Bra Shopping- Only Slightly Less Torturous Than Swimsuit Shopping

*Actual Bra, Blogger Not Pictured :)

My band has been very mean to my breasts. My band is a bully, really. All those times my band stole my boobs lunch money and made yo mama jokes was bad enough, but it also left my boobs all depressed and deflated and prematurely aged from all the abuse.

I have found it impossible to find a bra that fits these new haggard boobies. I started in a 46G and I've been trying to wear 38DD (because I can find those in regular stores), but it hasn't worked because they gap at the sides but my boobs fall out the top. Strange, strange situation happening up under my shirt.

So, I go to a very chic-chic lingerie store for a fitting today. And guys, WTF has my band done? I walked out wearing a 34FF. I am skeptical about the fit, actually, but the 36FF was way too big and the 34F was too small-- I personally think she should have tried me in a 36F but she insisted the 34 is a better fit. So I bought myself a $70 bra (don't tell my husband-- it is not pretty enough for him to like the price tag).

I'm a mutant with a small ribcage and huge funbags. And apparently until I get my breast reduction, I'm not going to be able to buy bras in a normal store.

Crankhead Zombies. . and other sleepless nights

So, I'm reading the book World War Z.

For those of you who haven't read it, it's about the Zombie Apocalypse.

Now, I should have realized going into it that it would hit.my.buttons.hard. See, the scarriest thing to me since I was a small child were books and movies about global pandemics. Diseases that killed almost everyone, and left a horrible world for the survivors to live in. They have ALWAYS given me nightmares, yet I still read them (The Stand is the scarriest Stephen King book ever, forget that stupid clown. But the dead pets/children are a close second). I guess the thing I find so frightening is that they are realistic, and that it's not so much the disease that's scary but the prospect of the horrible ways the survivors or the attempting-to-survive people behave in their panic.

Yet, I decide to read a really good book about Zombies. This already freaks me out, and has me considering what I would do to try to survive such an event (including the modifications that would be necessary were I to stay in my house), or whether it would be better just to shoot myself in the head to prevent myself from infection.

I realize you're probably worried about me now.

But it gets worse! My husband tells me that our cross-the-street neighbor told him that there is a bit of a drug problem happening down in the creek region of our subdivision (very nice subdivision, very isolated creek on the other side where traveling meth labs seem to have popped up recently), and to be careful with locking doors, etc. He even said he had to call the police a couple weeks ago because some guy was just sitting in his yard, high. We live on a dead-end and it has been idyllic in my mind to this point. Very quiet and private, and I often forget to lock the doors. No more.

Well, last night, I kept having visions of crankhead zombies staging an invasion of our house. Talk about a bad night of sleep.

And you wanna know what the ridiculous thing is? I'm only half-way through World War Z and I can't stop now! I'm just going to have to keep giving myself nightmares.

Wednesday Confessions

* I can't stand my mother's husband. I mean, I really loathe him. So when she called and said he can't come with her to visit this summer after all, I literally did a happy dance.

* I take my national licensing exam on Monday. I think I'm ready, but I do plan to spend the weekend cramming.

* I take my state exam on Friday. I have not studied for it. I am so cocky that I think I'll be fine looking over the material tomorrow night. If I whine later because I failed, don't give me any sympathy.

* I have gotten super comfortable with 175 on the scale over the past week. I have started imagining what it would be like to just stay here. This is not a good thing. My BMI is *barely* under 30. I would have to gain about 5 lbs in order to qualify for lap-band surgery all over again. That's crazy to think about.

* Looking at myself now, it's hard for me to imagine WHY someone who "only" has a BMI of 30 or 31 would EVER get WLS. It's short-sighted and judgmental, and it's all about perspective- so if you're a low-BMI'er, please realize that I know this is my issue and not about you at all. My 29 BMI seems tiny and healthy to me because, in comparison to a 48, it is. But objectively, I'm still carrying around too much extra weight that will put me at risk for developing Very Bad Diseases. It's just so hard to remember that when I look at how far I've come.

* Summer teaching puts me in a bad mental place when it comes to food. For the past 4 summers, I have followed each 6 hour teaching day with a stop at a fast food place on the way home, where I binged, and then followed it with a 2-3 hour nap, at which point I'd get up and eat dinner. This summer I have made sure to take a protein bar for breakfast and some lunch for my 30-minute break between classes (today it was a few slices of pepperoni, a tomato/cuc/moz salad, and a slice of cantaloupe). That is PLENTY of food. But I'm so conditioned that when I got done at 2:30, I was ravenously hungry even though I already ate. I did manage to resist the pull of an ice cream cone and go home, but once here I had a few chips with salsa as a snack. On a normal day, I would not have been hungry but these summer teaching days are crazy hard-wired in my brain or something. I just hope I get through the next two weeks without a gain.

*I am pretty geeky when it comes to my entertainment. I was a big Buffy fan back in the day, and then my love turned to Battlestar Galactica, and now I have it bad for Game of Thrones & True Blood. I read any crappy paranormal romance book I can get my hands on, including Twilight (blech).

*I'm pretty sure that my exercise push was yet another short-lived and failed attempt at getting into a habit. Maybe this was just a bad time for me to try to start, but really, when is a good time when you're just not that into it compared to other ways you could be spending time? Perhaps I will get there someday, but this week will not be the week.

I have a hard time making myself exercise even when I've got hours of free time-- no excuse is a good excuse in my book. I am in awe of all of you who have made exercise a regular part of your weekly routine.

I'm hopping back on that treadmill tomorrow, by golly (haha). If I work out tomorrow, then I've still done 3 days this week, which is 3 more days in a week than I've normally done.

Summer classes started this week, and man is it intense to teach for 6 hours straight every day for a month. But it's marathon work and when the month is over, I will have a big chunk of money and the rest of the summer "free". Or at least unstructured in terms of the hours I have to do in order to get work done.

Here I am in my back to school outfit :) I took a pic because even though my two weeks of exercise has made me GAIN 2 lbs, my size 10 Anne Taylor shorts fit me perfectly. The top is a size L Banana Republic and the shrug is a junior's size L. I felt very sleek, I have to admit. I can just imagine what students who had me last fall and are just now seeing me again are thinking, but one thing about the South-- people are very polite about these kinds of things!



And here is a dorky, "look at me I think I'm hot shit" poolside pose. Just for fun.

Will. . . Not. . . Kill. . . Husband.

Just a quick little gripe-- one that you ladies with a partner might understand only too well.

I booked our trip to Punta Cana in January. That's 6'ish months ago, for those of you counting. I said to husband, who is normally "the anal one", that he needs to get his passport and not to wait. I then proceeded to remind him a couple of times-- don't forget you still need to get your passport for our July trip.

So in completely uncharacteristic fashion, he blows it off until today. Today is exactly 31 days before we are supposed to be flying out of the country. He gets to the passport office, they process his application, and then as he's leaving the lady tells him she doubts it will make it by our trip since it's taking 4-6weeks for passports.

He calls me in a panic. I say, ok, so why didn't you expedite it? He says he couldn't (which was a lie-- he had no idea what the hell I was talking about and the passport office-- also the post office-- could give a shit about actually being helpful and informative about options if it takes two extra seconds of their day). So after somehow trying to blame me for all of this, which is his #1 stress reaction-- make everything my fault no matter how much he has to stretch to do it-- he goes back to the office and inquires about expediting. They say, ok, but you need to pay us more money and it has to be before our office closes because we've already notarized your application and we can't give it back to you to start again tomorrow. So he leaves, and calls me bitching because he has to drive 30 minutes home to get our checkbook and 30 minutes back and by then it will be too late. So I say, won't they take a money order?? And he's like, yeah, but how do you get one of those.

???????

The mind boggles that he is a well-educated man with a graduate degree and lots of people working for him.

So I say, uh, get some cash, then go to Walmart. Or, I said, better yet, I bet you can get one at the dang post office! Which he denies. But then after blustering (I may have hung up on him), he manages to go back to the post office and ask HOW MUCH additional it will cost for the expediting, and then leave the post office to go to Walmart for a money order, then go BACK. And, I feel a little gleeful telling you this, what did the passport clerk say to him as he was handing her the money? "We have money orders here, you could have just bought some stamps and got cash back, then done the MO here."

The end result is that unless something else went wonky, he should have his passport in 2-3 weeks, just in time for our trip.

But, I will tell you that there was about an hour of time there where I was planning on going to Punta Cana on my own and finding a new dang husband ;)

My New Favorite Breakfast

1 packet of sugar-free instant oatmeal made with water (100 cal)
1 tablespoon of sweetened coconut flakes (35 cal)
Sprinkle (teaspoon) of crushed walnuts (? less than 50 cal)


Yummy to my tummy.

Two Days Do Not a Habit Make. . .

But I feel good anyway.

I have three life goals for June, that I will call the 3 E's: 1) pass the EPPP- my licensing exam, 2) Exercise, and 3) Economics- stop spending, start saving.

For the purposes of this post, I'm happy with goal number 2-- exercise. Yesterday and today I used my treadmill for 45 minutes. Today I even jogged, probably for the first time in 12 years. Considering the last time I used my treadmill I could barely walk for 30 minutes, the jogging felt like such a huge accomplishment. And just a note: Florence & The Machine's Lungs is the perfect cd for a 45-minute workout.

I have absolutely no weight loss goal for this month, because I don't want to disappoint myself and typically I stall out on weight when I exercise, at least in the beginning. So any loss will be counted a bonus. I took my measurements instead and I'll check again at the end of the month. My goal is to get into some kind of habit of exercising over the summer so that when the regular semester starts again, I will already have it down. We'll see-- this is certainly my weakest link on the health front.

The Beach = Awesome

Back from Pensacola Beach, peeps!

It was a great two days. I know Pensacola is a total tourist trap, but I love that beach. White sands and if you are at one of the hotels farther down the beach, it's comparatively quiet. The surf was VERY rough for our two days, so I didn't get in the water much-- I had one point where I was swimming and swimming but not getting any closer to the shore, so I freaked out a little bit. I realized, then and there, what horrible shape I'm in and vowed to renew my efforts to develop some cardiovascular stamina. I was a trained lifeguard, back in the day! The fact that I was so fatigued by fighting the tides was a wake-up call about my complete lack of fitness.

Otherwise, I felt very good about myself and my progress. I wore my swimsuit that I've been bitching about to y'all all spring and felt fine in it, even good when I was laying on my back so that my bulges flattened out (haha- you know what I'm talking about). Last night I wore a form-fitting dress to dinner and it looked pretty awesome if I do say so myself. I'm really not used to feeling this way, honestly, but it's pretty nice.

Next week summer session starts and I will be super busy and tired for a month straight. If you don't hear from me, that's why!