Merry Christmas!

Hoping you enjoyed your Christmas as much as these guys did!

More Painting Pics, Master Bedroom Edition

You'll notice a lack of posts about dieting and weight loss from the last couple weeks.  In case you haven't realized, I've been a little busy.  Unfortunately, for my weight loss that means eating out a lot, and not a lot of accountability on the tracking or workout front.  I keep telling myself that moving and painting counts as activity, but I know it doesn't cancel out everything I've been eating.

I feel like I've been trying to eat healthy foods, but the movers came on Wednesday morning, so I missed my Weight Watchers meeting.  And my scale is somewhere in there.

So I have very little to blog about on the Weight Watchers front.  And with our trip to Alaska starting tomorrow, that part of the blog will be pretty quiet until the New Year.

But here are some more painting pictures, Master Bedroom Edition.

Before

Before

After

After

After

 It's harder to see the difference for this bedroom than it was in the Tinkerbell Room.

But to be clear, we're talking about the difference between this:

"Mint Shake" (color confirmed by the cans left in the garage)

and this:

"Hazy Sage"

Before and During

Remember how I said we were moving?  And I promised to tell you about it? 

I didn't want to tempt fate or jinx it, but now that the deed is recorded, it's official.  Matt and I bought a house!

Our new home!

So, I wanted to do "Before and After" pictures of the inside of the house.  Don't get me wrong, I love my new house, but the seller and I have different, um, tastes in interior decorating.  But now that Matt and I are in there, I realized that if I wait to do "After" pictures, I'm going to be waiting a long time.  Turns out, owning a house is complicated.  And there's a lot to do.  And we're leaving for Alaska in less than a week.

What did we get ourselves into?

All kidding aside, the house is great.  As you can see from the pictures, everything we need to change is cosmetic.  Which we actually prefer, it means that we get to make the changes, instead of buying some flipped house where a contractor made all the changes.  But trust me, there will be some changes.

Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Master Bath (anyone need any hangers?)

Hall Bath

Family Room

Kitchen (My favorite part of the house)

Living Room (my second favorite part of the house, this is the view from the kitchen)

The nicest washer/dryer I've ever had

We decided to pack up our bags and spend the weekend there painting.  But first, the obligatory celebration dinner.

First dinner at the house

And then painting.

Color Board - it's hard to actually see colors on the bright green walls, so we used this

Spackle and Primer

More Primer

Finally, some color

Can you believe this is the same room?

Pictures of the master bedroom later...

Weekly Weigh In

Weekly Loss: -1.8

Total Loss (since August 2010): -44.8

I was really pleased with my loss this week.  November was a bad month for losing weight, and I lost a lot of ground.  This week I started getting that back.  For the first time in a long time, I felt good at my weigh in.  I was confident - I'd tracked, I'd worked out, I was within my points.  It's like my leader says, if you track, it works!

Next week is going to be a challenge.  Matt and I just bought a house, and it's going to take a lot of work to get it ready to move into.  We're leaving for Alaska a week from Sunday, so we don't have a lot of time.  Which means we don't have a lot of time to plan and cook or workout, so we're going to be eating out a lot, and not making it to the gym as often.

My goal this week is to keep tracking. No matter what I eat, I have to track.

Meal Planning Monday

Matt and I have a routine.  On Sundays we go to the Farmers' Market and Trader Joe's.  We come up with a menu, and Matt gets the rest of what he needs from the store on Mondays.

Routine is really helpful for weight loss.  If I can plan ahead, I can make sure I have food that's going to fill me up, but will still be within my points for the day.  

But this week, our routine is more or less shot.  We're moving in a little over a week (a blog post on that shortly, I promise) and our apartment is in boxes.

Boxes may make these guys happy, but they do not help with routines.

So the menu planning this week is a little, shall we say, loose.  But we did make an effort to make it to the Farmers' Market.  So our menu this week will be some combination of the following:

Kale

Radishes

Broccoli

Kiwi

Almonds

Dates

Cutie Oranges

My goal this week is to not let moving derail  my weight loss journey.  I may be a little more relaxed with points, but moving is not an excuse to eat all the things.  I can still eat sensibly, listen to my hunger signals, and make my good health guidelines.  I can still go to the gym or take a walk.  I don't have to eat fast food every night, and when I do eat fast food, I can order a sensible dinner.

There, I said it.  Now I just have to do it.

New Shoes!

This is how I know I've become a runner...

These are the new shoes I couldn't wait to get in the mail.

Why Hello There...

I want to have a blog.

I mean, I've had blogs before.  My first blog was mostly pictures.  I spent four months in the Galapagos Islands, so pictures were easy.

(not mine, but you get the idea)

When I got back, my life was kind of boring compared to that.  I was back in classes, then working, then going to law school.  I guess my parents cared what I was doing, but how many posts could I write about how HARD torts was?  (It was hard, but the only people that care about how hard law school is are other law students.  And they don't want to read it on a blog, they want to hear about it over drinks.)

But I got through law school, and even got a job.  I got married around the same time, and we set out for Washington DC together.  Another great opportunity for a blog, right?  I was finally going to get serious about losing weight.  Whining about law school over drinks may be good for the soul, but it's not that great for your waistline.  Neither is being a newlywed with the threat of everyone seeing you in a white dress removed from your motivation. 

About a year after the wedding, I rejoined Weight Watchers.  Matt and I also decided to be vegetarian.  Well, Matt decided, and because he does most of the shopping and cooking, I went along with it.  We were totally changing the way we thought about food, and I wanted to document it.   So we set up "Things We Ate" and registered the blogger address thingsweate.blogspot.com.  We kept it going for a while.  Then someone pointed out to me that if you move the spaces in our web address, you got "Thing Sweat E."  It's stupid, I know, but I couldn't unsee that.  So I let the blog kind of fall by the wayside.

At the same time, we were going through another major change.  I had finished my fellowship in Washington DC and accepted a job in Sacramento, CA.  Matt and I were moving again (3rd time in 5 years for anyone counting).

I realized recently that I miss having a blog. I miss having a place to talk about all the great food Matt and I are eating.  And my weight loss.  And our lives.  We're buying a house on Monday.  I want a place to write about all the exciting things we're going to do in that house.  (Well, not *all* of them.  I promised blogger this didn't have adult content.)

When I was sitting on a beach in Ecuador, I didn't know where my life was going to take me.  I was pretty sure I was going to law school, and almost as sure I'd be an environmental lawyer.  And I hoped I'd be with Matt.  But I had no idea what the details would be.  The details are the interesting part.