Anybody still occasionally checking in here? It's *possible* that I haven't blogged in a minute...ok, make that 20 months. Yeah, I'm a bad blogger. I've been reading a lot of blogs lately by Weight Watchers members, and I'm hoping that I can revisit using this blog as a way to keep myself on track with WW. I'm currently at a total loss of 93 pounds, with my (unofficial, as I never have actually sat down with a WW leader to set a goal) goal weight just 7 pounds away. (Last week it was only 5 pounds away, but I had an unexpected 2 pound gain at my weigh in yesterday.) I'll keep reading everyone else's blogs and posting here.
Some new foods that I've discovered in the last few months are spaghetti squash and Oikos chocolate Greek yogurt. (Not together...that would be bad!) I've been cooking a little bit, which is a big change for me as I've always depended on my son or my husband to cook for me. I can make spaghetti squash, chicken breasts, pork chops and (new tonight), tilapia.
I've been really ramping up the activity in an attempt to shed these last half dozen or so pounds. I've been doing classes at the gym, my favorites are Body Attack and Body Combat. I also do Body Pump every Wednesday and Body Vive occasionally. I also invested in some good running shoes and I can run over 5 miles at a time at a pace of 5.5 MPH. My goals are to increase my speed (if I can get it up to 6 MPH that will be a 10 minute mile pace) and to increase my distance so I can move up to 10K races (6.2 miles) along with the 5K's I've been doing. I've been doing the "30 day chip" challenge on Twitter, aiming for 30 minutes per day of exercise every day for 30 days. Today is day # 19, once I get another 5 minutes in. :)
I hope that a handful of you will join me in this effort to get those last few pounds gone and to reach my WW goal weight. Here is a pic of me and my "little boy" (who's nearly 6 feet tall at 15 years old)on Christmas to show my latest "after" picture. Please feel free to comment here or email me to keep me accountable, that's why I'm here!

Weight Watchers before and after (in progress!) pictures

Apparently I'm on the blogging-every-90-days plan, lol. My Weight Watchers leader asked me for a before and after picture, after losing over 55 pounds in just under a year. These won't exactly be "after" pictures since I still have 42 more pounds to go until I hit my final goal at WW, so maybe it's more of a before and "in progress" set of pictures. Here is my before pic, from the Powlen family reunion in July 2009. (Thanks for making a cameo in my before pic, Aunt Sandra!) :)

and an even more distressing one, from that same week in July 2009:

Here is a pic from July 2010, almost a year to the day from the picture immediately above this.

and this one is from the July 2010 Powlen family reunion, the 2009 version of which is my first "before" picture.

Next Thursday will mark my one year anniversary of attending Weight Watchers, I have 42 pounds to go until I reach my final goal on WW but I have a few smaller goals before that: in 12 more pounds lost, I'll weigh what I claimed to weigh on my ID badge when I worked at HRS/DCF in the early 90's (in truth, I weighed more than I do now, but I wasn't putting that in black and white on my badge, lol!), in 30 more pounds lost I'll weight what I did when I got married...each of those will be huge achievements to me, but I'm hoping to hit my final goal (which is a few pounds less than I weighed when I graduated from high school) by this time next year.

Spring is here!

I managed to miss the whole month of March in my blogging, sigh...I'm simply not a dependable blogger, I'm afraid! April has been a good month, lots of concerts and a steady countdown to the end of the school year less than two months away. This past Friday I saw one of my favorite singers in concert, Colin Hay. My seats were 4th row center, no more than 10 feet from his microphone stand. I got to talk to him for a few moments after the show, and got up the courage to ask him about two indecipherable lines from one of my favorite songs of his, "Wayfaring Sons". I've listened to the song probably over 100 times, and the lines that I hear are "twar haims are better than yen/some people they get maimed"....doesn't make any sense, does it? He laughed, then patiently explained that the first line is sung in a Scottish dialect slang, and means "two homes are better than one", while the second line is all in English and I'd simply misunderstood the last word- it's "some people they get none". After he explained it, he said "Now you can finally sleep, right? You understand it now?" He's really cool, and a beautiful singer and guitarist. Here is a video of the show that I went to, the line that was puzzling me is at 1:30 in

I've also been sticking with Weight Watchers, if I can lose 1.4 (1 point 4, not 14!) more pounds, I'll have lost 40 pounds since August. One of my friends at work told me last week that I MUST go shopping because my clothes are all baggy. So, on Saturday I went to Old Navy- where I haven't been able to shop "in store" for a couple years because they only offer plus size clothes online, not in the retail store. Not only did I find regular, NOT plus size clothes, I found that I could wear their clothes two sizes smaller than I had expected to fit into! I got a pair of work pants, a belt, two light sweaters, a shirt and a cami. Today I wore some of the new clothes to work, and one of the teacher's assistants (who is Puerto Rican) yelled, "ay, hot mami!" when I walked in. Then this evening I went to get a haircut and my stylist finally noticed that I was losing weight- 40 pounds must be the magic number for folks to actually notice, lol.
We have a concert this Saturday, we're seeing John Fogerty after the Rays game in St Pete- I'm really looking forward to it, I *love* John Fogerty!

February's end

It's a lazy Sunday here, so I thought I'd try to improve on my blogging record with (gasp) one more entry before February sneaks out the back door.

Last week was the motherlode of concert tickets, I bought tix to 4 different shows. I *finally* got Ron White tickets, after waiting months for them to finally go one sale. The St Pete baseball team (the Tampa Bay Rays) have a summer concert series where they offer, for the price of a game ticket, post-game concerts on the infield. I grabbed tickets to three of them, I love watching live baseball almost as much as I love concerts so it's a great deal for me. At the end of April I'll be seeing John Fogerty. (Did you hear that? John freakin' Fogerty! I **adore** John Fogerty!), then one week later the first weekend of May we're seeing ZZ Top and (on my birthday, no less) Hall & Oates. John thinks that watching baseball is akin to watching paint dry, but he's a good guy so he'll be attending all the games/concerts with me.

I got my 30 pound star at Weight Watchers last week, I've lost 30.2 pounds since the first week of August. My goal is to lose another 10 before summer vacation, that's about 14 weeks away so I think it's do-able as long as I don't leap headfirst into a bucket of ribs and Coca Cola on a regular basis. :)

Joey's doing well at school, in reading class he has to read enough books to get 13 "Accelerated Reader" points, that's usually 1-2 books every grading period. He has almost 100 points for this grading period, he absolutely consumes books! He's making a "vodcast" (video podcast) about one of the books that he just read, I'll post it on here when he's all done with it.

I'll leave you with one of the songs that I'm desperately hoping John Fogerty plays, along with his better known CCR and solo hits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6-QEUYNsXs

February thoughts...

I'm trying to be more regular in my blogging, even if I don't have a whole lot to say I'm working on posting every week...or so.

Last week was a rough one, we lost our wirehaired doxie girl Pepper. Of the three dogs, she was the one who was undeniably "my" dog- even though she was blind and deaf, she followed me everywhere I went. In the morning, when I was in the bathroom fighting with my unruly hair and getting ready for the day, she would push her nose under the door and snort until I opened the door for her...she always wanted to be near me. She started showing the telltale signs of congestive heart failure a few days earlier, and she passed on Tuesday. She was a good girl, and I'm so glad that we had so long with her- she would have turned 15 in May, which is quite old for a dachshund. Our other two doxies- Brina, 15 (16 in June!), and Max, 7, are really eating up the extra attention that we've been giving them because we miss Pepper, so they're very happy.

The girl's basketball team at Joey's school won the district championship this weekend, and they go on to the regional tournament starting this Thursday. The coach gave Joey one of the district champion t-shirts since he videotapes all the games and rides to the away games with the team. Joey thought that was pretty cool, he's already looking forward to taping the games again next year when this season ends later this month.

Joey made a delicious treat for us last night while we watched the Super Bowl. He came up with the idea of marinating chunks of pork tenderloin in honey and brown sugar, then cooking it on the grill. It was SO good- we finished every bite! He's a creative cook, he always come up with something interesting when we have a special event. Pork tenderloin was on sale at Publix recently, with my coupons I got them for (literally) close to nothing. So, we have nearly a dozen pork tenderloins in our freezer that John and Joey have been preparing in a variety of ways...I just can't pass up a good deal!

John and Joey are going hog hunting in Northern Florida next weekend...I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea, but Joey really wants to go so I'm trying not to fuss too much. They're going with a very experienced hunter who is a deacon at our church and has a hunting trailer up there that they'll stay in. Thank goodness they'll be in a tree stand, because when I hear "hog hunting" I totally flash back to the scene in "The Thorn Birds" with Stewie being trampled while hog hunting on the ground...I think a tree stand is a good idea in this case, lol. However, they will be leaving early on Saturday and returning late on Sunday. It has been suggested that John's absence on Valentine's Day should earn me some sort of excellent gift...what do you think, lol? I'm going out with my friends Lisa and Lisa (L-squared) on Saturday, we'll think of a proper punishment for his poor timing. :)

First entry of 2010

I was reading blog entries by my family and friends, and thinking about how much I enjoyed keeping up with them, when I realized that I haven't blogged since the week of Christmas. Time flies, and I didn't blog at all in January. So what has been happening in our world?
Joey turned 13 in early December, and (so far) shows no sign of teenage horribleness, he's a remarkably pleasant kid to have around. He's finishing up his job as the videographer for the girls varsity basketball team at school, with conference, district, etc. championships all coming up this month. He's also reading up a storm, most recently tearing through series of 500 page fantasy books called "Fablehaven". Last night he asked me to read a short story that he wrote to read the the first grade students at his school, and he totally wrote it in the style of his current favorite author, Gary Paulsen. It was about a hunter who nearly shoots Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer but instead he and Rudolph become roommates for every day of the year except Christmas Eve. He just applied to be in National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) at school, he needed 20 hours of volunteer time this school year to apply and when we added it all up he had almost 70 just since the end of August, between running cameras for church services and cleaning up at the gun club that he and John belong to.
John and I have been going to Weight Watchers since the first week of August, and most weeks it goes pretty well. I'm down 27 pounds and he's down 22. As a result, I got to reduce my blood pressure meds from two a day to one. Two weeks into the new dosage, my BP is still beautiful so taking a bit of weight off seemed to really help.
I've been continuing to catch up with some of my very best friends from high school, we talk on Facebook or through texting every day. We've also been going out to eat once a month, that meal is coming up this Thursday. It's so much fun, I really look forward to that meal out with my old friends.
We've been enjoying having my parents and my grandma here with us for the winter. Joey loves to cook for them every once in a while, and to just generally hang around with them every day when he gets home from school.
We have a few concerts coming up, I'm seeing my old favorite Colin Hay in Clearwater in April, and comedian Craig Ferguson in March. John and I are both seeing comedian Ron White in May, he is really funny. I'm hoping that some more concerts pop up in the summertime, we haven't been to our usual amount of shows recently. Whew...when I don't blog for a month I appear to have a lot to say, lol!

Coupon savings, sale week ending 12/25

There are a handful of websites that have helped me go from using a few coupons each time I shop to now being an "extreme couponer". The most helpful one is http://www.iheartpublix.com/. Each week, the readers of that website post a picture of their weekly Publix savings and this is mine. This week I bought the following at Publix, for the sale that ends on Christmas Eve:
(4) Barber chicken meals (Cordon Bleu and Chicken Parmeseam) BOGO, plus $4 in manufacturers coupons= $1.98 final cost for 4 boxes
(2) Buitoni Angel Hair refriderated pasta BOGO, plus $2 in manufacturers coupons= .38 cents final cost for 2
(6) Kraft Philadelphia cream cheese $1.25 each, plus 4 $1 manufacturerers coupons and 4 $1 retailers (Publix) coupons for a 75 cent "moneymaker" on each (total of $4.50 moneymaker)
Strawberries $2.99
(8) Steamfresh vegtables, 50% off plus 8 .50 cent off manufacturerers coupons for a total cost of about .40 cents each ($3.20)
20 tangerines, total cost $2.00
Downey wrinkle releaser $4.19
(2) Publix Ceasar Salad mix BOGO $2.99 for 2
(5) Kraft Mac and Cheese cups .99 cents each
Arnold Mulitgrain sandwich thins
(4) Schick travel size razor packs, .99 cents each with 4 $2 off manufacturers coupons, makes it a $4 "moneymaker"
Rachael Ray magazine $3.75, plus a $3.75 manufacturers coupon and a $3.75 Publix coupon, making it a $3.75 moneymaker
(7) cans Pedigree dog food, .99 cents each
Revlon emery boards $1.89, plus a $2.50 Publix coupon for a .61 moneymaker
bananas $1.53
(2) Sorrento Mozz cheese $5.00 plus $2.00 manufacturerers coupons and $2 Publix coupons, total cost $1.00
(4) Coca Cola 12 packs, $12.00 buy three get one free plus a matched Albertson's coupon for $2.00 off
I also used Food Lion coupons for $2 off a produce order, two $5 off a $50 order from Albertsons and GFS (because my total was well over $100 before coupons)

My final total before tax was: $20.20
plus tax of: $ 1.47
total out of pocket cost: $21.67
total savings after BOGOs and coupons: $100.38
Big thanks to www.iheartpublix.com for the coupon matchups, I couldn't save this much without them!