but I'd forgotten how short her memory is. Already, I'm hearing from her: You're writing drivel.

We talked about this, remember? I'm supposed to be writing drivel. This is about word count, nothing else.

No, but you're really writing drivel. I didn't agree to any of this. It's so painful, I'm going to SCREAM!

And so it goes. I'm sticking with it, even if she does scream. Hopefully, she'll do it in my dreams, and sleep while I'm writing. I refuse to be bound to her desires anymore. We'll get through this together, o Internal Editor, and you will see my truth as I've lived yours all these years.

Wish you were here

My brain is severely broken, and let me tell you why:

Here I am, innocently shopping for fruit in the local Giant on a relatively quiet Sunday morning, when suddenly the background music snaps into sharp focus.

Pink Floyd. Wish You Were Here. On a Sunday morning. In Giant.

And not even a Muzak version, which would have make a little more sense.

No, the real thing. There to scare the normals half out of their wits, could they but hear it.

One of my favorite songs, but not my choice of grocery shopping music.

That snapping sound you hear is my brain.

Presidential words

Fascinating site here: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. Take a look at the current president's word cloud, then move the slider back in time to see how the words change.

And yes ...

Yes, I should be writing. I'm waiting for Hubby to get home so we can get started together.

I've also noticed that my blog is slow to load today. It's the NaNoWriMo widget. Their site is, not surprisingly, r-e-a-l-l-y slow today. Please be patient - soon there will be a word count to justify your patience.

Godless money

De-god your money (link originally from Boing Boing)