Tresa's Blog

I’m only half way through but it makes sense to me.  If you want to buy  Naturally Thin from Amazon, you can click on it there.  Bethenny Frankel writes well and despite the differences in our upbringing I didn’t find her approach spoiled or unrealistic (she grew up eating in restaurants, she lived in cities, I grew up on the farm where everyone gained weight as they got older).  The food bank idea is rather depressing since I’m one of those people who used to be able to eat and eat and stay @ 110 if I kept up my physical activity level.  I won’t say exercise because I don’t exercise, I work, I hate to exercise for exercise shape and I can’t see exerting that much energy and not making a physical difference in anything but myself.  I suppose that is the immigrant farm person coming out in me?  Back to the food bank, it seems that you have a food bank, like a bank account, makes sense, the more you exercise the more food you can take out of the bank, (the way I can think of it) if you take out too much with fudge cake for breakfast you will have fruit and vegetables and an egg white for the rest of the day?  Make sense?  AND the food bank continues from day to day but you shouldn’t just quit taking food out or only take one kind of food out (starvation or fad diets) or the bank will get upset and not let you take so much out?  Now that I’ve explained the whole premise of Naturally Thin (just kidding)Bethenny’s  recipes are a little ingredient happy and if you don’t like portobello mushrooms you are pretty well up a certain creek but they are more intesting than most by far.

On a scale of 1-10 right now I’d give the book an 8 right now.  Talk to me in a month if I follow it which of course I’m trying to do right now. Why?   I weigh 150 again.  I’m 5′4″  and I can still wear a size 6 in stretch  jeans, it’s not so pretty as it was when I weighed about 140 a couple months ago.  I’ll keep trying to post about how this book does in the diet department.  What made me decide to write about it this morning?  It’s what is going on in my life (besides having to give the dog a bath and defrost the fridge, it’s an RV fridge evidently they are not frost free?)  My husband quit smoking in June and has gained weight, surprise surprise.  I cut down far enough where some days I have none and some days I have 3 or 4 which I consider pretty good for me.  I will make no bones about it.  I had to quit, I had blood clots and I’m not old or I don’t think I am.  Therefore I am gaining weight too.  My parents were both overweight and I know what it does to you.  I’ve never been obese and spent most of my life thin till I started working @ a computer.  My husband and I  plan on walking , haven’t done so yet, the new tv season started!  I did buy him Nike walking shoes though.

Back to the book, it’s a GREAT idea and more sensible than most I’ve read.  I started to pick up the one by Jillian Michaels because lets face it that is the body we want.  Jillian Michaels book  involves exercise, I won’t do the exercise (I decided to quit fooling myself), I’m very muscled for my size which is a good thing and WHY I can wear a smaller size and eat more.  It’s hereditary, so is the fact my relatives are mostly all fat.  So I’ll let you know in this blog how it goes with the book Naturally Thin and my diet.  I’m also trying to drink 8 12 ounce glasses of water or crystal light drink mix ( I HATE WATER) .

The book isn’t bad and I ate sensibly yesterday because of Naturally Thin and it’s entertaining enough I’m not skimming through.  Buy it and judge for yourself.  BTW this is only like the 2nd diet book I’ve bought in my life so that says something.

I thought I had immunity.  I evidently don’t.  Forget about me wandering around all smug because I found something good about that half century mark, it’s only for those OLDER than me.  1956 is the cut off date for immunity. For those wondering about it these are the cold hard facts all you who are 52 and below.  WE can get the FLU!

I had something last week, I feel so much better this week it’s not funny, it wasn’t I was so sick I just ached and was tired, coughed a bit and had a runny nose.  I guess it could have been an allergy but I refuse to be allergic to anything (my mother was allergic to everything and I swore I would never be that way, I know it doesn’t work that way but I do think a positive attitude has something to do with it? Or blind luck)  My husband was puny yesterday and doesn’t feel well today but he’s not running fever or achey, mostly his stomach.  Anyway he would have immunity if those born before 56 do have it.  So if that was the  H1N1 I had I’ve had worse colds and I’d rather have it than lyme by a long shot.

I did find out the deaths from flu are caused sometimes from having an immune system that functions well. For geeky weird people like me there’s this supposed fact sheet.

Fat Loss Pro brings up the fact that the h1n1 is the same flu as the pandemenic of 1918.  I even found a site that says the Rockefellers had something to do with the spread of the h1n1 and somehow a drug cartel is involved, I might be wrong  just skimmed (and went yeah right and Elvis was on the bus your grandma rode last Tuesday) when the article inferred the same group  was responsible for 9/11 also.

What does this all mean to you?  Cough in your arm, wash your hands as much as possible (if you are ocd you might ignore this one for a normal amount of hand washing, NOT MAKING FUN, I’ve got a touch of OCD), use hand sanitizer if you can’t wash your hands, stay home if you are sick and use common sense.  I don’t go grocery shopping @ peak hours, I can do this but it doesn’t mean I will avoid all crowds of people.

So does anyone think they have or had the h1n1 virus and have a different opinion or something to add?

This is what I wrote last night about the census worker killed in Kentucky and how it could have happened anywhere, anytime.

This is what the Police Link Had to say about it 8 minutes ago.

Mountain Sage Blog had this to say.

Political Byline says the Left is trying to make it into a Right wing crime, I thought the Right was trying to make it into a Left wing crime. They also call it dead-census-worker-gate!  Catchy huh?

I say someone wanted the guy dead, before anyone jumps to any conclusions about the duct tape around the guys hands and feet and his eyes taped shut, there was a man found hung in a barn in MO with almost the same duct tape, no fed written on his chest though of course, and they ruled it a suicide?  Of course if you think that is blarney then there is no question this is murder.  I tend to believe no matter how talented you are it’s hard to duct tape your own hands together and then hang yourself.

In no way am I making light of this murder, it’s gristly and but for the Grace of God it could have been me or anyone I know for that matter.   I know there is “shine” still being made in the woods of Missouri and patches of marijuana scattered around, much less the meth labs (sounds like paradise huh?).  Being @ the wrong place @ the wrong time would be enough to tick these drug dealers off.

What do I say (like anyone listens? ) ?  The guy was killed, no one from acorn killed him, and he wasn’t recruiting for acorn.  No one on the radio told people this guy was horrible and must be stopped and if it meant the demise of our country so be it.  What am I trying to say?  The extremists on both sides of the political fence are ludicrous and perhaps dangerous.  What if someone does take the possibility this is a politically motivated killing seriously?  Say we spend a few hundred thousand investigating that angle?  In the meantime whoever really did it has more time to cover their tracks and the trail grows cold.  Plus money no one has to spare has been wasted for the cause of political rhetoric.

Did I mention I thought it was murder?  I will say I could be wrong, don’t have all the facts, wouldn’t know what to do with them if I did except I’m a pretty logical person.  I’m just getting really tired of BOTH political sides making everything political and saying things they really shouldn’t say.  Democrats lost 8 years ago, Republicans lost this time, so GET OVER it already!!

BTW most of my family doesn’t hold my political views but we have enough sense to respect and listen to each others VALID points of view.

Back to the census worker.  It’s a horrible thing and his family has my deepest sympathy.  Makes me a little leery of all wilderness and rather glad I didn’t go back to work for the census bureau although it was a GREAT job.

I heard tonight on the local news that police and federal agents had not determined that a census worker found hanging from a tree in rural Kentucky earlier this month was a homicide despite his being found hanging and having fed scrawled across his chest.  I laughed with my husband, not at the plight of the worker but the apparent stupidity of the officials.  I didn’t know all the facts of the case but I used to be a census worker in a rural area.  Then I read several articles that explained the census worker was found with his feet touching the ground and the word fed scrawled on the mans chest may or may not be true.

These are my sources of information in a quick online search.

From The Examiner, and  the Boston Herald says it’s maybe not suicide,  while Cnn is middle of the Road,  and  The Christian Science Monitor has an excellent article on the incident.  The Christian Science Monitor has a viewpoint on the possibilities of WHY? in this article also.

I worked for the census bureau in 1987.  I was warned not to go where the roads seemingly end.  I had made plans to go in by horseback or on foot in the rural Ozarks, I was told by local officials there are reasons WHY those people block off their roads or don’t maintain them (they also didn’t pay many taxes or send their kids to school much) and I would just end up being missing or a statistic if I pursued it much further.  My job (pre-enumeration) didn’t entail working with property owners I couldn’t find (also it didn’t entail me being a complete idiot) and I was allowed to use other sources of information.  Being not totally stupid I spent time with the friendly locals to find out my information.  More than one road was blocked off or not maintained, one was actually owned by an acquaintance from high school I found out, he wasn’t doing anything illegal, just didn’t like the world interfering in his life.  His nickname was Grizzly if that tells you anything?

It’s hard to believe but the census workers death may well be the result of homicide because someone didn’t want to be counted or the guy stumbled onto something illegal or worse case scenario the word federal with the census workers badge set someone into a homicidal rage.  It could have happened years ago when the world was a differnt place so it’s entirely possible now.  This case was eerily familiar to me.

Your views?

Update Friday night:

I had tags on this, where do they go when I publish?

Sorry if you commented and I didn’t let it on here, spam program was a little overly cautious.

My nose is running, I feel like crap, hope it’s not that flu.

I’ve been up since 5:30 am which is when my husband gets me up by tickling my feet and annoying the dog by throwing the covers over him.  That is a whole different story.

I watched a bit of news this morning, bathed, smoked one of my 3 cigs for the day and started working on blogs, they both had a bit of annoying html @ the top that was showing up like this “;  />”  so I couldn’t stand it, it wasn’t RIGHT.  Sort of like when I took windows 95 off the computer and reinstalled it 2 weeks after I’d sat down @ the computer with windows 95 (can we say obsessive personality disorder?).  So back to this morning,  I’d take the offending bit out of the html, it would reappear, I’d think it was something else.  I made it worse on this blog it was showing something about charset and UTF and UTF I couldn’t find in any template, I remembered I’d typed it in in my wp files but didn’t think it was a good idea to change it there (smartest thing I’ve done all morning!).  Finally figured out it was a plugin and maybe my infernal or eternal tinkering.  So I got the Animals blog right, this one I figured I could fix?  Yeah right, I had an error on line 11 in my heading and html tidy said it was on lines 8, 9, and 12 and basically didn’t like any of it.

So what did I do?  I changed my theme, all is forgiven, I don’t look like such a crass fool, now I can go back to accounting and doing laudry, I’m thrilled, are you?

Moral, with wordpress troubles, look to plugins, then change theme, if you are an idiot and use theme editor BACK UP the html BEFORE you change anything on the templates.  DUHHHHHHHH on my part big time.

Think I will nap.  It’s late morning now.

Oh, and the reason I have public service ads on is because I’m supposed to get something from google I probably threw away so when you start adsence PAY ATTENTION to what they tell you you need to do to get paid, OK?

Oreo Cookies

We were @ my brothers over the weekend.   He ate a cookie by dunking it in water, (he was taking his many pills and just happened to have water instead of milk and I’d like to think that’s why he was dunking said cookie in water, otherwise my brother is WEIRD and considering he is my brother that can’t be so?  Maybe THAT will be incentive for him to get a computer instead of a stupid phone and a bunch of old cars to restore, I mean calling him weird, he can’t be weird he’s my brother?)  So I ask him if his mother would have jumped down his throat if he had dunked a cookie in anything?  Bob said no.  I said that is strange because MY MOTHER would have jumped down my throat (somehow this woman morphed in between children, we are 17 years apart) I told him that proved he was her favorite.  What brought all this on?  I was reading dooce 4/15/05 (I’ve read like 4 blogs from the beginning, I mean LONG blogs, I’m sick that way) and she was discussing eating said oreo.  I am a splitter of the oreo and I carefully remove the icing with my teeth, if alone I may lick said cookie, and then I eat the chocolate cookie.  My husband being of the dunk in milk and eat oreo whole school of thought has always bothered me that he can’t see the virtue in splitting the cookie?  I wonder how many people are irritated by the dunking of a cookie or the proper eating of an oreo and how dull life would be without oreo’s and the proper way to eat them?

1. Waiting till I think world is safely awake to go to Wal Mart for groceries etc. because I have to stop by the landlords (RV Park owner) house to get mail so I can maybe get my google adsense straightened out.
2. Back in TX which is where we call home even though it isn’t our native state?
3. Wondering if I should start wearing t-shirts instead of summer sleeveless tops?
4. Thankful we had such a nice “vacation” @ home and @ my brothers.
5. Listening to Good Morning America about the parents who took pictures of their kids naked, wal mart turned them in, and the children were taken from them for a month.  ?????  Everyone who hasn’t taken a picture of their kid naked please get busy because you will be the only ones out of jail and you are about 1% of the population.
6. Wondering if there is anything I can do about my step daughter who has a baby who lives in a tent with her husband whom the family doesn’t consider suitable.  We have reason trust me.  Think a record for one.
7. Thinking I’ll have to take some sort of nap because I got 5 hr sleep because I stayed up playing with my blogs or I can tough it out today without a nap?
8. Thinking I’m going to have to figure out a way not to eat 2000 calories a day even though I want to.

I was cleaning off the patio (used to be garage apron) tonight and my cousin’s husband stopped by.  Nothing unusual in that because I’m surrounded by cousins.  We were talking about his wife who has survived liver cancer for over two years.  It was bad, not long after she found out she had cancer they called the kids in to say goodbye they thought.  Then they gave her one shot with chemo and it got a bit better……She’s taught school the last two years!

I had blood clots earlier this year which is nothing like cancer and they weren’t even bad blood clots, I now live healthier and my husband gave up smoking not exactly because of the blood clots but it was a wake up call to us both.

So that is what I”m thankful for other than a loving husband, a great familiy (sometimes), a few good friends, and the ability to enjoy it all.

What I’m NOT thankful for is the TV commercial down south they have for the “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” monitors for elderly people, there is a discount for people over 50, grrrrrrrrrrrr.  70 maybe but 50??  So I just finished cleaning about 100 ft of grass growing in cement cracks and then cleaned off the concrete, discount on I’ve fallen buttons my royal red… well you get the idea.

So what are you thankful for or not thankful for today?

Sara meditating in 2004.

This is a picture of my granddaughter Sara, I think she was three or close to it.  She seems to be so lost in thought or daydreaming.  Actually everyone was outside on the patio or garage apron whatever you want to call it and the toddlers thought it would be great fun to dump rocks on the cement and ride toys through them? She seems to be drawing toe pictures in the rocks?

Yesterday I had a horrible moment where I didn’t know where I was in relation to the world.  I was driving on a road I’d driven hundreds of times before to a place I’d been probably 40 times (I can already hear the old age jokes and the alzheimers and I’ve done this before but this was BAD) and I couldn’t remember if I’d passed it already and I had a strange feeling I had.  This would have been horrible because it’s a mechanics garage and my husband was waiting there for me to bring the car and I can imagine the usual shop group of boys and men that seem to populate anyplace with grease standing outside  going , “why’d she do that? Do ya think she’s nuts?  Lookee there she didn’t even slow down.”  Of course by the time the story was passed around a few times I would have missed the whole state and been a blathering idiot.  I admit I was daydreaming, or actually I was reinacting the last few days, I”d found a scratch on my car and was trying so very hard to figure out where it could have happened.  I don’t put scratches or dents on cars.  Period.  Men say they can drive but I don’t hit things unless they are in the road or I can’t see them @ all.  Period.

So I know you are waiting with bated breath for the end of the story… NOT.  I’ll tell you anyway, I wasn’t past the garage but it was a terrible two minutes where I was trying to go through the houses and farms in ORDER of a road I travel often but not everyday or even every week.  Try it sometime.  It’s a mind boggler.

We did figure out how the car got scratched, I didn’t do it and it was an accident, mechanic said he could make it go away.  So I admit I daydream, especially while driving, this isn’t the first time it’s happened but I usually can right myself quicker.  So do YOU do this? And will you admit it?

Because when you come home after being gone 3 weeks and you are knocking cobwebs out of the  top of the opening to the living room and you get carried away you will knock down your little antique shelf in the living room with the rock that looks like a rabbit and the one that looks like a ship that the kids found.  Said kids are now in their late 20s or 3os but rocks are still precious much less the shelf being fragile!