One project completed!

The last two days have been non-NS days.  This whole week has been so bad!  Saturday, we went out to eat dinner for Mom's birthday at King's Hawaiian Restaurant and Bakery, the same place my cake came from.  It was great, and I ate too much, even though I brought home half my meal.  Most of it was meat, which I'm not used to eating, so I made sure to also get some fruit dairy in.  

I spent the weekend working on the lap afghan I was making for Mom and finally finished it Sunday evening, just in time!  She loved it :)
Here's a pic:

It came out really well.  Have left over yarn of the lighter green, so I'll make Tyger a kitty blanket.  Then maybe he'll give me MY blanket back.

I got into a good rhythm while working on the afghan.  I'd crochet five rows then take a little break and drink some water followed by several minutes of walking in place, then I'd go back to crocheting.  Have to get some movement back into my day!  I'll be using my shake weight and exercise DVDs to help get me back into shape, and watching the scale go down is a real motivator.

Didn't get any writing done at all this weekend, but I did some research and made some good plot notes.  All the hours of crocheting gave me plenty of time to think.

Slacking off in several directions

For the past five days or so, our kitchen cabinets have been undergoing refinishing, so we've been unable to use the microwave, oven, stove and refrigerator, which has made it difficult for me to stick with the NS foods.  We've eaten out, and twice I ordered Chinese soup, so I'm hardly starving.  Actually, I've gained back two pounds!  Annoying, but hopefully our kitchen will be back in working order by tomorrow evening and I can get back on track.  Come to think of it, Thursday will be another off-NS day, as I will be celebrating my birthday with turkey chili, cornbread and the Hawaiian Paradise Delight cake from King's Hawaiian Bakery that I get every year.  At least it's a light sponge cake with whipped topping rather than frosting, so my conscience won't bother me too much.  The three layers are flavored with guava, passionfruit and lime, and it's topped with kiwi, peaches and strawberries.  Gorgeous, isn't it?  

I just read another history of Pitcairn Island from the point of view of the Tahitian women who helped colonize the island and was written by a descendant of Fletcher Christian and Mauatua, his Tahitian wife.  It's a fascinating tale and quite an eye-opener to how life was back then, and it's definitely a tribute to those women who formed the backbone of the society.

Work on my book is slow, though I keep coming up with new scenarios and details that I want to add into what I already have.  Camp NaNo begins again in April, so March will be spent ramping up for that, and since I'll be rebelling, I'm trying to get as much as I can of the outline filled in, so I can spend the month fleshing everything out.  

So, I've slacked off a bit this week, but I'm ready to get back to work.  Stay safe and have a good one!

Pitcairn Island fascination

Haven't written nearly as much as I had planned on, which I need to remedy, but I've been getting quite a bit of reading done.  Lately, I've been fascinated by the Pitcairn Island history.  I had seen a House Hunters International episode of a couple buying a house on Norfolk Island, which is between Australia and New Zealand.  It's absolutely beautiful there, so I did some research and found out that it was originally populated by Polynesians, who lived there between the 14th or 15th centuries but disappeared after several hundred years.  It had served as a British penal colony twice between 1788-1794, when it was abandoned again.

In 1856, the entire population of Pitcairn Island were relocated to Norfolk Island, although after two years, some people decided to return to Pitcairn Island, and then more followed in 1863.

The people of Pitcairn Island are descendants of the nine mutineers from The Bounty led by Fletcher Christian and the Tahitian women they brought with them in 1790.  By the time their first visitors arrived on the island from an American whaling ship in 1808, only one of the mutineers, John Adams, ten Tahitian women and 23 children were left.  All of the other men, mutineers and Polynesians, were either murdered or died by other causes.  

From a rather violent beginning, the small island colony was introduced to Christianity and adopted the Seventh Day Adventist doctrine as their own and became peaceful and created a successful society.

Interaction with the outside world was very slow in the beginning, with years going by without seeing a ship.  Even today, they might have to wait months between contacts with outsiders.  

The circumstances in which the Pitcairn Islanders have found themselves is unique in the world.  For a small band of people from two cultures to come together and over the next few hundred years build a new society and culture together with very little outside contact is fascinating from the anthropological standpoint.  The intermarriages and intertwined family lineages would make an interesting puzzle for genealogists and DNA scientists to work through.  

Would I like to visit the island?  Yes, though I hear it is very difficult to get permission.  I'd love to get the chance to learn for myself, firsthand, what their culture is like.

1 Month with NS

Start date: 1/12/13
Total lost: 15.6
Two-week loss: 3.4

Well, I didn't do as well this past period as I did during the first period, probably because I didn't realize until I was in the second half of the period that I was eating more almonds than I should for one serving.  How could I have mistaken 28 for 16?  Ah well, a lesson learned.  Watching the total calories better now, too.  

I've found some favorite meals now:

Breakfast: 
Turkey Sausage and Egg Muffin
Cinnamon Roll

Lunch:
Fudge Graham Bar
Red Beans and Rice

Dinner:
Broccoli and Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breast
Roast Turkey Medallions

Dessert:
Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies
Red Velvet Whoopie Pie
All of the ice creams

Meals I'm not so fond of:

Breakfast:
Cinnamon Bun
Egg & Turkey Sausage Roll

Lunch:
Spicy Kung Pao Noodles
Chicken Parmesan Pasta

Dinner:
Chicken Alfredo (but my cat liked it)
Risotto

Dessert:
Fudge Brownie
Apple Pie

Overall, I'm extremely happy with the food, most of them are full of flavor, and I'll have no problems rotating the yummy selections through my menu.  I'm also happy with the weight loss thus far and look forward to my next weigh-in in two weeks.

Books Read in January 2013

Boneham, Sheila Webster

• Drop Dead on Recall

Fiction.  First in a cozy series starring a freelance photographer/dog enthusiast who witnesses a co-competitor collapse at a dog obedience trial and becomes involved in solving the murder.

Brady, Joan

• God on a Harley 

Fiction.  Interesting tale of a woman burned out on life who meets a mysterious man on a Harley Davidson who seems to have all the answers.

Brown, Rita Mae

• A Nose for Justice 

Fiction.  Boring and full of rhetoric.  Too many things going on, couldn’t even figure out what the main mystery was.  I thought I’d like talking dogs, but not in this book.  Actually, the dogs were more entertaining than the human characters.

Burke, Jerome 

• Black Point 

Fiction.  Time travel novel about a man who finds himself in another century, who falls in love and makes a life for himself, while trying to avoid a lawman intent on finding his secrets.

Galenorn, Yasmine

• Etched in Silver 

Fiction.  Novella starring Camille D’Artigo of the Sisters of the Moon series.  She meets Trillian while tracking down a murderer.

Peters, Elizabeth

• Crocodile on the Sandbank 

Fiction.  First in a long-standing series of cozy mysteries starring a wealthy English woman who adopts a companion and takes her on a tour of Egypt’s archeological sites.  They discover the beauty of Egypt along with the dangers, as they encounter a mysterious mummy who threatens them.

Sparks, Nicholas

• True Believer

Fiction.  Mysterious lights flicker in a cemetery, and a freelance journalist is hired to solve the mystery.  He finds love and loss along the way.

Wallace, Benjamin

• Dumb White Husband vs. Santa

Fiction.  Short story of Dumb White Husband’s struggle to provide the perfect Christmas for his family.

First Loss with NutriSystem

I wasn't sure I was going to blog about my weight loss journey, but I decided, with some prompting from friends, to go ahead and do just that.  On January 12, 2013, I started the NutriSystem program.  

This is actually my third time with NutriSystem, the first being way back around 1988-89, when I lived in Denver.  Back then, they had small storefronts in mini malls, and you went in every week to get weighed and counseled and to pick up your food for the week.  The food was fair, but I wasn't expecting a lot from diet food anyway, and some of the items were tasty.  After about four months on the program, I had lost 30 pounds, which I was very happy about, but I had noticed that I was having cravings for things I had never even eaten before, like raw mushrooms and oysters.  At least twice a week, I found myself buying raw mushrooms and stopping for fried oysters on the way home from work.  Obviously, my body was craving something that I wasn't getting through my NS food, and that concerned me, and I noticed an odd aftertaste from a lot of their foods.  Not long after that, I quit the program.

My second shot at NutriSystem was in 2006, and by then they had online ordering and mail delivery.  The food was all shelf-stable, no refrigeration required, but you still had to provide your own dairy, lean proteins, fruits and vegetables.  I stayed with the program for over a year and lost 60 pounds.  I eventually started eating non-NS food, and left the program again, hoping that I could keep the weight off by eating sensibly.

My plan didn't work so well, and I gained back some of the weight I'd lost.  It wasn't that I was eating a lot of unhealthy foods (though I must admit to some junk food eating), it was the quantity of foods that caused the problem.  So, I'm back on NS again, and the majority of their food is still shelf-stable, but they also have frozen foods available, which I'm thrilled about.  All of their food has been greatly improved, and knowing that I've lost weight on their program before is really motivating to me, so I'll be able to stick with it until I get down to a healthy weight.  I'm not interested in being stick-thin, but I do want to bring my blood sugars down to a manageable level without medication and to just feel better and be more active, so I'm excited about this.  

I'll keep you updated on my progress.  Wish me luck!

Oh!  I forgot to say that I'm only checking my weight every two weeks, and in the first two weeks of the program, I lost 12.2 pounds!  I know the weight loss will slow way down from here on in, but it's a good start :)

Life After NaNo

NaNoWriMo ended on November 30, 2012.  It's now the 21st of January 2013, and I've had a tough time with the writing.  I've FINALLY decided to give in to my characters and let them write Chrysalis as a romance.  It's a story being told by two people, rather than the single-sided story I had intended.  

But characters, as you know, have minds of their own, and after fighting with them back and forth, I give up.  Why the battle? I dislike reading romances with a passion...unless they have an excellent plot.  So, I thought, "Why should I write a book that I wouldn't want to read?"  

The answer is simply that this is a book I WOULD want to read, with depth to the plot, a wonderful location, and characters that anyone can relate to.  These aren't stunningly beautiful well-toned young 20-somethings.  My characters are fairly well-along in their years, experienced with life and its pitfalls, who somehow find themselves living at the same time in a quaint little town on the Washington coast, at a place in their lives neither of them expected to be.