Sunday, December 27, 2009

Merry Belated Christmas!

Seven years and two days ago, this is what I found under my Christmas tree:


He (the Gum Zombie) was one week old. Hee :)

I hope everyone had a good one, whatever it is you celebrate!!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Christmas Miscellany

My favorite Christmas movie of all time, Scrooged, doesn't appear to be set for broadcast by anyone this holiday season. I was forced to go out and buy my own DVD of the thing so I can watch it... probably during the gift wrapping frenzy later on this week.

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I have finished all my Christmas shopping except for Choreboy. And I would have him finished too, except I left his shirt sizes at home on my cell phone. And I couldn't call him from the mall to get them from him because my cell phone was at home. With his shirt sizes on it. It was a cyclical kind of mess.

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My local cable provider has the 2009 Yule Log in its "On Demand" lineup.

Worse yet, I watched it.

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Merry Christmas, folks!!

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Marketing and PR

Disclaimer: I love Publix, and specifically I love the Publix Pharmacy. I get all my prescriptions there. It's easy, it's affordable, and it just makes good sense time-wise.

That said, it's time for another Open Letter to Publix.


Dear Publix Marketing Powers-that-Be:

I listen to the radio on my morning commute (Tampa Bay's Mix 100.7 if anyone cares), and over the past month or so there's been a new Publix Pharmacy commercial airing.

Oh. My. God. And you people paid good money for this? The mind boggles.

The first offense? It's done by one of those female voiceover artists who graduated from the the William Shatner School of Public Speaking where she was apparently taught to pause awkwardly, and then give one of those little half laughs in a semi-confessional tone to make it appear that she is Just A Regular Person, when in reality she is A Truly Dreadful Actor.

And then there is the meat of the commercial.

Kill me now.

[Note: text of the commercial is from memory because a) I don't have an audio of it close at hand, and b) even if I did... no. Just no.]

"My son ___ has always been a pretty healthy kid, but I knew the day would come when he would need a prescription."

Really? Gee, there's a shocker.

"I remember that day so well..."


Oh hogwash. None of us remembers that day because unless you've locked yourself in a sterile environment your kid has his first cold before he's 3 months old, and then you're squirting Augmentin down his unwilling little mouth, resulting in you then being stuck with the aftereffects in his diapers for days afterwards... not that I'm bitter or anything. But seriously, it happens so many times that the first blends into the tenth. It's just a part of parenting.

"After visiting his doctor we'd stopped by Publix to pick up a few things, you know, chicken soup, tissues, cough drops..."

Yep, been there done that. Countless times.

"When we were about to leave, he said 'Mom, what about my medicine?'"

WTH?? The kid is old enough to TALK? This is so not his first prescription. Good grief.

Anyway, more ridiculousness follows about how they didn't have a family pharmacy (with "oh how embarassing!" overtones), but then she got hit by a bolt of brilliance and realized they were loyal to PUBLIX!

So now Publix is their family pharmacy, it was a memorable experience, blah blah blah, and oh God will someone just make this commercial go away???

Newsflash, Publix Marketing Folks: people use Publix Pharmacy for their family because most parents (okay, humans in general whether parental or child-free) like to combine trips as much as humanly possible rather than making a separate run to a pharmacy. This goes quadruple if you're dealing with a sick kid. Come in, drop the scrip, grab the groceries, pick up the meds, and you're out.

Easy-peasy. Nothing "memorable" about it. And that's the beauty part.

Because if I can remember a trip to the pharmacy, that's a sign that something went terribly wrong.

Lordy.

Okay, rant over. Must finish actually working.

'Tis the Season

I've actually got a spreadsheet detailing my Christmas shopping progress. One of my friends (Tycho from the comments) informed me that spreadsheets are for calculating and analyzing data, so I'd be better served by a table in a Word document. To that I say bah, humbug... if only because the cells in the spreadsheet are already there and I don't have to come up with some notion of how many rows and columns I need for making a table. Formatting is just easier, period.

So anyway, the spreadsheet is done. Items yet to be purchased are highlighted in yellow, and holy crap there are a ton of them. Good news is, everything I've purchased from online has finally shipped.

Bad news is, the last item to ship went out today and if the Elder doesn't get his set of three micro wrestler action figures, Santa's ass is grass.

Monday, December 14, 2009

The 100% Weekend Challenge

For those of you who read Jenn over at Watch My Butt Shrink, you already know I joined her and Coley on the 100% weekend challenge. After inhaling most of a stuffed-crust pizza last Thursday (and the boneless chicken wings -- mustn't forget those!!!) I was determined to somehow get back on track since my scale reflected a weight of 168 on Friday morning, up from 149.99999999 a mere two months ago.

Again, please remember that I've been struggling to lose the last 30-40 pounds of a 70 pound overage for THREE YEARS. I've gotten as close as 15 pounds away, but that 168 is my high since I first started losing the weight since August of 2006. So it is absolutely imperative that I not put any more back on. Just give me a few months without watching my food I'll easily have 170 to lose rather than even that initial 70.

So I'm happy to report that I had a 100% Friday, Saturday, *and* Sunday. YES. It was a close thing on dinner last night because I was trapped at church for the younger son's Christmas choir doohickie-thingie, and they were feeding us. But it worked out very well because they had baked chicken (I took the skin off of mine), green beans, salad, rolls, and mashed potatoes with gravy. I ate everything with the exception of the potatoes/ gravy combo as I didn't know just what they'd made the potatoes with (i.e., skim or whole milk, butter, no butter, etc).

Anyway, hooray! Jenn was awesome with the text and email support, and I can only hope I reciprocated in some small way. She did a great job herself with severely extenuating circumstances.

For today, I'm well on track. Breakfast was an egg and a banana, and I just ate a SouthBeach Peanut Butter High Protein bar to tide me over until lunch, when I'm having mustard maple pork tenderloin, left over from Friday night, along with some broccoli and a roll of some persuasion.

I cannot begin to tell you how awesome that mustard maple pork tenderloin is. It's become a staple in our home. I nearly had to beat Choreboy off the leftovers with my cast iron skillet.

For those of you still reading, dinner tonight is buffalo chicken. I cook boneless skinless chicken breasts in a non-stick skillet. After the chicken is cooked through, I remove it from the heat and slice the chicken breasts. Then I return them to the pan and pour just enough buffalo sauce into the pan to lightly coat all the pieces. Toss on a bit of blue cheese crumbles, and we're good to go!

This works out especially well for us because the Gum Zombie prefers the chicken without the sauce, so I remove his before the saucing, and the Elder thinks blue cheese is disgusting, so we just sprinkle accurately measured amounts of blue cheese over individual servings rather than into the skillet.

In other news, the choir event yesterday was lovely. Gum Zombie was a marvelous little chorister and didn't need me to fling the Look of Doom at him even once. The Elder suffered through the concert beautifully. He did, however, proceed to tell the Gum Zombie that he really should join chess club next year... a chess club which conveniently conflicts with choir, which would thus save the Elder from EVER having to attend one of these gigs again.

Boy's resourceful... gotta hand it to him.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Un!Ac!Ceptable!!!!

Oh.

My.

God.

I just got on the scale at my mother's house this morning, and holy crap, the news was bad.

168.

I've gained nearly 20 pounds in about two months. THIS is how I got to weighing 200 pounds back in 2006, y'all. The whole "eating as if famine is approaching" thing.

Now granted I know that if I eat well over the weekend and weigh myself on Monday that I could drop up to five of those pounds as I ate pizza last night (major water retention) plus I woke up late this morning and was totally off schedule with everything, so when I weighed myself it was with all my heavy clothing and shoes on...

But seriously? 168???????

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

You know, sometimes I feel a bit weird prattling on about my weight when I'm in what so many folks term as "one-derland" and in fact barely broke over that even at my highest, but the truth of the matter is that if the Elder son (then seven) hadn't announced to the entire grocery store "Mommy, you weigh two hundred!!!" in August of 2006, I might still be eating like I was.

Wait. I am.

But I could have done it without a break for the past three years, and well... do the math. I am fully capable of gaining 10 pounds per month. The rate of weight gain would eventually slow, but I could easily be much closer to 300 rather than 200. All it would take would be for me to ignore the scale for about six months.

I have to get this in gear. I have to get my eating straight. I have to get my butt back on that treadmill and work on Couch-to-5K because the only way for me to beat this is to make sure my lifestyle is utterly changed, and parking my ever-widening ass on the couch or in the computer chair clearly isn't effective.

And what kills me is that I can say all this, and yet there's a huge part of me that's still thinking "Maybe tomorrow's good..."

*headdesk*

No, today is good. I've got an adequate lunch. I've got more oatmeal than I can shake a stick at. I've not screwed up my eating yet today, and in fact even if I had that's no excuse for me to continue to eat as if all the food on the planet is about to disappear.

I have a treadmill and I know how to use it. Ditto the weights and balance ball.

I totally know what Susan means about the Crazy Woman who inhabits her head, because I've got one of my own and, damn, girlfriend's loud. She's also the one who's been telling me not to read all your blogs, because she KNEW that if I did that I'd be forced to get on the scale...

Well, I beat her yesterday. And I read over at Jenn's blog about her one day challenge, which got my mind going again.

I'm so tired of watching what I eat. I'm so tired of exercising. I've been doing the food-watching for over three years now, some months more intently than others obviously, and the exercising this round kept going for three months. There's part of me that wishes and hopes that I could eventually stop doing either one of those activities.

But I can't. So... one day. I pledge to eat well today. And I just "signed up" over in the comments of Jenn's latest entry to make it a 100% good choices weekend too.

I think I'll take a "before" pic tonight. If I don't manage to make it 100% this weekend, I'll post that sucker on Monday. If I do make it through, the latest I'll post the "before" pic is when I have an "after" pic I like.

The bottom line is that I can't keep hopping up and down like this with my weight. My health can't take it, and my wardrobe seams can't stand the strain.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Just a quote

I've got a good rant boiling at Publix's advertising folks, but it's not quite ripe. In the meantime, here's a quote:

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." (Herm Albright)

Heh. I like.

Monday, December 07, 2009

Not that *I* have a new post...

... but Choreboy does.

Read it. Almost-live-and-in-action, folks.

Snerk.