Finis!

Remember those clogs I was working on throughout the college football bowl season? The first half of the first and littlest pair was done less than a month ago. And while my original goal was to make four pairs and then felt them all at once, I stopped after three:

The blue ones are for my daughter-in-law and granddaughter, leaving the
brown/green ones for my husband.

I'm still going to make the fourth pair (they're for me) and, in fact, have already started the project. But my husband kept asking when his would be finished and I wanted to send the mother-daughter set off before summer.

My husband has never worn slippers, because he used to go outside every hour on the hour (I might be exaggerating a bit) to smoke. Now that he's a former smoker for almost a year(!), he can slip his cold feet into toasty warm wool clogs and relax every evening. Just like an old man.

He kind of makes fun of the old-man-ness of them, but he truly appreciates the warmth of wool. He only has two pairs of handknit wool socks (I should probably work on his sock drawer) and he loves wearing those during cold weather. Which we haven't had much of this winter, but he's managed to pull them out of that drawer a few times.

Okay! That's the knitting part of the post. Thanks for paying attention and letting me brag about a Finished Object or six.

Moving on to the weight-losing part, it appears my attention span for journaling lasted exactly three weeks this time. I thought 21 days was what it took to form a new habit! For me, 21 days was the signal to quit.

And I'll be honest with you: While I'm not chowing down on forbidden fruits, I'm certainly eating more than I did when I was writing everything down. Go figure.

The first day of non-journaling coincided with the decision to join the gym. Am I so busy that I can't journal and go to a gym three times a week? Does my brain only have the capacity to handle a minimum number of successful weight-loss strategies at a time? And if that's true, why would I toss out the number-one predictor of weight loss?

I have no answers, only questions. And a firm resolve to begin journaling again. It's not hard. I love this web-based application that also has a syncable BlackBerry app, but if you read the article I linked to in the previous paragraph, there are many others that do the same thing.

To sum up: In addition to working out regularly and following South Beach Phase 1, I will attempt to create a journaling habit again. Starting today. (Adding one carby food per day the last two days – a serving of Shredded Wheat Wednesday and a low-carb whole-wheat tortilla yesterday – has completely wiped out the stellar two-pound loss from Tuesday's weigh-in)

I'm heading out of town for the weekend. My little Hershey girl, whom you met here yesterday, will be in the hands of my very capable neighbor/housesitter while my husband and I meet some friends to explore Asheville, NC. We won't be meeting them until Friday night, so my husband and I are planning to have a mid-day meal at 12 Bones, a lunch-only rib place that appears to be SB-friendly. (And, really, what restaurant isn't? The grilled-chicken salad is ubiquitous, isn't it? Chez KnitRunRepeat served it last night, as a matter of fact.)

Also, if 12 Bones is good enough for my President, it's good enough for me. I'll do my best to throw up a daily post while I'm gone, since I've committed to doing January NaBloPoMo. Might just be photos; I imagine after this wordy post some of you would enjoy that!