The "joys" of being a Marine wife and Nurse: January 2011

Super quick post before my lap top battery dies (way too lazy at this point to find the charger)

I am starting my diet back up again, and starting another 30 day challenge. Alex and I 30 day challenged cutting off our cable back in November, I am still cableless, and as far as I can see will continue to be that way for a long time.

This months 30 day challenge
Exercise 4-5 times a week, at least 45 min a day. This challenge is officially starting this week with the first week of Feb, but I did work out 4x last week too:) I have been going to Planet Fitness with my sister in law, since her membership allows her to bring someone every time she goes. I will eventually get my own membership, but at this point it does not effect/cost her anything for me to be her guest, and since we have a schedule set, it keeps both of us accountable to the other. I also got the key to the "fitness center" at the apartments. It's not much but it's enough.

As for the diet, I have re downloaded the calorie tracker app on my phone, and am going from there. Since all I have to do is plug in the food, I can tell where I am compared to what they say I should be eating. I also found a great website for putting in recipes and finding out the nutritional information for a serving. This will be invaluable to me since I LOVE to cook.

Hopefully we should see some big changes in my future. My initial goal is 16 lbs, that would take me to 199. My doctor wants me to aim for 25. Grand scheme of things I'm looking at 40, but let's start with 16 :)

So I have no pictures for this weeks tackle for a variety of reasons
1) I went to use Alex's camera, got 5 blurry shots and then the battery died
2) I found my camera while picking up, and have since lost it again
3) I'm still getting used to remembering to take pictures
4) It probably would have slowed me down
5) I don't know that I wouldn't be embarrassed to show the before pics :)

Seriously though, I kind of wished that I had remembered/re-found my camera, because I would have gotten some good posts out of my evening cooking. Oh well on to the tackle.

So since I had today off for Martin Luther King Jr day, and I have tomorrow off for a furlough, I decided to be productive today, and a lazy bum tomorrow. I woke up going, "Today we will finally fold the laundry." and no surprise, that is the only thing we did NOT accomplish today. I feel I should do a side note on the laundry. We have a small half sized washer and dryer in our apartment. When we moved in both of us were excited because with loads that small they would be super easy to put away right away. All of that is good in theory but we are both apparently TERRIBLE at putting away laundry. We hardly ever have any dirty laundry waiting to be done (right now being the exception because Alex brought in some blankets from the car that have been hanging out in the trunk since the eclipse. D'oh!), but for some reason the act of putting it away, only to wear it again two days later seems like such an exercise in futility to me. We were really good for a while, Alex's cat kept peeing on his clothes, but once we got that all figured out there has been little incentive, other than the whole fact that you're supposed to put them away. Oh well, I'll eventually get some sort of routine figured out. I think I just need to stop unloading the drier RIGHT before I go to work. Anyways, back to the tackle.

So we didn't get the laundry folded, however we got so many other things done that I'm not even going to feel guilty. Today we:
~ Picked up our ENTIRE living room, including behind and under furniture
~ Finally finished packing away Christmas so that it can go back into storage
~Found everything else in the apartment that needs to go to storage, including a box of Halloween makeup.. whoops!
~ Vacuumed the living room as well as under and behind every piece of movable furniture
~ Vacuumed the sofa and chair
~ Finally made a disk of wedding photos for my mom
~ Wrangled all of the cat toys into one box (that will NOT last thanks to Gumby, but at least I have a place to put them now)
~ Bagged up the goodwill and took it to the car
~ Threw away umpteen bags of trash
~ Scrubbed every counter top, cabinet front, drawer, and appliance in the kitchen (it needed it.. badly)
~ Scrubbed the stove, stove/oven front, changed the foil on the burners and scrubbed the rings
~ Swept and mopped the kitchen/dining room area

Then I started on the cooking. Alex and I like doing 30 day trials. Our last 30 day, 30 days without cable is now on day 70 something and we're not looking back. This months 30days is 30 days without eating out, unless we are in a group, or at someone else's house, since those are a bit hard to control. In general we do not eat out a lot, before we couldn't afford it at all. But now that his unemployment has kicked in, and we're making more than our bills are again, we have a little bit of extra cash. While we still shouldn't be spending the money on that (we could be putting it in savings, paying down our car, saving for our Disney trip, paying of credit cards, etc etc etc) it is easier to go for it when you know there is that little extra in the bank account. So that is the financial aspect of the challenge.

There is also the health aspect. I am overweight, and my doctor would like me to lose 20-30 pounds. That still leaves me at curvy (to say the least) but that is her goal for me at this time, and I think that it is a good goal. Alex has the opposite problem. We would like him to gain about 15 - 20 pounds ever since we found out he is 7 pounds less than we thought he was. Now most people would think that eating out would be great for him, and that just I should stop, but just because he can eat what he wants doesn't mean he should. Heart disease runs rampant in his family. His father died of a heart attack at 48 and his uncle of a heart attack in his early 50s, so he is worried about his heart. He is the only person I know who has been taking baby aspirin since their early 20s.

Last Monday he had a scare that gave him a glimpse of what a heart attack would feel like. We went into urgent care to get part of a tick removed, and get prophylactic antibiotics for Lyme disease. When the doctor injected the lidocaine to numb the area he accidentally got it straight into the blood stream. He was also using 2% lidocaine which is actually the strength they use on crash carts. Since the tick bite was in his left armpit the lidocaine went straight to his heart, causing palpitations and a racing heart beat, and spread throughout his body causing his left arm, both legs, and diaphragm to go numb. It was a scary 10 minutes with a crash cart in our room (that was thankfully never used). If you ask him, he was certain that he was going to die. This experience has shown him that he most definitely does not want to die one day of anything heart related, so we are trying to keep our diet as heart healthy as possible, which is really hard to do when you eat out.

Wow that is a very long winded segue into my cooking portion of tonight's tackle. I decided to try to do a weeks worth of cooking, 1) to see if I could and (2) even though Alex isn't working, I still wind up doing most of the cooking, and I don't really like cooking after I get off of work. So tonight I cooked:

~Honey Walnut prawns (not the healthiest but still better than ordering them at a restaurant)
~ Spicy Chicken and bean soup (they called it chicken chili)
~ Home made pizza dough for buffalo chicken pizza (my FAV and way healthier to make at home)
~ Buffalo chicken
~ Rosemary garlic bread
~ Chicken broth
~ Roasted some butter nut squash for butternut squash soup, and butternut squash pasta (I'll make the pasta the day of, I still haven't figured out how to dry it yet)
~ Roasted chickpeas (oh my goodness I had no idea how good, and addicting those would be, crunchy, salty, and not fried or super fattening)
~ A large pot of rice, because when all else fails either one of us will eat a little bit of meat (if it's chicken he eats 6oz, otherwise we've been sticking to 3oz of meat) with katsu sauce over rice

Hopefully this will work out for lunch and dinner for both of us for the week, and if any of the recipes turn out spectacular I will defiantly share them :) And it will give me an excuse to make them again so that I can take pictures. (I do apologize for any rambly ness, it is 1130 at night and I just realized that the bread I'm making is a 3 rise bread, and it still has 45 minutes on the third rise before I can bake it, I'm a little sleepy)