Resolutions - schmesolutions

Okay - I don't really mean that - I've made great resolutions, and I expect to at least strive towards them, but change is HARD! And making excuses is EASY!

For instance, I totally have no excuse to not walk Jasper EVERYDAY. The truth is, he loves his walks; I love his walks. The problem is, I just haven't made it enough of a priority to actually do it most days.  Okay - to hit the three-days-a-week goal, I still have three days to get in two walks, so it is certainly possible, and I will try very much to hit it, but . . . Well, let's be realistic, right?

The writing I'm doing a fairly good job on - even if my "novel" hasn't gotten any longer, I have been writing here pretty much every day - which does, in fact, count. And I expect to keep this up - really.

So - here goes the rest -


food for today -

• Breakfast





• egg salad (two eggs)
• 10ish Triscuits (Triscuits always make me think of Sandy Duncan who always makes me think of Michelle Marckwardt - I'm not sure what the connection is there, but it's a strong one:)(And after Googling it, it appears that Sandy hawked Wheat Thins, not Triscuits - my childhood is full of these kind of mix-ups!)
• Hot tea
• Lunch 
• oops - forgot to eat this meal!
• Snack 
• A bunch of delicious fresh tortilla chips left at home by Eric before he went back to college
• Supper
• New York Strip Steak - RARE!
• Cottage Cheese
• "Snack"
• A bottle of Chardonnay (YIKES! At least it was the cheap stuff!)

spending for today

• About $17 dollars on groceries (including steak and cottage cheese:)

Well, Poop

Didn't have time to write yesterday - so:

food for yesterday:

• Breakfast
• two pieces peanut butter and jelly on whole grain sourdough toast
• glass of skim milk
• hot tea
• Lunch (this will be a big surprise:)
• chef salad (with chicken this time:)
• fruit salad (yummy yummy)
• chocolate milk
• Snack
• LOTS of baby carrots
• apple
• Supper
• taco salad
• "Snack"
• bottle Blue Moon Winter Abby Ale
• two pints of Coal Stoker's Blackberry Ale
• bottle of Fat Tire Amber Ale

spending for yesterday:

• $1 for the Tooth Fairy
• $18 for the pints of Coal Stoker's and 2 Trainwrecks for John + tip for the lovely bartender
• $100 for a keg of Cow Catcher Red Ale to feed our well-loved kegerator

Just a Quick Check-in

It seems Carlos has inherited his Momma's teeth. He lost yet another one today - that makes four in the last two weeks or so. We thought he'd have to make a trip to the oral surgeon, as he had four adult teeth shoving over, but not out, the babies. But, with a little wiggle-help from Momma, a day at the doctor has been avoided. His poor sissy was never quite so lucky; only one of her teeth came out of its own volition, the rest had to be yanked out by the dentist with the exception of her two front teeth - one was knocked out by a basket-ball, and the other by a friend's head:)

What do you do with the baby teeth? I have a case of them from the kids; it seems wrong to throw them away, but it seems creepy to keep them. My dentist says she framed those of her son, but that seems a step up the creepy-staircase from throwing them in the junk drawer. Maybe we'll watch them dissolve in a cup of Coke one day?:)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Another pretty good day of resolution keeping.  Still staying away from the candy stash, but I need to bring in a good snack, because I am HUNGRY late morning and late afternoon. Hmmm - maybe some baby carrots or something?

food for today:

• Breakfast
• two small pieces of peanut-butter-and-jelly whole-grain sourdough toast
• glass of skim milk
• hot tea
• Lunch (and I didn't copy and paste from yesterday!:)
• Chef salad with black beans
• fruit salad (yummy yummy)
• apple
• chocolate milk
• Supper (at Wendy's - Carlos's treat:)
• Jr. Cheeseburger deluxe
• 1/2ish large fry
• small Frostie
• ice water
• one spicy chicken nugget
• Snack
• chai tea

spending for today:

• $0 - though I still owe the kid $2 - that'll get paid tomorrow!:)

No Stinkin' Butterfingers for Me!

Gaarrr! At school today I was tummy-growling hungry both before lunch and at the end of the day. I happen to have a file-drawer full of bite-sized Butterfingers (and an assortment of other sugary treats, but the Butterfingers are what really matter) that I would normally dig into, but since I knew I'd be reporting back to YOU tonight, I kept that darn drawer closed tight. I have mixed feelings about this - just writing about them makes me want one NOW (though they're at school and I'm at home), but I'm pretty impressed with myself that I resisted the crispy-peanut-buttery temptation.

Mmmmm-mmm.

Success number two for the day: after supper, the kids and I took J-dog for a walk! Well, the kids rode their scooters, which was quite an adventure in the 2-inches of snow we have on the ground, but the effect was the same for Jasper and me. The walk was a fairly short one - only about 1/2 mile - but it was cold out, and if any of you have walked with Carlos, especially when his meds are nearing the end of their day, you'd know this was a fair accomplishment.

food for today:

• Breakfast
• bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats
• glass of super pulpy Orange Juice (I want to chew my juice!)
• Hot Tea
• Lunch - I work lunch at school, and part of that gig is FREE lunch every day - and school lunch is SO much better than in the olden days:)
• Chef Salad 
• fruit salad (Yummy Yummy)
• apple
• chocolate milk
• Hot Tea
• Snack (while fixing supper - I was just SO hungry!)
• 7ish Triscuits with hummus
• Supper
• spaghetti with red sauce and kidney beans - this is leftover from my veggie days - the kids love it this way, and it's pretty healthy and tasty. I used to sneak spinach in the sauce too, but Ally's rebelled against that!
• glass of milk
• Snack
• couple handfuls popcorn
• decaf chai tea

spending for today:

$0!!! (though I do owe a kid $2 for eggs:)

Off to write that novel now!

Happy New Year

So, I've made various resolutions for various New Years with various levels of success.  A few years ago, I made four resolutions and made a point to journal about them every night - that was, by far, the most successful resolution year to date.

This year, I have decided to again journal every night - but instead of keeping the progress to the privacy of my own pen and paper, I'm sharing with the world (or at least that very small corner of the world that reads my blog:). My hopes are that by sharing my goals and steps towards them with my adoring public, I'll be more accountable to them. So please, if you notice me skipping a blogging day, feel free to share your disappointment with me.

The resolutions:

Write for a least a half hour every night. This is a two-birds one-stone goal - I need to get back in the habit of writing if I'm ever going to grow up to be a famous novelist, plus I need to journal, So - yay me:)

Keep a food journal. Most of my life, I've had a fairly easy time with my weight. I never really had to watch what I was eating, never much gained weight. Then forty hit, and with it came 25 pounds. I know how to eat healthily, I just typically don't - fessing up to the world about the too many Butterfinger bites I gorged on should help that to happen less often.

Erase debt. Years of bad financial decisions are still hanging around, and though I've stopped building additional debt, I still have more than a bit to lose. I intend to cut debt by at least $500 per month by paying more and spending less - we've already taken a great step by limiting our eating-out expenses - I'll be searching for other ways to cut all year.

Walk Jasper at least three times a week. The food journal will be important towards getting healthier, but I need to get some exercise back into my life, and so does my pup. I don't think I'll ever get back to the seven morning a week workout of my late thirty's, and frankly I don't think I want to, but three walks a week seems manageable.

food for today:

• Breakfast - 
• Bowl of Team Cheerios 
• Glass of skim milk
• 10ish Triscuits with Port Wine Cheese ball spread on them
• Hot Tea
• Lunch - 
• Qdoba - 
• small bowl Mexican Gumbo w/ black and pinto beans
• small black bean quesadilla
• water
• Supper - 
• Steak and shrimp
• two Fat Tire beers

spending for today:

• groceries (Beer, celery, toothpaste) - $35
• Qdoba (Ellen and I were shopping:) - $15

Hoarding and Minimizing - Finding my Place on the Continuum

I've been thinking a lot about minimizing for years, and compared to many - maybe even most - Americans, I do live fairly sparsely.  I come from a short line of hoarders; Grandma grew up during the Depression, and her hoarding was attributed to that, though Mom's isn't as easily explained.  I refuse to fall into that trap, so an annual garage sale, and semi-annual trips to Goodwill are constants. Sharing an 850 square foot house with my husband, two kids, and two dogs, plus occasionally with my two step-kids, certainly helps keep the accumulation down.

A few years ago, I read an article about minimalism in ReadyMade magazine in which the author was striving to own fewer than 100 things.  I thought that sounded cool, but didn't do much with it. Recently, after reading many of my friend Bethany's blogs, I decided it was time for a closet-purge and thought I'd go for a reasonable number of each type of clothes.  Fourteen pieces total is not something I'm thinking about approaching, but I figured fourteen pieces of a certain type of clothing would be a reasonable beginning - two weeks worth of short-sleeves or bottoms or whatever (okay - I know that sounds like a lot, but I had to start somewhere, right?:). I figured that once I pared down, I'd work some sort of system where I have to get rid of a t-shirt every-time I bought a new one.

So, I opened up my closet, and started counting.  Thirty-seven short-sleeved shirts. Thirty-seven.  And that didn't count the ten or so at the Gladwin house. Or the two or three in the laundry.  THIRTY-SEVEN. "Good gosh," I thought, "maybe I AM a hoarder!"

So, with my girl's help, I did lose a lot of the t-shirts, and enough skirts, dresses, sweaters, pants and tank-tops to fill four plastic grocery bags. (How do I keep getting these things?  I've been bringing my own bags to Meijer for fifteen years, but never run out of those stinking plastic ones!) But, I did not - nor will I likely ever - meet the number goal.  I suppose I should just be content that I can actually fit everything into my tiny closet.

Sliding into the grave

Robert Plant - Led Zepplin

David Lee Roth - Van Halen

Robert Plant and David Lee Roth both started out as the long-haired, bare-chested, crazy-sexy, front-men of hugely successful, ground breaking bands. These men epitomized the ideal of the "Rock God". If you polled a representative sample of so-called Generation X, I'm willing to bet you'd find the vast majority of us either wanted to be one of these provocative crooners or be with one - and a sizable portion wanted to be both.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -
Bluegrass Emmy

So as a Gen Xer, it makes complete sense that as my years add up and I consider just what aging may bring, I turn to these idols of my formative years for guidance.  And here's the thing - despite their very similar beginnings, Robert and David Lee have taken radically divergent paths toward old age.  Robert Plant strayed from his rock 'n roll roots and tried new stuff - this turn began with the Honeydrippers at about the same time that David Lee was at the top of his game.  He's explored different genre, and has seemed to have, well, just slowed down a bit - sort of easing into those "golden years".

David Lee Roth and Van Halen -
reunion tour

David Lee Roth, on the other hand, has chosen the "slidin' into the grave" approach. It seems he's doing what he's always done - rocking hard, drinking hard, and cashing in on the success of his youth. Touring again with the brothers' (and son) VanHalen has undoubtedly been incredibly celebratory and lucrative for him.

So the big question is. "Which is the better approach to aging?" Though I know which path I'm following, I don't know the answer to that.  Who's more content with his life? Who feels the most fulfilled? Who knows?