Must We Be Idiots? (No...)

Every now and then it will occur to me that I'm an idiot. Not generally, just about one particular thing or other.

I've been working really hard knocking off a bunch of goals, and actually revising some that I didn't really care about to others that I did actually want to accomplish, like re-organizing my kitchen.

I should actually break that down into smaller goals, but what the heck.

Today I organized my antique pie safe! Which I am actually using as a kitchen cabinet, there not being many of the ordinary variety in my approximately 10-foot-square kitchen). Here's a "before":

What you don't see in this picture is all the stuff I DO use stacked all over the dining room table and the wine rack and sitting on the floor behind doors and stuff. Why on earth would I be storing a whole bunch of stuff I never use in this cabinet???? Idiocy!

So I rolled up my sleeves and started looking at the junk in there as though I'd never seen it before. Like those humongous schooners up on the top of the cabinet--we never use those, and they just sit up there and get covered with greasy dust. Out they went. Also out went serving dishes we never use, a set of old measuring cups I didn't even know were in there, a whole dish full of water bottle caps...you get the idea.

Now I have room to put all the humongous wine glasses I got for Christmas! Plus some of the old ones. And the Chardonnay glasses I'm planning to buy.

After I clean out the bottom of the cabinet--NOT looking forward to that--I'm going to put all the random Rubbermaid containers down there, and possibly the KitchenAid mixer which is now sitting on the floor next to the new Cuisinart.

You'll notice the top of the cabinet is slightly less picturesque than before, but that's because I decided to put only stuff that we actually use up there every now and then, like the wok, so it doesn't sit there for ages and get the greasy dust thing going on.

There were Splenda packets in the right drawer that must have been eight years old. And I swear we must have fourteen boxes of birthday candles...I have to be selective what I put in these drawers because they don't open and close very easily. This is a VERY OLD piece of furniture. Well, by American standards, anyway--circa 1810.

So NOW I have a whole bunch of stuff to throw out/store/give away stacked on the dining room table and sitting on the floor, etc. Wonder how long it will stay there...

As a reward for reading all the way to the bottom of this very boring post, here's a bonus picture of the spice system I put up several months ago and having been meaning to brag about. I don't have room for a spice rack anywhere, and I've never liked them anyway because you're limited to however many the rack will hold and if it held a lot it would be a great big thing to have sitting around in your kitchen. Anyway, I heard one day about magnetic spice containers, and I went straight online and bought some. I forget how much the whole thing cost--I guess about $75. But what's it worth not to spend your entire cooking life having to dig around for the spice you want and usually knocking several of them off the shelf unless you keep them in a drawer like I used to but can't now because I have no drawers to spare. And I can always buy more jars if I need them. I even keep them in alphabetical order (except ScottieDog keeps putting them back wrong). (But that's okay because I really appreciate his cooking.)



BTW that yellow apron was a Christmas gift from the lovely AC! Isn't it the cutest thing? It has rickrack on it.

BLEccchh!

"I'm so sorry, Grandmother!"

Week of utter disaster (in three parts).

1. Massachusetts discovers its inner idiot.

2. The Supreme Court issues the worst decision in the history of the court.

(I went to a lot of trouble to write the following for a post elsewhere, so I'm pasting it in various places.)

[getting up on my soapbox]

From the WSJ: "the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision supporting free political speech."

Here's the problem (aside from the issue of whether corporations are people): they keep conflating money with speech. Everybody already has free speech in this country. It isn't as though a corporation can't issue as many press releases as they want in support of whatever they want, or an individual can't get up on a soapbox in the town square or write a letter to the editor or sign a petition without fear of persecution.

What is at issue here is that money is not speech. It is power. Those who have more money have more power. If you conflate that with speech, then those who have more money have more free speech? What kind of democracy is that?

Speech will no longer be "free." You'll have to pay through the nose to keep up with what the corporations are doing.

AND...

3. I lost my Fitbit. I was babysitting the adorable Baby Jack (see above), and he kicked it out of my pocket, or kicked it loose enough to fall out when I went home, and I feel bereft and abandoned. We can't find it anywhere. I put in a Lost and Found inquiry to the MTA, but it takes ten days at least to find out anything. So I just bought a new Fitbit--I figured somebody somewhere could use the extra if it turned up--but that won't get here until the middle of February.

BUMMER.

But at least there's a sweet picture of Baby Jack.

In Love with my Fitbit!

Well, hey, everyone!

I have been super busy with holidays and packing on some poundage, but all to the good since I've just gone on another FatBet today!

I'm so pleased to be starting at exactly 140. That's counting the holiday poundage, but before that I was maintaining my last weight (after the last FatBet) pretty darn well. This time we have four people! $400 is on the line, and ten pounds is the goal. If I get to 130 I will be thrilled, since that's Goal 45.

But about my Fitbit...*sigh* It's the greatest. We are never apart! We even sleep together. I found out on the Fitbit community site that people are naming their trackers! Well, they're so cute--but somehow I'm not catching on; "Fitbit" seems like a good enough name to me.

Check out my sleep charts for today! I got a 100% efficiency on my nap!! I really zonked out. (You can't see the time in this shot, but it was 32 minutes.) My first 100%! And last night I got 90%. That's pretty good--usually I get in the low 80s. (Sorry about the low picture quality; I had to shoot the screen with my iPhone. I couldn't do a screen grab.)



Yesterday I got all 10,000 steps in and my activity score was up in the 800s (1000 is the goal). That was undoubtedly because I was babysitting Baby Jack!!! And I know you're dying to see a picture, so here you go:

(Well, okay, it's three pictures, but it's not like you can have too many.)



I got to feed him peas and rice cereal!! Every time I gave him the peas, he went "mmmmm!" God, I love being a grandmother.

Fitbit! Better than FatBet?

So far, the answer to that question would have to be yes. The FatBet was truly motivating, and I spent some quality time with my friends who were in it with me. I don't really miss the social interaction, because everybody wants to look at my Fitbit Tracker and ask me questions! There is also a function on the website interface where you can invite friends and compare scores. I'm going to see if I can goad some people into joining me there. It's so motivating, you don't really need to plunk down the money for a FatBet. You don't even necessarily have to buy a tracker (it's $99 plus shipping), you can enter your stats and food and activities.

But the tracker is SOOOO CUUUUTE. And so fun! I'm so glad mine finally shipped. And I'm glad that they refused to send it out until they had worked out all (or hopefully most) of the kinks.

You can see how little it is--just two inches long. They keep calling it "thumb-sized" but really it's smaller. At least smaller than my thumb, and my hands aren't that big.

Below is what the readout looks like. (Sorry it's fuzzy, but it's so tiny you have to get really close. I can however read the numbers without my glasses.) You press a little button and it shows you how many steps you've taken that day. (My goal is 10,000.) You press it again, and it shows how many miles you've gone. Another click and it shows the calories you've burned. One more click and you get a little blue flower that grows as you get closer to your goal! (Shoot, I should have taken a picture of that.)

A really cool feature of the tracker is that you can put it into sleep mode and wear it to bed. There's a silky-soft cuff that you put on, and it has a little pocket for the tracker. It records your movement during the night, and can give you a pretty good picture of how well (or not) you're sleeping. Last night I got a score of 89%. I'm not sure how good that is. I was awake from 3:00 to 4:00. This morning I checked the interface online and got a very interesting chart that showed my sleep pattern during the night.

I like the Fitbit interface too. Entering your food for the day is a lot easier than using the Weight Watchers interface! And it has all kinds of little charts that automatically generate and tell you how you're doing.

The Fitbit support people are superlative. I had a glitch downloading the software--just a strange fluke that they had never heard of before--but the support people responded very quickly, and I was up and running in no time. Yesterday I even complained to them about a grammatical error. Today I got an email saying, "Thank you for noticing this and we will contact the website administrator about it." :-) [UPDATE: They actually corrected the error!!! OMG.]

So we'll see how this goes...I'll be posting more about it as I follow the program. (And I lost a half a pound already.)

Mission Accomplished!

Goal 5 - Attend The Nutcracker

Melissa in the ticket line

I was SO JAZZED by this you have no idea!!! ScottieDog said he'd never seen me so happy at a performance. [Actually that might be an overstatement. I was pretty darn happy at Spamalot!] It was SO. GREAT. Scott said it was certainly the best production he'd ever seen, so much better in fact that he enjoyed it thoroughly all over again.

Well hey, it's Balanchine, after all. What I didn't know is that Balanchine essentially rescued The Nutcracker from relative obscurity and established it as a Christmas classic at the NYCBallet in 1954. I had been assuming it always was--like Handel's Messiah--from day one. But apparently when it was first performed in Russia, people kind of went "meh..." Amazing.

All the little kids were great! And the mouse costumes were amazing! And the big Christmas Tree! Oh gosh... And the dancing! And the snow!

I could go on and on.

Here are some random shots of the evening:



Clockwise from the upper left: 1) the David H. Koch Theater, 2) the humongous stage, 3) Melissa by the newly renovated computer automated Lincoln Center Fountain, though it wasn't doing much at the time, 4) two big strong ladies in the lobby who do great things for Melissa's body image.

(ScottieDog has some great pictures on his iPod that I might post later.)

Then we went out to an Irish pub that turned out to be the hangout for the ballerinas and the ballet guys (ballerinos?). Several of the principal dancers came in after us and sat down at the table in the picture. But by then I was not in a picture-taking mode, being busy with my Southern Fried Chicken. It was pretty good, but real Southern Fried wouldn't have had such a crisp eggy crust on it.

Dammit, no more yoga!

So anyway, it turns out I have mechanical sacroiliac joint dysfunction. (SIJ) At least it's not arthritis. I decided to go get it looked at since it's been bothering me for years, and because I keep getting hurt.

But get this: the therapist says I can't do yoga anymore! Or at least not a lot of the poses. She says yoga is for mobility, and I have too much mobility. She doesn't want me doing anything with one leg that I'm not doing with the other leg. For instance, the pose in the picture is a big no-no. I wanted to say, does that mean I have to hop upstairs, but I didn't. Still wondering about that, though. (That would make for an interesting Sunday morning, because the choir loft is three flights up.)

I'm also wondering about the "yoga is for mobility" thing, though. I think there are a lot of strength poses in the yoga I've been doing. Even in the Sun Salutation. It's not for wimps.

And I can't cross my legs anymore either!!! Or stand in that cool model pose with the hand on the hip and the weight on that leg... She says I have to stand in the army at-ease position. Great. That'll look elegant.

So anyway, now I have to do Pilates instead. I changed my Goal 49 to say "Take Pilates classes," and I'm in the process of registering for one, except they have to have my doctor's approval. Bureaucracy... (Speaking of which, did you read this???? Counterbureaucracy Scary!!!)

But here's the good news: Tonight I am going to go see The Nutcracker!!!! (Goal 5) For the first time in my life!! Just one of those weird unexplainable gaps in my musical entertainment experience...

ScottieDog is all excited; he's seen it a bajillion times growing up in Chicago, but I never did except for bits and pieces on TV. I asked him if he minded taking me, but he said "God no!" He explained that it's like having your child's first trip to the zoo: you get excited all vicariously. He did say it was an awfully "girly" ballet.

Again, I have to say I would never have scheduled this, or a lot of the other things I've done in the past year, if it hadn't been for my "101 Goals in 1001 Days" project. I'll be lucky if I get 50% of them done, but just look at what I've accomplished that I might not have done! I got to see Jon Stewart!!!! And the stars!!! (The real ones.)

I'm making a very big effort to get a bunch of them done before the new year. I slacked off majorly here lately, and I have some lost ground to make up for.

I was going to try to do another December of Discipline, but I'm off to a very late start for various reasons, such as SIJ. Still, I think it's a good idea. Get a running start on those New Year's Resolutions with me!!!

Habit-forming

Revisiting Goals 80 and 81

Acquire five new good habits and get rid of one bad habit.

The bad habit I got rid of was leaving my shoes all over the house. And this really stuck!!! I hardly EVER leave my shoes anywhere any more. Of course now they're all thrown into the closet cluttering up the floor, because I'm too lazy to put them in the shoe thingy, but still. I call that an improvement.

The good habits I've been trying to acquire...hm, I just hope I can even remember what some of them are. (Must I reread all my posts? Oog...)

1. I do know the first one was trying to get my makeup on before I leave the house, and though I've done well mostly, I have lately slacked off majorly. I credit the spiral-down with this development. I keep sleeping until the last possible minute, if not beyond.

2. And one I addressed in the last post, processing the mail every day.

3. Oh geez, flossing. I really need to do better with this one.

4. Getting over myself already. I've been trying to do better with this, but my reputation as a Wincer, at least, is still alive and well, according to my colleagues. And I don't think I did so well in one of my recent concerts; I got so worked up I started gagging when I started to sing. Not the solo stuff, thank God, just the ensemble stuff. And I hate those concerts where I have to go back and forth between solo voice and ensemble voice...it's really hard.

What's number five....? Maybe I didn't start one. I'm sure something will occur to me.

One thing that strikes me revisiting these goals--you really have to keep reminding yourself what your goals are.