Since we fixed our irrigation system, our tomatoes are getting watered each day, and we are starting to get some larger tomatoes. I read that getting the smaller ones indicated stress in the plants. I’m hoping our plants are happy now.
This is the ‘nook’ planter – beside the screened back porch and on the back of the house. (Amber is helping me harvest).
This is the other brick planter we converted to be a square foot garden planting area, filling it with Mel’s Mix.
We are really enjoying fresh tomatoes with lunch and dinner!
Yesterday I scrubbed the aquarium, taking everything out, washing it, changing the filters, decorations, etc. and then filling it back up with treated water. I did everything EXCEPT scrub the fish, though I thought about it.
Due to the things I’ve learned and the changes I’ve made, I have to clean the aquarium every 1-1/2 to 2 weeks now, rather than absolutely every week. I have talked to the fish about the alleged pooping contests that I have read that goldfish have, but they don’t seem impressed with my arguments. Apparently, that is just too much fun…
Both fish seem healthy, and they continue to welcome me at feeding time by getting into one corner, wiggling their bodies and blowing bubbles at me until the flakes start raining down. I like it. :0)
Filed under Family, Housekeeping - Maintenance
I told you yesterday that I felt dumb because I finally noticed – after 2-1/2 days – that “Phase 2 and enjoy with Phase 3” was printed on my husband’s package of pancakes. Intelligent woman that I am, I thought, “Maybe we’re screwing up.” I spent a half hour or so finding some information on the South Beach website and printing it. I spent another hour or so reading the information, discovering that
I separated the aqua-striped packages (Phase 1) from the purple-striped stuff (Phase 2) in my husband’s box, and then did the same in mine. I did the same with our frozen foods. There is a bit of confusion, as the soups don’t say what they are, and it is unclear about the prepared snacks, but I will see if I can reach someone to talk to on the website today.
I told him we are only eating and drinking BLUE stuff – except for DIY meals and snacks – until the end of next week. (Actually, we’ll continue until all the BLUE stuff has been consumed -whenever that is – before going on with Phase 2.
My husband is still upset that so much chocolate stuff was included in his box, when he carefully ordered what he wanted. He really doesn’t like chocolate, and has no patience with the coronavirus causing supply chain problems. I have given him the vanilla stuff they put in mine – also not ordered. He will have to make do with some of the chocolate stuff if our supplies don’t last until the end of the month.
I have gone onto HIS account page and MY account page, making sure that he has no chocolate ordered and I have no vanilla – with high hopes.
My husband only has about 10 or 15 pounds to lose to get to his goal, so he is much more cavalier about the diet than I am. He wants to cancel after the next month’s order is confirmed as shipped.
I have more to lose than that, but I’m hoping that this two-month ‘pay attention’ time will remind us of things like eating something sensible every few hours to avoid hunger, to eat reasonable portions when we do eat, and to avoid things we know we shouldn’t be eating. I will continue to use the carb tracking they provide, whether we are eating the prepared foods or not, as I am more likely to keep with the program doing that.
I am trying to walk for 10 minutes 3 times a day, as they suggest. I’m also doing a half hour of “Gentle Yoga” stretches daily. (I think that the 70+ times I have to get up and go to the bathroom each day, due to all the water I’m drinking, should also count as exercise. :0) )
Fingers crossed.
I am feeling pretty dumb right now.
We just started the South Beach diet after lunch on Wednesday. We are messing up, mainly due to stupidity – MINE.
They don’t include a lot of instructions – that’s on them. I read the paperwork that came with the order, but I haven’t been reading the packages and boxes of food carefully enough. They are clearly labeled, “Phase I,” “Phase 2 and enjoy in Phase 3”. I just noticed THAT this morning when my husband wanted to fix pancakes.
He decided that it was ‘too much work’ to make for just himself, so we got out another package and he cooked for both of us. He technically followed the directions, but I’m not really sure of that, since I was doing other morning chores. We ended up with really THICK, pretty hard – pancakes. We decided we will not pass judgment on these until “I” cook a batch. THEN I noticed that this was a “Phase 2” food, and we shouldn’t have been eating it yet. Oh, well.
I will have to get on the website and see if I can find more information. We probably shouldn’t be doing the DIY meals, either, yet. Oh, well, again.
They sent my husband a whole bunch of chocolate stuff he didn’t want. I guess they were having trouble filling orders and just did the best they could. He immediately dumped all that out on the table, refusing to eat or drink them. (Patience and ‘going-along’ have never been his strong suits.) I went on the site yesterday and modified his order for next time, eliminating all the chocolate. I hope their warehouses are in better shape for the 2nd order. Meanwhile, I had some vanilla stuff in my box, so I gave that to him and I took the chocolate.
When we get back home from Lunch Bunch (our DIY lunch this week), I’ll get on their website and see if I can figure out what we’re SUPPOSED to be doing.
Duh.
GrammarlyCards via Cathy Ruggiero
Filed under Funny Signs - Humor
via Jeff Jett – LinkedIn
It is really pretty outside right now. We will have to close our doors and turn on the a/c soon, but right now we have a nice breeze with ceiling fans.
We will meet our friends for Lunch Bunch in about an hour. We wear face masks, and there is a limit on capacity inside the restaurant. It’s wonderful to be able to see our friends, catch up on what’s been happening, and laugh together.
I’m hoping for a quiet day today. I will clean out the aquarium and hopefully work on some new earrings upstairs in my art room.
I hope that YOU have a good day, too.
Getty Images – CBS News
My husband and I have been reworking our genealogy records. We have found some areas that we either left out, or messed up, so we are going through things very carefully again, trying to verify things, match up images, etc.
After you work on it awhile, using different kinds of records, your brain turns to mush and your eyes glaze. That’s the state we’re in now.
I just went out and gathered some tomatoes – taking our dog Molly for a walk – before it starts to storm again. We will soon have a snack from our South Beach Diet box and then do some relaxing before the afternoon is gone.
Filed under Family
Can Stock Photo
I had a lovely massage this morning. I asked her to just leave me there and let me drift off to sleep, but she made me get up, pay her, and leave. Imagine that! She is truly a miracle worker. I feel a lot better.
It was getting dark as I left – at 11:00 in the morning! I got home just before storming started. I shut the garage door, and closed up the house. It has rained, but it doesn’t seem to be severe at this point. We have more waves of storms coming this afternoon and tonight.
I chatted with our son in Thailand this morning briefly. There is 12 hours difference in our times, so we have to chat quickly sometimes. He sounded really happy. He said, “last night when i was falling asleep i was listening to the rain, and i think i heard some kind of religious singing from somewhere, maybe the nearby wat, and i was feeling the breeze from my fan, and i thought to myself how fortunate i am.”
We are on our official whole first day of the South Beach Diet today. (We started after lunch yesterday.) So far, we’re doing fine, although we’re fumbling around some. We like the shakes, and the ‘ice crushes.” Mine are chocolate, of course. :0) I got home from my massage late for our morning ‘snack.’ We went ahead and did that, deciding we would delay lunch for an hour or so. I have keto chili in the crock pot for one of our DIY dinners for the week. I’m interested to see what we think of our lunch options. I have found that their ‘peanut butter bites” (a package of small cookies) is delicious. I am trying to record what I eat and drink on the tracker on their website. It’s different that the other I have been using, but I’m determined to make it work.
I received one of the new wooden earring shapes I ordered yesterday, and am eager to get up to the art room to see what I can do with it. :0)
I hope you’re having a wonderful day.
Food City is a Southern grocery store chain with headquarters in Bristol, Tennessee. This is their one-minute commercial. Not a word spoken and none is needed.
*Thanks to my good friend, Marsha Koenig, who forwarded this to me.
If the video doesn’t start when you click on it, here is the URL – https://www.youtube.com.uoABty_zE00?rel=O
Filed under Favorite Things
Our first shipment of the South Beach Diet was delivered this afternoon – right after we ate lunch.
1st impression – there was a lot more frozen food than I expected. I apparently didn’t read carefully enough, so I was scrambling to find an organized way to store my husband’s choices in one place and mine in another. My husband immediately wanted to know what he could have for a snack. We had JUST finished lunch, so I firmly told him I needed some time to get my act together, and that we would have our ‘afternoon snack’ around 3 pm.
2nd impression – we will be eating more TIMES each day than we have been. We have been doing intermittent fasting and then eating lunch and dinner (with an occasional dessert) before bed. This obviously hasn’t been working – though we have helped the failure along by eating stuff we shouldn’t and not paying enough attention to portion size. Now we will eat 6 times each day – having breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack, dinner, and a dessert type snack each day. I will be doing ‘do-it-yourself’ meals and snacks – 2 of each spread out over the week. I’ve gotten out my calendar so I can do some planning. One regular ‘DIY’ lunch each week will be Friday’s Lunch Bunch. Since we’re starting Wednesday afternoon this week, I’m doing the best I can to get in as many DIY’s as seems reasonable.
3rd impression – We have just enjoyed our first ‘afternoon snack.’ My husband had a vanilla shake and I had a chocolate. They seemed a bit ‘thin,’ but the flavor was good.
4th impression – This is not as much ‘just heat up the food and eat it’ as the Nutrisystem we tried quite awhile back. There is cooking even on the meals provided in the program. (For example, I have tried to prepare my husband that he will be mixing and cooking his breakfast pancake mix.) I really think this is a good thing. We will be constantly aware of what we are eating, preparing much of it, actively engaged, rather than just nuking something and taking no responsibility for it.
5th impression – we are supposed to be eating 3 non-starchy veggie servings each day. (I’m happy because we’ll include tomatoes from our garden and some salads, as well as small servings of other good veggies.)
6th impression – I may have to live in the bathroom! We are supposed to drink half our body weight in fluid each day. I will make every effort to drink more, but my eyeballs are already floating, trying to drink 64 oz of fluid each day.
7th impression – they suggest that you keep your exercise routine to a minimum during the first week since your body is adapting to a new way of eating. They suggest walking 10 minutes 3 times a day. I will plan to add my old lady stretching yoga routine to that, since that is not at all strenuous, and is relaxing.
Filed under Attitude, DIET!, exercise, motivators, taking care of yourself
NextShark
Jennifer Rizzo
Raising Kinley
Raising Kinley
I dreamed about the techniques I saw demonstrated on YouTube yesterday. This can be done with string or chain and can be as simple or complex and you would like. I’m really looking forward to making the time to play!
Filed under learning new things, playing in my art room
Photo of the Year
“Photo of the year
It was considered the best photo of this century. A lioness and her cub were crossing the Savannah but the heat was excessive and the cub was in great difficulty walking.An elephant realized that the cub would die and carried him in his trunk to a pool of water walking beside his mother.
And we call them wild animals.It’s a great lesson for mankind who are fighting and dying for no reason.”
*This was sent to me by my good friend, Marsha Koenig, and I wanted to share it with you.
Filed under Amazing Animals, Awe-Inspiring Photography
Wallpaperhi
Filed under memories, Mother Nature, music
I’m going to take this to my wonderful local shop, Rags & Roses Collective in Greenwood, probably tomorrow. I’m hoping that this will be a good way to display my earrings for sale there.
Filed under Uncategorized
As you can see, I have gained weight over the course of the last couple of months. I can blame it on lots of things, but the truth is, I ate the wrong things and ate too much, and didn’t exercise enough.
We ordered the first shipment of what we plan to be a two-month “get-back-on-the-horse,” “shot-n-the-arm” course of the South Beach diet,
the closest to the keto plan we have not been following closely enough lately. We are hoping that once we see the results on the scale, we will be re-motivated to act like adults and eat responsibly.
One aggravation is that we ordered on June 22nd and we still have not received our order. I got on the chat part of the website and talked to a nice lady who tried to find out what the problem was. She told me that they were waiting for parts of our orders to be delivered to THEM. I know that everyone is having problems with shortages, slow shipments, etc. due to COVID-19. They are probably trying to work with a skeleton crew, and they can’t ship until the orders are complete.
I found out recently that MY order had finally shipped on the 6th, but my husband’s had NOT. That is upsetting because if HE is unhappy, MY life is even more of a challenge. I checked this morning and found that HIS shipment was shipped on the 6th, too – apparently the his account had not been updated when I checked last time. HOORAY!
They use Fedex, but their track your order link isn’t working. I’m hoping we will get the delivery this week and can get started. Fingers crossed!
Filed under DIET!, exercise, Healthy Eating
Rodney Dangerfield via keepinspiring.me
My husband is a genealogy buff. He worked for a long time researching and gathering information and then put everything on Family Treemaker. The company changed hands or something, causing us a large period of time with no support, but they came out with a new version not long ago.
My husband decided that he needed to organize things better, standardizing how names were listed in pictures, for example. He’s been working on that all last week and is still working on it now.
A disappointment is that I don’t know much of anything about my mother’s family. I asked her to sit down with me and tell me about her family. I told her I would make notes. She was always ‘too busy,’ and I wasn’t insistent enough. When she died, I found a whole cedar chest full of albums of pictures, NONE of which was labeled. I had NO idea who anyone was.
When the software has been updated (thanks to my husband’s good work) , I will be able to start with someone in our history and see all the pics and documents we have associated with them!
Filed under Family, Funny Signs - Humor
The zucchini and yellow crookneck squash plants are looking pretty good, though none have started to produce actual veggies yet. I will have to make time to weed out there very soon. The sweet red onions are continuing to get larger.
This is today’s haul of tomatoes. I really don’t know why we’re getting so many little bitty tomatoes, but I’m grateful we can enjoy them with our meals.
It’s really humid out today. It’s 80 degrees now, which would be wonderful, but the humidity is 78%, making it feel like a sauna the minute you go out. We have had the doors open to enjoy the morning, but are going to have to close up, or I will melt into a puddle onto the floor in front of my computer…..
Fine Art Blogger
Stephen Berry
“Sunshine” – Lana Matich Privitera
YouTube
Filed under Watercolors I Love
creativeartworksblog 