Then and Now

You don't know how far you've been, until you can see where you came from.

This was taken April of 2005 at my friend Theresa's house. Notice how I am putting food in my mouth while bonding. Touching.

This was taken last month at Scott's sister's graduation dinner. Yes, I know my eyes are not open, but I don't have many full body shots as I'm still not really a fan of having pictures taken of my whole body.


And what REALLY gets me is that as sassy as I've been feeling (I mean LOOK at what I got my body to do!), I know that I will look back on this picture and think, "Good LORD -- I can't believe how far I have come since then."

Because the amount of weight I need to lose to fill in the blank for the final picture is the amount I have lost to get to the middle picture.

Crazy, isn't it?

That's right -- I'm halfway there.

Meetin'

Tonight Scott and I went to our first "Meet In Va Beach" event. It's a local organization he found online as a a way for people to, well, meet. The way he initially described it, I was a little apprehensive that it was going to be a swingers thing, but luckily that was not the case. (Not being swingers and all, sorry Lori.)

Anyways, it was at a martini bar in town. When we first got there, we were a little late, so wound up at the Newbies table. We were kind of holding on to our seats a little and waiting to get our toes wet, like the first day of junior high. I think people were a tad surprised when we finally burst out of our shells and started mingling.

Alcohol has a way of doing that sometimes.

Particularly to people who have recently lost weight and don't know their limits, which we both fit in to.

We met tons of people whose names I sort of remember and whose faces I also sort of remember, but I doubt I will be able to put them together again if/when I see them again.

I just can't reiterate enough though how INCREDIBLY exciting it is to have an organization devoted to helping people meet people. It seems like forever that we have been griping that we wish we had a way to meet new people to find fun things to do. While we are occasionally sort of good about generating the fun thing to do, we can't always generate people to do the fun thing with and then it's just me and Scott drunk in a bar. Well, shit -- we can drink at home much cheaper and have the same amount of fun.

We still didn't meet another couple to hang out with, which is the ultimate goal.

That's the thing the single people don't realize. They believe that once you get married, the dating is over. And it sort of is, but then the couple dating begins and that's even harder. Think about how hard it is to find someone to meet your own particular needs and demands. Then multiply that times two to meet the needs and demands of both you and your new soul mate. It ain't easy. It usually turns out that the kind of people you are attracted to in friends are not usually attracted to the same type of mate that you are -- so it's an uneven match. Game over.

Hence all the tv watching that occurs. It's often easier than trying to match up all the parts with other parts.

But, I was talking about the meet-in. (Can you tell the martinis haven't completely worn off yet?) We met a wide variety of people and had quite a few nice but shallow talks with them. I found someone to latch on to (which usually spells disaster) but we also met just other generally super nice people who make us want to go back out and try it again.

I mean after all, aren't we just a group of people who have such a hard time meeting people the traditional way that we resorted to the internet as a way to win friends and influence people? If nothing else, we have that in common, eh?

The Cottage Cheese Conundrum


I have been wanting to introduce a good protein source into my daily diet for a while now. It's important that I mix up my Weight Watchers activity by ways other than cheating sometimes, you understand...

Cottage cheese is excellent source of protein and calcium and so on and thought this would a simple way to reintroduce this into my life without having to use up a lot of daily points. The problem is that cottage cheese looks like cottage cheese and it tastes like cottage cheese and it IS cottage cheese.

I could find something else but really I just have this freakish thing with food. It really goes back to Julia taunting me about an imaginary list that she and her family thought I had. It was a list of 17 things that I would eat -- and only those things because they were the only things I had ever eaten in my life. So, sometimes when I encounter foods that I am not fond of, I feel the need to prove to an imagined audience that I AM willing to eat other things, and that I will even grow to like them -- much to my own surprise. (Frankly, there are many circumstances where I am not willing to test this theory, but this is mostly to do with the portion of the vegetable family known as The Greens. Collard, mustard, kale, in most cases spinach... You get it. And you can have it when you get it, because I'm not going near it.)

Such has become the Cottage Cheese Conundrum.

Because of this thing, I have recently focused my radar on wanting to eat cottage cheese. I think about it more than is normal. (I really need to get a hobby.) I ask people how do THEY manage to eat cottage cheese. And let me tell you, people do STRANGE things with cottage cheese, and I'm not even talking about that really weird sight I found on the internet... No, I have a friend who eats hers with Catalina dressing. I wasn't even willing to consider that.

Here are a couple that I was willing to attempt in my first few attempts. Salt and pepper was suggested and I thought this would play up the cheesy aspect of the situation. Turns out, I must have gotten too free-handed with the salt packet and it just tasted like salty cottage cheese with a dash of pepper. No good.

An earlier attempt almost cured me of the pursuit entirely. Scott had been required to eat mushy food during his early post-operative days, and I had purchased cottage cheese as one of those items. A short time after, I decided to try the cottage cheese and a friend had suggested dried fruit was a good mix-in. I couldn't find that, but I thought blueberries might be a good complement. Turned out that it was more than a short time before when the cottage cheese had been purchased and the last time it was put in the refrigerator, the lid wasn't exactly put all the way on. Let's just say that while I at least finally figured out where that awful smell coming out of the refrigerator was coming from, I was turned off of cottage cheese for a while.

My latest attempt was at the suggestion of a WW friend. Now, I should have taken the suggestion with a grain of the excess salt from my last cottage cheese experiment, but I'm not that smart. (She's given me past suggestions and swore they were so amazing and they were not as much so.) She suggested the direction to go is sweet. Put a dash of vanilla and a bit of splenda and blend it up. It's the best thing ever, you will swear you died and gone to Heaven -- this is what she promised.

Huh, if that was what Heaven was like, think I'll stay on Earth and stick with Heavenly Hash. Granted, the first bite was pretty good but not quite sweet enough so I added a dash more vanilla and that turned out to be too much and then it was a balancing act (add MORE cottage cheese, add more Splenda, etc) to get back to the first almost okay bite... But, who wants to work this hard to eat something that was only moderately okay??

So, that experiment basically used up the last of the tiny experimental container that I purchased.

And then tonight I learned that in order for a serving of cottage cheese to count as a daily serving of dairy (one of WW's good health guidelines is that you should have two servings of dairy a day) you have to consume 2 CUPS! I mean, Jesus -- are you serious? I can barely gag down 2 tablespoons and they're saying I've got to come up with 2 cups? Just the thought makes me want to hurl.

I'm afraid that cottage cheese is going to be headed the way of collard greens on my list of acceptable foods.

hugs,

Heather

PS -- One of the reasons for the long delay is that we just got back from a week long vacay to California. We got to sit like THIS close to Bruce Willis at Koi in LA and I got a tattoo in Venice Beach... I will put up a picture once it heals.