And thus and so...

So, week one of the diet is complete.  I lost five pounds which I am happy with for a first week result.  Below is a picture of the meal I actually get to chew each day:

That's eight ounces of protein (chicken in this case) and 2 cups of vegetables.  I also get two cups of vegetables for lunch along with whatever packet I've snagged before I left the house in the morning.  I'm having to look up more ways to cook vegetables or think of new ones to try because I don't want to get bored over the potential months I will be doing this.  I just don't want to buy a new vegetable, hate it, and then have to eat it because, you know, I spent money on the thing :P.

Also had to do all the medical stuff I couldn't do at my first appointment because there was someone else with me and HIPPA frowns on trading medical details like bubblegum cards :).  The last thing I had to do that day was...get measured (gasp!  oh, the horror!).  I still am proportional (47-42-49) but would like those measurements to go down just a wee bit.  Ah well, if this gets my pancreas to (a) stop giving me the middle finger and (b) start giving up insulin instead of hoarding it like it's preparing for a bomb shelter for World War Z, that will be worth it.  Plus, the need to no longer stab myself in the stomach every day with needles would be pretty awesome, too.

I am knitting, knitting, knitting.  I finished the first cable hat and sent it to my favorite girl-child-who-is-not-one-of-my-granddaughters, Beanie:

She was very happy with it per Mom.  What is on her shoulders is the shirt I also sent her:  Bambi (she's allllll into Disney right now).

I also started work on this dress (model picture):

I am about a third of the way through the back skirt portion of the dress and feeling rather ambitious since this is the first piece of clothing I am making so I'm learning about decreasing stitches for clothes as well as how to sew together the pieces (when I get there).

The linen stitch scarf got put to the side for the moment because I wanted to get the hat finished (check), get started on the dress (check) since I have hopes of finishing it in time for Christmas, and I am pretty close to getting this scarf done:

I've got about eight more sets of the thin stripes to complete and then around 100 more rows of solid block knitting using the gray color first and then the white (or I may use one of the blues again, who knows?).  BTW, please excuse the crappy picture - it was taken on my desk at work.

Still kind of writing off and on.  It's a relaxing thing like knitting.  I've been working on an SGA/Chuck crossover for a while and I have various scenes written but I think I need to start trying to stitch them together and really nail down my timeline between the shows.  There is some difference and if I go one way, I need to use the Legacy series SGA books as canon and the last one won't be out until November.  Not a problem one way since (a) I write at a glacial pace these days and (b) this will probably never see the light of day to an archive or anything like that.  But I can see another way I want to go and I'm not sure I can get the timelines to mesh as well as I would like.  Oh well, at least I'm writing!  Now if that SGA/X-Files plot bunny would leave me alone...(I'm skeered of Chris Carter's ever fraying grasp on his own series canon.  That's a migraine waiting to happen!).

BTW, if anyone has a good idea for a topic I can write about for Public Finance Administration, sing out!  I have my Public Policy topic but Finance eludes me.

Cookie Exchange

Kitchen Aid

For most of my life, I had avoided cooking or anything resembling actual work in the kitchen of the food preparation variety. I'm not sure but I think it started way back when my dad told my mom that she needed to teach me how to cook because I wasn't ever going to get married unless I could cook. Being the Type B (i.e., quietly rebellious) child that I was, I determined that if cooking was a prerequisite for marriage, then some poor schlub was going to go hungry a lot or become very well known at the drive-thru.

I did manage to get married without a pop quiz into my cooking skills (outmaneuvered you on that one, Dad!). The motto of our marriage was "If music be the food of love, play on" (I married a musician). For the first years of my marriage, I could cook if I had to or felt like it, but they were generally uninspired dishes; easy things like Cornflake Chicken or tacos. Neither of us starved but we didn't exactly set the culinary world on fire.

When we moved to Georgia, the Spousal Unit got smacked around by several health issues - Hello, diabetes! Good day to you, heart problems! - and I started cooking. A lot. As in poring over magazines and recipes, watching the Food Network, and buying ingredients I'd never heard of. Flat-leaf parsley may not be exotic to me now (or to anyone else as a general rule) but back then? Might as well have asked me to go harvest it myself from the Italian outback.

footnote: Yes, I know there isn't an Italian outback. It's a metaphor. Then again, my father might not think so. He also hated that I was an absolute dunce at geography. Really ruined those "friendly" family Trivial Pursuit games.

For several years, I had a sweet relationship with my kitchen. We were BFF. I'd go into there, open some cupboards, pull out some ingredients, smack some pans down and create, baby! Booyah!

Then we moved to Tennessee and I got very involved with training/fighting muay thai and such...and stopped cooking again. The Spousal Unit was also working long hours as well - first for another company and then for himself - and also ended up having gastric bypass surgery. Once again, for a very long time, we went back to subsistence cooking. Meals boiled down to what was in the fridge/freezer that could be easily thawed/thrown together/broiled/what have you.

Long story short, it's now almost five years later. I've cooked enough to keep my hand in and my skills fairly sharp, but I haven't had the relationship with my kitchen that I had in Georgia and I've missed it. The kitchen had become my Zen, my relaxation, a place to sip a drink and pore over the potentials of a new or previously made recipe. Do I follow the instructions exactly? Do I want to change it up a bit? What if I do X instead of Y? I wonder how that would come out if I...well, you get the idea.

I find that I miss it. A lot. So I've made some changes. I'm not going to be training for a while and that gets me home several hours earlier in the day versus the oh-crap-it's-almost-8p.m.-what-do-I-do-for-food routine we've been locked into for many, many months. I've refreshed my cooking bookmarks, dusted off my cookbooks, pulled out my recipe folders and re-installed my cooking software. I hope to detail some of what I make in this blog, but my bigger hope to reconnect with that quietly creative part of me that's been silent for a while and revive the pleasure and satisfaction that came from taking diverse ingredients and making something good from them.

Let the experimentation begin :).