Lent 2013

Today is the first day of Lent (or rather, it was when I first started this post).  I never observed (celebrated?) Lent growing up, so this has been a new idea to me as an adult.  I'm not even sure what the whole entire thing is about, other than people usually give up something for the 40-ish days until Easter.  And you're usually trying to pick something that is a challenge because it's supposed to be a sacrifice.

Now, I've been thinking about what I could sacrifice.  I could give up one of the usual things: caffeine, chocolate, soda, fried foods, etc. and all those would be a sacrifice, but I'm thinking I might go for something more fundamental, which would definitely be a challenge, but I'm not sure it would count as a "sacrifice".

The idea I had on my way to work is that I could give up worrying for Lent.  I've been trying to develop/foster/have a closer relationship with God lately and I think that consciously not worrying would be beneficial to that.  I want to trust God and worrying certainly shows that I don't trust with all my heart.

I'm reminded of the blurb in Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek where he mentions that a vast majority of the things we worry about either are (a) out of our control or (b) never happen.  But they consume a lot of our mental energy. This could help free up my mind quite a bit, if I can be successful.


Now, how to actually stop worrying is another topic, but I think that's what I'm going to have to figure out!

Update as of 3/11/13:
Here's what I've been doing:  When I catch myself starting to worry about something, I make myself stop and just start thinking about something else that is unrelated to the the worry topic.

The result?  I've been much happier and less negative since the beginning of Lent.  At least I feel like I have been.  It's been pretty great actually.  I have a lot of self-doubt about almost everything in my life and this has really helped me not dwell on it because mostly, it's ALL IN MY HEAD.  My crazy, crazy head.  I'll update again closer to Easter about this.

Budgeting in 2013

Jason & I are approaching our four month anniversary!  So far, things are going well.  We decided to try something new this month: write out a budget.

We're using Mint.com to track all of our expenses.  I have it linked to all my accounts (banks, credit cards, investments) so it can automatically pull the transactions from the websites.  It automatically categorizes everything, so I just check in every few days to make sure that it doesn't need to be slightly adjusted.

We sat down at the beginning of the month and decided how much we were going to budget for all our major categories:  rent, utilities, food (groceries, eating out together and then our separate lunch accounts), entertainment, tithing, saving, car stuff, etc.  I've been half-heartedly using Mint.com for the last few years, so it had some history to draw upon so we could guesstimate the variable expenses.

It's weird to look at your money in advance and kind of earmark it.  I haven't budgeted  at all since I split up with my first husband.  Mostly, it's just been me, spending money on whatever I want, whenever I want.  My monthly expenses are pretty low and I typically try to be frugal with my spending (or at least not frivolous), but it's a very different experience to sit down before the month starts to decide together, in advance, what will be spent on which categories.

It was different, but in a good way.  It made me feel like we were a team, planning together how we wanted our month of January to look.  It would also help us keep an eye on our money.  Together.

So far, I'm pleased with the mid-month results.  We've been adjusting our restaurant choices so that we stay on target for our monthly "restaurant" budget.  I've discovered that I care more about my manicures and pedicures than going out to eat lunch.  I think we need a miscellaneous category to catch the monthly weird things that you aren't a "normal" monthly expense, but happen every month anyway, like buying a new TiVo or attending a game convention.

I haven't been feeling stressed about money and that part has been good.  It's been a very open topic, which I appreciate.  Generally speaking, I think money is a common reason for divorce (or at least arguments) and while I'm sure we will have those arguments at some point, it's nice to be able to talk about what we want in the future and be able to start planning for it now.

I assume we will do it again for February.  I might be changing my work arrangement in the very near future, so that may cause us to have to redo the budget.  Rather than have a blanket monthly budget, I think I like the idea of sitting down each month to look at the upcoming month.  I think it will help us keep focused on it.

Will update later on the progress!

Hoping for a baby

Last night, I took my first pre-natal vitamin.  I'm not pregnant, but I would like to be, hopefully next year, so I took my friend Erin's advice and started taking pre-natal vitamins.

It's a little weird imagining that a baby could be growing inside my sometime next year.  However, the probability isn't great considering that I'm 37, soon to be 38.  But I'm hopeful and willing to just put it out there.  Yes, I would like to have a baby.

I'm a little worried that letting the whole world (all five of you!) know that I've taken a pre-natal vitamin isn't a good idea.  What if I don't ever get pregnant and then everyone knows my internal organs are failures?  Or worse, just stubborn!

I'm trying not to worry about it or focus on it too much.  If it's meant to be, it will be.  If not, there's always fostering or adoption.

Fingers crossed!

BGG.CON may be BBQ.CON

In preparation for getting ready to head out to BGG.CON next week, I made a map of some new potential BBQ places to hit while in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.

Here's a map which includes a few places that I definitely want to hit again:

• Babe's
• LA Burger (for kimchi/bulgogi smothered French fries!)
• Hard 8

Luckily, BBQ fits right in with the slow-carb diet that may or not be happening while I'm in Dallas on vacation...


View Places to eat for BGG.CON (mostly BBQ) in a larger map

Non-local trick-or-treaters

This post is a few days late, but here goes.  As I was driving home from work on Halloween, I hit awful traffic, so ditched the freeway and took side streets to get home.  I cut through the "nice" neighborhood that is only a few blocks away and it was JAM PACKED with kids, people, cars, everything.   Normally, it's a pretty low key, quiet, uncrowded neighborhood.

What is the deal with people leaving their own neighborhoods and going to the "nicer" neighborhoods for candy?  When we were young, we just went in our neighborhood.  We never would've had our parents take us to a more affluent neighborhood for better candy.  I guess the thought just never crossed our minds.  We wanted to run around in the streets we were already familiar with and with people we already knew, not roam around a strange neighborhood.

Is it Robin Hood trick-or-treating?  All I know is that if I lived in one of those homes, I'd be demanding addresses for kids when they came to the door.  Not a local resident, no candy for you!  Call me a grinch, but it just ain't right.  Actually, instead of not giving them anything, I'd give them the lame candy and save the chocolate for the locals.  A two-tiered system.

It'd be fine if you were there with people who live in the neighborhood.  But they aren't.  I was chatting with a woman at work who took her kids to a nicer neighborhood.  She said they give out the king size bars instead of the trick-or-treat sized ones.  Really?  Really lame.  Because I'm sure that's what kids need.  King-sized chocolate bars.  I'm not sure exactly what I hate about this, but it just seems so wrong. Like it's not in the spirit of trick-or-treating, but maybe it's just me.

SoCal Games Day #51

We held SoCal Games Day #51 at the Little White Chapel in Burbank today from 11 AM - 11 PM.  We had a pretty good turnout, about 50+ people there.

A remarkable number right at the opening bell, which is a little unusual, but I think it was because there were two tables of Struggle of Empires happening right at the beginning, so all those guys showed up right on time to learn the game and play.  All told, I think the teach took about an hour and then not sure how long each table took, but I think Jonathan's (the organizer) table took about 4-ish hours to play.  My favorite part?  The same group followed up Struggle of Empires with Hoity Toity, a very lightweight game.  I guess they needed a palatte cleanser after a heavier game.

I played: Ticket to Ride Team Asia, Shogun (for the first time in over a year), Escape (the new Queen game), Industrial Waste, Time's Up! and Tichu twice.

Overall, had a great time.  Tim and Heather came down from Paso Robles so Shane and Jon came down to have dinner with us.  We had *awesome* Lebanese food over at Hayat's Kitchen.  They were super-busy, so the service was slow, but that baklava is worth the wait!

One negative: a guy peed on the floor in the men's room and I had to clean it up.  Thank goodness Karl TOLD ME about it so it could get cleaned up.  He also helped me clean it up, which was very sweet of him. Not sure who did it, but a message will be going on out the games day list tomorrow.

Slow Carb Diet

I decided to accept Tim Ferriss' challenge to try his Slow-Carb Diet.

I started on Sunday, so it been almost six whole days. I think I've maybe lost of couple pounds. More than that, a pair of pants that I rejected on Sunday as being too tight fit better when I put them on Wednesday. They weren't loose, but they fit better because my love handles are noticeably smaller. So that is happy-making!

I've never tried a low-carb type diet before because I love, love, LOVE carbs. Pasta, rice, bread, corn, potatoes, chocolate, anything really!  But every time I've read Tim's blog post on it, I always wondered if it would actually work, so I decided to see if I could get through one day without carbs.

It was tough. I won't lie.  It didn't help that I decided to start on a Sunday to see if I could get through a single day without sugar.  Especially hard when I was going out that night for trivia at a bar with awesome garlic fries and poppers.  But I made it through.  Once I made it through that day, I decided to see if I could last a week.

And here we are, six days later.  So, even though it hasn't been an official "week" yet, Tim's Slow-Carb Diet advocates having a cheat day and he recommends Saturday, so tomorrow is my cheat day where I can eat anything I want.  I'm pretty sure I'll have a potato ball from Porto's and a Drumstick for dessert when I get home.  I'll likely throw some chocolate in there at some point too.

The weird thing is, the first two days were tough.  Sunday was the worst.  Monday was a little better, but still tough.  But since Tuesday, it's been fairly smooth sailing.  I haven't cheated once and honestly, I haven't even been that tempted.

My meals have been looking something like this:

• Breakfast - Scrambled eggs with sauteed onions and chives and a few strips of bacon
• Lunch - Spinach salad with chicken breast OR Mexican food (beans and meat, no tortillas)
• Dinner - Salad (Cobb), Shrimp Creole (without rice), smashed cauliflower, and more Mexican
• Snacks - Nuts, pickles, cheese, red wine in the evening

The nice thing is that I haven't been that hungry either.  I haven't been really monitoring my portion sizes as much as I should've.  I'll work on that next week.  And I'll work on exercising.

One of the ways you can "earn" the chance to eat carbs is if you do a 30 minute resistance training workout. I bought some resistance bands tonight at Target for $10.  I figure it's worth a shot.

I probably should've taken some "before" pictures, but I'm mainly just hoping my clothes fit better.  I doubt it will be a long-term thing, but I'll just see if I can get through another week and play it by ear.

My ideal goal is to keep it up until Thanksgiving.  With BGG.CON coming up, I'm not sure how that will work out, although we'll be in Texas where we eat our weight in meat each November, so it might not be too hard to stick with a low-carb diet.  Dallas is the perfect place for that actually.

More than "losing" weight, I just want to feel better about how my clothes are fitting and so far, we're off to a decent start.  If I throw in some exercise, I might be able to speed up the process a bit.

NaBloPoMo 2012

Every year I toy with the idea of doing NaBloPoMo, which is the challenge to blog every day for the month of November.  This year I should have absolutely no excuse because I can blog from my iPhone! So, let's just give it the old college try and see if I can even do it for a week.

Meanwhile, today I got a check-up.  I went to have an echocardiogram done, a treadmill stress test and right now, I have a Holter monitor attached to my chest (insert joke here).  The technicians who did the first couple tests said that, unofficially, everything looked normal.  I hope that trend continues!  I have to return tomorrow at 9 AM to have them remove and download all the information they're collecting for the next 16 hours.

Day one complete, but I reserve the right to add more whenever I want.

My Jeopardy Episode

My Jeopardy! episode was online for a short while.  Meanwhile, it was deleted from that site.

Here is a link to my episode.

Me and Alex Trebek

Ir's me!  With Alex Trebek!  Tomorrow is the air date! Set your DVRs!  Recap to be posted soon!