Be Patient I Am Getting To The Point

Hey everyone,

How are we all doing? Enjoying the summer? Today it finally got hot outside and I'm sitting here in my apartment sweating out a cold. Needless to say I'm not feeling much like being in the sun.

I've gone this entire year and then some without getting any kind of cold that has been flying around my office, but last week it hit me like a ton of bricks. Unfortunately because of this I've had to put a stop to my running program. I only got to my first day in my second week and then this cold hit me. I don't know about you, but when I have a bad cold I just have no appetite and therefore no energy and can't bring myself to do much of anything. I'm hoping that I can start up the whole thing from week 1 day 1 again and hopefully my immune system will be strong enough not to give out on me just as I'm getting into a groove of working out.

How is everyone else doing? Hopefully good. I don't have much to write other than complaints about being sick haha.

Hey Everyone!

I am so sorry I have been so absent lately. Basically the laptop I had was giving me a lot of problems. It would freeze every time I tried to do something and the u and w keys were completely caput, which made it pretty much impossible to type anything at all!

I guess I have a few updates for those of you who have been kind enough to stick around in my absence! I am so thankful for all of you and I really apologise for being a terrible blogging friend lately.

First and foremost, I am excited to report that I've joined a running program. I initially started this blog to inspire myself and others to lose weight. Somewhere along the way I abandoned Operation Get Un Fat, otherwise known as OGUF in favour of being lazy and not doing anything with myself. I'm not sure what happened. I guess I had come to terms with the fact that I was overweight, but that I didn't look as heavy as the scale said I was, and as a result figured I could just slack off. Well friends, after being at 195 for about a year I got sick and tired of it and tried Atkins. I was able to break out of my 195 slump and actually got down to 196 on the scale for a period of time, but really found that Atkins was not something I could do long term. I am far too picky an eater and am not a fan of meat that much, so eating that every day was kind of getting boring for me. But now that I am back in the 188-190 range I am really starting to feel that I can do this weight loss thing.

Last week I started a program that some of you may or may not be familiar with. It's the C25K program, aka Couch to 5km. Essentially it gives you week by week instructions on how to train yourself to run 5K. Today I started week to, and I am feeling great. I had never thought in the past that being a runner was possible for me, but there is great support on their facebook page from everyone else who is joining the program and those who have succeeded. If you're looking to start running but have no idea how to get into it, I really recommend you look up Couch to 5K on facebook!

What else? Well, my last roommate moved out. I can't remember how things were the last time I wrote to you, but I had been living with 2 roommates- one of them of which I was sharing my room with. Both of them are gone now and I have procured a new roommate. The nice thing about this one is that despite the fact that he is almost never home. He leaves in the morning before I wake up, and when I come home from work after midnight he's here and then we both go to bed after talking about our day a bit. It gives us zero opportunity to get annoyed with eachother. Despite the fact that D is never here and so doesn't get a chance to clean the house doesn't seem to bother me. It's nice having the place to myself, and it really isn't too much work to clean his cereal bowls and glasses he uses the odd time he does get to eat here. And he doesn't spill things everywhere which is the thing I like best!

When I was living with S, he would leave a mess all over the entire house and use up all the dishes and leave them all over the place. And he was always at home and yet never cleaned. It would drive me nuts and it eventually almost destroyed our friendship. I'm glad to say that since S has moved out we've been getting along much better, but that also may have something to do with the fact that he and I virtually almost never talk. I think we definitely need that space right now, because living with someone who has a completely different lifestyle to you for a year and a half can really wear you down. Especially for someone like me who really likes a lot of alone time and quiet time.

Let's see, what else? I've been watching a live feed for Val Lisista. If you are unfaimliar with who she is, she's an incredible concert pianist. What she's done is set up a live feed on Ustream where fans of hers can watch her practicing for her series of concerts she has coming up in the future. She practices 14 hours a day which seems insane to me, but I guess that's how you come to be amazing. It's really inspiring. So I called Long and Mcquade which is a music store we have here in Canada to ask about piano lessons. I think I might get started on those. I'm really feeling it's time to get back to the basics and start doing things that bring me joy and fulfillment, and I think taking those lessons will be one of them.

I also went to Staples, which I love and adore, and bought myself a nice journal and some new pens. I am trying to make an effort to take time every day to write out my thoughts and what's happened in my day. I want to get back into writing regularly and I feel that writing out my own thoughts and feelings is a good start. If you can't communicate your own emotions, then how can you hope to communicate the emotions of a character? It's been going well so far. I only write a page or 2 a day. But as a friend put it to me "if you write 2 pages a day you'll have a novel in a year." So I am going to keep up with it.

All in all things are going well here. Now that I have this new laptop I hope I can come write to you all more often. I know I know, people say that they'll blog more often, etc, and never do. But I am really going to try.

I hope everyone out in the blogging world is doing amazingly well.

Take care,

Sandra

A BOARD GAMER!

Don't you just love board games? I do. There is just something so innocent and care free about them and it takes me back to my childhood. Well, I guess Risk is a little less care free, but I think everyone loves a little world domination :)

The picture above is my collection so far. I need to continue to build upon it. I wish that I could go out and buy Battleship and the old Guess Who, but these days these game manufacturers keep upgrading the games and they are just becoming ridiculous and losing their charm.

What are some of your favourite games?

I know I haven't mentioned Operation Get Un-Fat in a long time, but it has been under way even if I have been a little less consistent and certainly less committed than I was when I started. However, something in me has changed recently and I have felt more motivated than ever to commit myself to losing the 30-40 pounds I need to lose.

Recently I went through a phase where I was having terrible cravings for all things sweet. I am not a sweets person by any means. Perhaps once or twice in a month I would indulge in a tasty treat, but for some reason or another it seemed to balloon up to every single day that I was eating these things. Mostly confectionary items like chocolate chips and peanut butter chips and the like. I wasn't aware of it at the time but during that period of time I was so out of sorts. I was forgetful, disoriented, my brain was all over the place. I couldn't seem to get enough sleep and I woke up as tired as I was before I went to bed. For some reason it didn't equate in my mind that all the sugar I was eating was doing this to me.

Then at some point my online searches and browsing led me to the Atkins diet. I know there are a lot of people out there who hear "Atkins" and back away in disgust, and truthfully I was one of those people until I started reading about it. Then I bought the book. I think people misunderstand Atkins and assume that it's all protein and fat and that it's low carb so you don't get anything good because you can't eat fruit. Well, first let me tell you that I now eat healthier and more vegetables than I ever have in my entire life. I was hardly eating any protein what so ever before and now am eating eggs and chicken and tuna and am actually bothering to cook. I feel like my life is changing as I make better choices about what to eat in my body, and the best thing is that I have a TON of energy.

What really got me is the fact that one morning I stepped on the scale and my heart dropped seeing 201 staring right in my face. I felt disgusted with myself and tried to rationalize it by telling myself it was water weight and it would just drop off. The problem there was that I had held on to water weight plenty of times before and never got above 195.

After a coupld of weeks changing my eating habits (I didn't give up my 2 pieces of organic, flour free bread though) I am 190 on the nose. I am looking forward to being out of the 190's permanently by the end of the week. I feel refreshed and renewed and excited that I am doing this and I don't even have to work hard at it.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a little update on that!

Does this new layout make you feel good, or what? I'll tell you something, I am absolutely loving it. I've felt pretty inspired this week to do some writing so I figured I would celebrate with a brand spanking new layout. A friend of mine told me how to easily get one uploaded on here, and this particular one just sparked my interest.

I really think the things you look at and surround yourself with can really inspire you and change your mood, so I thought I'd change it up.

In other news, my cats are still adorable and here's some proof: