The Secret To My Success?

Maybe it was the sticky notes

I have really had a pretty easy time of it I think. I read a lot of the posts in the forums on the quit for life web site and think how much easier it has been for me. I am not sure why but I am grateful. I know part of it is that if I set my mind to do something I do it. I plan and create a process that I stick to no matter what. The process for this was simple. I had seven days to ween myself off of nicotine so that when I hit my quit date I was only dealing with the behavioral and emotional part of the addiction. I used the sticky notes program on my netbook to keep track of my smoking each day in addition to the tools on the web site.

 The sticky notes appealed to me because they were right there every time I was on my computer. As far as cutting back on my smoking each day I found I nice little thought process that helped a lot. Every time I would reach for a cigarette I would ask myself if I really needed the nicotine or if it was just what I was used to doing right then. If I thought about it and decided I didn't really need to smoke I didn't. There was really no pressure because I knew if I really felt I needed it I could smoke. I found as the days went on I needed them less and less. As you can see from the picture of my netbook screen it happened pretty fast. I had actually quit two days early. This brought up another thought. If I was able to quit on the dosage of Chantix that I was currently taking then what was the point of increasing the dose on the eighth? I decided not to. On the eighth when I got to the 1mg pills I got out my pill splitter and split them in half so that I could stay at 1mg a day. This is not to say that I never think about smoking because I do. It just doesn't really get to me because I know that when it comes right down to it I don't really want to. The thought passes rather quickly and I move on just fine.


I think the next use for my sticky notes will have to be to help me keep track of my new diet. changes to my eating habits. Turns out that while I have done very well on the blood sugar thing I have now been dealt the family cholesterol card. I now get the challenge of kicking the fast food habit and learning to eat low fat/cholesterol foods. So, time to set my mind to it, make a plan, create a process and stick to it no matter what. 

Oh My Yummy!!! (and tarter sauce)

I went to my parent’s house on Saturday. I was awake early and since I had been away so long I just decided to go. It was a fun surprise for my Mom and Dad. After hanging out for a bit we went out to lunch. Dad and I got a great fish and chips. (My chips were sweet potato) We both ate half of our lunch and brought the rest home to save for dinner. This is where the trouble began. They had no tartar sauce.

Heather and her family had left to go to a Birthday party at a friends and we were watching the first Harry Potter movie on Disney Channel (they were so tiny) Toward the end of the movie was when I began having a terrible craving for something cakey. I happened to mention this aloud so my Mom (being a bad influence) suggested we go to La Cupcake. We didn’t want my dad to feel bad that we were going without him so we used the need for tartar sauce as our excuse to go out.

At La Cupcake we tried their signature cheesecake brownie cupcake and the pumpkin cupcake with cream cheese frosting. By getting one of each we were able to cut them in half and then we each got to taste both. The cheese cake one was ok but really didn’t fulfill the cakey craving. The Pumpkin one however was exactly what I was after. It tasted great and the whole time I was eating it I kept thinking “I have got to find a way to make this legal.”

That was my mission for today. Well, that and laundry. I spent most of my day on the internet. I knew there had to be a good pumpkin cupcake that was low sugar, low fat and lactose free. I also needed a cream cheese frosting that met the same requirements.

By altering a couple of recipes I came up with something that in my opinion was way better than the one I had on Saturday.

Sugar-Free Pumpkin cupcakes

• 4 eggs
• 1 ¼ cups Splenda
• ½ cup vegetable oil
• ½ cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
• In a medium bowl, mix the eggs, Splenda, oil, apple sauce and pumpkin with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Stir into the pumpkin mixture until thoroughly combined.
• Spray cupcake pan with non-stick cooking spray or use paper cup liners. Fill the cups a little more that ¾ full. Bake for 15-20 min.

Healthy Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

1 (8oz) package Tofutti milk free better than cream cheese
1 (8oz) tub Cool Whip Free Whipped Topping
1/2 cup Splenda
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

In a medium mixing bowl, beat cream cheese until soft. Add Cool Whip, Splenda, and vanilla extract. Mix until smooth. Makes 12 servings

In order to keep it lactose free I went with the Cool Whip. Unfortunately that meant some corn syrup. Considering the amount of protein in the recipe vs. sugar I decided the little bit of corn syrup was probably ok. This way my Dad can eat it too.

With the major success on creating such a wonderful tasting cupcake. (I could hardly keep the kids out of them long enough to take pictures.) I will definitely be making them for Thanksgiving.

And to think it all started with tartar sauce.

A Sweet Success

Blueberries with Lemon Cream

 

Serves: 4

Total Time: 10 min

 

 

 

Ingredients

· 4 ounce(s) reduced-fat cream cheese (Neufchatel)

· 3/4 cup(s) low-fat vanilla yogurt

· 1 teaspoon(s) honey

· 2 teaspoon(s) freshly grated lemon zest

· 2 cup(s) fresh blueberries

Directions

1. Using a fork, break up cream cheese in a medium bowl. Drain off any liquid from the yogurt; add yogurt to the bowl along with honey. Using an electric mixer, beat at high speed until light and creamy. Stir in lemon zest.

2. Layer the lemon cream and blueberries in dessert dishes or wineglasses. If not serving immediately, cover and refrigerate for up to 8 hours.

 

http://www.delish.com/recipefinder/blueberries-lemon-cream-recipe-5726

Excited over a Vacuum

Most of you know that I have five black cats and two dogs. So finding a vacuum that will handle that much pet hair has been a constant battle. I love my pets but I simply cannot stand pet hair everywhere.

Recently Melaina has been on this weird lets watch info mercials kick. Which resulted in me watching the “Shark Navigator” commercial. I admit I was totally sucked in. (lol no pun intended)

I am a bit of of a skeptic when it comes to someone trying to sell me something. Especially on TV. I am always watching for those little tricks. Like before and after shots where the lighting is clearly better and they’re wearing makeup in the after shot. Or the vacuum is used and looks amazing then they move to the next set up and if you look the canister is totally clean so it clearly is a different  vacuum.

Some of the selling points of the “Navigator” are: never loses suction, light weight and easy to maneuver, pet hair removal attachment for furniture and a longer crevice tool for less bending over. Obviously what caught my attention was the never loses suction and pet hair attachment. I watched very closely for those little tricks and was pleasantly surprised to see that they did not switch out vacuums between messes. Needless to say I ordered one.

Today it arrived and I immediately put it to the test. I vacuumed the entire living room and when I saw that the canister was full I went to the one place in my house that almost never gets vacuumed. The carpet under Jeremy’s desk was black. It is supposed to be light blue. This area makes the examples on TV look like nothing. I went in nice and slow and came out on the same line. IT WAS BLUE!!! I have never had so much fun vacuuming in my entire life.

Well that was a chore

I got to thinking today that I had not written anything in seven months and people may begin to think that there is nothing on my mind. So I took a moment to scroll through some of my older posts. Much to my dismay many of them no longer had any pictures. I realized of coarse that they had been linked to my msn spaces and that is no longer in existence. Consequently I just spent the last couple of hours pulling up each entry on writer to delete the box with an X in it and replace it with a picture linked back to my photo bucket albums. Oh and did i mention searching through my photos on my computer to upload the ones that were not on photo bucket yet? Having finally finished all of that I completely forgot what I was going to say in the first place.

Spring Fever

So, Earth Day was last Wednesday and I celebrated it by laying in bed with a migraine and sleeping with the TV on. Not really the best way to help the planet. So yesterday after work I felt all inspired to do something.

We have had this three tier corner thing sitting next to our front porch for about a year now with Jeremy’s chives and a few empty pots. I really wanted to get a few more pots and some flowers to put on it. I thought it would be pretty and then that thing would look on purpose and not like we just had nowhere else to put it.

By the time I had all the pots in place Julian had brought my big blue pot from the back yard for me and put it on the corner of the porch. I stood there admiring my work and feeling like something was missing. I needed something to hang from the two hooks that I had taken the jack-o-lanterns off of. While that was still bothering me I went to get my wind chime to hang in the upper part of the V posts. While I was setting up the ladder I hung it on the hook so I could use two hand and Ashton said that he liked it there. Well that decided it for me and I went back to get my other chimes. I did end up having one to hang in the V.

While Jeremy and I were shopping for the flowers and pots he came across some perennials that he really liked and we decided to get them and plant them in front of the corner piece. By the time I had finished the pots we had come up with a better place for them. That project would have to wait for after work today though because I was too tired to do any more. I did take a picture of the before on this one though.

That spot is so hard to mow because it is basically a hole that I am guessing was a round garden at one time.

When I got home from work today I sent Jeremy to the store to get some weed block to roll out in what would be our new garden and while he did that I mowed the lawn. Then if you’ll notice there are two bricks that are a little more curved than the others so I dropped them in the driveway to break them if half. (That was kind of fun.) Anyway he finally got home and I let him remove the grass. We used it to fill some holes in the back yard. I did the stuff closest to the rose while Jeremy rested. When we were ready to put the dirt in we discovered that he had accidentally grabbed the bags of bark. So back to the store to return the two unopened bags and get soil. Well he got a couple more plants while he was there.

I am quite happy with the end result. We had a lot of weed block, one bag of soil and half a bag of bark left so I went with my new theory of, “If it’s hard to mow it’s got to go.”

Ok, so it is not real pretty just yet. the roots of this tree are the worst for mowing over and now I wont have to. I will post a new blog when this project gets completed. Except for the two broken bricks this really doesn’t look bad from a distance.

My OCD Moment

Well it started with a rather frustrating day at work last Saturday. Or maybe it really began the night before when I could not get to sleep and did everything in my power to not start organizing my closet. I woke up tired and by the time I got off work I just wanted to feel better and found myself doing something I have never done before. I shopped for new clothes. (yes I have shopped for clothes before just not as a way to make myself feel better) When I got home I went into the bedroom to put away my new clothes and was again struck by the sudden compulsion to reorganize my closet. (I was tripping over my shoes again) So I started out by putting a load of laundry on and kicking the rest into the hallway. I threw everything from my closet onto my bed and then spent like a half and hour or so vacuuming the floor. You’ll notice in the pictures that we are not talking about a lot of floor here. Fortunately Melaina was too busy with Niki to make fun of me for this. By the time I got all the laundry done everything was put where I wanted it. You may think this is the end. You would be wrong. I followed all of this with pictures to send to my Mom and Sister. What follows is the email I sent them. 

Left to right: pj's for tonight, corduroy, denim, other pj's. Top drawer: two slips, my old tummy sucker (just in case), six bra's (yes I got new ones) and panties. Middle drawer: light socks, medium socks and dark socks across the back and tights and pantyhose in front. Bottom drawer: all my sandals and flip flops. Every shoe in it's place

 

look nothing to trip over

 

ok left to right: 3/4 sleeve shirts that look like two layers, short sleeve look like two layers, long sleeve blouses, 3/4 sleeve blouses, short sleeve blouses, short sleeve knits with collar, sleeveless blouses, sleeveless knits with collar, 3/4 sleeve top w/out collar, short sleeve w/out collar, long sleeve knits, 3/4 sleeve knits, short sleeve knits (aka T-shirts), sleeveless, empty hangers, casual slacks on fold over pants hanger, city shorts, Capri's, slacks, knee length skirts, long skirts, dresses and scarves. Robe on hook. Shelf left to right: blankets, sheets and pillow cases, winter hats, snow sweaters (likely to go away cause they're from the 80's), two stacks of assorted sweater with two active wear outfits on bottom of right stack.

 

  Left to right: new top and shoes, new top and shorts, new top and pants, new top

 

Ultimately this was more of a day than a moment but hey I have clothes for spring and summer and my closet is clean. The end result is much better than if I had eaten junk food to feel better.

Hair Color

I was in Safeway today and happened to be passing the hair color section. I stopped to see what kind of selection they had. I have been considering dying my hair for a while now and Jeremy said he would like it if I went blonde. I knew I wanted a subtle change so I chose Clarol Hydrience #16 Dark Blonde. Ok, talk about subtle. It is essentially the same color I had before minus what Julian so kindly referred to as my “platinum blonde” hairs and slightly lighter underneath where my hair always gets extremely dark in the winter. It did bring out a bit more of the red highlights which I like.  Over all I am not unhappy with it.

before after

Catching Up

Well I haven't written in a long time. (almost three months) So here are the highlights.

November: Jeremy was working and Julian was healing well. We went to my Moms for thanksgiving and I got to have Friday off so I was able to help them get their Christmas decorations up and Grandma let me decorate her apartment too. Melaina didn't get to be in the thanksgiving parade but she saw her friends on TV. I was training in the Cash office at work and still getting a lot of hours.

December: We decorated our house in blue silver and white Christmas decorations. Jeremy got December pretty much off because his contract ended and that meant nothing until after the holidays. Julian got his boot off right before the snow. We all had fun building a snow slide and snow forts out of the snow I shoveled off the driveway. Our friends flew in from Kansas to visit with his family and us for the holidays. Christmas was fun. I worked a short shift in the morning on Christmas eve and when I got home we celebrated with the kids. They went to there Dads house for Christmas day and Jeremy and I just stayed home and had a nice quiet day. The Saturday after Christmas the snow was finally melting and we went to celebrate Christmas with Julian's family. It was at Sherry's house and her street was still deep with slush. The next day (my birthday) we finally made it down to my moms to celebrate Christmas and birthdays. It was a lot of fun.

January: Jeremy and I had our nine year anniversary. I have gotten quite good at the cash office and Jeremy started his second week of his new job today. This is a long call so that gives me some hope. Travis and Deb (the friends who came to visit) decided to stay and are actually staying with us for three months. Travis had his first day of work the same day as Jeremy. After his three months of training he will be a maintenance supervisor at an apartment complex in Kent and they will get an apartment then. My hours have been cut back. (normal for retail after the holidays) I had my six month review day before yesterday and I did well. I got a raise. I expect to do better at my one year. I have very high expectations for myself.

So, there you have it. Life is busy but Life is GOOD.

Good to be Home

 

Ok, so I started typing this blog and I got pretty far when I went to help Ashton upgrade his email. When I got back to my computer one of the cats had obviously tried to publish my blog. It was actually funny especially what the cat wrote. Unfortunately not having been there to see exactly what they had done I ended up having to close live writer losing the entire blog and am now starting over. I do believe I can recall what the cat said though. It was something like this.   b\ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp.....................

What I was say before all this was that I had a good time at my parents. I got to be gone for five days. In my book that is a week long vacation. Sunday as you can see from my last blog was just a kick back and relax kind of day. Good after a long day on Saturday going the funeral for my Dad's Aunt Doris. Monday was a wake up slow take it easy kind of morning followed by a not so bad dentist visit in the afternoon. I think Tuesday was my favorite day. Heather came to pick me up after she dropped her boys at school. We spent the day at her house just hanging out and talking. Her friend Jen came over as well. It was really nice to meet her and between the two of them I finally gave in and got on face book. That has been fun and I have found a few people that I haven't seen in forever. It did not end there however, Wednesday was go home day. That was a rush around the house get my things packed and get in the car so my parents would not be late to an appointment they had. We went to my grandparents house for the day and had dinner with them and my Aunt Deanna. It was a good day. It was a good vacation.

I walked into the house Wednesday night and was immediately accosted by a very unpleasant smell. Now please understand that I am well aware of the fact that my place smells like pets. This however, was a very new, VERY WRONG kind of smell. Kacey needs a BATH!!! Anyone who knows me is aware of the fact that while I love animals I simply can not stand the smell of dirty-wet-dog. Did the dog get a bath yet? Well, I was face booking, and making  a My Space, and linking them to this page, and well..... Ok, Ok, I will go bathe her now. (I could use shower myself) Bad smells or not it was good to be home. I missed my guys and the animals. Sleeping in my own bed was great and Julian says I am grounded and I am never aloud to be gone for more than two days ever again. Makes me smile 'cause I know he missed me.

woohoowoohoohooo

Ok, so today I made my list (Yeah, yeah I know said I would do it yesterday.) I got my hair cut, I got the kids and now I am ready to knock out the things on my list because Sat. through Wed. I will be gone. Saturday is the funeral for my Dad's Aunt Doris and so I will go home with my parents from there so they do not have to come back to get me for my dentist appointment on Monday. My Mom has a Doctor appointment on Tuesday so they will bring me home on Wednesday. Woohoo! Vacation! So that means stop typing and get to work. Later Gater.