AGH!

I'm so bugged! Why is it a guy is okay with ANY reason you can give him for not being interested in him, unless it's religious differences. Really!! I could tell a guy I don't want to date him because he smells like rotten fish, and he'd bow out gracefully, but if I don't want to date him because we are on different religious pages, I'm a jerk and the scum of the earth! My goodness, even if he doesn't feel as strong as I do about marrying within my religion, he should want someone he thinks like, etc. You know!? GOSH! I really am bugged! I don't like guys liking me! It just ends up crappy. Guys, if you are smart, please stay away from me! I'm not interested in anyone, I never am, I never will be, make it easier on us both! I'm eternally single! Stupid, stupid boys!

An Exciting Update... Exciting To Me

First of all, this is my second blog today, so there is a new one below this as well.

Well, I haven't said much recently about my efforts to lose weight, so I'm doing so now.

Backing up a little, I gained a little on my cruise (reading the previous blog, you can see why), then I got sick the week after I got home, and threw up for about 24 hours, losing 5 lbs. After being sick, my apitite wasn't very big, but I soon messed that up, and went back to eating as I usually do. THAT, my friends, is my problem. I LOVE FOOD! I LOVE TO EAT! I do, I won't deny it, I won't. Despite working out, I don't change the way I eat THAT MUCH. I eat better when I'm on track, but I still eat a lot. Heathly or not, too much food is too much food.

I have really tried everything to get a handle on eating. I'm weak though. I've pondered not eating... but i love food... and bulemia is out, I hate throwing up, besides, I want to be healthy and have the weight stay off, and I want it to be someinthg that I can continue for life without having to greatly alter my life, cause then I'll fail, so eating disorderes and weird miracle pills and things were out.

SO, last Monday (June 29th), I decided I really need to get a handle on my food consumption or I was never going to lose weight and get back to 8 (or less). I had recently listened to a CD that was part of my ChaLean Extream workout package, and Chalene said something that stuck. She said that eating just 50 calories too many each day, will cause you to gain 10 lbs in a year. So I started to do some math, that means, 100 calories to many each day, and you'd gain 20 lbs in a year, and 150 calories too many each day, would cause you to gain 30 lbs in a year... 30 lbs, that's 2.5 lbs a month... if my body can't burn as many calories as I consume, I was going to put on weight.

Then I started to think about 150 calories... that's nothing! There are so many dinky little 100 cal snacks out there, and I personally could easily eat 2+ in a sitting. Even on the healthy end, one medium sized banana is 105 calories... and I can easily eat a banana. I started to realize what I'd been doing. I was eating relativly well, but I was not thinking about the quantity, just the quality. "I've had a healthy breakfast, a healthy luch, and 2 healthy snacks, I'm doing goo so far today." Than I'd go crazy with food at night when all my cravings would kick in, because I didn't think I was eating bad things.

So how much was I supposed to eat? I decided I would see what Chalene suggested I eat. She recommended to for a woman between 151-181 lbs (which I am), to eat no more than 1,400 calories a day to lose weight. Okay, I was going to do that. I had always poo-pooed calorie counting, thinking it was silly and a waste of time, but I was starting to FINALLY see the light, and it made sense.

Tuesday June 30th, today I would begin my efforts to eat less. First thing in the morning, use the bathroom, strip down, and weigh myself. 165 lbs :(

I was SO diligent! I made myself proud. I didn't eat more than I should, and I ate healthy. THAT was the ticket. I still had to eat healthy. If I wasted precious calories on nutritionless foods and crap that was high cal and not filling, I was going to suffer all day because I would have run out of calories, and I would still be hungry.

Wednesday July 1st. Wake, potty, strip, weight... 164. Cool! :) I kept this up pretty well all week, slipping up Thursday, I went over a little, but doing pretty good. The scale looked like this:

Tuesday June 30- 165
Wednesday July 1- 164
Thursday July 2- 163
Friday July 3- 162
Saturday July 4- 162
Sunday July 5- 160
Monday July 6- 160
Tuesday July 7- 158

Doing the math for you, that's 7 lbs, in 7 days. :) WAHOO!

And the great thing is, I'm not hungry. I'm not eating till I'm full, I'm eating till I'm satisfied, and if I'm really good and keep a good control on the number of calories I eat, I can reward myself with a little treat now and then (still keeping track of the calories) with out messing it all up. And it's easy! I just keep a running tally in my head, or if you are bad with that, write it down. Read labels, and both the internet and a lovely calorie counter book I got, help me know the calories in things without lables (produce, etc.).

I still get cravings, but I aware of how much I've eaten, so I know when it's okay to give in, and when it's not. Monday night I was sitting in my room. I had had most the calories that I could for the day, but I was having mad cravings. I wasn't hungry, I just had the munchies and wanted to eat things. So I thought about what little calories I had left for the day, and went and found a 60 calorie string cheese to eat, and then drank water to keep my mouth busy to bed time. As I was sitting there though, I thought about how before I made this goal to eat this way, I would have thought to myself, "I've eaten healthy today, I'll just go find something healthy to eat and I'll be fine." But not anymore. It's so great. One other thing too, I'm totally all about working out still, but I only worked out twice last week, and twice so far this week, due to time, but I'm still having success.

Oh, and I try to plan my meals a little bit beofre I eat, so that I don't eat all my calories before dinner and leave myself hungry, or with few options in the low, low range.

The scale read 158 still this morning, but as you see, I'm not worried, that's happened before. I'm going out to dinner tonight with friends from work, and I already know where we are going, so I kept my calories tight today, and I went online to look at the menu for the restaurant to see what was a good, healthy, low cal item I could order, and I was happy to find one I'm excited to order tonight, and only 320 calories (add that to what I've already had today, and I'm still 370 calories under my limit..

I tried an experiement while I was looking at the menu. I moved to the side of the menu with the names of the items, and didn't look at the calories. I went through the menu and looked to see what sounded good and what I would normally have picked. I found the item that I know I would have gone with in the past, and moved acorss the page to the calorie column... 1,340. YIKES!!! That's almost an entire days worth of calories for me, in one meal!

I never realized how much I used to eat, but now that I know, things are going well. I just wanted to update you, and give my recommendation to anyone looking for something that might work for them. Toodles!

The Journey Finally Continues

As I said, we all made it back to Venice in one piece. We made our way back to the hotel, and with shock and horror, watched as one after another other members of our "singles" cruise made their way into our hotel. Why the shock and horror? Well, we hadn't seen a person our age enter the hotel yet. People 20+ years older than us kept coming in. There was nothing to be done, we were there, they were old, but we could easily separate ourselves from them and still have a blast.

We once again decided to ventured out to find some dinner, and as we prepared to leave, we ran into one of the two people in charge of getting our cruise taken care of, and some other guy who was going on the cruise, one who was actually close to our age, so they accompanied us. We went to a little joint called Crazy Pizza, just around the corner from our hotel. Having tried the pizza in Rome, and not loving it, I went for a calzone. Sadly, the calzone was yet again, blah (as I was warned). I just have to say, while the Italians were for sure headed in the right direction on the food ideas, they fell short and missed the target a bit, so thank heaven the Americans had their way with it and made it what I've come to love today, yummy American Italian food. :)

Unfortunatly, there is a big problem in Italy whenever we ask to have the check split, so it all had to go on one card, and we each had to pay Kirsten back our part of the bill. In theory, this is fine, but things never work out that way. Somehow Kirsten was shorted a good deal of money, so we sat in the foyer of the hotel trying to figue out what happened. This lady in our group, who was considerably older than us, decides to come over and chat with us, which is fine, but we were all a little to preoccupied with what we were doing to really chat with her, and she got a bit offeneded, then when we got it worked out, we were ready for bed, so we started to leave, and one girl said she needed to go take a shower, so the lady was offended again, unintentionally... sorry lady, it was late, the kids needed to go to bed, go find some adults to play with.

The next monring, we went to eat breakfast in the restaurant, and the bus boy, Vincent, decided he would flirt with me. He was just silly, and when I was done I left, and he told my friend he thought I was pretty... silly boy. Then I returned later to the dining room to chat with some of my friends who ate after me, and our cruise pal from the night before came to chat, again, but by that point we were getting ready to leave and get ready to check out, and the same girl from the night before said she needed to go take a shower. "I thought you took one last night!?" Said this lady, a little put out. "I was going to, but I was too tired." Said my friend. A sour look crosses ladies face, as we bid her goodbye and leave the dining area. (Just a funny story I wanted to share, cause she was busy with the youngest kids on the cruise so far, and not people her own age.)




ANYWAY, so we get on the ship, and get settled, and then of course we have to go out and do our lovely muster drill before we can take off.





I decided, I'm going to tell you about life on the ship, and then I'll tell you about our ports. okay? okay! :)

First of all, we did end up having a large number of people our age in the group with us, so that was not so bad.

Well, We only had 2 days at sea, so we didn't sleep in much, because we usually had to be off the ship early for our excursions, and it was SO hard to wake up when your room is pitch black, prime for sleeping late.

Our first night on the ship, we all went and danced to night away... but we sure were tired in Croatia the next day. After that... pretty much, I went to bed soon after dinner (not that weird, dinner usually ended around 10:30 or later).

We ate a TON! We would wake up between 7 and 8 and eat breakfast, usually at the main buffet, then we would have lunch sometime, dinner at the buffet around 5, because we were STARVING, and then dinner again at 9 in the main dining room. :) Oh, and of course the main dinner was a three course meal, AND, there was a soft serve ice cream machine on the ship, and we had at least one cone a day... :) oink oink!


There was a mini golf course on the ship, and a rock wall, but we never did either, because they were on the top deck, at the back, and it was too windy to enjoy. I'm sad to report, I was in my swimming suit once the entire trip, for a short period of time, due to lack of swim time, and lack of desire to squeeze myself into a swimming suit that fit me 10 lbs earlier. But I still had fun. :)

9 pm dinner was probably the most fun on the ship. It may sound weird, but we were always laughing SO hard and just enjoying sitting at the table talking to each other and our waiters.





Viviana and her assistant george are in the picture with us above. LOVE THEM! Story time.

Viviana, so cute, so nice, loved her. The first night we went to dinner, we had all the wine glasses and such on out table, after that night, just water glasses. We found out the last night the Viviana was LDS too, and she was so excited to have us on the ship with her. Such a nice lady.

George, was super quiet! He spoke English pretty well, but he was self-conscious about it, and was embarrassed to talk too much in English. The, second night I believe it was, on the ship Heather asked for some hot cocoa at the end of our meal. We expected something like a cocoa mix poured into hot water, but no, it was warm milk and chocolate, made by hand by our dear George. The next night, Viviana asked Heather if she wanted cocoa again, and she said "yes please" and then she started to ask the rest of us, and we all kind of wanted to try it, so George just made a bunch and brought us all some. Well, after that, they never asked again... no, George would just disapear around the end of the meal, and return later with cocoa for us all. Super Awesome! We loved it. but then some people sarted to feel guilty that he was doing it, so one night Heather said we didn't need it, and his face just dropped. "Okay." he said, trying to hide his disappointment, but then we felt bad, and explained that we felt bad having him do it everynight. I turned to see the pitcher of cocoa sitting on the service cart, and passed the word that he had already made it. We told George we did want it, but we didn't want to put him out. George happily told us he didn't mind and poured us our cocoa with a smile. After that, we just got our cocoa like clock work every night, and never had to ask or be asked. Makes me smile. :)

When we left for our cruise the first day, I didn't have my camera up on the top deck with me, so I missed out on pictures, but swore I'd get them coming back into Venice when we returned. I almost forgot, but as I climbed out of bed that morning, I suddenly remembered, so I grabbed my camera and ran up to the pool deck. Much to my excitment, the sun was still rising, so I got some great shots. Here are a few, and I'll tell ya'll more later.

Good People

There are some pretty dishonest people in the world today, and they just keep getting worse. It seems too, with the economic woes on everyones minds, that the number of dishonest people in the world keeps growing as formally honest people give in to their dark side and start commiting small acts of dishonesty to save a buck. Sometimes it seems you don't know who you can trust as you hear the stories, and live some yourself, as sadly our own family members, and those we count as friends, can often be the ones we have to worry about. Then something happen to restore, once again, your faith in people. While small things happen everyday, I was more surprised than usual today, and my thoughts rested on all of this.

I was driving home from work as usual, and I came around the bend in the road that takes me to the last leg of my journey home, when something caught my eye. I looked over to see a sign posted at the bend in the road so as to been seen from either direction, by all who drove past. The letters and numbers were large and there were two flags on top of the sign suggesting that the person posting it had a real desire to address the situation. In large black letters, the sign read; "LAPTOP FOUND- 555-5555". Obviously it contained a real phone number that I can't recall, but you get the point. "Wow!" I thought, "As people are trying to take valuable property from other peoples homes, or businesses, or are try to dishonestly get a better price than they should, someone out there had found a laptop (that the owner was no doubt sick about and chalking it up as gonner) and they were actively taking the steps to restore it to its rightful owner.

That computer in the hands of so many other people would have been kept or sold, but the right person found it.

Thank heaven for those people who are still honest in our world today.

I Realize I'm a Mean Person, But I Always Have Been, It's Nothing New.

Okay, so while I should maybe be finally telling you all about my cruise, I'm not, I'm venting, because I need a place to vent and this is it. This is another long one, it requires detail.

OKAY, first of all, I really, really do hate to date. I do! I first hate the awkwardness of it, and then I hate that without fail, either, he's a manorless fool, or he likes me and I'm not interested.(I know, heaven forbid I like someone, but such is my lot in life). SO, I really do try to avoid dating if I can. Every now and then I get asked out by someone I mistakenly think I can go out with and have fun, and when/if the inevitable happens, they won't hate my guts.... like I said, mistake.

For those of you who do not know, I do indeed have a Facebook account. Now I beg of you not go try to find this poor fool, I really have nothing against him personally, but you will see my dimela.

Lots of people I have gone to school with have sent my invitations to be their freinds on FB. I typically accept the invitation, and it was no differt for (let's call him Milton to protect the innocent) Milton. A few weeks, maybe months later I happen to jump on FB real quick before work, and the contemptible messenger informs this dear soul that I am online, so he begins to talk to me. Eventually he tries to ask me out. Now, I realize that it takes some courage to ask someone out (but ask me out on Facebook and I don't care who you are, there is absolutly no class involved), but I am not one to feign any similitude of interest when none exists, so I thought long and hard about how to respond.

Now, I thought the easiest thing would be to tell him I was dating someone, but that would make me a liar. Then I thought, well, I could either say I'm a lesbian or I'm schedueling my terminal illness to take me later this evening... but again, both lies. I thought about how guys claim, "Just be honest with us, we want the truth, don't lie about why you are saying 'no'!" So I thought, well, at least no one can fault me for not being honest, or not handeling this the way guys think we should. So, I tried honesty.

"You know, I'll be honest, I'm just not interested, and I don't want to lead you on and pretend I am when I'm not. I'm sorry, but I don't think we should go out." There, I said it, I was nice, I told him I didn't want to lead him on, who can hate me for that, and I'm not going to Hell. :) Dead wrong! He gets mad. "How can you say you aren't intested, you haven't even seen me for 8 years. Why don't you give me a chance?" On and on.... "Look!" I said, "I could have lied and told you I was dating someone just to end the conversation, but I tried to be honest and you are getting mad. I'm sorry, I'm not interested, and I really have to go to work now." Oh, but it doesn't end there, no he's not done. "Oh really, where do you work?" NOPE! I'm so not telling him, I DO NOT need him coming into my work. "In Layton, gg, bye!" Log out!

Needless to say, I made sure my messenger would never do that to me again, it's perminently in the off position.

But again, our story does not end there. A couple weeks later, he leaves me a message on my wall and asks where I work again, I chose not to answer. Then, a couple of weeeks ago the poor sap leaves me a message on my wall again. It was harmless enough, "Hi how are you doing?" So I suck up my doubts and all my witchy tendencies, and I comment back, "I'm good thanks." BUT I'm wise enough to know better than to return the inquiry, "How are you?", because that will only lead to bad things. WELL, it turns out, it doesn't take much provoking. "We should hang out sometimes." Hang out: code for , I'm too scared to say date, and I want to make it look like It's casual, so I say 'hang out' to lure you in. But I was not lured... I debated deleting his comment or ignoring it, and I decided ignoring was less mean, so I ignored and never responded to it.

Oh but that little rascal, Milton, does not give up, no, he sure doesn't, and that is why I'm here ranting to you today.

I really need to start listening to my instincts more. I ignore the thoughts and what I thought COULD happen, DOES happen. Last night I went to see the movie "The Proposal" with a bunch of my friends. It was a cute and funny movie, and I really liked it. It had that little "Aw!" factor that made you swoon at the leading man. So when I got home last night, I checked email and FB, and I wrote (against my better judgement based on Milton's possible actions);

"Audrey Spencer thinks that The Proposal is so funny and so cute! Almost makes her wish she was in love... then she remembers that in the real world, that would require dating, and then she remembers she HATES dating, and could be okay with being single forever if it meant not having to date. :)"

I thought, well, that's obvious enough to make one think, "She shot me down, once, maybe twice now, perhaps that, if for no other reason, would be a good reason not to ask her out again."

Wouldn't you think? I think so. But maybe I'm the slow one here.

So, once again, I was... that's right, WRONG!

I get an email message on FB this morning from him; "Want to date me?"

NO! NO, NO, NO!! Why is this so hard!? I'm trying to be nice, I'm trying to be honest, I can't make myself clear to him! I really don't want to resort to meanness, and I think that deleting him as a friend qualifies for meanness, but I'm not seeing any other options.

I don't know what to do next, BUT lesson to be learned here, just lie. We all will lie someday, it might as well be for a worthy cause like sparing someones feelings.... and your own sanity.

And if one person tells me to just go out with him, you will be counted as an enemy, forthwith and forever. It's even more clear now than when I first said no, that no was the right answer. He won't give up without a date, he'd be a scourge with a date. YIKES!

Clarification

For anyone confused, I did make three posts yesterday. I'm just sorry they are always so long, I've just got a lot to say, and I want you to get the full experience of what happened. :)

My Poor Little Puppy!

So when I took a break from writing the last blog, I went to let my dog out. We have been letting them out in the front... for a long story, but I let her out front, and I could see the across the street neighbors were outside, but there was a truck parked in front of our house, so I could only see some of what was going on over there. Lilly walked to the edge of the driveway, and then she turned to face across the street, and I saw her kind of jump and and then she started barking and I heard the neighbors yell, and before I knew it, there was a dog running up our driveway toward Lilly. I called her to me so she could run in the front door, but instead she ran to tward the back with the other dog right on top of her, litterally, this dog could have taken a bite out of her at any time.

I leaped off the front porch and ran after them around the side of the house, the neighbor was right behind me. I got to the back and the other dog saw me and went around the other side of the car to get away from me. I found Lilly at the end of a trail of urine at the top of the back stairs barking her head off, and Junior was running up to defend her. The neighbor appologized, took his dog home, and locked it in the house.

I took Lilly in, and the poor thing couldn't stop jumping at everything she saw and heard. The poor things tail was wet from her own filth. I washed the poor girl up, and she was back to normal, but I felt so bad for my baby. I don't think the dog planned to hurt her, but he sure scared her.