Fancy Meeting You Here

I know I haven't been around in a while.  I haven't had much to post about, and didn't want to bore you all to tears.  My solution was to not post for a while.  Life has been pretty much normal around here, but I can't complain.  I finished training at work last week, and man have things gotten crazy again.  I had a nice break from work insanity there for a couple of weeks and tried to enjoy every minute of it.  I'm out of training now, and thrown back in with wolves.  OK, that might be slightly exaggerated, but I did tell my manager today that I felt like they drove me out to the middle of the ocean on a boat and then dumped me off with no life jacket.  Not exactly the best feeling in the world, but also not the first time I have felt like that in my job.  I know things will get better, I just hate being at the bottom of the totem pole again.  In my job there is only so much they can do to prepare you and the rest of it you have to learn on the job.  

Things around the house have been pretty quiet the last couple of weeks.  We are gearing up for trick or treat night in the new house, which I'm pretty excited about.  We have a lot of kids in the neighborhood, so I think it could be a busy night for us.  Luckily, Andrew was able to get the night off work so he can help wrangle the dogs/hand out candy.  Buddy has his Trick Or Treat shirt as his costume, but so far I have lost the battle on Maya having a Halloween costume.  Maybe next year she can dress up. 

This past weekend, we celebrated my Mom's birthday.  Andrew and I worked on Saturday to build another bench like the one on our front porch.  Both our Mom's loved them so much, they each requested one this year for their birthday.  I told Andrew I feel like we should go into business on this deal, but I don't know what we would do when we ran out of wood from the fence.  I have a couple of other projects in the works for this winter with the remaining wood panels.  Andrew inherited a new miter saw a couple weekends ago, so that made the construction of this bench a lot faster.  He is now dreaming of his workshop he wants in the garage and the projects he will complete.  Major projects on the list are bookcases for the library, and a wrap around storage closet for the basement.  When our basement was finished, there wasn't a lot of room left for storage, but we have plans to fix that.  Luckily, we have several options to work with. 

You may be wondering how the weight loss and diet are going.  Slowly is the best answer I have for you at the moment.  I am finding that my sweet tooth is killing me.  Brownies, cookies, cake, bars, you name it and I want it.  I have talked myself out of going to our local cupcake store more times than I can count.  Enter a slight rant on this topic.  Several times I have thought how ridiculous it was that I had to give up sweets to drop even one pound.  So, I went on the hunt for low carb dessert options; I knew they had to exist.  Of course I found many delicious looking things on Pinterest, but when I looked up the recipes I was annoyed.  When I went to the store, I was even more annoyed.  This past weekend, I had a recipe on our grocery list for low carb pancakes.  We love breakfast food, so I thought why not try and make it healthy.  The recipe called for almond flour.  I wasn't prepared for the $11.00 price tag when we got to the store for such a small bag of flour.  That wasn't my first experience with outrageous prices.  Another recipe this week called for coconut flour, there was no way I was spending $7.00 for a bag of that either.  The sugar substitutes these low carb recipes call for also kill me.  No, I'm not going to spend $15.00 for a bag of sugar when I can buy a regular bag of sugar for $3.00.  I'm also convinced it is going to come out twenty years from now that all these sugar substitutes are known to cause cancer.  I guess for now, I'm stuck with the peanut butter cookies I posted a recipe for a couple of weeks ago.  Don't get me wrong, those things are delicious, but I do like to mix it up now and then.  If anyone has any dessert recipes they would like to share that doesn't involve crazy expensive bags of flour or likely cancer causing sugar, please feel free to pass them along.

Luckily, while I battle my food addictions, I have found a new workout buddy at work, which makes heading down to workout after a long day a lot more enjoyable.  I'm more accountable about working out when there is someone else counting on me.  I have been able to maintain four workouts per week for the past three weeks.  I hope to keep that up, and going into the holidays I am going to need all the time on the elliptical I can get.