So it’s day 12 of the South Beach Diet.  I have been doing incredibly well; I haven’t really cheated except for going out for dinner last night.  We went to a murder mystery dinner and the choices were chicken with pasta or brisket with mashed potatoes.  I opted for the chicken (far healthier than brisket) and only ate about 3 forkfuls of pasta, leaving the large majority of it on my plate.  I also ate most of my piece of cheesecake which was a definite no-no but I was able to get back on track right away.

I’ve been careful to explain to the kids why I’m eating the way I am - for example, I love bread too much, so instead of eating one healthy piece of bread I’ll eat the whole dang thing of it, which is not at all healthy.  And I’ll have to top it with a bunch of butter because I just love butter on my bread, so you do the math, it’s just not a good thing for me.  So no bread for now until I get things under control a bit better.

But somehow, they’ve heard that I’m “on a diet”, even though the couple of times I’ve heard them say it I’ve corrected them and explained that I’m just trying to eat healthier because my eating habits got kind of out of control for a while there.  They seemed to accept that just fine.

So today we have been out of the house all day and at about 2:45, B realized we hadn’t eaten lunch yet.  We headed over to the local pizza place on base where they were going to have a big pizza and I was going to eat from the salad bar.  However, 2:45 is Spanish lunchtime so it was packed.  Frustrated, we decided to go to Subway instead (I’d have a wrap).  We got there and again, there was a long line.  So we walked down to the Commissary and they bought pre-made sandwiches and chips and I bought a box of cherry tomatoes and a small plate of meat and cheese cubes.

As we settled down to eat - finally! - the base commanding officer walked by.  He is generally a pretty friendly and likeable guy and I’ve worked directly with him a few times so he knows who I am by name, so when he walked past he said, “Hi, LN1!  How’s it going?”  And my daughter responded directly to him by piping up with “My mamma’s on a diet!”

He chuckled as he walked past, and the rest of us maintained relatively straight faces until he was out of sight, at which point we all erupted in laughter.  My daughter is the Queen of Good Timing.

I’m the first to admit that I’m relatively geeky.  It’s all good, though - it’s come in handy on many occasions.  I’m not nearly as talented as my brother Dan at fixing computers, but I’ve been able to bail myself and others out of situations involving lost files, broken email, webpage disasters, missing folders, etc.  And I can’t program much at all but I know enough HTML to have been able to get by with my webpage all these years.  The only problem is, HTML has been mostly replaced by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which I’m completely and totally unfamiliar with.

This has meant that I haven’t wanted to tackle any sort of modifying of my webpage for the last couple of years, as I just posted about yesterday.  But when I found this theme on Wordpress, I immediately saw the potential of it to be just what I had in mind.

So remember, I don’t know anything about CSS.  I managed to do quite a few things on my own but I was still struggling with making some minor changes that I wanted to do to really make the layout “my own”.  I went out on a limb and emailed the creator of the layout, Liane from Rose City Gardens, and what do you do know but she wrote back within a couple of hours and has provided me with so much help that I’ve almost got it where I want it now.  Thank you so much, Liane!

I think the thing I’m most excited about - because I’m a geek like that - is my new little icons.  I’m so proud of them!  It was what really made the layout feel like my own.

I changed the search icon from this: to this: ;

the bullet from this: to this: ;

the date icon from this: to this: ;

the comment icon from this: to this: ;

the edit icon from this: to this: ;

and the submit comment icon from this: to this: .

So - what do you think?  Do you have any suggestions for things I can improve?  Anything you’d like to see added?

In case you didn’t notice immediately - or if you read me via a Reader - I made some major changes to the website.  I hadn’t made many changes in the last 4 years I’ve been blogging because I’ve always been very happy with how things looked.

However, I have been wanting a 3-column layout for quite some time and finally found this pretty little layout courtesy of Rose City Gardens, and I’ve been fiddling with it all night trying to get it just right.  I have a few more things to work on in my sidebars but this is pretty much what it’s going to be.  I hope you enjoy the changes!

For the first time in almost 7 years, B is a full time employee!  It was a hard decision to make - this means he won’t be able to do some of the things that have become important to us.  We were always very appreciative to be fortunate enough to have one parent stay home; it has been nice being there every day before school to send them off and after school to make sure they’re doing their homework, practicing piano, making it on time to swim or soccer practice.  B has been with the kids continuously since Isak was 2 and Anja was just 5 months old so it was a bittersweet decision for him to get a job.

And of course, having established a career in fish farming before he quit to stay home, there was always the question of “What kind of job do I get?”  But he found a job as a GS employee working at the base gym, which, while it’s nothing along the lines of what he’s done in the past, it gets him out of the house in a setting where he can unfold his pretty pink social butterfly wings.

So I started the South Beach Diet - again.  I was on it once a couple of years ago and I loved it - I loved how I felt on it and I lost a good amount of weight.  First time around it was a little more novel, a little more do-able because of that.  This time, I need to lose the weight, I am tired of eating poorly, and I need the energy I had when I was eating well on it.

The problem is the first 2 weeks.  I have a hard time with the first 2 weeks.  It requires a lot of planning, which is something I’ve never been all too keen on.  Today was my 3rd day on it and I had a really hard time today as I had to work out this morning and with my body being in withdrawals from carbs, I had a really hard time with jogging.  To make matters worse, I hadn’t eaten breakfast before leaving, save for a forkful of leftover guacamole, and when I got to work I still hadn’t eaten and was starting to get sick - and even worse, a nasty migraine was settling in.

I know it’s going to be worth it in the long run, because I noticed a decrease in migraines when I was on it last time, and have I mentioned yet how much energy I had?  Yeah, that’s all well and good except that right now, I look in my cabinets and see cookies.  Pasta.  Cereal.  Chips.  Soda.  The logical part of me is getting me through things now, because I look at that list and think why in the hell did I need any of that stuff, anyway?  I mean, I’ll get my (icky whole wheat) pasta in 2 weeks, and I’ll be able to eat some (depressingly un-brown-sugared) oatmeal, and have the occasional sweet treat for a special occasion and hopefully by then I’ll have a better handle on my overeating problem.

Because yes, in all seriousness, I have an overeating problem.   The pendulum swung back in about 1998, in the middle of my pregnancy with Isak, and I have had a hard time getting it to settle in that healthy in-between.

So wish me luck.  Convince the kitchen fairy to magically turn in all the unhealthy stuff in my kitchen into cherry tomatoes and pico de gallo and roasted red bell peppers.  Because those are about the only healthy things that I truly enjoy.

Counting down the days until Monday the 6th…

(12)

$2,700 for THIS??  I’m trying to figure out how to justify needing this one….

Ahoy all ye landlubbers!  As every black-blooded pirate-wannabe knows, Friday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  To celebrate, a friend of ours threw a Pirate-slash-Let’s-Celebrate-Oktoberfest-While-We’re-At-It party and invited us to dress in either pirate attire or German digs.  Despite my German heritage, I needed to release me inner pirate.  Besides, lederhosen never seemed too comfortable.

What does a pirate do to relax?

They go on ARRR and ARRR!