Monday, Monday, So Good To Me

Okay, so I like The Mamas & The Papas...

Today was so good to me!  I've been looking for some sugar-free Peeps for about a week now and I just happened to be in Wal-Mart today when they were putting some out!  Three little scrumptious chickies for 98 cents!!  Woo hooo!!  

And I made a broccoli and brown rice casserole for supper.  Here's a pic!  (Purple plates show a lot of fingerprints.  Ha!)  It was very, very good!!  And real good friends with the South Beach diet.

This is how I made it:

I steamed a package of frozen broccoli and cooked two cups of brown rice.  Then I drained both of them and added a can of reduced fat Cream of Mushroom soup, topped it with shredded sharp cheddar cheese and baked it at 350 for 20 minutes.  Yum yum!!!

But the best thing about today was I got my books for school!!  I went out to the college bookstore at lunch and the line was SO long!  They were moving pretty fast, though, and I only had to wait 45 minutes to get mine.  I only had to pay $106 because my Hope grant paid $100 toward them.  I am so ready for class to start!!  All I gotta do now is sharpen my pencils.  :)

Snail Mail Rocks!

In our world of emails and Facebook, it is SO NICE to get some real mail!!  I got this sweet, homemade card from Ami and Brian today.  Ami does such a beautiful job with her cards and scrapbook layouts and I just had to show off her work!!  Thanks, sissy!!  I love it!!!

I'm SO excited about going to school.  I think I'll be a better, more focused student now than I was back in the 80's.  I'm not so worried about my social life this go 'round.  OR how many times I can go to Fort Payne and stalk Mark Herndon!  Ha!

Hippie Hoppy Easter's On Its Way!

Meet Jude and Lucy, my hippie bunnies.

I found them on eBay several years ago and I just love them to death. They are very old, I'm sure they've been around since the 60's or early 70's, and they've marched in so many peace rallies that they've had to have their feet glued back on a time or two and poor Lucy even lost her head one time and it's had to be glued back on but are they not the cutest little hippie bunnies you ever saw??!  I just LOVE Jude's li'l attitude and facial hair and Lucy's little sweet face absolutely kills me.

I got up in the attic and got all my Easter stuff down and I just had to show them off today.  :)

29 And Holding (But Not For Long!)

I've been at this weight loss thing for 12 weeks this Sunday and I've lost 29 pounds now! I teetered between 26 and 27 pounds for about two weeks. My first plateau. I knew it was coming, though. I also knew what I had to do about it. Pump up the exercise and cut back on the calories and get that scale moving again.

So I started running! I've never run in my entire life unless a dog was chasing me. But I did it. I started running a while and walking a while on my treadmill every day late last week and I also cut back on the carbs a little more. I started doing some toning exercises, too, that Larry suggested called tabatas (which are a whole 'nother kind of fresh hell, ohdearlordsweetjesus).

I was determined to bust through that wall and I got my reward this morning when I weighed.

29 pounds!! Woo hoooo!!

I am sore in places a girl ought not be sore but I feel great!! My goal was to be at 30 pounds by Easter. I think that's doable.

I also think my Peeps are gonna be especially sweet this year.

I'Mo Be There...

....just not at midnight.

New Moon will be released at midnight tomorrow night.  There are DVD release parties planned all over the country and although I took Jessica to last year's Twilight party, I think I'll pass this year. We went to the one at Wal-Mart and we got there a little after 11:00 to find the party in full swing.  There were people (grown folks, y'all, not just kids!) dressed up like vampires and werewolves and some had on Team Edward and Team Jacob t-shirts and a line had already formed in electronics that stretched clear around to housewares.  The whole experience was amazing!  The excitement in the air was awesome. My old ass loved being a part of it! We had a ball and finally got our DVDs around 12:30. There were gift packages for the first 100 DVDs sold and Jessi and I were #99 and #100. That was pretty dang cool.

I'm gonna pass on the party this year.  I gotta go pick up a couple of things Saturday at Target and I'll get my copy then.  

I'm still waaaaaaay excited.  :)

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Peanut Butter Cookies

There are still Girl Scouts everywhere around here peddling their cookies!!! Argh!!!

I dug around on the internet and found this recipe for peanut butter cookies, South Beach style, and I made some this afternoon.

Super, super easy and yummy, yummy good.

All you need is a cup of natural peanut butter, a cup of granulated Splenda and an egg.  Mix it all up, form it into balls, place the balls on a cookie sheet, smash 'em down with a fork (you know the drill) and bake 'em for 10 minutes at 350. 

South Beach says you're allowed two of these cookies per day.  Yeah, right.  They are so good that they are totally worth thirty more minutes on the treadmill.  Try 'em!! 

Spring Forward...Finally!!!

Y'all don't forget to change your clocks tonight!!

I don't mind losing an hour of sleep if I'm getting an hour of sunshine!!  This has been the longest winter EVAH and I have already moved all my clocks ahead one hour.  Ha!! I'm sooooooo excited about spring coming!!  

Love Yourself

Hodgepodge

There hasn't been much going on around here lately and that is such a good thing.  I need some calm and quiet before school starts next month.  I got my student ID and parking sticker the other day so all that's left for me to do is get my books.  It's driving me crazy that the bookstore doesn't open until the 29th!!  I want to get my books and start studying!!  Since I can't, I've just been getting my head together, getting lots of rest and cleaning my house like a fiend.  I have a set housework schedule that school is going to just bust wide open.  So I've mopped and cleaned cabinets and washed sheets and quilts and scrubbed tubs and baseboards.  I've mopped behind my washer and dryer and the 'fridge.  Told ya. Fiend.

I've lost 25 pounds so far and have been craving my mama's chicken and rice something fierce.  I have her recipe and I've watched her make it a thousand times but for the life of me, I cannot make it like she can.  Nobody can.  I can't have white rice on the South Beach diet so I did the best I could last night and made chicken and brown rice.  It turned out pretty good, too.  Just not like Mama's.  Sigh.

My clothes are loose and I'm seeing parts of my body that I haven't seen in a while.  Like my dimpled gallbladder scar.  It was kinda funny when I saw it the other day.  I was like, "Hey!!  I remember you!!!"

Y&R is driving me nuts, too.  I'm so ready for a couple of storylines to come to a head and pop already.  That's one thing I don't think I'll miss when I'm in school.  I might need a break from my soap for a while.  

So that's what's been going on with me.  Not much but that's fine by me. For now.

My Plan For Ridin' Out The Storm

Guess what??

I'm going back to school!! At 42!!! I am sooooo excited and scared slap to death at the same time.

When I lost my career with Citigroup last year, I looked on it as a blessing in disguise. My chance for a fresh start. Freedom! I'd been there so long (sixteen years) that I felt like I was just stuck. I had a good salary, good benefits and I really liked the people I directly worked with every day. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. I never was happy, though. I never liked charging people 20% for a car loan and I never liked calling them every month for money and I sure never liked having to go to their houses to collect when I couldn't get them on the phone. (I only had to do that part a very short time but that was enough! White girls in new cars in crack neighborhoods just do not mix.) I hated that part of it. There were some things I liked, though. The last five years that we did auto loans only was pretty sweet. No collecting and absolutely no "chasing"!

Citi has/had some really greedy people up at the top and us little employees at the bottom got the axe. So home we went. I don't really know what I want to be when I grow up but I know that finance just ain't it for me anymore.

I was very fortunate to find employment pretty soon after that and I've met some really sweet people who I absolutely LOVE and we've made true lifelong friendships. I don't believe in things happening by accident. I believe everything is God's plan and I honestly believe that I was sent to that office not just to help them out but for them to help me out. They have helped me release a lot of demons and for that, I will be forever grateful to them.

Just recently, though, I decided to get off my butt and DO something about my future. Finance is all I've ever known and even if I wanted to go back, nobody's hiring. I believe that the recession will be over eventually and our country will recover. Until then, I'm gonna learn something new. Brand new.

I've enrolled for spring quarter at Middle Georgia Tech in the Electronics co-op with Robins Air Force Base. I'm super, super excited about taking on something I know next to nothing about! The most I know about electronics is how to turn on the radio in my car. I hear tale that after I complete this program, I'll know how to BUILD a radio. How cool would that be?

I'm all registered and stuff, got my Hope grant waiting and classes start April 6th. I'm going to continue to work at my job every day and go to school at night. I'm going to school full-time so that's four nights a week. All I have to do now is get my student ID and my books.

Y'all. Pray for me. I'm already worried about it cutting into my Facebook and blog time. Ha! AND my napping!! This girl loves her naps.

Lord Of The Dance Comes To Macon!

Last night I went with Heidi and Lisa to The Grand Opera House to see The Lord Of The Dance and let me just tell you, the show was absolutely AMAZING.  It's this Irish dancing story of love and good verses evil.  I LOVED it.  I'd never been to the Grand before and we had box seats. As in seats that sit in a BOX AND HANG OFF THE WALL.  I was more than a little worried about crashing two stories to the floor and messing up my hair. As soon as the show started, though, I completely forgot about where I was and I was just caught up in the story, mesmerized would be a good word for it.  It's awesome. If you ever get a chance to see the show in person, GO!

We had to be there at 7:30 so we went to eat at the Downtown Grill before the show.  I'd heard lots about the DG and wanted to see what it was all about.  Yeah, that and it was the only place on Mulberry open for dinner!  So we park and get out to walk to the restaurant and the wind was so mean and hateful (seriously, what is the deal with all this WIND lately??!) and it was SO cold. We get in there and the first thing that hits us is CIGAR SMOKE.  Yeah, you can smoke in there since children aren't allowed. That was big strike number one. But we were so cold, we just wanted to get inside somewhere and as we were led to our table, there was a fire going in the fireplace and it was toasty warm in there.  That still wasn't enough to make up for the smoke but okay.  We sat down and glanced over the menu and everything was so expensive!!  I'd checked the menu out online beforehand ('cause I'm OCD like that a little bit) so I already knew a grilled chicken breast was $17.  And since I'm doing so good with the South Beach thing, I already knew I was getting a shrimp cocktail for $9. That's more like it!  I ended up getting a bowl of French onion soup, too, which was delicious but the shrimp.  

Oh my God, the shrimp.  'Twas six little bitty shrimp you couldn't even use for bait and they were NOT DEVEINED.  Now that's nasty.  I had to devein my own shrimp and then pay them $9 for the privilege.  I was so not amused.  I'm not one to send food back either.  I've seen Dateline. The service was so bad, too.  We got there at 6:10, I got my food at 6:40 which wasn't that bad but Lisa and Heidi got theirs at 7:10.  We had told the waitress when we got there we had to go at ten after 7:00.  As soon as she sat the plates down, they asked for a to-go box.  My first experience with The Downtown Grill was not a good one.  I'm sure the food's great and so is the service on a night when there's not much going on in town.  I'm also sure I won't go back and find out.

Chicken With Fire Roasted Tomatoes and Goat Cheese

Larry found this one in his Men's Fitness magazine and I made it for supper tonight.  It was so easy and sooooooo good!!!

INGREDIENTS:

4 (4 oz.) trimmed boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 cup canned, drained, diced fire-roasted tomatoes or fire-roasted tomatoes with garlic
2 oz. (about 1/2 cup) goat cheese crumbles
2 tablespoons finely chopped basil or parsley, or more to taste (optional)

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 
Season chicken with salt and pepper.
Place ovenproof skillet over high heat. When it's hot, lightly mist with a bit of nonstick spray and immediately add the chicken. Cook 1 to 2 minutes per side, until golden brown.
Remove pan from heat and top each piece of chicken with about 2 tablespoons of tomatoes and 1/2 ounce of the cheese.
Transfer skillet to oven and bake 5 to 9 minutes, until chicken is no longer pink in middle and cheese is melted. Top with basil then serve.

Yields 4 servings.

Nutrition: Per serving: 171 calories, 29g protein, 2g carbs, 4g fat