Toe, Car, and Coffee Breaks

So, initially when I started this blog, I planned to write at least every other day. Now it's been, what, two weeks? Yeah, it's been crazy here. I started my new job as a housekeeper at the local hospital and I actually like it. It's hard work but I actually feel like I accomplished something during the day. And it inspired me to clean top to bottom in my kitchen one day after work. What a project! But it looked great afterward. Of course, now it's a complete disaster, but that's besides the point.

My past week and a half haven't been the greatest. It started last Monday when I woke up at 5am and stumbled into the kitchen to make my morning coffee and proceeded to jam my baby toe into my kitchen table. It immediately swelled up and turned black and blue, which was great cause I had to wear my uncomfortable sneakers and stand for 8 hours at work that day. By the time I got home I was hurting. In fact it's still swollen and hurting...

Tuesday came around and the day was just bad to start with. I was in a crappy mood (no doubt due to the pain that was radiating through my foot and leg) and I just could not get on my game at work. I got home, relieved to be out of work, and relax for a few hours. It was about 8:30 pm when I got the motivation to cook dinner, so I decided I would make rice noodles with tofu and peanut sauce. By the time it was ready to serve, I was starving and really looking forward to having this delicious meal. As I walked toward the stove to take the pan from the heat, the burner detached itself from the stove and immediately tipped my whole wok over and dumped the messy, sticky peanut sauce and the noodles onto my floor. I was not pleased. As I cursed like a sailor and cleaned up the mess (which required me to mop to remove the stickiness) I said to myself, "That's it, I need a pack of cigarettes. I'm going to the gas station". So I get dressed and go down to my car and head the mile up the street to the local gas station. I get my pack of cigarettes and I suddenly have a feeling that is a combination of victory and guilt. I get in my car and turn the key. Nothing. I try again. I get a click. At this point I am cursing even louder than before, with my window down for all the other customers to hear, and am seriously on the verge of setting my car on fire. I call Mike and he comes up and we call AAA. By the time they come to tow my car it's 10:30 (and I have to be up at 5am) and we still hadn't eaten. They tow it home and Mike and I are sitting in his car thinking about food, and then it happened. The mistake. We ate at Taco Bell. By the time we got to bed it was well passed midnight and I had about 4 1/2 hours of sleep. I was exhausted.

Then on Thursday, I had the day off so we decided to get the car fixed. We called the local garage and they towed it and then replaced the starter and a couple cables. $500 later, I got my car back.

So that was the extent (for the most part) of how my week has been. Good news is since I last wrote, I've lost 4 lbs.! Woot! Just 15 more to go....But since I started my weight loss goals I've lost a total of 18 lbs, so I am pretty happy about that. :)

Zucchini Relish and Squished Tomatoes

It's been quite a busy week...First off, I've been doing a bunch of things to get ready for starting work on Monday. I'm excited but also very nervous. Good news is, they had more hours come up and were able to hire me so that I would be eligible for health benefits. So as of September 1st, I can actually go to a doctor if need be. :)

This past weekend, Mike and I visited his family and went out to eat with them. His dad asked us if we wanted to go see a movie so we said we would. His dad didn't know what movie he wanted to see so he said he was going to go on the computer and look up movies on "Squished Tomatoes" (rottentomatoes.com). He was then stuck between Cowboys & Aliens and Crazy, Stupid, Love. We got to the movie theater and he asked the lady behind the ticket booth which one was doing better, and then we got our tickets to Cowboys & Aliens. It was a fairly good movie and we had a fun time.

Monday, I went to Ma's and we did the zucchini relish. It was a lot more work than the jams we did the week before, but it came out just as delicious.

Then Yesterday, we worked on the zucchini bread and butter pickles...Haven't tried them yet because they have to set for a few days. But they smelled delicious.

We then brought all the jars to the basement to our temporary storage for the canned goods. We are going to be cleaning off a floor to ceiling shelf that's probably about 10 ft. long and using that eventually, but for now this is what we have:

In other news, I haven't gained any weight, but I haven't lost any either. I have to step up my game here. Today I am doing a lot of cooking since it is my last day really before I start the new job, that I don't have appointments and whatnot. So, today I am making homemade bread and biscuits, a couple batches of pizza dough for the freezer, homemade pasta sauce to freeze, and some hummus for the week. Plus, I am going to work on getting my herbs dried. Then I'm off to do errands.....it's going to be a busy day.. :)

Talk to you all soon!

~Jenn

"I want to get blueberry wasted!"

Hey everyone! So, I didn't write an entry yesterday because I was doing TONS of canning at my mom's house. It was so much fun!

We went blueberry picking on Thursday and ended up getting 9 lbs. of blueberries! It only took us about 1 hour to pick them all.

Sorry. Crappy cell phone pic.

So I got to my mom's house early yesterday morning and we started right in. We ended up making Spiced Blueberry Jam and Blueberry Lime Jam. They are delicious! We are probably going to go back and get more blueberry towards the end of next month when we pick peaches. Then we will be able to make even more jam. In a couple weeks we will be working on making the Zucchini Relish and Zucchini Pickles. Yum!

Ma mashing the blueberries.

Me spooning the jam into the jars.

The final product!

Other than the canning not much going on. We are doing a bunch of chores today. How exciting. Going to the farmer's market down the street and getting a ton of fresh veggies. Love it!

On the diet front, I have lost 1 pound. That's not bad. Wish it was a little more, but I will take what I can!

Well, I'm off to run errands! Have a great weekend, everyone, and eat fresh veggies!! :)

~Jenn

I'll just have a sugar packet or 2.

It was quite a day yesterday. I had a job interview at the local hospital for a housekeeping position and I got hired on the spot! I'm totally psyched! It's seems like it's going to be a great place to work and they have a lot of benefits for their employees. My position is part time on call, but once I make it to full time status, there's medical, dental, and all that, but they will also help pay for schooling if I decide to go back for something in the medical field. I think that's totally awesome. I went to school a few years back for massage therapy and while taking the medical courses, I found that I really enjoyed learning about medicine. So who knows where this might lead!

Last night I decided I was going to try a recipe I had seen on a cooking show on PBS. It was lasagna with eggplant in place of the pasta. I thought "This is great! Less carbs and more veggies!"  I used no fat ricotta, sauteed mushrooms, onions and fresh garlic, and some herbs from my patio garden. Yet I ended up gaining back the 2 lbs I lost yesterday.  So today I need to be really good with my diet.

My mom and I are going blueberry picking today. I'm so excited cause this starts the canning process for the rest of the year. We are making Blueberry Lime Jam and Blueberry syrup tomorrow. Not the most healthy, but better for you than the stuff bought in the store. Next month we are doing peaches, and then my favorite: Zucchini Relish. YUM!! I can't wait. After my wedding and once everything calms down in the fall, we will be doing apple picking and canning applesauce, apple butter, and a bunch of other apple things. We might make pumpkin butter too.

I need too get on a schedule for my exercising. I need to force myself to get up early and really focus on getting in my exercise time. I've decided that I need to it in the morning because otherwise I won't get it done. Once I start working again, doing it during the day is out, and then I will be exhausted at night, so that's out too. I thought about trying to start jogging in the morning, but I have arthritis in my knees, so I'm not sure how that will work for me. Another idea is to get one of those mini trampolines and put it in my living room, and I can use it while watching a show at night. I've been using the exercise ball we have and my abs are definitely feeling it. So at least I have that.

I've been working a lot on my family tree and it's coming along great so far. I've found a lot of information yesterday that was nowhere in the binder I had. I found a ton about my maternal 2nd great-grandmother's family, which I thought was totally awesome. I've typed out about 35 pages of family information in the past 3 days, so I feel like I've really accomplished something with it.

Well, that's about all for today. I will be back in tomorrow to let you all know how my blueberry picking went!

Eggplant-y, cheesy goodness.

~Jenn

2 lbs down!

Unbelievably, just since my post yesterday I have dropped 2 lbs! I'm not really sure how I did it, but I did! Yesterday was somewhat of a slow day, exercise wise anyway.  I worked a lot on re-typing what I had of my family tree. This was quite the task. I have a binder that had been in my great grandmother's house for years and Mom took it when my Nana passed away in 2000. So this book hadn't been worked on since the mid-70s. I wasn't even in the family tree yet. A bunch of people weren't in it. So this required gathering more information such as birthdays, birth places, spouses birthdays and birthplaces. All I can say is thank God for Facebook.

I suppose you could say I got some exercise in when I walked around a local cemetery to see if I could find one of my distant relatives and get a picture of the stone for the binder. The cemetery was huge and there were a lot of old stones in the back that had broken or had just worn away. I was still looking around when the large gusts of wind started and the sky got really dark. I started back to my car (which was all the way at the other end of the cemetery) then it started raining. I was full on running back to my car as the sky grew darker. Then the rain just stopped and everything was still for a moment. I got into my car and got some awesome pictures of the sky. Soon after the downpour began and I decided it was time to head home.

So I headed home and being on the back roads, I had some great opportunities for pictures of the storm.

It was a pretty good storm. I was drenched by the time I got home, and I hadn't found the stone at the cemetery that I was looking for, but it was still an interesting outing.

So, going back to my diet and exercise. I did well yesterday as far as not eating a lot of bad foods. A little cottage cheese with fresh herbs for breakfast, hummus wrap for lunch, and a black bean wrap for dinner. I had a few popsicles last night, but other than I did okay.

Mike said I should explain to you guys how I came up with the blog name "Pleasantly Obese". It all started a few years back when my sister had been having problems losing weight after the birth of my niece. She went to her doctor and they did a few tests and found out she had a thyroid problem. They gave her medication and she started to be able to just shed the pounds.

I thought, "Hmm...we are related, maybe it's a genetic thing". So I went to my doctor and had tests done. The results came back and my doctor told me I had a normal thyroid. To which I replied "Oh, then I'm just fat." He then proceeded to tell me I was morbidly obese. Ok, now, I know I am quite a bit overweight, and at the time I was probably 30- 40 lbs heavier than I am now. But MORBIDLY obese? Come on.

So, I told Mike this story, and we kinda chuckled about how far off the doctor was, and I stated that "I'm not fat, I'm just pleasantly obese."

And to end this entry, I'd like to add a picture of me when I was the most fit and when I was at my heaviest...

Me at my Graduation party in 2001.

Me with Jamie Bamber from Battlestar Galactica at MegaCon 2007.

~Jenn

So it begins....

So, here I am. Writing a blog in which I'm openly admitting my struggles with my weight. I'm not being negative in this sense, I am being honest. I need to be honest with myself and see where I need to improve in order to reach my goals. And I mean, what better way to do that than share all my failures on the internet...(Great idea, Jenn.)

Actually, I got the idea from a friend of mine who also has had troubles with weight loss. She has a blog as well and lists her struggles so that she can be totally open about it. I thought it was an awesome idea. Even if no one ever reads this, it's there for me to read back on and see where I went wrong.

Although, this blog isn't all about my weight, but also other things I'm going through. However, most of them stem back to my weight and how it affects other aspects of my life. This just shows me that I need to lose more weight to feel more comfortable in my skin.

I'm getting married in September and my dress is a bit snug. I'm confident I can lose the weight before then, (whereas it's only a few pounds I need to lose) I'm just afraid of not being able to keep it off. My fiance, Mike, and I eat fairly decent, with an occasional treat. However, this week, we went out for ice cream (which we haven't done in a very long time). That was Saturday and now it's Tuesday and I still feel crappy. I've realized this is the second time I've gone out for ice cream this year and my stomach couldn't deal with it. So apparently I'm partially lactose intolerant. Yay.

I've been unemployed for over a month now. I'm broke and can't afford to eat as healthy as I'd like. That doesn't mean that I only get junk food, it's just that I get the same stuff all the time. Good thing is that Mike and I have cut red meat, pork, ham and all that junk out of our diet. We still eat chicken and fish but that's about it.

Anyway, I spend a lot of my time looking for recipes that are cheap and healthy. As I find some I will add them here.

I'm also getting more into finding information on my family tree. I've been doing a ton of research and have found a lot of info. Actually found some of my distant relatives at a local cemetery yesterday, and I'm going to the local town hall for more info. It's just cool to know what your family was like 100 years ago. A hundred years from now, my relatives will find this......Ugh.

~Jenn