Paging Sally Miller....

Well I can't say it was a wasted day, but here it is coming on 4 in the afternoon and I have not gotten anything personal done. I have dealt with house stuff all day. First thing off was our installation appointment with Directv: yay, we have DVR now! But that took 4 hours (and it's not even complete: Jason damaged a cord for the internet downstairs and has to finish that piece of it). Next, now that that was a done deal, I called to cancel cable and add digital phone to our Comcast account. Once that was done I got to call our phone provider and ask them what the hell this new fee of $15 was for and who ordered it. And that's where it got weird.

Turns out Sally Miller ordered some voice mail via the internet service and added it onto our phone number. Hmmm... So how does that work?? Our number is public, not unlisted, and we have had it for almost 10 years now. Wouldn't you think they'd check? I'm really baffled. Thankfully I noticed this right away because I had a limit on how much my auto payment would fork over, and this new fee tripped that alarm, as it were. Now I don't know if this was a simple typo or some kind of a scam or identity theft in bloom. Kind of freaked out.

Odd coincidence is my daughter's computer identity is Sally Porcupine. On the off chance she accidentally signed up, still: how the hell would that happen. She clearly does not sound like anything other than a kid on the phone. Very weird.

Now I'm going to play with my new toy until Kyra gets home. I was making fast progress on my current quilt, but that was nipped in the bud with the arrival of my new TV toy. Sigh. Tomorrow is another day, and I have a week until the birthday party, so no worries.

Baby steps

So the topic for last week's meeting was the futility of trying to do anything, with the word "trying" being the problem. The theory (and even Yoda agrees with this) is that to try is to give yourself an out. If you try to do something or promise to try it's like the unspoken thought is "but...I may not be able to". Think about it: if your response to an invitation is "I'll try to make it" do you really want to go??? So the key is not to try, but to do. And if you don't do, it's because you don't want to deep down.

I knew last try at WW that I didn't really mean it. I remember one meeting when the leader asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to lose weight, and I thought to myself that I didn't really want that. So now, as I slip past my highest weight (ouch) and I try on summer clothes that don't fit, I need to want to lose weight, and I need to find a way to mean that.

I have a lot of intellectual reasons to lose weight: the way it makes me feel to be healthier, fitting into my clothes, being healthier, living longer, even "bragging rights". Knowing all the reasons for why I should lose weight is just like knowing I should floss more or I should get out there and be more social. It's a should and not a want. To me that just don't always equal action. So this time, if I want to be successful, I need to try something different. This time, I choose...vanity.

Why not? Vanity is one of the reasons I won't go swimming. Yes, every time I go to a pool I see hundreds of people in worse shape than me, people who really should rethink their bathing suit choices. But I am not them. I know it's vanity keeping me out of the pool. Or stubbornness (more on that another post). So maybe this time if I appeal to my vain side I can find the motivation to stay on program.

Last week I took little baby steps and lost 1.2 lbs. Yay me! This week I will work a little harder to stick to the plan. If I maintain this rate of loss, I will be about 20 lbs down by my HS reunion (hello, vanity). So that's my goal: to find that place in me that can do this; to get to a place where I want to lose weight. And when I find that, I will succeed because I know I can do it when I really want to.

Curse you, Comcast!!

I am so not  having fun with the upcoming digital conversion for TVs. It's not the national conversion that's the problem here. My TVs are fine. It's the fact that my cable provider is taking this opportunity to make some changes to their digital service. Overview: they're requiring digital converter boxes on all TVs in order to get any channel over 30 (in other words, all the good cable channels like Disney and CNN). This means that not only do we have to reconfigure our TVs to include these stupid boxes (we don't use a box currently) but we also lose the ability to record TV shows. The boxes don't play well with the digital converter boxes. The sales guys keep trying to sell my on how many more channels I'll be getting and how much on-demand and pay-per-view I'll be able to get (like that's of any value: we already have Netflix for movies).

I just got off the phone with my third cable guy. It was a 35 minute conversation. As nice as he was, this time I take Jason's view that it's 35 minutes of my life I won't ever get back. The best deal he could make us is $11 more than we'd pay if we switched to Direct TV. I'm pretty sure I know which way the wind is blowing now. Considering we're in for an afternoon of messing with our TVs, there is no loss for us to switch providers now. The up-side of this whole mess is getting DVR service: the ability to pause and rewind live TV, watch one channel and record up to 2 others, and justify the whole shebang as saving us money every month. Cool. That 35 minutes pays off.

Timing is Everything

Riddle me this: how is it that I can put Ethan to bed at 8:00 and it's hard for him to drag himself out of bed on time, yet if I move up his bedtime to 7:30, he wakes up 45 minutes early?? What's up with that?! Both yesterday and today he was up at 7:15. Before spring break, he was hard pressed to make it up by 8 come Friday. Sigh.

Still trying to get our nightly routine to allow for more Ethan-time, but dinner is still ending around 7 to 7:20, which is not enough time to do anything except rush the boy. Both Kyra and I are already annoyed at the lacrosse practice schedule, which happens at dinnertime on Tues. and Thurs. Haven't even had a game yet and she was trying to beg off practice this week. I told her no way considering how much it cost and how hard she begged. I don't want to get all "Remember when you tried ______ and you gave it up and we put all that money and time into it??" on her and not let her try new things, but on the other hand, we sort of can't afford to be experimental right now. Oh well...

Does this font make me look fat?

Looking for something springy. Out of nowhere it became warm today. Seize the moment (so unlike me, but hey...)

Wanted: a mother

So apparently the only way I can be held accountable for a really hard or overly challenging or somewhat boring task is guilt. Unless I am accountable to someone, some of my more spontaneous promises will just fall to the wayside. I think everyone has experienced one of my grand ideas that never gets off the ground. Well, payback is a bitch...

I am nearly done cutting out the pieces of the quilt I committed to make for my daughter's school auction. One week ago, I showed the winner bidder a number of ideas for what I thought were all easy-ish quilts, and now almost a week later I have yet to finish one block of this monsterish "intermediate" quilt. Actually, yesterday I gave up on making the sample block because A) I could see that the colors were working without finishing it and B) I slapped the pieces together without really following directions and ended up having to rip everything apart several times. Since I'd already shown that my seams were too narrow and that it pays to follow directions (sigh) what was the point in continuing? I actually bought more material than I need, so I have lots of wiggle room in case something else goes wrong. 

In the meantime, the monotony of tracing templates onto fabric and cutting them out is starting to get to my neck, my back and my mind. Calgon, take me away!!!! All that stands between me finishing up the last template shape is like 100 pieces (I'm sadly enough not exaggerating) and these 2 marking pencils that keep breaking when I sharpen them. Did you know it's really hard to find a good marking device for dark fabrics?? Me neither. I swear half the pencil has ended up in the trash after snapping off below the base of the pencil wood. It is not helping my mood. This project is going to make all the other quilts I do look like child's play in comparison. Hopefully it will be stunning. The recipient is not a sewer and I'm sure she'll be happy with the results. If I don't commit seppuku in the meantime, I'm sure I'll be proud of how it turned out and pleased that I was able to donate something meaningful to my daughter's school. Till then, back to the salt mines (bugger...)