Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Friday and Saturday were spent at the Tea For All Reasons Annual Open House selling my wares. It was a very profitable weekend for all.

Sunday I went to the early service then brought the kids home while Beau finished his parking lot duties. I don’t remember the rest of the day.

Monday was chaos at work in the form of two conference calls. In the middle I went to visit my friend who is expecting twins in the hospital. She’s at the 34 week mark and hoping the babies will stay in for a couple more weeks.

Yesterday I stayed home from work to tend the kiddos while Beau was getting Mohs surgery on his nose for a small spot of basal cell carcinoma. They think they got it all with the first scrape, so he was home by noon. By dinner time he was in serious pain and took a leftover vicodin from when he had his wisdom teeth out earlier this year. I made the snap decision to stay home again today since his instructions also said not to do anything strenuous for the first 24-48 hours. Jesse alone is strenuous. However, he woke up feeling much better this morning and thinks Tylenol will take the edge off of his discomfort from now on.

Tomorrow and Friday will be more chaos at work with the end of the month and having been out for two days.

Other than that, life is grand.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

I’ve gotten a lot of books read on the commute lately. The last two were outside of my normal reading materials and I thought I’d mention them in case anyone is looking for something new to read.

A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd - the author was recommended by a librarian friend who seems to enjoy reading the same things I do. We compare favorite authors a lot, so when she sent me a list of authors that I had not read yet, I thought I’d give them a try. Todd came up to bat first.

The winning first in a new WWI series from the bestselling mother-son Todds (A Matter of Justice and 10 other Inspector Rutledge mysteries) introduces Bess Crawford, a resourceful British army nurse who’s injured when her ship is sunk in 1916. While convalescing in England, Bess is tormented because she’s put off delivering a message from Arthur Graham, a dying soldier under her care for whom she’d developed strong feelings, to his family. Her own brush with death prompts her to travel to Kent and transmit Arthur’s cryptic last words to one of his three brothers.

I chose this particular novel because it is a stand-alone. Todd has a series of novels featuring a certain Inspector and because I couldn’t get the first one in audio format, I went with the stand-alone instead.

I liked the book very much. The story was compelling, the characters well written, and the narrator was excellent. 4.5 stars.

The Attack by Yasmina Khadra - This was on sale at Audible.com a few weeks ago, so after becoming intrigued by the plot synposis and thinking that I needed to branch out in my reading I bought it.

Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a respected, dedicated surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He has learned to live with the violence that plagues his city and works tirelessly to help the victims brought to the emergency room. But one night, a deadly bombing in a local restaurant takes a horrifyingly personal turn, when his wife’s body is found among the dead, bearing injuries that match those typically found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers.

As evidence mounts that his wife, Sihem, was responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Dr. Jaafari must face the inescapable realization that the beautiful, intelligent, thoroughly modern woman he loved had a secret life that was far removed from the comfortable, assimilated existence they shared.

I had several problems with this book. First was the narration - either the translation from French to English was poor or the writing was weirdly stilted in areas or the narrator was just a bad reader. I was never able to pin it down. There were parts where the prose was lyrical and beautiful. There were parts where the prose was overly cliched. And there were parts where the prose made no sense. At one point I looked up my account to make sure I had gotten the unabridged version of the book because I felt like I had missed whole parts of the story somewhere - I had the full version, so there was some bad writing/translation in there.

My other issue was the story itself. I know the author was trying to present a mostly non-partisan view of the goings on with Israel/Palestine, but I don’t think it worked. And there was no light. It was dark from the beginning to the end. It was morose. Then again, the subject matter is not light-hearted either so maybe I shouldn’t have expected any lightness.

That said, my general impression was that I liked it. 3 stars.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

From the inbox, from my MIL. Prescient.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

[via Letters from Kamp Krusty]

Friday, October 16, 2009

If you want to see what the agency does best, then check out US Marshals: Operation FALCON.

Monday, Oct 19 at 9pm and 10pm on Discovery Channel and Discovery HD.

Featured cities: Miami, New Orleans, and Washington, DC

I’ll be setting my DVR to record it.

[Added Later]: I’m still waiting for the new season of Manhunters on A&E, too.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Woke up cranky again this morning - at 3am when Molly woke up crying. I was baffled because she hasn’t woken up in the middle of the night for a few weeks now. So I went in to see what was up and still couldn’t figure it out.

I changed her diaper - twice. She managed to wet the new one as I was attaching the sticky strips. All while she was still crying.

I walked with her - crying. I sat and tried to rock her - crying. I felt for teeth - no sign of anything, but still crying. And then I tried to nurse her - that ratcheted up the crying several notches.

At that point I put her in the crib to see about getting a bottle when Beau stumbled out of our room. He went to hold her while I made a 2 oz bottle. She grabbed at it in desperation and gulped it down pretty quickly. And then started crying as soon as it was empty and looking at the bottle as if it had betrayed her. So I went to make 2 more ounces, which she gulped down equally quickly. She started to cry again, but I burped her and then she started to rub her sleepy eyes. She was sound asleep by 3:30am.

But I was wide awake so I’ve been up since 3am. I’m armed with several teas today - both for the caffeine that I think I’ll need, but also for the warmth on this chilly, rainy day and for my diet.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

I’m cranky this afternoon.

I blame the lack of chocolate.

There is no opportunity for any either since the deli upstairs is now closed.

One more hour until I can go home. At least I am listening to a good book this week. It’s one of those books that you think about all the time when you can’t read it because you’re supposed to be working.

Why is it so impossible to get to a human?

You want your money? Then get a human to answer your phones.

I posted about this at my FB page, but I thought I’d post it here, too.

Starting today I’m counting calories. And I’m keeping a food journal - I’ve had this lovely little leather moleskin for years, but I’m a terrible journal keeper (I blog!) so I have never used it. I pulled it out of a drawer last night to be used as my food diary. Already I have marked down my current weight and goal weight. The number of calories allowed per day at this point (1716) and the foods I have consumed so far. I’ll add lunch in a little bit - Beau’s lovely daily salad with much less cheese, no hard-boiled egg, and with less croutons and dressing. Not no croutons/dressing - I’m not going to punish myself by eliminating all fun foods. That’s a diet killer for me. I’ll keep certain no-nos, but just cut way back on my intake of them.

For instance, I was told that 10 plain M&Ms are 1 WW point. I told Beau that if he bought a large bag of them (and hid them from me) and he portioned out 10-20 pieces per day with my lunch, then I’d be happy. And I’ll have to tell him to buy “light” dairy products from now on, too.

Oh, according to the WW points calculator, I’m allowed 26-28 points. I get 2 points for every nursing session - we’re down to only nursing once a day at this point so I get those extras, but I’ll try to keep it to 26 points when I know the WW values on my meals. I figure between the total calories and WW points I should start to get a handle on what I’m eating.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Now that I am no longer The Food Source™ for Molly Ann, it’s time to shed the extra 50-60 pounds I’m carrying around post-childbirth of two babies.

I’m motivated by the clothes that don’t fit.

I’m unmotivated by the food I like to eat.

There’s also our budget, which is tighter than tight. So while I’d love the accountability of paying for Weight Watchers meetings or their online stuff, we just cannot afford that. So I’m trying to figure out how to do WW without the meetings and without knowing how they value foods to their points system. I hate counting calories, frankly. I don’t want to think of every morsel that goes into my mouth as points. How tedious. I hated doing that when I had the gestational diabetes, too.

Add the complication that Beau is our primary cook, and it means I have to remind him how not to cook. So I’m on the hunt for low cal/low fat recipes that will still taste good and won’t break our bank. I’m hoping this blog will help - I already found a recipe that has potential for the pork chops we have thawing in the frig.

[LATER]: Yes, I know. Exercise. Not happening. No time. For real - there are no extra minutes in my days to work in exercise.

I present, you decide.

SaveAward.gov

We get weekly emails about it from the lead organization.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

I put together this casserole for my friend with the baby and kidney infection. It’s a great one, but I can’t make it for us until I figure out how to do it without milk products. But I am going to work on that, because it is delish.

Chicken Tortillas Casserole
Serves 6-8

4 cooked chicken breasts
1 onion, grated
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can cream of chicken soup
2 cups any kind of salsa (I used roasted verde salsa this time)
1 cup milk
12-15 corn tortilla, cut into quarters
2-3 cups cheddar cheese, grated
2 cans green chilies, seeded/diced

1. Cut chicken into chunks. Set aside.

2. In a bowl, combine the onion, soups, salsa, and milk. Blend well.

3. In a large, lightly greased, casserole dish, layer half of the tortillas. Top with half of the chicken, half of the sauce, and half of the cheese. Sprinkle with 1 can of green chilies.

4. Repeat layers, ending with the cheese on top.

5. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours. You can refrigerate for longer, if you like.

6. Remove cover. Bake at 300 degrees for 1 full hour.

Friday, October 09, 2009

For those of you who pray I have a request for a friend in my small group. Here’s the story:

She just had her 3rd baby about 3-4 weeks ago. Everything seemed fine and then she started experiencing severe pain. She went to the ER where they determined she had the flu and sent her home. The next day the pain was worse so she went back to the ER where they determined she had some kind of kidney infection. She was checked in overnight but released the next day - given pain meds and antibiotics. The pain did not abate, so she went to her doctor (her hub is in the Navy, so she is being seen my military docs) again and this time was told there were two possibilities - a postpartum cyst or some other kind of blockage. She was scheduled for a renal scan on Monday - the results were inconclusive as to the type of blockage and the docs decided to wait 2 more weeks before deciding on surgery to fix the problem in order to see if it would correct with meds.

In the meantime, she’s trying to nurse her baby and had to pump/dump her milk Monday-Tuesday because of the radioactivity from her renal scan - she couldn’t even hold her baby for 48 hours. Then they had a scare when the baby started vomiting after going back to nursing - turns out that was just a reaction to the switching back and forth from formula to breastmilk.

To make matters worse, they are scheduled to move to Korea early next month. Their house is on the market and they have people coming through to look at random times. Her hub is on leave until he leaves, but he will be leaving in about 3 weeks. Her retired father has been with them to help, but he returns home today. And she is still in severe pain.

When I think about it all I have no idea how she’s keeping her sanity and doesn’t just melt into a puddle. Maybe she does, but she puts on a brave face when I see her.

Folks in our small group (ladies only) and their couples group have stepped up to provide meals for the past couple of weeks and for the forseable future. And we’re trying to figure out how to help in other areas - house cleaning, taking care of her older kids, etc.

So, there are so many things to pray for and it’s hard to know where to even start. I love that God already knows all of the troubles. But I admit it’s hard to understand why He’s allowing this at this time.

Anyway, please pray for her healing. That’s the crux of it all. If she does have surgery, it will mean that she does not go with her hub to Korea because it will involve a follow-up surgery than cannot be done there.

Father, please heal her. Please take away whatever is it that is causing the blockage. Please take away her pain and restore her body. Thank you that she is able to still provide the nourishment her baby needs. Thank you for the way You have provided for their needs through the friends at church. Thank you for hearing our cries of petition.

Thanks for praying, friends. I’ll try to update when there’s new news.

Thursday, October 08, 2009

I have a Twitter account, but I don’t use it much.

However, I discovered the awesome power of Twitter as advertising tool for my shop. Now I need to find the balance between spamming my followers and gently reminding them that there’s pretty stuff they can buy.

Follow my business on Twitter - BeadonaWire.