ohsoretro

Inspired by Randy & his work out success, I’ve decided to restart my own exercise regime. I’m only 4 days in but already I feel great. The plan is to do 30-60 minutes of cardio a day, plus crunches and weight training every other day.

I’ve lost 5 lbs since the beginning of summer (due to being sick) but I want to keep that off, and maybe lose another 10 lbs although I’m not focused on the #s.

I will have reached this goal after 3 months of daily work outs. It will be interesting to see how fit I can get & how much better I can feel.

Finally sat down, organized my photos and information and created my Facebook Fan page. It wasn’t too hard, mostly it was just time consuming. It only took a couple hours to do and now all my products and information is in one place. It will make updating my customers on new products much easier too. I don’t know what took my so long but I’m glad I finally did it!

http://facebook.com/ohsoretroaccessories

Had a couple minutes to kill this morning so I spent it using http://friendorfollow.com to clean up my page a bit.. It’s such a mess! I’ll have to try to do a few minutes when I can until it’s functional and I’m caught up on new followers. I was caught up once before but I got lazy and haven’t added anyone new in months. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

So I finally got my butt in gear and have my first pattern completed and listed! I am so proud of it & can’t wait to get some feedback on it. Already working on #2! Once I reach 10 & have some sales I think I’ll consider this one accomplished. :)

This was a really good week time wise! Every morning during breakfast I made a to-do list and actually accomplished most of my goals for the day. The things I didn’t get to I would add the next day until they were completed. Tonight there’s only two things I didn’t get to on my list and they can wait for next Monday. I hope to keep this up, it feels really good to be on top of things & organized. It makes me more productive too!

I’ve been really good about updating my blog this month! It’s like a habit, once you get out of updating it’s really hard to get back into it. My goal is to update at least once every three days, hopefully more. Now I just need to come up with a nicer layout and banner & I’ll be set.

http://ohsoretroshop.blogspot.com/

Last night I finally made a really good Indian dish! I’d tried to make butter chicken & tikka masala before (from scratch) but they just never turned out that great. I’d found out recently that many of Patak’s sauces are gluten free so I did some research and decided to try the butter chicken curry. It was so simple that it almost feels like cheating! I steamed some cauliflower for a few minutes and threw it in for a vegetable and made a green salad. It was a perfect, quick & easy supper & delicious too.

Ingredients:
* 2 tbsp Patak’s Butter Chicken Curry Paste
* 1 tbsp vegetable oil
* 1 tbsp butter
* 250g chicken, diced
* 1/3 cup of water
* 3tbsp of cream

Directions:

1.  In medium size pan, gently heat oil, butter and chicken. Fry gently until browned.

2. Add Patak's curry paste and fry for another 2 minutes.

3. Add water and cream and simmer gently for 15 minutes until cooked. Add more water if necessary.

4. Garnish with chopped cilantro and serve with hot rice or naan bread.

I’ve pulled up my socks and spent the entire weekend working on my first pattern for Simple Cases. It’s coming together really well and I’m hoping to get it listed tomorrow tho Randy still needs to do a bunch of drawings for me so mid week is more like it. I’m ridiculously excited about this project! Hopefully pattern #2 comes together quicker than this one did.

Really have to stop going to take my PM pills and finding my AM pill still sitting in there.. unless I want a headache the next day. Which I don’t. Which is why I made this goal.

Goal: Take my AM pill by 8 am and my PM pills by 9 pm. Daily. Forever.

but I want to be and I know that in order to be a blogger one must also read blogs. Well you don’t have to but it helps. It’s all about the community, right?

So for now I’m setting myself up with a simple goal: I will comment on 3 blog posts every day. Also I will try to build up my reading list with blogs from interesting women doing interesting things & I will not follow a blog that I have no intention of reading just to get followers in return.

We moved in December so the kitchen isn’t really that bad but I didn’t put things where I would like them when I was unpacking and now it’s pretty much a disaster waiting to happen. I hope my breath every time I open up the food pantry. This is a good, easy to obtain goal that I would like to accomplish within the next couple weeks.

I realized a couple years ago that I hadn’t read many classic novels so I started working my way through this list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time. So far my favourite is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and my least favourite has been Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Top 100 list from http://www.best100novels.com/
Started in October 2008

1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 
  3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (done book 1)
  5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
 10. Ulysses by James Joyce
 11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (need to reread)
 12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
 13. Animal Farm by George Orwell (need to reread)
 14. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (need to reread)
 15. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
 16. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
 17. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
 18. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
 19. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
 20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
 21. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
 22. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling 
 23. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
 24. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
 25. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
 26. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
 27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
 28. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
 29. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
 30. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
 31. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
 32. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
 33. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
 34. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
 35. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
 36. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 37. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
 38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
 39. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
 40. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
 41. The Stranger by Albert Camus
 42. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
 43. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
 44. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
 45. The Stand by Stephen King
 46. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
 47. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
 48. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
 49. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand 
 50. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
 51. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand 
 52. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
 53. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
 54. Watership Down by Richard Adams
 55. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
 56. Dracula by Bram Stoker
 57. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
 58. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
 59. Dune by Frank Herbert
 60. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
 61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
 62. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
 63. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
 64. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
 65. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
 66. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
 67. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
 68. Middlemarch by George Eliot
 69. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
 70. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
 71. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
 72. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
 73. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
 74. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
 75. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
 76. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
 77. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
 78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
 79. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
 80. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
 81. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
 82. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
 83. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
 84. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
 85. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
 86. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
 87. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
 88. Persuasion by Jane Austen
 89. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 90. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
 91. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
 92. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
 93. Beloved by Toni Morrison
 94. Light in August by William Faulkner
 95. The Trial by Franz Kafka
 96. Atonement by Ian McEwan
 97. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
 98. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
 99. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
100. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

I love how PMS makes me so lethargic I can talk myself out of doing this. It’s like.. bah.. I’ll cope with it next month, this month I’m going to eat this entire box of cereal and cry. That’s not the kind of coping I want!

I’ve been suffering with agoraphobia since I was 3 years old, and have been housebound since I was 17. It started with school and then spread to all other areas of my life. I wasn’t able to graduate, never got a job, don’t drive.. etc. I was diagnosed with just about everything under the sun until recently, when I discovered a book called The Agoraphobia Workbook which describes me perfectly – since I don’t have panic attacks I could never figure out what was wrong with me and was too ashamed to ever tell anyone what was actually going through my head. Since discovering the definition of agoraphobia – the fear of a sudden symptom attack where escape is difficult – it makes so much more sense. You always just hear that agoraphobia is the fear of having a panic attack but it’s so much more than that – for some people their feared symptom attack is the panic but for others it’s things like vomiting or headache or loss of bladdar control. When I first read this it was such a relief! For the first time in my life (I’m 28 now) I really feel like I have a chance to overcome this and find some sense of normalcy in my life. I’ve missed out on so much, and I don’t want to let any more of my life go by without trying to be fully immersed in it. I highly recommend this book to everyone & would love to hear from others who have used the program on their own.