Aaaaaarrrrrrgh!!!!!!

After a week in which I exercised more and ate the same as the last two weeks, I HAVE GAINED BACK THREE POUNDS.

Since I am clearly doomed to being fat forever, I'm going to go eat several chocolate chip cookies while grinding up vegetables in the garbage disposal. Then I'm going to ask the trash collectors if I can watch while they smash my scale in the compactor.

It's not in the DSM IV

I'm having Quilt Anxiety, or Color-Combo Disorder, or something, over this Bento Box quilt. I've been looking at pictures on Flickr of other Bento Box quilts, and it's quite clear that there's no way this thing is going to look even remotely like them. I have a number of fabrics, but the general colors are red, black, green and white (or cream), and I just can't visualize how they will all work together. I've started mixing around the blocks I've completed thus far, and they just look like I put some random shit together. Frankly, I'm not sure how people come to the final pattern on quilts like this anyway. There's entirely too much left to the quilter (i.e., me) to decide - and at this stage I'd really prefer to be dictated to more: put color A here, put color B there. I can't handle the responsibility of making these decisions on my own. I need a supervisor.

4 down - 53 to go

Despite the fact that Week 2 in the Bitchy Stitcher Diet Plan was a total failure, I have gotten back on track this week and am down a total of 4 pounds. I don't really know what happened last week except that my little one, Devon, appeared to be teething again, and her black, black moods simply ruined everything we all tried to do. I think I still managed to keep my snacking down, though honestly I don't remember much of the week at all, except for a small girl crying and throwing fits. But I've been determined to get back on track this week, and I made it to the gym both Monday and Tuesday.

Although I love my gym - love the childcare, love the showers - there are always moments there that make me cringe, that make me almost sorry I showed up that day. On Monday there were two women in the showers at the same time as me, obviously friends, and they were talking about those pesky 5 pounds that they just can't seem to lose. One woman was going to try to do a liquid diet for two weeks, while the other was extolling the virtues of a diet doctor another friend had seen (the upshot appeared to be that he prescribed amphetamines). Of course I took a peek at these obscenely flabby women as they were leaving, and, of course, another 5 pounds off of either of them and they would have slid down the shower drains.

I have probably seen a total of 2 women at the gym who look like me - and, yes, that includes me. I know the point of losing weight is for my health, so that I don't end up diabetic and needing artificial knees like my mother, so that I can play with my girls without getting winded and needing a nap. But I have to admit that a large part of my motivation is also just wanting to fit in again. I hate being the only fat mom at the playground, the only fat woman on the block, the only fat woman in the grocery store (no lie - I look all the time). I hate that what everyone sees when I leave the house is not the way I see myself.

When I look in the mirror, this is what I still expect to see:



or this:



but not this. I don't know who this is:

Stag beetle - LOVE IT!

The Bento Box quilt continues to progress bit by bit:



Harper, my oldest, declared last night that I had done it all wrong because the colors don't line up right. I reminded her that she regularly puts her clothes on backwards, so she might not be the authority on such matters.

On Sunday morning, we dragged the girls out for our usual weekly grocery trip, and decided to stop by a new store that opened this summer: Fresh World International Supermarket. This place is so fresh, they don't even have a website (I have no idea what that means), though they do have a few locations in the D.C. area. It caters largely to the Asian community, though they also carry a good number of Latino items. On this trip, we found that they had begun stocking some Indian goods, but the selection was not quite what we had hoped for.

But no matter - because there's plenty there to keep eaters like us happy. We're basically willing to eat anything that comes from any other country, with specific emphasis on Asian cuisines. We weren't really prepared with any recipes that we needed ingredients for, so we just ended up buying stuff for fun (not a smart way to grocery shop these days - but this place is pretty cheap as well).

This is what I had for lunch today:



which is like a Thai version of Top Ramen. It had several packets of flavoring to add: an oil, dried vegetables, the soup base, and chili powder. Not only was it tasty, but Harper - she who only eats plain spaghetti and cheese pizza - loved it and kept stealing noodles from my bowl. then we had dessert:



It has these cracker/cookie sticks that you dip into a little vat of chocolate icing. The best part of the whole thing is that the crackers are printed with little pictures of an animal, and then some brief saying related to it, like "HORSE - GALLOP AWAY" or "OWL - ACTIVE AT NIGHT." These were my favorite:




I want to make a t-shirt that says STAG BEETLE - LOVE IT!

We also got a bunch of other noodle soups and our other favorite Japanese chocolate snack: Pocky. Pocky are thin pretzel sticks covered in chocolate. We got the dark chocolate, which is, apparently, more masculine than milk chocolate:



Next time we go, I'm going to take pictures of the HUGE live fish they have in the seafood section. And if we're lucky, there'll be eels!

Love the little old ladies

I finished the Flea Market bag, despite the inscrutable instructions, and while I was sure I would end up hating it, I actually quite like the little monstrosity:




The strap is just long enough so I can wear it like a messenger bag (the pattern actually has the correct length for a messenger bag, but I didn't have enough fabric - so I just made it as long as I could) and that means I have a nice lightweight bag for keys and a cell phone when I take the girls on walks (none of my pants have pockets). I took it with me this morning when I went out to my fave fabric store, and all the little old ladies who work there pounced on it immediately: "Oh what a cute bag! Did you make that? Helen, look at this bag - isn't that cute? It's reversible? Helen! Look - it's reversible! You've only been sewing since July? And you taught yourself? HELEN!..." These are women who have made things far more complex and difficult than I ever will and they are cooing over my half-assed bag. LOVE THAT STORE!

And now I am starting the Bento Box quilt. I think that when this is finished it will represent every sushi-themed fabric that exists in the world right now.




Now if they just had quilt fabric with Dr. Pepper and Reese's cups, we'd have a theme quilt for me!

If only they'd consulted me.

Now, I don't know about you. Maybe you like this sort of thing. Maybe it's perfectly normal, and everybody does it, and I should just take my provincial attitudes back where I came from - but I just don't think the instructions for a pattern should be so vague that you have to go to the website to get the detailed version. And it says right on the pattern "go to the website for tips," and when you go there, and you click on "tips," there's only one tip - and it's for the part of the pattern that makes no fucking sense!

Let me elaborate. Here are the aforementioned instructions for how to attach the handle to the bag:



"Carefully turn strap at corner"??? What the hell? However you try to turn it, you end up with a flap of material you don't know what to do with. So, then I consult the website, and it turns out you have to make this crazy cut UNDER THE PRESSER FOOT. The cut allows you to turn the fabric at the corner of the bag and - guess what! The strip of material that you are sewing to make the straps is also the sides and bottom of the bag! That extra material turns out to be the corner! Would have been nice to mention that somewhere; maybe I'd have had a fighting chance at UNDERSTANDING YOUR FREAKING DIRECTIONS.

I hate patterns

My pattern for the Flea Market Bag arrived today, so I've been hunched over my worktable, trying to affix paper to fabric (low-tack tape or pins? super glue? fairy dust?) and then cut out shapes that look like the ones on the paper. I hate cutting out patterns.

I also received my Bento Box quilt pattern and I'm really itching to get started on it, but I have to pick out fabric. I really want to use some of the same fabrics, plus others in the same vein, that I used in my sushi bag. The quilt will be for my husband - he is a sushi fanatic, and also wastes large amounts of time looking at pictures of actual bento boxes on Flickr

Oh! And here is the update for Week One: The 3 glasses of water a day - total failure. I think I drank two on the first day, maaaaybe one the second, and not a drop since. I am sure to develop a kidney stone the size of my head. However, the 30 minutes of exercise 3 days a week was a success. On top of that, I somehow stopped snacking between meals. In our last few grocery trips, I just haven't bought any of my usual treats, and I've been doing a lot of cooking. Since breads are another of my weaknesses, I've made an unspoken rule for myself that any bread I eat - I have to make it. So I've made 3 loaves in the bread machine, plus popovers, pizza dough, and I've even made homemade pasta twice. And except for my beloved Dr Pepper, I'm attempting to eliminate as much high fructose corn syrup as possible from my diet.

Net result: lost 2 pounds! If week 2 progresses as well, I'll know there's hope.

So, on to Week 2:

1. Try again with the water
2. Keep up the exercise
3. Add at least one vegetable to at least one meal each day.