No Sweets?

I'm doing something I've never done before. 

I'm on a diet. 

After getting married, I put on a few pounds or twenty . . . five. I'm blaming it on the fact that hubby can eat whatever he wants and still stay thin, compounded with the two mall jobs I had last Christmas that sent me on multiple trips for Starbucks lattes (and I didn't even think to get them skinny) and Chik-fil-a peppermint shakes a week. Before last winter, I was consistently a small girl. Not super skinny, but small. Like 115-120 pounds at almost 5'3". It worked for me.

I had plans to start counting calories once we got settled into our new home to try to get back to my high school weight, but I got the idea from another blog (Better Life Bags) on Facebook to go sugar-free right after Christmas. Now, I'm not going all out, and I don't think I'll have to in order to see a difference. 

I'm allowing myself plenty of fruit (and lots of veggies, of course), honey, and a limited amount of artificial sweeteners. I already splurged on a diet lemonade at Chik-fil-a yesterday. 

I just can't eat any "sweets". You know what they are. I will, although, have a few preplanned exceptions.

Next Wednesday when we see my family in Mobile for our "going away-ish" party, there will be ice cream. I originally wanted a cake from the lady who did our wedding cakes, but we opted to spend that money on a fabulous shrimp boil instead (ohmygoodnessicantwaitimissshrimp!). So yeah, I'm eating ice cream that day. Then there will probably be some skinny lattes involved on our four day drive across the country. ;)And then probably Valentine's Day and then my birthday. 

My goal is to go clothes shopping on my birthday in March. And by "clothes shopping" I mean "smaller clothes shopping". So let the weight loss begin. 

I'll probably still end up counting calories a bit in February, and I'm going to try to find a yoga class (talk about some sculpting!) to get leaner and stronger. And hubby wants us to take kung fu. 

As of now, I'm at the end of my third day without sweets, and I really do actually feel a difference. I'm just a little more alert and a little less sluggish. I had to hide the pecan tassies at my MIL's house from myself earlier (that has been my biggest temptation so far), but it'll be worth it. I just have to remember that.

So This is Christmas

"So this is Christmas. And what have you done? Another year over, and a new one just begun"

This song always makes me think about how the year really is over and the next one is starting. I try not to let it get to me, but it always does. I feel like this past year has just been one long pause, and in this coming year life will resume. Sure there have been exciting and joyous moments, but we really have spent most of this year waiting. Waiting on information. Waiting on graduation. Waiting on orders. Waiting to plan our life.

Christmas is a little different this year. It's not as jolly or special or pretty or . . . Christmasy. The biggest thing on our minds this year is moving (countdown alert: 2 weeks!!!), and it definitely detracts from the joy of the season. With all the commotion and confusion I knew would surround us right now, I chose not to decorate this year. Can you hear my heart breaking? Ugh. 

Next year I will decorate the mess out of some Christmas. Hubby doesn't know what he's in for.

We also won't be with my family this Christmas, but will see them on January 4 on our way to Abq. No, it's not along the way, but it's what we're doing. I so wish we had time to see all the places I love while we're down there, but it just won't happen in one night. Places like these:

Bellingrath Gardens. I took this two years ago.

I grew up going here. (Not my photo).

Us on D. I. two years ago. Isn't he handsome?

I kind of grew up with this fountain in Fairhope, too. This picture is from the same trip.

Downtown Mobile. Took this when we were getting our marriage license.

The Fairhope Inn and Restaurant. We got married here. <3 (Not my photo).

So now, a mere four days before Christmas, I'm simply looking ahead to the next Christmas. We'll have our first tree in our own home (hopefully in a place I'd be proud to call home). We'll fill our new home with new friends as often as we can. We won't be waiting. 

And I am stinkin' excited about that.

First Snow

The first snow of the season here in Knoxville was wet, bulky, and short.

Studying Awesomeness

I haven't been nerdy enough lately. 

Let me explain. 

Growing up, I was always the good kid, the smart kid, the nerd. And I didn't mind a single bit. I actually loved it. I knew that by being good and learning things I would come out on top, plus I loved learning. I hated homework just as much as the next kid, but I loved learning. Not just one subject, pretty much anything. It all fascinated me how things worked together and subjects often collided (not until probably high school they didn't, but then that just made everything I learned more interesting). I even stayed after school to learn more through three different academic teams. MAJOR NERD. But it did get me on a LOT of field trips. I think I was averaging two or three a week by senior year. But anyway.

When I got to college, I decided I'd nerd it up just a tiny bit less. Actually, that wasn't the original plan. I went into Auburn as an aerospace engineering major (ha, yeah, you see how that turned out--I guess eventually I figured out that it would just be better to marry one instead), but after one semester I changed to Entrepreneurship and Family Business. Entrepreneurship kind of runs in the family. My mom's two brothers have always worked for themselves and done quite well, and my dad has owned his own business as long as I can remember. I can't help it, I want to work for myself. It's in my blood. But this new major was still pretty nerdy. I got to learn accounting stuff--and loved it--and economics and a slew of other subjects that I can't remember now. *The homework thing was a bigger problem in college than it was in high school, though.

I joined the Sailing Club sophomore year. I only went sailing once, but I really truly did want to learn to sail. Because it was awesome. 

I wanted to learn to fly a plane. Auburn has a program for that, and I knew I could never afford it, but still. It was awesome. 

I wanted to learn to kayak. I'd been once in Seattle, and it was awesome. 

I wanted (and still do) to learn to ride a motorcycle. That would be so awesome. 

I wanted to be awesome. 

If I crawled down a rabbit hole, I'm sure the Mad Hatter would tell me that I've lost my muchness. That sophomore year I met my rocket scientist and moved away from Auburn in May to be with him. Oh believe me, it was more than a fair trade-off, but it has been kind of hard. There's something I forgot to take with me:

My desire to be awesome. 

I'd come home from my job at the fancy-schmancy dry cleaner, or the daycare, or the mall, and he would be doing homework for some math class, and he would work a problem to a point where it was down to a calculus level. I could actually recognize it as something I used-to-could do. Or his little brother would be having problems with his math homework (ok, ok, I admit, I liked math. A lot.) and I could tutor him through it. Or hubby would explain to me some concept from orbital mechanics, and I would recognize enough of the components to understand. 

Little glimpses of my muchness. 

I used to love learning. I used to love knowing. It seems like the last two and a half years that I've been here, not in school, I've lost that. And that's a really big part of me.

It may sound silly, but blogging has brought a little of that back. There were things I had to learn to get started, and there are things I still have yet to learn to be more awesome. I mean, I had to learn some coding! 

I think that's a big part of why I'm so excited about this next big chapter in our lives. I have a plan to be awesome again. Maybe not in the same ways that I always wanted to be awesome, but in a different way. I mean, awesome is awesome, no matter what it looks like. And out there, with hubby working a "real" job, I have the opportunity to have no distractions from becoming awesome. As long as I'm working my Thirty-One business, I won't have to go out and get a job (you know, the kind where you work for somebody else? They're not my favorite). I'll be able to make my own schedule and push myself to do whatever I want to achieve. If I choose to go back to school, I can. I'll have a proper home (don't even get me started on our little apartment--I can't love a place if I never painted the walls. One day hubby will understand this), and a little cash to hostess a little more. I adore having friends over. The planning, the decorating, the oh-make-yourself-at-home-ing. But to be honest, I didn't put enough energy into making friends here. I have a very few here that are still a part of my life. That will be different in New Mexico. Because I will choose to be more awesome. 

Because awesome is awesome.

I Won Something!

Actually, I won two things. One is a Liebster Award that I'm still working on finding the blogs to whom I want to pass it on, and will post about that soon. But the one I'm going to tell you about right now is that I won some free ad space from Nichelle on Vintage Wanna Bee!

Hooray for winning something! I'm honestly pretty surprised at how things are moving along, since I just started blogging less than a month ago. 

My hope and my goal is to relate to other women who just may need that in their lives, and people like Nichelle (and other fabulous ladies that I've connected with through this) get that. It's their goal, too. So, without further rambling, I want to say a big THANK YOU to Nichelle at Vintage Wanna Bee for hosting such a cool giveaway. Go check out her blog and shop!

Orders!!!

Friday hubby finally got the email we've been waiting for . . . our orders! He had the afternoon off for doing some extra work on Thursday, so getting to spend some time together that afternoon just made it that much more special.

Ok, now what?

We took a printed copy to our apartment office to cancel our lease and that was about all we could do right away (I need to take it to the gym to cancel that, too). Now we're trying to figure out how to get a sponsor (an officer that will basically be hubby's guide to getting started out there, even helping us find a home), what kind of emissions testing our cars will have to undergo (we might have to make a few changes to our cars before that), who we call to let them know we're coming, and when we can get our "real" IDs. Actually, I don't have one at all, so I'm pretty excited about getting my dependent ID (hooray for military discounts!). Hubby will just get his fancy schmancy one with an embedded chip instead of his plain reservist ID he's been carrying around since his freshman year.

The actual orders themselves are just two pages that look like tax forms--boxes and boxes of stuff printed in them that don't really tell us anything. I'm not even on there. We're still not sure if I'm supposed to be. It does say that we are to leave on January 4 and be there by midnight January 8. 

Holy cow that's only a month away! 

We have so much to do, but it just doesn't quite seem real yet. We still haven't decided if we want the AF to just take care of moving all of our stuff, or if we want to do it ourselves (a PPM, or Personally Procured Move, as it's called). We already know for sure that we're going to have to go out of the way to avoid snow and ice, so we don't really want to be driving a U-haul or anything like that. The other problem is that we have belongings at two locations here in Knoxville (our apartment and my mother-in-law's garage), but the AF will only move from two locations once in your career, and we'd like to hang onto that free pass for a later time. Maybe a PODS? That way we could load everything up ourselves from both places but not have to drive it. Have any of you ever used one of those?

Anyway, I'll leave you with a picture of something I want to make when we get there, courtesy of Pinterest (oh how I love you, Pinterest).

Towe Family Christmas Photos

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of photographing one of my seniors that I photographed over a year ago. She's now in college and looking lovelier than ever, and this time I got to meet her brother, his girlfriend, and her adorable baby boy. 

Enjoy!