Hi Susie, we would love to have you join us. We do start a new thread monthly, I supposed we go by the name Worldlie Chicks since we are from all over the states, Australia and maybe some that pop in are from Canada. I joined in after this thread had already been established and love it here and the girls too. Please let us not a little bit about you...married, kids, hobbies, type of eating plan, exercise (which I am not very good at), that type of thing. Hope to see you around here.

Morning
Woke up to fog this morning after sleeping in till 8 a.m. Put my work clothes in the washer and almost have my bedroom cleaned from to bottom. Need to make a couple of phone calls and run a couple of errands and that will be it for the day.

Welcome Susie. We are glad to have you join us.

Annie
I know you will enjoy the time with bff. I need to check on the one in Jonesboro to see how she's doing.

More later.

Michelle
Thanks for getting all this organized. I've really enjoyed looking at all the pictures.

Morning all.

I stayed up too late on Tuesday night (after the movie), so yesterday afternoon at work I was really dragging. I left about half hour earlier than I usually do, but right on the dot as far as official office hours go. Of course I was waiting at the elevators when the boss, heading to the restroom (before she left for the day), saw me and gave me an odd look. Made me feel like I was sneaking out. Bleh. Whatever, she's basically checked out on everything except a couple major projects she needs to get through before she retires. Otherwise communication between us is just about nil.

Okay, I'll stop whining. I have a good job with a good company, good pay & benefits. Everyday isn't roses, it's work. Get over it.
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Perked up just a bit on my commute home, then changed into workout clothes right away. Prepped the onion and carrot and got all the other ingredients for the Middle Eastern lentil soup recipe out on the counter before I went to my barre class.

Barre class was fine. It really works the feet and legs a lot, and they often feel crampy and tired after the barre portion of the class. I need to remember to warm them up before class starts.

I put together the rest of the soup after class. I used my immersion blender to puree it, but I blended it a bit too much and the texture is smoother than bf & i like, but still tasty.
==

Hi Susie, welcome. :) I can't give you the history of this thread, but we do start a new thread each month and I find everyone to be very supportive! I'd say this is an active thread - daily postings for sure; can be a bit quiet on the weekends though...

Annie - Enjoy your time off today & tomorrow. :) Hope Sassy does well with her vet visit. :crossed:

Michelle - Thanks for all the work on dropbox, etc.!! :thanks: Mailing on Saturday is fine. I finally have a free night tonight, so I will look through my photos some more and try to upload more. I hope you have a good visit with the doc tomorrow.

Shad - I'd love to see more pics of our 3fc friends. :) Think you have one of Mel? Safe travels to you!!

Hi Ceejay!! :wave: Is it your weekend yet? I'm jealous!!!

Good morning all!

Welcome, Susie! :welcome: We're happy to have you join us! This is a wonderful group of ladies, very supportive, lots of fun. We chat about everything from eating right, exercise, movies, work, the weather...pretty much anything.

I'm exhausted today. For some reason, I can't get to sleep before 11 or midnight lately, and I guess 7 hours sleep just isn't enough for me because I'm really tired lately. I've been eating right and exercising...maybe my body's in shock! :rofl:

As for the digital frame, if I can get all the pictures together tonight (by 7 PM Pacific Time), then I'll try and drop it off at the post office on my way into work in the morning.
Oooops...after reading Laura's post....I'll just plan on putting the finishing touches on organizing the photos tonight and tomorrow and mail it first thing Saturday morning.

Please add more photos between now and Friday night. Ok?

Well, I'd best start tackling my work to do list. :D

Much love to all,

Annie - Have a wonderful time with your bff!!! I hope Sassy's vet appt goes well. My doggie day care reminded me that Santa is due for his bordatella next month.

Ceejay - Are you going to Jonesboro or Paragould this weekend? Or are you sticking close to home? Enjoy your days off and try and find time to relax.

Laura - I know what you mean about being exhausted. My boss is out today, and I'd love to leave a bit early to beat the traffic...but I'm worried others will notice. The soup sounds yummy. My immersion blender is in storage. Speaking of storage, my stepmom, who knows I have quite the Halloween collection, asked if I had any Halloween stuff she could use to decorate. I would love to be able to decorate with my Halloween stuff...but it's packed so deeply in storage that I don't think there's any hope of finding it. I'm fairly sure it's not anywhere near "the top" of the pile. Your Barre class sounds interesting. Is it mostly stretches and plies? I may have to google it to see what it's about. I can understand how your feet and legs get crampy.

Sending a big :wave: to Happy and Shad!

Much love to all,

Howdy Chicks,

First of all Susie welcome and we're glad to have you. I was one of the original of the group and we had adopted the name Worldly Chicks because a bunch of us came together from all over the world - The States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and England. We've been together over 10 years and in that time people have come and gone as life has gotten in the way of posting on the Internet ;) While we are mostly based in the U.S. now, we have occasional visits from our Canadian friends but the duty of "Worldly" falls to our one international friend and initial founding member Shad - who is a native New Zealander living in Australia. We change our thread title monthly only because at one point 3FC made you close a thread and open a new one after 500 posts. I would say we are more social and supportive than a full on diet and exercise challenge group - but we are really good at cheering each other in our efforts. So come on in, pull up a chair, make a cup of tea and tell us a bit about yourself.

The biggest thing going on with us right now is that one of our good friends Mel has been diagnosed with some very serious health issues. She is in the hospital right now and we are putting together a photo slideshow for a digital picture frame for her to send her some cheer.

In the spirit of yin and yang had a good day and a bad day yesterday. DH and I went out for a long ATV ride. It was a gorgeous warm and sunny day. This was a trail I'd not been on before but he had and it was narrow and winding and with the trees in color it was just spectacular. I was hoping to get some nice pictures for the frame but the colors are past their peak and while there are still some pretty bits out there, they don't come through in the pictures. :( Michelle I did add 3 more pictures last night - used your naming convention and hopefully you can look at the time stamp to see the newer stuff. I'm only doing that because you asked for a few more pictures. Back to the ride - along the way a deer jumped out in our path, we flushed several grouse out of the brush including one poor scared fellow who ran along side the UTV for a minute or so, there was a huge snapping turtle in the middle of the road. DH stopped to get a picture but that turtle had some moves on him and scooted into the brush. We also saw some turtles sunning themselves on rocks, a pair of swans in the lake as well as a bunch of ducks. Every SINGLE one of them scooted away just as I turned the camera on. We stopped for lunch and then hurried back as we were supposed to go to the movies. Got home and I got a call from the person we were supposed to meet up with - they were not able to make it. That sort of started the downhill slide. I was a bit miffed the way this all went down - lets just say we sort of put our plans on hold waiting on someone else several times only to come up short. I would have actually preferred going to the movies on Tuesday but we changed plans based on them. We were tired after our ride and barely had enough time to clean up and get to the movies but the movie is only there until today so DH said let's just go.

Ok, review of the movie Gravity. The scenery of earth from space is SPECTACULAR. The first 40 minutes of the movie are very gripping. George Clooney is his usual charming self - his character is a total Clooney fest (which was fun and entertaining). Without giving too much away, the second half of the movie was about Sandra Bullock trying to get out of her predicament. I hated the end - it was like all of a sudden they just wrapped up the movie fast forward and suddenly you're staring at the screen credits and the movie is over. They had spent so much time at the front end building the premise (and a good one at that) and then it was like, ok - what else you got, don't know so let's wrap it up. Disappointing. I thought the special effects for showing zero gravity and weightlessness were amazing. There was only 2 very short pieces of the movie where the 3D effects were interesting. Yes, at one point I did flinch when the space debris was coming at me ;) They said they were talking about Oscar contender for Sandra and while she played a good role - darn that girl can do serious character like few others - I wouldn't call it Oscar worthy.

We got out of the show a little after 7 and headed over to Perkins - a family restaurant that serves breakfast all the time - for a light dinner. We walked in, there were about 5 people in the restaurant and were seated promptly. The person seating us asked what we wanted to drink and we said coffee. He said he'd be right back. 10 minutes later our waitress came over and gave us menus and asked what we wanted to drink. We said we ordered coffee. 10 minutes later still no coffee. Waitress came and took our order and we thought she'd bring us coffee. Nope. She went in the back and was talking with the other servers and we had to get her attention to get some coffee. As she set the coffee down I asked her for more creamer (the coffee for a change was rather strong). She said sure and never brought us any creamer. After about 20 minutes she brought my eggs benedict and DH's French toast. She said they were still working on my side of pancakes. I had just about finished my eggs when she brought over a plate of the blackest pancakes I had ever seen. It was obvious they were burnt. I said "don't you think these are a little burnt?" - she said "yes, I would not eat them - let me get you another order". As she walked away I began to get fearful - I don't make it a habit of sending food back because you never know what people do in the kitchen when you send food back. I would have told her to forget it but she disappeared in the back again. Meanwhile I took a bite of the cantaloupe in the fruit cup and had the most horrid crunchy, didn't belong there feeling. Had no idea where that came from. The waitress brought a new stack of pancakes fairly quickly but not only was I afraid to eat them, DH had used up all the maple syrup leaving me the yucky fruit based ones. I figured if I asked for more syrup she'd probably leave it right next to the coffee creamer we asked for an never got so I just skipped it altogether even though the reason I walked in the place was that I wanted some pancakes! Got in the car, ran my tongue along my back teeth and discovered that the "crunchy" thing in my fruit was my back molar disintegrating. Half the tooth is gone. :mad: I just made an appointment with the dentist to replace a broken crown and now I have another one. Good bye $2,000. :tantrum: DH used the medical insurance this year and I guess I'll be using the dental insurance. I'm still mad today thinking about it. And I guess sitting in a bumpy UTV seat for 5 hours yesterday did not do my back any good as my neck is horribly painful today. We were supposed to check out another trail today - saw a trailgroomer (caretaker) at lunch and he said this particular trail was really pretty and the colors were only going to last for a few more days so he highly recommended it. But I told DH there was no way I could do this as I was afraid of having a bigger issue. Heat did not help, I used some icy rub/linament and took 4 pain relievers and it's eased up a bit. So tired of this already. Bah.

Back for personals. Geez I talk too much!

Michelle - that's unfortunate that your Halloween stuff is buried in the storage unit but I know how that goes. Did you take the Christmas penguins too? I'm still having trouble sleeping too - maybe it's just this time of year and we are restless during the transition of summer to fall :lol: That really is a hassle when you can't seem to wake up. And coffee doesn't seem to help but kick in when you are ready to shut down for the day. :rolleyes: Thanks again for putting the pictures together. I'll see if I can come up with something else. Wish I had access to DH's butterfly pictures he took in Chicago but we lost them when his hard drive crashed a couple of years back.

Laura - you mention Fosamax for your Mom. Might want to do a little research on it. They are finding that a certain class of bone density medications - FOSAMAX being one of them, Boniva another - have been linked with causing extreme bone brittleness in some women. The dentist had mentioned it to my Mom when she was considering some dental surgery. That's a shame about the odd encounter with the boss but sometimes it does get odd like that - I think it's just better if they announce they are leaving and are gone in 2 weeks to the month or keep things under wraps. There is generally some weirdness on both sides for everyone. Your soup sounds good - reminds me I have a bag of lentils I need to do something with. Thanks for the movie review too - I may wait for that one to come out on video - he did say it was real "Jersey Shore" sterotype. I loved your hydrangea picture - gorgeous colors.

Ceejay - sounds like you got a good start to your day and are a busy bee.

Annie - hope you have a wonderful day off with your friend - the weather is so nice right now, anything you do will be great. I can't believe that Sassy is a year old already. She is just adorable as are your pictures. Thanks for the tip on the exercise ball - is that to stretch and pull things out? I know I have one in the garage somewhere - a nice one too but like Michelle - it's "somewhere" but looking for it will give me an excuse to get in there and do some organizing. I noticed when I went to dump the trash the other day, DH is arbitrarily tossing things in the garbage - wish he'd toss his own stuff.

Shad - I have to tell you that one of my favorite pictures is the "Not Igor" one :rofl: And then I noticed Carla's "This isn't Igor either" :lol3: Poor Igor and all the Igor wannabe's. I see you are home safe and sound. To you have your time back to yourself again or do you have more work lined up? I hope they retain some of what you tried to cram in their heads in a short while.

Ok, I should get busy - sitting at the computer I think is part of the problem with my neck. Have a good day everyone.

Sassy's vet appt went very well. She was rated a perfect lil girl....her weight is maintaining for the past year at 8lb8oz. Very trim and just well, perfect. Teeth nice and clean, ears clear, skin smooth, heart rate excellent. Nails clipped, shots. Trifexa for heartworms and fleas. Cost 280.00, love and affection priceless. I just love my puppy!

Happy - I added the "This Isn't Igor Either" to Carla's photos. most of her photos just had numbers as the file name, so I tried to add descriptions where I could. And I just didn't know what to say about that guy other than definitely not Igor. LOL As for the outdoor lawn decorations, I left most of them with my ex. And as it turns it it was good that I did because my storage unit is packed to the gills, and I wouldn't have been able to fit them. When I get my own place, and unpack what i do have, I'll determine what I want to add.

Annie - I'm so glad Sassy's vet appointment went well. :D 8.5 lbs, what a teeny little baby! I need to get Santa's nails trimmed and the hair pulled out of his ears.

Gotta get back to it. It's been a crazy day so far.

Hi, quick run through. I will get to personals and stuff from home. Still haven't heard from Jen and am beginning to get a bit worried. Don't know who to contact since Jen said in her last note that she hadn't told many people about Mel's condition and I don't want to rock the boat. Thinking cap on
Michelle - Carols photo of 'its definitely not Igor' is apparently something she snapped in England at some time. I called it the 'beached whale'

Welcome Susie.

I'll be back later with some more. I think I have a photo of Mel somewhere in the house. I saw it only a month ago when cleaning out the files. If you can wait another 24 hours, I will try to find it and scan it into the dropbox. I can probably find another couple of photos of stuff as well. I was looking at the properties at some point. How are we going for size for the USB. Yeah I know we can get ginormous ones now, but.........
Anyway, gotta go get on with it. 4 hours to go and counting

Decided to mow only the front and side lawns today. Last week I over did it. Today I reached down to move a pine cone out of the way and ugh something stung me. It's still painful. I got it back as I stomped it. It was yellow so I'm not sure if it was a yellow jacket or hornet. I put a baking soda paste on it. I'll put and ice pack on it later. Should have gone next door to get a cigarette butt.That's what mom always used when we got stung in my younger years. I'm finishing the back lawn tomorrow.
----------------
Michelle
No I'm not going to Paragould or Jonesboro this week end. I'll try to go next week end. My uncle said he ate my share of food last week end.

Happy
I will more than likely wait till that movie comes out on dvd. I may watch Peter Pan tonight with Cathy Rigby. I bought a DVD for my neice who was her protogie (sp) while her show ran in Branson. I also bought the cartoon version for my nephew's son.
Wow when you go on an ATV ride you see lots of things.

Annie
Glad Miss Sassy had a good check up.

By the way I bought a gift card for Jen and Mel from Walmart. I'm going to send it to Mel's address.

Thank you all for the nice Welcome. I am having fun reading your posts and getting to know you.

I'm so sorry to hear about your friend Mel. I think it is wonderful that you are putting the slideshow together for her. She will love it. It's all very thoughtful of you all.

Some of you asked about me so here it is. I'm 48, live in Ohio. I am a Administrative Assistant and I work at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati. I have a 1 hour work commute each way and so I'm always tired when I get to Friday! ;) I'm married. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary just this week. We do not have children (we tried but never could get the deed done! lol). We have a lot of friends and family who share their children with us and we feel blessed and happy that we can sleep in whenever we want! :D

I have battled my weight all my life and I really don't want to weigh close to 300 lbs when I turn 50 in a couple of years. My goal is 180 by my 50th birthday.

I love to read (mostly fiction) and until this past year I loved to workout. I'm trying to get back to that. I attend TOPS for my weekly accountability and also motivation. I am also using My Fitness Pal to help me stay on track daily.

I try to post daily..I'm someone who needs daily motivation but sometimes after being on the computer most of my day, I usually get a post in 4-5 times a week and I catch up on everything I missed over the weekend.

I love the energy on this thread!

This is my last day of "stay-cation". DH and I have had a blast being at home and doing what we want, when we want. We cleaned out the garage yesterday and it looks so good and organized (I'm a bit of clean and organization freak). This morning I'm going to clean up the cars inside and tonight we are going to a high-school football game to watch my cousin's son play. Tomorrow, I'm going to a TOPS rally.

I'll most likely check in on Sunday but might make it on Saturday too.

Shad - umm why are we including a picture of Mel in the slideshow? Did she forget what she looked like? :rofl: :lol3: Actually she sent me one years ago - I think it might be on my old computer although I did look through it last week for the picture of you, DH and I to include and I didn't come across it. I'll look again. If nothing else then the other chicks can see what Mel looks like - or wait... was that your intention in the first place? *slaps her forhead for being a B-O-Z-O * :^:

Morning all. Called in sick today. I woke up in the middle of the night and after a bathroom visit it became apparent I have a UT I. Haven't had one in so long, forgotten what a PITA it is. I didn't sleep much after that & decided to stay home instead of going to the office like death warmed over.

Went to the drugstore & picked up a "urinary analgesic" to ease that gotta go feeling. Just started reading "Following Atticus". Will be back later with personals. TTFN.

Good morning happy chicks,

I spent all day yesterday thinking it was Friday so I get a bonus Friday today :yay: :dance::woohoo::cheer3::cheer2: Of course I am retired so every day is Friday to me.

Susie - nice to meet you - good to set a goal before your milestone birthday and you are giving yourself a reasonable time frame to meet it. Not like deciding a month before your birthday you want to magically lose 50 pounds. ;)

Quick about me - I am married - been with DH for 41 years, married for 36 of them. He stole me away when I was just a teenager ;) No kids - we were almost afraid of what the two of us would have produced :devil: besides the fact that both of our moms said they hoped some day we'd have kids just like us :yikes: We do have fur babies and always had. I was born and raised in Chicago, DH hails from Rhode Island originally and came to Chicago to escape a small town. We were both in I.T. In 2004 my company got bought out by a large paper company and they were closing the office. We were offered jobs but they insisted we relocate to the company headquarters in Memphis. DH's job with IBM was on shaky ground as they kept moving more jobs offshore and the job market in Chicago was getting bad so we decided to move to TN. We thought Chicago winters were bad but were not prepared for the blazing heat and humidity of the south. Lived there for 8 years, DH got his walking papers shortly after his 25th service anniversary and my job got eliminated almost 2 years later. We had been looking for a place to retire for the last 15 years and found what we were looking for in far Northern Wisconsin and bought a home here which was originally going to be our "summer retreat" while I worked for 2 more years. When my job got eliminated I looked for other positions but in the end we talked it over - neither of really fit into the southern way of life so we decided to dump our house, take an early retirement and high tail it back to the north again. Freedom day for us was 11/11/11. DH is quite happy here living in the forest with lots of animals and wildlife for company. I am still trying to find my nitch after working my entire life. But we are both happy, reasonably healthy and while not rich, we have "enough" to get by and enjoy our life. We joke here on the thread that my place is the "commune" that all the Worldly Chicks will eventually retire to so we can all be hippies again and live off the land. :grouphug: It's funny that you say you work for PnG. My "6 Degrees of Separation" to you - if you want to call it that - was that in Memphis I worked with a girl who was my mentor on a new project. She left the company and moved to Cinn and went to work for PnG. :lol: She stayed there for a year and a half and then decided corporate life was not for her and left to pursue her artsy passion. Feel free to share some good ideas you get in your TOPS meetings. Welcome again.

Yesterday we went to the next big town because DH's bathroom faucet broke and they don't have much of a selection here. We stopped at Applebee's for an early dinner. They have a whole page of the menu dedicated to WW meals so I decided to be good and order the shrimp parmesan with rice. It was very good but honey, that was NOT a WW 550 calorie meal! It had sautéed onions, herbs and diced carrots in the rice mix and there was quite a bit of oil on it. The parmesan sauce was the same high fat sauce that DH had on his steak and there was melted parmesan cheese over the whole dish. I daresay that was 3 times the calories it should have been. Disappointing because here I was trying to be good. On the way home we saw a sign for fresh cranberries in the town that had the cranberry festival last week. We took a ride down the road and found the nicest couple selling cranberries fresh picked from their bog. I bought 10 pounds to which DH replied 10 POUNDS! but hey, since they are machine harvested you have to sort through and pick out the not quite ripe ones, stones and those that might have some soft bits on them so 10 pounds is not quite 10 pounds. I will use a pound for some fresh cranberry orange sauce and will freeze the rest of the berries in 1 pound packages to use throughout the year although I am debating about trying to make a batch of fresh cranberry juice too. Today we might go for an ATV ride - it's the last nice day - rain is moving in and the temperatures will drop substantially. I was just out on the deck and while it's nice out, there is definitely a cool undertone in the air - you can tell the weather is about to shift. And it's breezy again so the leaves will be dropping. I love wading through crunchy piles of autumn leaves :D I'd jump in them too but I know I'm at the age where things break easily, heal slowly and take lots of money to get fixed again ;) so I'll be satisfied with just walking through them.

Ceejay - ouch on the sting. This time of the year the hornets come out. Have to watch what you touch. I think Cathy Rigby would be perfect in Peter Pan!

Shad - I'm not sure who else to contact about Mel. Was the office manager (whose name I don't remember) her friend or her enemy? All I can think of is Willie.

Michelle - was probably better you left the decorations back with the ex. If you move to a condo or apartment, having lawn decorations would just be a waste. Sort of like the guessing game with furniture - what to keep and what won't fit any more. That was funny about Carla's Not Igor picture - maybe we should devote a couple of pics to Not Igor themes - no wait, that would just be too ugly - my eyes, my eyes :lol:

I will look for a few more pics to add by the end of the day today.

Annie - glad that Sassy girl checked out just fine. She is a real cutie. I'd love to see her in the Weenie Dog races. :lol: Have a good day with your friend today.

Hello Laura whom I have probably crossed in transit.

DH is calling - gotta go. Have a good weekend.