Not Even SuperGirl Could Fix My Dishwasher

I’m squeezing in this post tonight because it might be a few weeks before I have time to write “recreationally” again.  Tomorrow is my first assignment for my new freelance project, and I will have nine days after the interview to fashion a 7,000-word piece, using the best writing of my life. I am extremely nervous about it, but I’m excited too, because there is nothing as rewarding and fun for me as writing well. We will see! There are a lot of expectations and rules, and I’m hoping I can remember them all!

It’s been an interesting week for us, on many levels.

My uncle Paul took these lovely pictures of Ryley playing in their leaves last weekend while we were at the Broncos game:

Meanwhile, we were watching this:

That ended up being my favorite part of the game, since we played so horribly. :-) We lost 45-10, or something like that. We left in the 3rd quarter. We are big Tim Tebow fans, and we didn’t want to see them boo him. It wasn’t all his fault.

The next night was Halloween, and we kept our tradition of attending Word of Life’s Harvest Carnival. Ryan had to work, so it was just me and SuperGirl….

 

It was really super.

On Wednesday morning we received eight inches of snow, so school was closed. Yay!!! Ryley and I stayed home, and it was wonderful! We built a fire in the fireplace, slow-cooked a pot of chili, watched prairie movies all day, and played…

It was one of those perfect, perfect days.

Thursday was my birthday, and I turned, ahem, 34. I’m getting to that point where I have to do math to remember my age. Haha! It was not the best of days for me at work and at Ryley’s school (aforementioned irritability?), and it ended up being a “confrontational day.” But we had a nice evening, and all my family made me feel so special. :-)

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Wellness Update….

Our dishwasher died two weeks ago. Ryan woke up at 3 a.m. one night, and our dishwasher was still trying to run (we started it around 9 p.m.), and it smelled like melting plastic. It has never really cleaned our dishes, and it has always leaked regardless of our occasional caulking. So after trying to run it a few more times with no success, we declared it officially dead.

This has made our lives extremely difficult, especially in light of all the cooking we’ve been doing recently. And even when the dishwasher service guys came out to deliver the new one, they couldn’t get the old one out of the cabinets, so the drama continued. Ryan was able to get it out on his own, albeit by putting a chip in our countertop, but then the old dishwasher sat in the middle of our kitchen for three days before the service guys could come back out to remove it and install the new one (last week’s episode of The Middle was extremely timely for us!). So, with a sink full of dishes and an inability to keep up on the washing with limited hot water and overall time/energy (not to mention it was my birthday), we decided to eat out in the meantime, and I feel like I didn’t make the best food decisions this week. We ate out a lot.

I tried to choose low-carb options everywhere we ate. As my nutritionist said, we are trying to get my body re-trained to view protein as fuel instead of viewing carbs as fuel. So the fewer carbs there are in my diet, the more my body leans on that protein and re-learns how to burn fat instead of store fat. Tonight we had my birthday dinner with my aunt and uncle at Texas Roadhouse, which was a first for me. I’ve never craved steak before (I usually crave pasta), and today I did!

But even with the weird week, my total weight loss since September 18 is now 20 lbs, and that is exciting. It’s certainly not easy, but it is do-able. The new amazing dishwasher is now installed, and our healthy meals are planned for the coming week. I will never take my dishwasher for granted again!!!

I got home from my friend’s baby shower this afternoon, and Ryan could hardly wait to show me:

“Look, our glasses are clean! So shiny!”

;-)