B is for ball
*** edited to note*** this is one from the vault, written in January 2006
A follow up to A is for Arggg.
The original ball of yarn cost me $55 (for 750 yards, I think). I’ve spent 10 hours untangling it and even though I don’t have an income stream right now, if I was billing for my time at my old rate, this ball of yarn would be costing me about $700 with about another 3-4 hours worth of untangling to go. I haven’t knit in days and won’t until I’m finished with this damn thing. Frustrated, me? No, never.
Yesterday, in an impulse moment, I took Cate to the local mall for a little indoor playground time and to do a quick check of the sales racks. It has been a year since I broke up with food, and in that time, DH and I completely changed the course of our lives. We both gave up fairly lucrative careers in finance to get our souls back - he wanted to be a stay at home dad, I wanted to go back to academics, starting with adding another graduate degree to my resume. This is our year of frugality and thrift. As the pounds started to come off, there were plenty of clothes in my closet to transition into - you know those pants you pushed to the back of the closet when they got just a smidge to small, thinking you’d pull them out when you weren’t bloated? Clothes that were too big were immediately banished to a box and when that filled up, off to the salvation army or friends in need. I’ve filled in with a piece or two from Target, but haven’t done any of that shopping that most girls claim will be the first thing they do when they lose the weight. I haven’t been tempted, mostly because I’m reluctant to spend money on transitional clothes unless they are really cheap. The result is a wardrobe built around rather butch looking basics. But something weird happened yesterday, I went in to Lane Bryant looking for a pair of chinos, (I have three pairs of pants that fit me right now, two pairs of jeans and one pair of black pants) and ended up with this:
A very, very girly looking skirt. Cate picked out a frilly, lacy cami and we topped it of with a black cardigan and some jewerly.
There are two points to this, the first is that I noticed Lane Bryant was still featuring shrugs, and very few were on sale, which tells me the moment has not passed yet. So I’m going to try and take those balls up there and turn them into one of the staff shrugs from Interweave Knits.
The second point is food/weight related. While I’ve lost a lot of weight, the progress is fairly slow and I’m ok with that most of the time. I figure slow and steady is the only way to make the changes stick and conquer my demons. I’ve been at my plateau for a while now and am ready to move on and am thinking alot about the next changes I need to make. I already walk 3.5 miles a day, close to 5 days a week, throwing in some snowshoeing when the weather allows it, with a random yoga class when I can squeeze it in. Lately, though, that isn’t enough. I know my 3 biggest weakness in exercise are the weightlifting, my cardio is no longer as intense as I need it to be, and random yoga isn’t enough to get the mind/body benefits I need. Now that I can recognize this, I’m going to try and fix it and see if I can move to the next level. For the next few weeks, I’m going to try to do weightlifting at least 3x a week, 20 minutes on the eliptical 3x a week and 10 minutes of yoga every day, in addition to my regular walk - which I can not imagine living without.