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bras & weight loss
I have, through no particular effort of my own, lost somewhere between 20-25 pounds in the past year. Mostly it’s just that I’ve been eating less. Not well, certainly, just less. Not exercising more, either. Just eating less. Basically for the first time in my life I’ve been stress not-eating instead of stress eating.
Anyway, so I’ve lost a fair amount of weight, and my bras have not been fitting well at all.
So a week or two ago I bought new bras, and people suddenly started saying, “Wow, you’ve lost so much weight!” Which, well, yes, that’s true, but since it didn’t all drop off at once, it’s clear that what they’re actually reacting to is the fact that my boobs are a lot higher than they were before, and the overall effect that has.
I thought that was pretty funny. :)
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so dinner. much friends.
A couple of girlfriends are back in town for the holidays, so our little Lady Writers Group went out to dinner last night. I’d put on one of my 1950s style dresses (at home, obviously) and was looking at myself dubiously in the mirror when Young Indiana came in and says, “You look BEAUTIFUL, Mommy! Wear that! Wear that!” ♥ ♥ ♥ So I wore that. :) We went into town, and Indy entertained a 9 month old baby girl on the train for the entire trip in, and I dropped him off at his grandparents’ and went to do some Christmas shopping, although I was not wearing appropriate shoes for this task:
As I said on Twitter, 8 miles later:
Me: walks all over hell
Me: walks all over breakfast
Me: well that was exactly what i didn’t want to doBut I did get my lowest left ear hole re-done with a non-allergenic post. I’m sort of working my way through all my ear holes; two of them had (not at the same time) closed up, and I got those repierced over the past few years. The bottom ones haven’t closed up, but they’re teensy tinsy and I wanted to put some of my non-allergenic posts in them but couldn’t shove one through. So I stopped by the piercing place and the guy ran, effectively, a needle of increasing girth through my ear, slid a post in, and was done, lickity split. So now I have a whole row!
For some reason I always have a good time when I go to that place. Yesterday there was a young man getting his new nose piercing adjusted in the other half of the room I was brought into, and the piercing guy was saying to him, “That’s twice in two days I’ve made you cry,” and I was like, “You brute!” and the guy getting the adjustment was like, “Yes, I don’t know why I keep giving you another chance,” which made everybody laugh, and then my guy gets done with my ear and says, “What time do you think the sun set today, 3:30?” and I said no, I was out at 3:30, it hadn’t set yet, probably about 4:10, I thought, and he looked really dubious and I looked it up. 4:08. BOO YEAH. :)
Anyway, then I really did proceed to walk all over hell and breakfast, and got very little for my efforts, forgot one shop I wanted to go to, made my way back to it, found it had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING I needed, argh, gave up, and went to dinner.
We went to a tapas restaurant we’ve gone to before, and, having spent twenty minutes or more exchanging stories, had to tell the waiter we hadn’t even looked at the menu and could he give us ten minutes. “I’ll give you eleven,” he said, and went away, and we looked at the menu and we said, “Well, we’ve done this before, we know what we like,” and went around the table and everybody swiftly chose three dishes and we were sorted in about sixty seconds. I think the waiter came back in about five, honestly, but we were by gum ready for him!
Everybody had a lot of war stories to exchange last night. It’s been a rough year. But we had a really, really good time, to the point that I’d looked at the time and it had been 8:15 and I thought “oh good lots of time” and then around what I figured was 9:30 someone said “It’s 10:30!” and I was like OH SHIT I JUST MISSED MY TRAIN! So we all had a moment or two of excitement while I found out whether or not there was a later train (there was!), although as I said, while looking up the train schedule, there *was* a late bus, so failing all else I could take that. But there was indeed a later train (I’d thought there was!), so whew! :)
I stood up to leave and realized I had not yet given the ladies the fudge I’d brought for them and sort of shouted “FUDGE” and distributed it. (I’d told them to bring something to carry a tin of fudge home in. Two of them said “MY MOUTH” and the third said “fudge? do i have to tell my family? O.O” which I assured her she did not :)).
(You’ll all be glad to hear I’ve got my fudge-making mojo back; it all turned out brilliantly and also I made a nice pie crust last week too, so apparently I was just having a bad run of it.)
Anyway, I didn’t get to bed until about 1am, and was awakened at some point during the night to rain pounding the window so hard I genuinely couldn’t tell what it was. It sounded like paper tearing. So today I’m utterly exhausted (although Indy, bless him, at least didn’t get up until 7:30 and we had no fights over food or getting dressed), but I’m really glad to have gotten out and seen friends and been all holidayish. :)
One of our cohort got out her phone, turned the flash on, and its shockingly brighty “hi i’m warning you there’s going to be a flash!” flash caused us to recoil in horror!
We asked the ladies at the table next to us to take a picture of all four of us. They did, then asked if we would take one of them. The first one apparently turned out very stiffly, as our intrepid photographer said, “Oh my god, loosen up. Go on, think it: I can’t BELIEVE I had SEX with HIM!”
We did not have to be told to think such things. :)
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holiday prep
Yesterday we went to Dublin to do any shopping that could be done in the real world. I was moderately successful; Ted was not. He was, however, very, very tired after tromping all over hell and breakfast without finding anything. Poor guy.
I had some kind of story I was going to tell about the shopping, but I seem to have forgotten it. Unless it was the fact that when I stood to get off the bus, coming home, the bottom fell out of one of the bags I had, and everything in it fell to the floor. The woman in the seat next to me, trying hard to be helpful but not understanding that the bottom had fallen out of the bag, started picking things up and putting them back into the bag, so they kept falling on my feet.
I am not, I confess, feeling wildly in the Making Goodies mood this year. I have a few friends who have Special Food Needs for whom I wish to cater, but overall my enthusiasm is pretty low. Possibly I have too much on my plate, or maybe it’s just that I’ve made 23402958659 jars of apple stuff already this year and am sort of fooded out.
But I’ve just made my first batch of vegan fudge, primarily for the dairy-and-egg-allergic son of a friend. Five seconds after I poured the last ingredient in I had Several Ideas on how to improve it next year, but it should be fine for a six year old (and the other egg-allergic adult friend I have who is also benefiting from this experiment will likely be more discerning but not complaining :)), and while I believe it’ll want keeping in the fridge for best texture, it’s setting up better than I thought it might, so I’m pretty pleased with it as an experiment.
Because I was getting the ingredients for that anyway, I’m making a batch of dairy-free fudge for another friend, too, and then a batch of regular fudge to send along with the Specialty Fudges so the snowflakes don’t have to share with the rest of their families. :)
Aside from that, though…meh. It just seems like a lot of work for things that I’m likely to end up eating myself and would rather not.
(clearly an alien has taken over my brain. i’m sure it’ll return it to me soon, and i’ll get in the goodie-making mood…)
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Good job, Adobe.
I’ve had an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for a few years now, under the monthly subscription where you don’t pay for it the months you don’t use it, and I tend to use it about…once a month. I sort of realized today how dreadful a scam that was/how much I was paying for it, and went and bought Photoshop Elements, which has really got everything I’m realistically going to use, in order to replace the Creative Cloud subscription.
They made me talk to a customer support person when I tried to cancel, and first they offered me a month’s free subscription. I said, “How about you start with a five year free subscription, and then we’ll talk?”
They then offered me a reduced plan, half the cost of the subscription I had. I said “Or how about I just pay €72 for something I can use forever?”
Then they said there would be a €150 cancellation fee, and was that okay with me. I said not even slightly. They said I’d been on a yearly subscription and there was a cancellation fee to end it. I pointed out it wasn’t a new yearly subscription and I saw no reason why I should pay a fee.
In the meantime I was reporting on all of this via Twitter, because of course I was, and the Adobe customer care people over THERE got involved.
I pointed out that I had *already* bought Elements, and that they were not losing a customer (except they were gonna if this kept up because I have the power of cancelling my own transaction), and that I simply wanted to be a customer on a different level.
Five minutes later both sides of the party, the Twitter and the chat people, had made certain that my Creative Cloud membership was cancelled with no fees.
It would obviously have been better if I hadn’t had to go through *any* of that rigamarole, but I’m very pleased with their customer service, which provided me with what I wanted in a reasonably timely manner. And they’ve made it *far* more likely that I’ll straight-up buy any other Adobe products that I might want in the future, which is, you know. GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE.
So good job, Adobe. You did this right.
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We are not well.
Between the beginning of September and the end of October I had three distinct colds. Since the beginning of November I have had a continuous cold, or colds in such rapid succession as to make no nevermind in the difference. So has Young Indiana. Ted had some kind of throat infection that got cleared up just in time for him to start catching colds, too, so we’ve been consistently unwell in this house for weeks to months, depending on how you wish to count it.
Today Young Indiana and I went Christmas shopping, which went approximately as well as you might imagine under the circumstances. We’re both now totally exhausted and I’m pretty much trying to figure out how to accomplish dinner without doing…anything. Ideally even without talking, since my voice is pretty unreliable just now.
OTOH, the Kickstarter keeps tripping along! This morning it reached 350 backers, causing Young Indiana to say, “Three five zero! Woo hoo! Nice job! You did it! You finished that book!”
*dorky grin* ♥ :)
#laughs. I just got a message from Kickstarter with the subject line of “352!”: “I know what you’re thinking. Three-hundred and fifty-two is a weird number to celebrate… but that’s a LOT of people that believe in your idea.”
I think that’s kinda cool. :)
