fat girl goes slim: progress!

I'm below 155! Our scale is not terribly accurate, and when I'm trying to read those little lines from all the way up by my head where my eyes are, they all sort of blur together, but it's most def below the 155 mark, and closer to the 150. Which is awesome. I don't know how much longer this will hold out, but I've basically just been eating more mindfully so that I generally eat less, even if I'm still not able to afford to eat better, I've upped my oolong tea intake, which kick starts my motabolism back to where it used to be when I was a tea fiend rather than just a tea addict, and I've started moving more when I'd usually just sit still-- like when I'm at work and I'm waiting for a customer, any customer, and I'd normally just be leaning against the counter, I try my best to stand upright, I tighten up my abs, I swing my arms back and forth, I bend and un bend my knees like little bitty shimmies. It ptobably makes me look impatient or wired, but it keeps me out of the no-customer malaise, and it burns off a little more than I burned before. Oh, and I tightened up my bike so that it's not so easy to coast and it's a little harder to pedal, which keeps me actively involved in getting to work, rather than just coasting around corners the whole way.

I'm also just trying generally to take more care of myself. I cleaned up my room for the first time in ages yesterday, I've been using my day and night face creams, washing my face more, brushing my hair more, and I started wearing makeup again, even though there's no one who cares whether I do or not (which was my excuse for not wearing it before). Tomorrow, I'm going to do my hair for the first time in about four months, and when the next Avon order goes in, I'm getting a revitalizing hair mask. I'm paying more attention to when I got to bed, and trying to get up at a decent and consistent time in the morning. I've been researching suppliments that help with moods, with balancing hormones, with managing acidity imbalances, and as soon as I have money (ha!), I'll be adding a few to my diet here and there.

I figure, if I take care of myself better overall, maybe some of the weight gain will reverse just because it was a dumpiness of character that caused it. Hey, it couldn't hurt.

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard

I've been reading Dooce alot lately, and it makes me want to be more open, and to Air some Neuroses and Strange Facts. So that's what I'm doing.

1. I consider myself to be actively exogamous.

I want to breed with someone from another country, someone outside the genepool of the cultures / communities I was raised in. I want them to be taller, healthier, stronger and smarter than I am, and especially than the average person I meet is-- maybe it's just that I work foodtail in a tourist town and people think it's okay to be horrible to someone you're never going to see again, but I don't want my kids to not know what coconut is, or to think that strawberry ice cream has to be neon pink, or to scream and scream and scream because they're too dumb to know how to do anything else. Currently, I'm all about Swedes and Scots, with the added benefit of a Swede being that I could possibly get to live in Sweden, which is quickly starting to sound like some sort of promised land. I also have an enternal attracktion for Asians with English accents, and Native Americans who have that on-the-res way of speaking. That last one might be Racial Guilt, but they're still hot.

2. There is a mole on my ankle that I catch every time I shave, and I use it as an excuse to not shave.

I really don't like shaving, though I do like hairlessness, and don't like the feeling of wind through my leg hair. I keep telling myself that when I get my second book published (the first one will pay off debts), I'm going to use the advance to get my whole body lazered. Anywhere there's hair I don't want, which is more and more frequent as my hormonal imbalance gets worse, I'm going to get it zapped. But until then, I'm stuck with shaving alone (Nair doesn't work and makes me break out, Smooth Away only works on the straight parts of my legs, I can't figure out threading, and waxing hurts too much), and I always hit that mole and get blood all down my foot. I'm pretty sure it jumps out at me. I'm also pretty sure that more than half of it's mass now is scar tissue, since I've been shaving and cutting it for... sixteen years. God, as long as some of the kids I work with have been alive.

3. I have a latex allergy, and it makes things awkward.

Most obviously, and probably the first thing that came to mind when I said 'latex' and 'awkward', there's the sex issue. Uncomfortable doesn't begin to explain it, and it was many a year before I figured out why it was so awful sometimes. And suck it, whoever decided that non-latex alternatives have to be so damned expensive. But less obviously, there's all the other little things that latex is in, like, say, underwear. Sometimes, in the summer, especially, when my skin is extra tender and all my pores are open, I'm alergic to my underwear and my bra, and wearing clothes is a horrible punishment that I've sort of gotten used to but still don't like. This is probably why I spent big chunks of my childhood in the smallest amount of clothes I could manage, and why I'd cry until my mom cut the elastic out of all my dresses. And other things: I can't wear the gloves at work, so I have to wash my hands at OCD levels, which damages my skin in other ways; If I leave even a covered hairtie on my wrist for more than a day or so, I break out and itch so bad I can't think; band aids eat away at my skin and are used only when the bleeding won't stop; Ace Bandages don't help at all, and give me exema on top of sprained limbs.

4. I'm half-convinced that the world is going to end while I'm here to witness it.

The other half is convinced that I'll live through it and I'd better have some survival skills so I don't die of my own stupidity after surviving the apocalypse. Because how lame would that be? I've got mental lists of everything I should stockpile, if only I had the money for it (I want to rent a storage unit and fill it up with camp cots, army rations, chemical heating pads, water, shampoo, feminine products, soap, toothpaste, canned goods, waterproof matches and so on). And the result is that I've been learning basic cultural things that we've almost lost, things that actually aren't that bad an idea for people to preserve: things like making jam, saving seeds and sustainable gardening, generating power off the grid, crocheting and weaving (and I'm trying to learn how to spin yarn), papermaking, sewing, canning, wild plant identification, and things like that. I'm comforted by the fact that I watch all the post-apocalyptic movies and have frameworks to work around in alot of circumstances, and that I've watched enough Discovery Channel to have a basic to fair understanding of how to canabalize tech to make anything I need made.

5. I'm addicted to roses.

I finally got one to grow, and better yet, to produce flowers, and now I want a dozen more plants, a hundred more. I want a whole rose garden, and a retirement spent breeding new rose varieties that I can name after science fictional women (Aryn Sun would be a kick ass rose, hardy and adaptable, while Chiana would be nearly colorless, but almost impossible to kill and Sam Carter would be unassuming, a blonde-yellow, and very dedicated to being a rose (and being secretly dangerous wouldn't hurt the namesake either)). I wear a wonderful rose-scented perfume. I eat lychees because they taste the way roses smell. I spray my face with rose water, use a rose-water facial soap (which gets bonus points for being from Sweden, see how this all ties together?), I bought rose jam and know how to make it, and I love turkis delight because it's rose-flavored. I make my own rose-scented tea. I'm considering naming a kid Rose because it's not already in the family, it's not very common these days, it's my favorite flower, AND it's my favorite companion on Doctor Who, so it has alot in it's favor. I'm obsessed. But I hate that dusty, soapy sort of roseness that's associated with old ladies, and I hate the color that's called 'dusty rose' and is actually the pink version of beige, and I hate things that are decorated with masses of roses in an attempt to be 'romantic'; all these things are insults to actual roses, and I'll be happy if I never see any of them again.

And I think five is enough for now. This will likely be the first of a series of five random neroses and facts and details, as I build this wayward blog into something all about me. Everyone should have something devoted to themselves; it's amazing for self-esteem.

another new segment!

I was going to start a sixteenth blog called Letters to the Aether, but that name's already taken on Blooger by someone who hasn't even updated it and picked much uglier colors that I would have, so I'm going to instead make that a new segment here. Any time I feel like writing random letters, it'll be on this poor little blog that hasn't quite found it's voice yet.

Like this one:

Dear Alexander Skarsgard,

On the off chance that you have a Google Alert on your name, I'd just like you to know that you're adorable. And so much taller than me that I'm overcome with strange urges: I want to climb up on your head and look into second-story windows and touch them with my hands. I want to paint you green and make you feed me peas and greenbeans. I want to sit on the ground next to your feet and look up, up, up, like I'm looking at a mountain. These are all good impulses, in context, I assure you.

I posted something like this almost a week ago on another blog, and I can't get these thoughts our of my head. For all your height, you fit quite nicely in my skull.

Love,

Me

Back in the game!

I'm back on the Avon train after far too long, and I'll be back on this blog as soon as the new catalogues come in!

fat girl goes slim: again

I've decided I'm done with being fat again. And now that I have my spiffy new planner to remind me of things, I have a better chance of remembering what I've eaten and keeping track of what I'm doing. So there.

Currently, as you can see,
I'm somewhere around 155. This is bad, because I'm supposed to be at around 110, according to those charts, which always seem a bit on the light side and don't seem to take muscle mass into account (so i'm aiming for around 120 at first, and we'll see how I feel there), and good, because a week ago I was at 161.

I'm not sure how accurate my scale is, because when I first stepped on, it looked like 153ish, and I know my camera doesn't weigh two pounds, but a rough estimate is probably good enough.

In the first picture, the orange in the foreground is my shirt; I can't see my own ankles because my boobs and belly are in the way, and that's part of what we're working on here.

Current measurements are as follows:

Chest: 34"

Bust: 39"

Arm: 12"

Waist: 35.25"

Hips: 45" at widest part

Thigh: 24" half way between knee and hip

I remember when I had a 25" waist... Depressing as this is, I'm going to work on it, trying to lose weight and keep it up until I reach my goal-- 5ish down, 35ish to go!

The Moon!

Today is Moon Landing Day-- 40 years ago today, humans landed on the moon. And then a few more did, and then nothing happened.

See, here's where I have a problem with it. All that money was spent, several lives were lost, huge risks were taken, lots of veryusual spin-off tech was created, the world's view of space and human capability was changed forever, and then we did nothing? What happened to space colonies and the first man on Mars by the end of the seventies? Worse yet, there's a need for a human footprint in space.

As far as we know, we're the only life in the galaxy, maybe the only life in the universe. One plague, one asteroid, one massive ecological disaster, one climate shit, one war with the right (or very wrong) weapons, and we could very well die off-- which would leave the universe without life. If we're all there is, then the ecological mindset means we have to protect ourselves as much as we try to protect our ecologies, and it's not that big a leap, really. We move animals around to open up genepools, we preserve areas and breed species to re-release, so why can't we build safety nets for ourselves throughout the solar system? If something happens to the Earth, if humanity is wiped out here or the world is rendered unlivable, then we can survive on the moon, on Mars, on the moons of Jupter and in the Asteroid belt, on Titan and in orbit and in the spaces between planets were we can spread out.

Even more pressing, there will soon be more people than we can make food for, more than there is space for, and more than there is water for-- and space opens up that constraint, too. Space is called space because there's space. It'd be almost impossible to overpopulate the openness of other worlds, of colonies in orbit. We could build arcs and preserve species and ecosystems as well as people, we could manufacture as much water as we need from the raw ingredients of the cosmos, we could grow food for everyone. As the world gets too full, people can move to the moon and on to other homes, founding new colonies, new cultures, adding to our diversity and our chance of survival, bringing life to the universe and greening up what's currently, as far as we know, kind of a collection of pretty dead rocks. If there's no other life out there, who's going to complain? If there is, we can share information with them if they're sentient, increasing our knowledge and worth that way, building the next sort of human culture in tandem with a galactic community, and if they're not sentient, we can study them, understand the universe and leave them alone to become what they need to become.

So why did we leave the moon alone? Why did we let the governement and the world tell us it wasn't important anymore? Because now, as things look more and more dire, it is important, and we should have had that release valve up and running thirty years ago, that safety net in place and waiting a whole generation before now.

So today, on Moon Landing Day, think about the future of the human race: isn't it better to spread out as we always have, then to burn up or starve as we seem to think is the way to go now?

Alternatives alternatives alternatives

I was channel surfing the other day, and I got distracted by part of Whale Wars. Here's these very young and idealistic looking Greenpeace and the like people trying to stop ships from harvesting whales. Which is probably a good idea, what with them getting scarce-- but these kids aren't offering any sort of alternative to these people. As long as the demand is up and the pay is good, they're going to hunt whales, and that's really all there is to it. I mean, it's happening with rhinos and pangolins, too right now: big money always trumps environmentalism, and as long as the hunters don't have anything else that pays as well, they're going to keep doing it. So why isn't there are show about that? About building an alternative that makes the hunting look bad? Why isn't there a show about environmental groups that go out and teach people other ways to feed their families, other sources of the sorts of products they get from these endangered animals that are endangered in part because of unsustainable harvesting, dangerous folk medicine beliefs, and a taste for the exotic? I think it would be more interesting to see real change happening, not just hippies getting hosed down and whaling ships getting accosted and this so-called war that can't really ever change things. It could maybe hold things up, but that'll just make the ships go somewhere else, hunt some other whale population. It isn't stopping the source of the problem, or even really acknowleging that there is one. The hunters are just doing what they know will make money; I doubt many of them are pathologically opposed to whales. I doubt there's that many Ahabs out there, willing to kill them all to get payback on one of them. Mostly, it's just fishermen who know that this'll pay the bills and feed the family and offers the least amount of work for the most amount of income. So why not find them another source of income that is sustainable, responsible, useful and better advised?

emma peel's shoes

We've been watching old episodes of the Avengers lately, and every time they show Emma wearing something green, I want to lose fifty pounds so I can dress like that. But mostly, it's giving me a vintage show fetish. I have no idea what size shoe I'd wear in vintage sizes, but they're all so cute! The maryjane styles are my special favorite, and I can't seem to find any pictures of them-- but she wore green ones in one ep, and a pink and yellow pair in another, and sweet little slides, and some really kick-ass pumps...

I'll keep you up to date on this.

silkies enriche ageless moisturizer

While I've been out of work, I've been trying to make a little money through those websites that have you sign up for samples and things to get a few cents of pay, and one of them was for Silkies Enriche.

It's a pretty good lotion, thich, but not too thick, and it smooths in with almost no trouble at all. It smooths really quickly and makes my face feel a little firmer just on the one use, but on my face, it's almost a little oily-- on my neck, it works perfectly, and my collarbones still feet really soft, even after going out to watch the fireworks in the heat last night and not reapplying this morning.

I don't know if I'd buy it again-- I still like my Avon Liiv Botanicals better, mostly because it at least tries to be all-natural-- but I think if I find it again (I don't remember where I got it), I'll probably use it in the winter, when my skin is drier and less oily.

Some Beautiful Things