raggedj

...but I’ve been good since sometime during the second week of the month and since then nary an animal product has passed my lips. And along with that, I’ve been working out on the treadmill most days and even jogging some! I feel so much better, I know I’ll keep it up and after Wednesday will be able confidently approach March as the month to make it all the way through! :D

On a surprising note: I learned that I absolutely LOVE collard greens! who knew??? AND…I also finally managed to cook tofu in a way that didn’t disgust me, and In fact, i actually enjoyed eating it! Go figure! :)

...I even have trouble remembering to snap a photo of something…anything! with my phone and send it to blogger. It shouldn’t be this hard to remember. I don’t even need to type an entry when I send it—i can go back later and add descriptions (because typing on my phone is a challenge in and of itself.)

Sometimes I’ll snap 3 or 4 possible photos and THINK I sent one, then delete them, only to find out the transmission did not go through. Then that day’s gone.

And my email reminders to my future self just seem to get lost in the day’s correspondance…I notice them, but will just get busy and not remember.

There. Now that I’ve worked through that, I’ve got an hour an a half left to go take a picture for today. :)

at least I can enjoy the lightheadedness from all the practicing for a while! what an interesting natural high! :)

I can never remember to put the stupid trays in my mouth at night!!!!!

I haven’t been really good about this lately. In the last week I quit one job, started another and opened a show. It’s been crazy and I haven’t had much sleep, let alone time to get on the computer. I haven’t even been good with my photo a day from my camera phone, (which should take no effort at all!). I just need to try to regroup, and hopefully I’ll eventually figure out a way to get it all done. (hey…I guess I can consider this my journal entry for today!) :)

So I met a young lady whose father owns a pawn shop, and she believes he just may have an accordion or two for sale! Depending on what kind of shape they’re in and how much he wants for them, i just may be a little closer to marking this off my list! :)

this is how it ends…
my last act at the ballet:
a friday haiku.

drove across town to a local market for their macro lunch selection: tofu & broccoli “quiche” with brown rice and steamed veggies. it was fantastic! It’s like my body was craving healthy food, I felt so good right away! Even indulged in a little vegan dark chocolate. One day down, only 27 to go and I’m one month down!

keep coming and are higher than ever! our bank acct went into the negative this week. Without going into all the boring details, it really could have been prevented. The bills are so high this month, though, that I don’t know how they’re all going to get paid.(heat is outrageous and the cell phone was ridiculous.)

Gee, I hope this didn’t sound whiny…i just needed to vent, and this is more fun than ranting in one of my half-filled paper journals that haven’t been cracked open in years…

Getting the negative issues out of my head here helps me deal with my issues in reality. I just hope this forum doesn’t become a place for me to whine without seeing real progress. Maybe by ranting like this it’ll actually give me impetus to make positive changes to post. Yeah, that’s it!

...so I’m not too disappointed that I keep stress-eating chocolate and sonic cheesburgers. I feel awful and I know it’s unnecessary, but I’m putting myself under a lot of self-inflicted stress this week and with that comes with making bad food choices that do not make me feel better…just leave me wanting more.

I think maybe if I set myself goals a month at a time with this one I can make it happen. Last year I followed a lowfat vegan diet for 3 months…my cholesterol dropped 75 points and floored my doctor. (I decided to try it after reading much about the Ornish diet and the China Study.)

I felt GREAT! Not only did my cholesterol drop, but my skin cleared up, people commented that I had a “glow” about me (whatever that entails), my sinuses cleared up, and my allergies (to dust, mold, and other airborne pollutants) went away. I also was able to stop taking prevacid every morning and had absolutely no instances of heartburn. I didn’t even miss cheese!

My doctor encouraged me to keep with the diet and throw in a little exercise and I may eventually be able to drop the statins alltogether!

Then came the holidays. I was still feeling weird about having special dietary requirements during the season of parties and festivities, and not being able to partake of what my hosts offered. So I ditched the diet, gained 12 pounds and my sinus and allergy issues returned, but hey…it was easier to get through the holidays, right?

Now it’s the end of January and I’m still embracing a totally non-vegan way of eating. Well, I am using soy milk, but I’m also stress eating a lot of junk food (I could throw several excuses here, but that would just seem whiny.)

I want to embrace my low-fat vegan way of eating again, but I seem to have developed a reliance on chocolate, cheesburgers, and other easy quick “comfort foods”. I think I’m going to have to attack this like I did when I quit smoking…no ifs ands or butts…Cold turkey, and not let myself cheat. And if I could do it for 3 months last summer and fall, then certainly I can do it for February. (and later March. and April. Then May…)

Only one more week!
(I bet my new job won’t have
hot guys in dance belts)

(yeah, it’s Sunday, but
I did write that on Friday—
I’m just posting late.)

I’m going to hate doing this, but i know it’s got to be done. Our household debt is so out of control it has it’s own entry! This will hopefully get a plan in place that we can stick to without feeling too much of a crunch. We’ve done it before (when we made more money it was much easier)...we’ll have to do it again if we want to start taking those vacations again!

my partner and I paid off all of our credit cards before we bought our first place in Chicago. That was like 8 years ago, and the debt has been climbing steadily since. Now our credit card balances are almost as high as our mortgage balance! I know we can budget, and as money manager for the household I should be stricter, but I’m just having a hard time sticking to it. If I continue to remind myself of this goal here, I may actually do something about it and get us there.

someone told me that cleaning the area around the crack and sealing it with packing tape would work. I thought “ooh…I can try it out with a nice soak and a glass of wine and a new book!” It leaked into my craft closet. I guess I’ll probably need to add “replace drywall in my craft room” to the list, but I don’t want to think about it now!

Alright, so when I was running errands at work I snapped a bunch of self portraits with my phone. Yeah I was driving, but I figured that would somehow make the pictures seem less posed. Anyway, back at the office I asked a coworker to scroll through the pics and help me pick out my new avatar.

Another coworker overheard the conversation and informed us that avatars are “digital representations of individuals” and that what I had was a headshot. If I used a cartoon likeness, it would be a cartoon. This led to much googling and a lot of time on wikipedia wading through definitions, discussions of semantics, and I finally decided that since when I added this item to my list I meant I was going to take a dorky picture of myself and put it up online, I can consider this item completed.
(I’ll probably change it soon anyway.)
As a bonus I used it for this entry .

I’m kinda nervous…
My new job starts all too soon:
Just two weeks to go!

...I bought an old beat up accordion from a man selling used band instruments off the back of a pick up truck. I’d never played one before but decided I wanted to learn. It was only $80 and he even threw in an old beat up suitcase to lug it around in. I drove my apartment building nuts. It was loud and kinda wheezed a bit, and I never really became proficient enough to create a tone not unlike that of a slightly out of tune perhaps sinister calliope…but still a fun sound! I taught myself to play somewhat, and apart from some obligatory polkas learned a little Duran Duran, Police, and ABBA songs and was working on Bohemian Rhapsody when the instrument finally died.

How I long for the days when I’d stand in the window on the second floor, a plodding version of “Hungry like the Wolf” wafting across the sidewalk, puzzled pedestrians pausing to seek out the source of the tune. Good times…

Now I’m in South Carolina. The ethnic diversity is not like it is in Chicago, and as a result, I was dismayed to learn there is not a very large accordion playing population. I’ve been told by a number of music stores that I’ll have to go out of state to find an instrument, or try ebay (but I really hate to spend the money without seeing it in person). I keep trolling the thrift stores hoping a decent used one will show up eventually…and I know eventually one will because the music is in me and is screaming for release…

OK, so I was a little concerned that I probably would not take the time do download photos from my camera each and every day and then upload them to this site. Then I realized…I’ve got a camera phone and a mobile blog that I haven’t used in almost a month! That’s perfect! I can take a photo and post it immediately from wherever I am and not have to worry about getting home to late to do it! (and maybe even add a brief comment, but I’m still a little slow with the typing on the phone thing)..Anyway, I’m counting on this working…and i’m hoping that maybe I’ll end up learning to take some relatively decent pics with my phone. We’ll see.

Oh yeah…If you want to follow my progress, here’s the link to the blog: http://raggedj.blogspot.com/

I think if I update a goal or two every day it should count. I do keep a paper journal in the nightstand for clearing my head before sleeping, but if 43 Things turns out to be as addictive as it seems to be on this, my first day here, I’ll fall asleep at my computer each night!