Monday, Monday

I have done absolutely nothing today. I did my big blog post yesterday but felt like doing another one today. 

I lie- I did some schoolwork- I emailed a teacher, I took a final, and looked ahead at when my next assignment is due. It is light since I have worked so far ahead this summer.  

I have tracked my calories so far. I weighed in and I am back to ZERO.  

No gain as listed above anymore. However, I will not change it till Saturday as that is my weigh-in day. I can say that I am down the 5 lbs that I gained from the cruise. Now I just need to get rid of the pounds I gained from the week before my birthday to the cruise eating. 

It is 4:18 pm and I do not have a plan for dinner yet. I do have 4.75 lbs of boneless skinless chicken breast in the fridge though from my Kroger order yesterday. I have no excuse to not actually cook a meal. I have nothing pressing on me that I have to get done today. I am FREE!  Of course, there are lots of things I could be working on. 

Maybe I will update you tomorrow on what I cook tonight. 

End July

I have to say goodbye to the loss that was previously listed above. Now it is a plus. 

For my birthday I didn't do anything but cook my own dinner and make brownies. I kept not caring and eating what I wanted throughout the week till we left on Monday 7/22/24 to go on a cruise- I ate.  I drank regular soda. I am drinking regular soda now!  LOL, I figure this will be my only one then back to diet. I already got two 12 packs of diet plus there is always water. I figured this Coke would be lower in calories than a coffee if I tried to make it with heavy whipping cream since I am out of half and half.  I do have a Kroger delivery arriving in about an hour though. 

Today is the first day I finally feel normal and like I am back to myself after arriving home from the cruise. We drove down to West Palm Beach on Sunday afternoon to beat the traffic that would be there Monday morning.  Who wants to make a 3.5-hour drive the day they are supposed to be somewhere? I was able to get Pollo Tropical for dinner which made my grew up in Miami heart happy. :) Then we went and boarded the ship on Monday mid-afternoon. It was a comedy of errors with mine between issues that kept happening. We finally got on board though and we were able to go to our rooms. We had booked two rooms right next to each other. Our rooms were free so no matter if we got one room for the four of us or two the cost was the same. Margaritaville has a Hero's Sail free promotion and teachers/staff fall under this category. We were allowed a guest plus a kid. We still had to pay the port fees and all the other fees though. This cruise was FAR from free. Far, far, far from free I can tell you that! But at least we made memories with the kids. Our 19-year-old stayed home and held down the fort as he usually does. Middle son (16) and daughter (8) went with us of course. There was a boy's room and a girl's room. The port in the Bahamas that the ship docks at is an industrial port. So to visit the island you have to book an excursion. You can do this through the ship or through various people on the island that have taxi services. I chose the ship because you are guaranteed that the ship will not leave you if the excursion is late. If you book on your own and you are late the ship can leave you if you are not back in time. We spent a day at an all-inclusive resort and I was not impressed. The food was buffet-style and just not very good. The drinks were flowing but the bees made it hard to drink them. There were bees all over the drinks looking for free access to sugar. I was so tired and sunburnt when we got back to the ship. I used sunscreen but not well enough apparently. Sleep and then we were back in Florida. It was only a 3 day 2 night cruise and the 3rd day was just disembarkation. My husband didn't want to get off early even though we had an express pass. That turned out to be a mistake. We were stuck in there forever and a day till we got off. Then the 3.5-hour ride home. It has taken till today (Sunday) for me to feel back to normal and we got home Wed afternoon  LOL  That long of recovery and hurting from sunburn and whatnot. 

I am blogging instead of writing the assignment that is due today. Haha, Story of my school life if you look at past posts. 

I did write and turn in that APA draft. The professor graded it and just wanted me to tweak a few things like add titles. Also when I copied over my references from citation machine it flipped the indents so I had to fix that. I didn't have to fix any of my report as far as writing so that is great! 

I just did the math  I have 10 days left till I go back to work. Technically I will go back on the 1st to go to Freshman Preview because I love seeing the new faces. 

I just paid for a year of LoseIt so I will try and track again.  I have completely gotten out of the habit of taking pictures of my food.  I was on a cruise and didn't take any food pictures! Just of the water and the ship and whatnot. I used to take pictures of all of my food. I don't know why I just have not felt it lately. Ok it is 6 pm and I need to get this assignment done. 

Mid July

 My titles suck but at least I am posting so I call that a win.

So last I left you was that I had lost 3.2 pounds and I was hoping that I could report a loss the next days as it was weigh-in day. 

I was indeed able to change it to show my small loss of .4 which made it 3.6 lbs down. You might be thinking "Wait a minute I just saw it and that is not what it says". 

You would be correct! It has now been another week and I can report my minuscule loss of .2.  Which now brings my three-week loss to 3.8 lbs. 

Tomorrow I reach level 47 and I have no idea what I am doing. I have a 3-5 page draft APA paper due on Wednesday that I have not even started yet. I have to be in the correct mindset to write. I doubt I will be in it today or tomorrow. I do at least have a simple but yummy plan in place for dinner tonight. I picked up a few packs of top sirloin at the store the other day. I have some russet potatoes in the oven currently to eat with the steaks. 

I assume I will go out to dinner tomorrow but I am unsure of where we will go. I am thinking maybe Storming Crab or KPot (all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ) The price point is similar but I have never been to KPot. 

I made sirloin steaks with baked potatoes for dinner and baked some brownies. It is my son's level up to 19 tomorrow but he just doesn't care about stuff. He is so minimalistic that he won't be upset if we don't grab him a cake or something. He never wants to go out for his birthday and would prefer Little Ceasars. 

Let's hope I can report more of a loss next week even with my birthday being here. This coming week is the last week of summer school and then I will have 20 days off before I get back to work for the school year. 

July

I attempted to post last weekend but it never happened. I wanted to add pictures and it just was not working well so I got annoyed and closed Blogger.

I have a habit of stopping and starting a million times and I wasn't sure if I would keep myself on the straight and narrow. I kinda have, but kinda have not. I did fantastic the first week and I was flying the correct path. The second week I started on a nose dive. I was able to pull back on the throttle and readjust my trajectory though. :)  I started posting on TikTok my eating again and I got behind on posting. I made brownies and then when they were gone I made cookies. My calories were creeping higher and higher and my fruit and veggies were nonexistent. 

You can see what I mean by the RED to the left. The top of the column should be 1700 as that is what I have my calories set at. However, LoseIt takes my activity and gives me extra calories a day. I try not to eat them though. I ate all the calories on Wednesday. I was at like 2700 for the day. I even tracked all my food that day which is how I know what the final damage was. I just wanted what I wanted and I was going to eat it no matter what it did to my calorie count. I was able to turn it around yesterday though and today should be fine as well. It is really day by day as we all know the choices we make daily either help or hinder us. 

Our 21st anniversary was 6/21/24. I decided to start tracking my calories in the middle of the day. I am using Saturday 6/22/24 WI as my new start. You may have noticed the little turtle at the top announcing a loss of 3.2 pounds.  I hope to report another loss tomorrow but my activity Wed may hurt this I am aware. I am trying to stop weighing in daily and start only doing it once per week. Tomorrow will be week two and is my WI day. 

I finished my A term summer class and am now in my B term one. It is financial accounting and it is rather scary. It is an online class so you basically have to teach yourself. Thankfully, I have basic Excel knowledge about formulas and stuff but it is still scary as heck. Hard to believe I already have 1 class done out of 21 towards my BA. It is 21 as I had to take a pre-req class which is one of the ones I am in now. We are over halfway done with the summer term. There are only 8 more days left of working summer school. Once that is over (7/18) we have our vacation planned for 7/22 thru 7/24. We are going on a cruise!  We were able to go for free (room cost) for being in education. We still have to pay for everything else though. I have always been suspicious of cruises and all the extra money that you have to pay with them. I was not shocked when after booking when I already paid for the port fees and taxes to found out that there would be an additional $66 per person for fuel and gratuities and then another $57 for parking at the port. I was a little disappointed though to find out that if we want to get off the ship in the Bahamas and do anything we will have to pay more. The port is an industrial port so you have to pay to travel elsewhere to go to the beach. I was envisioning getting off the ship to being at the beach already. This is another cost to add to the total. I am sure there will be more things. I'm just going to try and roll with the flow though and not freak out.