Top Ten Tuesday - Things that make life better

1. Repainting your nails any color you want
2. New haircuts that you love
3. Collectibles
4. Vacations--even really short ones
5. Cats who like you
6. Tea, all of it
7. Chocolate, all of it
8. Sleeping in because you don't need to be up yet
9. Babies laughing
10. Finding the exact thing you need to bring the room together

Top Ten Tuesdays - Places I want to visit

1. Ireland
2. Slovenia
3. All the places I used to live
4. Macchu Picchu
5. Sweden
6. The Redwood Forest
7. Stonehenge
8. The Moon
9. Tuscany
10. Skara Brae

What about you guys? Where do you most want to visit?

Seven things that are annoying me right now:

1. My computer somehow got 113 bugs on it and almost wouldn't run enough to clean them out--and I'm not sure where the gap in coverage is.
2. I didn't even see that the Maybeline ad for the Hunger Games inspired make up totally did what the Capital does--divide and distract--and now I'm wondering what else I've missed lately.
3. My bedroom is dark and I don't have a spare lightbulb for my lamp.
4. Being poor.
5. Wanting cake.
6. This pervasive feeling I'm having right now that I don't have enough time to do things--and the certitude that this is a lie my brain is telling itself.
7. That smudge right in the middle of my glasses that I just can't seem to wipe off.

Gluten Free Me - What I've been eating

Somewhere on one of the GF blogs, I read the best advice ever: the easiest way to be gluten free is to eat stuff that naturally doesn't have gluten. So that's what I've been doing, mostly. Recently, we've had:

- Potroast and mashed potatoes

- Pork and sweet potatoes with applesauce

- Roast chicken with baked potato and cheddar-broccoli topping

And when something normally has a wheat-based starch, like tonight's hotdogs and beans, I usually just skip the bread. Last night, when we had barbecue beef sandwiches, I had mine over rice.

Lunches are more in my control than dinners, which everyone shares. I eat a lot of soups at lunchtime; it's fairly easy to find GF soup, and ones I make myself are guaranteed to be GF. Plus, home made soup makes use of bones and veggies we have lying around and freezes real well for later.

One of my fav lunches is at the top of this post: toasted corn tortillas with tuna and veggies. I use mostly the pre-flavored tuna, and I find that I don't need to add sauce or mayo or anything because it already tastes good. Then I top it with whatever veggies we have around and nom away! Less that 300 cals, naturally GF and delicious!

I do eat a lot of the standard GF pancakes, and I'm starting to get tired of them; I think I'll try the Bob's Red Mill pancake mix soon. And I do miss cupcakes, muffins and cookies, so I think I'll also try Bob's GF all-purpose flour soon; I found out yesterday that WalMart has it for almost $2 cheaper than Target, where we usually shop.

Day 27 and I'm doing pretty well!

Font Friday - Versa

Mine. I made it. With my own hands and my own iPad.

You can get it here, at 2tff.

Do any of you make fonts? Share them!

Top Ten Tuesdays - Some of my favorite songs

1. "What the Water Gave Me" - Florence + The Machine
2. "Little Talks" - Of Monsters and Men
3. "Karma Slave" - Splashdown
4. "Soul Meets Body" - Deathcab for Cutie
5. "Be My Wife" - David Bowie
6. "Blinding" - Florence + The Machine
7. "Love Is A Battlefield" - Pat Benetar
8. "Broken Wings" - Mister Mister
9. "Once In A Lifetime" - Wolfsheim
10. "Lullaby" - The Cure

What about you lovelies?

Tuesday Tattoo Inspiration - Nesting dolls for sisters

What a fantastically cute way to share a tattoo with your sisters! And a versatile idea, too, since you could add as many nesting dolls as you need, or as few as two!

Top Ten Tuesday - Geeky items it would be super-useful to have in real life

1. Sonic screwdrivers
2. Tricorder
3. Spaceships that can fly faster than light
4. Ubiquitous supercomputing that you just have to talk to to get whatever you need
5. Holograms
6. Heads-up displays in our actual vision
7. Phasers
8. Scanners of all sorts
9. Replicators--the kind that make food and clothes, not the kind that take over the planet and kill everyone
10. Little robots who maintain things, fix things, plant things, etc

Top Ten Tuesday - Art supplies everyone should have in a box that's always on hand

1. Sketching pencils
2. Colored pencils
3. Watercolor pencils
4. Paper--a nice selection of it
5. A clipboard or other hard surface
6. Sharpies
7. Gel pens
8. Whichever paint you prefer and basic useful brushes
9. Scissors
10. Glue

I'm convinced you can make anything if you have these things.

Top Ten Tuesday - Things We Need In Sleepy Hollow

1. The obligatory shopping scene that next week pretty much promises us--but in the end he decides to keep his own clothes, and just have a tailor copy them so he has the ability to change his clothes.

2. Abby allowing just a little bit of fondness to show through, and Jenny jumping on it as proof that she likes him--then Crane walking in on that conversation and protesting that he's married, which shuts Abbie down and doesn't even faze Jenny.

3. Flashbacks of Jenny and Corbin working together to extract magical items from dangerous parts of the world--and doing their best to help people. Crane sharing some of his own adventures, A bid feeling left out--until he points out that these are her adventure stories.

4. Abbie agreeing to that other cop's attempts to rekindle their spark, but finding him boringly ordinary after everything she's seen; he decides to win her back though, and doesn't give up just because of one tepid date.

5. Modern Templars.

6. Also the Illuminati. 

7. Possibly Nazi Occultists.

8. Others who aren't on the side of either witch coven, but who wind up like Jenny and Abbie and Corbin, studying and dealing with this stuff, and surviving it. Both good ones and bad ones.

9. Other contacts in the supernatural world--seers, researchers, freelance witches, lesser spirits that don't want to kill the world, other ghosts...

10. Ichabod really feeling the loss of everything he knew and everyone he loved, and a moment quiet enough for him to really deal with how he can't go back and how strange and alien this world is now. Preferably before he has to lose Catrina again, because I want it to really feel like it comes from him.

Gluten Free Me - Two weeks in!

You guys, I don't even know what to say about this whole thing other than wow.

I mean, I thought maybe something would change, but this was almost immediate. As of now, my face is way cleared up, and that usual dry grittiness that I've always had on my upper arms and back is greatly reduced. The psoriasis on my scalp is almost gone. I hardly itch at all! I'm used to always itching!

There are days when I feel cruddy, and I think that's a combination of my seasonal allergies kicking in at the same time as my body chemistry is shifting. The last, like, two days, I've been feeling the lack of cookies and cupcakes a lot but I'm going to try making GF brownies to sate that, and I have some Halloween candy for when I get a sweet tooth--which so far is much less than it was before, though not gone.

I'm feeling more motivated and more clear-headed, too, more often. Which is great since I'm just figuring out how to get an agent and get my book published and that needs me to be sharp. It's not all the time, but it's more than it was.

And all of this is more than I was expecting!

Quote - | Inspiration for the new week.

| Inspiration for the new week. :

'via Blog this'

Font Friday - Gifffff

Yes, with five 'f''s. Another one of mine! I'm getting to really like making fonts; it's sort of...zenlike, going through the alphabet like that.

You can get it here, at 2tff.

Wednesday Weigh In - 166!

I'm down almost four pounds since ten days ago when I started this new diet! I knew that I was feeling less puffy, but four pounds! That's way more than I was expecting!

Yesterday, my brother bought my mom and I lunch at his favorite bagel place. I decided to test it; I was nine days without gluten, lunch was free for me, and it looked amazing. It was delicious. I ate half a sandwich. And then I had a stomach ache and was queasy for the rest of the night. So I guess there is some real sensitivity!

But I also guess it's working and doing good things, so I'm re-committed!

Top Ten Tuesday - Reasons to journal

1. It lets you clean out old pains
2. It preserves current daily memories that would otherwise be forgotten
3. It also preserves great triumphs and the best days, as they are when you live them
4. It shows you the inside of yourself so that you can better understand yourself
5. It's a holistic view of your life, so you can see the patterns you miss when you're living it
6. "the unexamined life is not worth living" and this is exactly examining
7. Anything you put in your journal is journaling
8. A planner is really just a stripped down journal, and journaling can reclaim that day-to-day aspect
9. Have you seen all the awesome people in history who kept journals? You could be part of that group.
10. Clearing out your brain helps you sleep more and worry less