Silver, I wish you would just come along for the ride, I enjoy your company.
If you feel you must leave us for awhile, please remember the door is always open , come back anytime.

"Not all who wander are lost." Silver, as everyone said, your company is much appreciated and I hope you find your balance soon. :hug: The train continues far beyond May, I think. May is just a convenient target for many of us, like the July wedding is for you. Not necessarily a deadline, so much as a waypoint on the horizon to keep us headed in the correct direction.

saef, I've had a few events fall apart like that; at some point, it gets so bad it's actually funny. I've had fair success with taking notes and pretending that I am a famous comedienne and will need to use the piece in a future show. At times, you wonder if perhaps killing a chicken and doing an impromptu dance while shaking the carcass might persuade the universe to cut you some slack! ;) I haven't tried it, but your adventures make me want to try it on your behalf. :D At least the scale was kind - that has to help just a little!

Bill, welcome aboard!

Dagmar, you expressed exactly why I've been lurking around here. I don't post in the Maintainer's Chat because I still don't feel like I'm where I want to maintain; these "challenge" threads let me stay out on the fringe. Maybe I oughta just buy one of the train's club cars, like those folks who own cruise ship staterooms, and just plan to ride into the sunset here, eh? :) If I stay long enough, maybe I'll get to drive. :D

Massive Mom Braggage moment: DS12 has been invited to join the Ann Arbor Boychoir mid-season. He jumped into a rehearsal last night, auditioned at the end of it ... and he's in! He's wanted to move beyond his little church choir and see what he can really do. It's going to be a headache from here through April, because they are preparing Carmina Burana for Apr 21 with the U of M orchestra. I knew he was good ... I just had no idea he was THAT good.

Oh May is definitely just a waypoint for me... No way it is the end of this journey. :)

Becky - congratulations to DS! How exciting!

Just WOW - getting to sing in Carmina Burana is so neat.

Warm weather is arriving with Spring - like a switch being thrown, LOL.

silvlerbirch - whatever floats your boat, I salute your journey. Here, there, or wherever it takes you. My own goal here is just another place bang my head about staying my path. I don't have a number or a time frame.

Congrats to your son, Becky!!

May is not my endpoint, either. It's just the place to set my goal. Something to work hard for. I need to remember to work hard for it! This will not happen without my working at it.

I am feeling a lot better about myself. My tummy, although still a bit flabby, looks a lot better. I got a new bra on Sunday and when checking it's fit in the mirror yesterday, I determined I have less back fat than before. That is one GOOD thing! Now to get my thighs in line.

Tonight is the "official" celebration for my birthday. We have tickets for Blast (it's similar to Stomp if you know what that show is/was). We also have $100 in gift cards to the Chop House, so we'll go out to dinner and then the show. While I haven't decided on chicken or steak just yet, I have decided to ask if they can steam my broccoli and serve my salad with the dressing on the side.

I lost, I regained now I am at a net loss of 12.8 since first of January.
Anybody concerned about our train, remember it is completely open ended, get on , get off where ever you want to, just come along and enjoy the ride,

Happy belated Birthday to Allison!

ICUwishing, congrats to your son!

I'm starting measuring/calorie counting again as of yesterday. I've decided that from now until Easter I'm going back into diet mode (except for one day when I am going to the Renn Faire - that's a free day! ;)). Off to a little bit of a rocky start - it's tough for me to get back into weighing/measuring rather than just throwing things in the mix. Last night I made a stir fry and some veggie egg rolls (baked). Not sure how accurate my calorie estimates were, and I also did not need the 3 glasses of wine along with the meal... anyway, tonight I am sitting the scale out before I start cooking.

I blipped up to 152.0. Not sure how high it got - I tangled with sodium nitrite (red dyes) in the corned beef brisket over the holiday weekend. It was ugly. I was ugly. :) Today was the first day I dared to get on the scale. Funny, I never thought about the dyes in sodium nitrate. They don't have to declare it on the packaged finished food, because the dye is a mandatory additive for sodium nitrite. It's too poisonous to leave white! Thanks for looking out for us, FDA ...

Becky, that is seriously thrilling news about your son singing "Carmina Burana." In fact, it's far too stimulating. I've got the strains of "O Fortuna" crashing through my head as I write this, and am envisioning about a half-dozen action heroes rappeling down the sides of tall buildings or racing speedboats across the gulf or coming up behind villains and strangling them with piano wire. The kid is going to learn some portentous Latin sentences but fast.

Oh, and I am happy today. Yesterday, the Travelodge corporation sent an email to my Yahoo account looking for feedback on my recent stay with them. They are SO gonna get it ...

Originally Posted by saef:
Becky, that is seriously thrilling news about your son singing "Carmina Burana." In fact, it's far too stimulating. I've got the strains of "O Fortuna" crashing through my head as I write this, and am envisioning about a half-dozen action heroes rappeling down the sides of tall buildings or racing speedboats across the gulf or coming up behind villains and strangling them with piano wire. The kid is going to learn some portentous Latin sentences but fast.

Oh, and I am happy today. Yesterday, the Travelodge corporation sent an email to my Yahoo account looking for feedback on my recent stay with them. They are SO gonna get it ...

OH.....I wish I could be there when Travelodge reads your feedback.

The last time I complained about a company's service (Time Warner Cable), they sent me a gift basket from Harry & David.

Carmina Burana is one of those things you hear and know you've heard it, but you don't necessarily know just what you're hearing. But as soon as you pull it up to check it out, you say, "Oh, I've heard this before." My DD would immediately know what it was--whether you call it by name or start playing it. (Listening to it now on Spotify.)

Last night at the Chop House, I opted for macadamia encrusted mahi mahi (served with a house salad, sauteed spinach and lobster mashed potatoes). The fish was blech. Kept tasting it the rest of the night (and even into the morning). The potatoes were amazing!

The show was amazing. It's called Blast! and it's basically a drum and bugle corps done on stage. All the musicians were amazing. I wish DD could have gone with us. She'd always had a dream to be in a drum and bugle corps--perhaps she ought to try out for the show!

Thanks to all for the congrats! DS has been singing for about 6 years and taking formal lessons for about 2. He just about flipped himself inside out when he found out they would be performing Carmina Burana next month! He told me that singing it was on his "bucket list" - the director of the choir said he should plan not only to do it with the soprano section this year, but to come back and rehash it as a tenor/baritone in a few years.

saef - I absolutely relate to your images! The one that I remember the most is from a movie (Sword and the Sorceror?) where there's a wave of chain-mailed calvary riding through an orchard, with dislodged apple/cherry blossoms spinning through their wake. A live performance may be more than I can handle! Like Bargoo ... I'd love to see your response to Travelodge. :devil: Given your skills with the language, it may take them about three days to figure out that you're ripping them a new one. ;)

allison, Blast sounds like something DS would love. We've been following the Stomp website for a few years, trying to arrange a chance to go.

We saw Stomp a few years ago. While I liked it a lot, I think Blast is better. Of course, they change things up from time to time, so probably if I were to see Stomp now, there'd be new things included.

:lol: Saef, maybe they'll give you a free night's stay at a Travelodge!! Thanks, but no thanks, right?

Becky that's pretty cool!

:wave: at everyone!

The men in my life never seem to "get it" about weight loss/maintenance, so I generally just avoid the topic. This works well for my father, but my boyfriend....ugh. My bf is constantly on me about "eating enough" because he swears I don't. I always remind him that:

1. As a female who weighs about 50 lbs less than him, I simply don't NEED to eat as much food as he does. We don't have to split everything in half.
2. Yes, I had a bout with eating disorders. Beginning with anorexia that morphed into binge and starve, and then just binge. I'm not likely to relapse, and if I did it would probably be into the binging end of things.
3. It is not helpful for him to comment on something I am eating being unhealthy or having a lot of calories one minute, and then telling me I am not eating enough the next...

Anyway, last night I decided not to have a second beer so I could have a piece of garlic bread instead. And this opened up a whole calorie conversation... BF is eating healthy/trying to lose weight right now too, and is aware that I'm counting calories again so the switch was no big deal. But then I made the mistake of telling him that the previous day I'd eaten about 2000 calories and I really needed to back off. He told me that was normal and I needed to not starve myself... I'm trying to explain that to MAINTAIN my current weight I should only eat about 1650 cals/day but he's going off on me about USDA recommendations or something. Seriously? He's an educated guy. In public health/epidemiology, no less. I swear he KNOWS better. Maybe he, as a 180-lb male, needs at least 2000 calories.

*sigh*. Anyway. Needed to vent that out a little.