Ugh. That’s all. Just. Bleh.
I’m on day three of a four-day break the school district saw fit to give us. Thank goodness we’ve had decent weather this school year, or I’d be headed back to work tomorrow instead of Tuesday.
I’ve been frustrated for the past couple of months. Frustrated with a lot of things. School – mine and Joseph’s, testing (which really is just another aspect of school), home life, weight. There is so much WRONG with our public schools, and parents have NO CLUE. Oh, they think they understand what is wrong. I certainly did before I started teaching! But really, they have no idea.
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I was right when I said in college that our public school system is so broken that it’s unfix-able. The best we can do is to scrap it where it stands and start all over. It is so overwhelmingly bad that I can’t even begin to explain. With another public school educator, all we can do is look at each other and just nod in mutual understanding. There are no words. We just know it’s very, very wrong.
Last weekend, I guess for April Fool’s day, a bunch of high school kids snuck onto the school district’s bus parking area, and slashed all the tires. More specifically, they cut the stems off of most of the tires, letting the air out. We got a recorded message from the district’s emergency broadcast system, telling us what happened, and advising us that the buses would not be running that morning, and to just get our kids to school “as best we can.” This is not the district I work for, but rather the district my son goes to. I really worry about the future of this country. Seriously. (And if I were the type of chick to gather stalker-type people, that little tidbit of trivia would have just blown my cover. Thank God for being a fatty. No stalkers!)
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Home. Oh, home, how you make me want to hide. Really, things could be much worse around here. We’re all generally getting along and doing what we can. But I need to move. Soon. I worked out a new budget on Friday, to try and figure out if we can put more money into savings each month. We’re not good savers. We do well living within our means, but if we have it, we spend it. And saving is not a priority. EVERYTHING is more important. Before Christmas, we finally opened a savings account with our bank, and have a whole $25 automatically transferred each month. I’m proud to say we’ve saved $150, and have finally earned $0.01 in interest! Yahoo!
However. (Isn’t there always a “however”?) Rick needs a new car, but we have to pay mine off first. With Rick’s new job, we can easily increase my car payment and get it paid off by next January. That’s great, considering we still have over a year of payments actually still owed on it. We agreed to use next year’s tax return, plus a little that we’ll have put into savings, to make a down payment on a new vehicle for him. His current car will be parked, while we slowly put work and parts into it to make it a worthy vehicle to pass onto Joseph. Joe doesn’t drive yet (paid for driver’s ed, the kid won’t take the classes. Go figure.), but I refuse to continue driving him around after he graduates from high school. There’s just something wrong with being driven to college classes by your mommy. Just sayin’. We can’t just save twenty-five bucks a month to come up with a down payment, though. We need to do more than that, hence the reworking of the budget. If we do what I want (I have serious doubts that we will stick to the new plan), we’ll be more than golden to get another car by January.
However #2. We also NEED.TO.MOVE. Finally, we’re making enough to afford our bills plus rent, if we needed to do rent. We don’t want to do rent. We want a mortgage. (Well, we don’t really WANT a mortgage, but you get what I mean.) We knew we needed to reach certain goals to be approved for the buying of the house. 1) Clean up credit. We had terrible credit when we first moved in with the ‘rents. We were defaulted on every credit account and bill we owed money on, and it was the driving reason why we moved and I went back to school in the first place. We worked our tail feathers off, paid stuff off – sometimes by settlement agreements, but mostly in full – and got back on top of our financial house. We made sure to pay off accounts and not open ANY. The only exception being my car. But we paid Rick’s off first, and it was paid off for over a year before we got mine. If you have bad credit, this is the first way you “fix” it. Pay shit off. Get rid of the debt. If you need to work out settlement amounts, do it. It’s better than defaulting on the account entirely. The next step, wait. Once you have bad marks, even after you’ve paid them off, they linger for 7-10 years. There is nothing you can do about this. They have the legal right to keep it on your credit reports for that long, and trust me, they exercise that right to the fullest. We’re into year eight, and it’s time for me to get my credit reports again. Note to those still reading: if you’re married, you have a LOT of reports you need to get. For example, I need to get my reports, under my married name, from all three agencies. I also need to get all three under my husband’s name. And then, I need to get all three that are under my MAIDEN name, as well. And the last time I checked, there were separate entries that listed me and my husband together. So I would need to see if the reporting agencies had any under Rick AND Godsweigh OurLastName. That’s potentially 12 reports, and not all of them will be free.
The next step to home ownership goodness is to establish good credit. We finally have an actual Visa card in our name. Debit cards don’t count. I’ve had an Avenue card for over 10 years, and a Catherine’s card for about 5 years, but those don’t count as heavily as a major credit line: Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AmEx. Buying a car or two helps, as well, but they don’t count the same, because they are not ROTATING credit accounts. The Visa is doing well, having been used for Christmas, and is now nearly paid off. So, that’s good.
Third step: Savings. We took this step six months ago, and by the time time we think we can finally get around to actually buying an actual house, we’ll have had that savings for over two years. That’s very good, and I can count this step as done. This is our problem, though. If I put the maximum I can into savings every month, it will take us four more years to save what we need to move. We’ve played this ball game long enough to know that it’s not just closing costs we need. The house may need repairs or upgrades. Plus there are odds and ends of other expenses that will come up that will need to be handled. We need about $30,000. My parents do not understand this, since the last time they bought a house without the funds from the sale of their current house was in 1972. The house they bought cost $30,000, and the owner financed it. Their down payment was their first year of rent payments. We will not be so lucky.
So, I could be looking at my son graduating from COLLEGE before I move out of my parent’s home?!?!?! All I can do is to trust that God has a plan for this, as well. If He wants us to stay here, we stay here. There’s no use fighting it, but I will warn you: I will still whine and complain about it. Briefly.
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Weight. Oh, has this EVER been a struggle. I checked back into the record I’d been keeping of my weight loss. I weighed 232 mid January. I weigh 230 today. 230 is good today, though. I had crept back up to 234 and stayed there for a VERY long time. Oh, I would fluctuate by a handful of ounces, plus or minus, but 234 is where I stayed. My body is currently acting like it’s gearing up for another period. I’m annoyed with everyone, have sore boobies, have a seemingly insatiable craving for sugar. Yeah. Good times, good times.
I was talking to Rick last Wednesday about my frustration. Have I gone through all this, just to stay a 230-pound fat woman? Is this really were my trip ends? Mentally, I am not ready to give up! But what am I doing wrong??? Oh, I knew what was wrong. Too much of the wrong kinds of food is what.
Here’s the deal. I know what my surgeon wants me to do for the rest of my life. It’s very simple: Liquid protein breakfast, liquid protein lunch, 1 cup of green veggies and 6 ounces of lean meat for dinner, 1 cup of fruit as a snack. Real people don’t live this way! I do acknowledge that my diet needs to have more protein than anything else – pretty much for good. I also acknowledge that I need to limit the carbs I eat, and to keep them balanced so that most of them are natural carbs and not processed ones. Can I eat processed carbs (sugar, candy, etc.)? Yes. But they do not need to be eaten daily, or in large quantities. I get all of this. But the idea of making two-thirds of my diet liquid – for the REST OF MY LIFE – is nauseating to me. Surely there is a way to be protein-centric with chew-able food, and still lose weight! I need to find something that works for ME AND allows the weight loss to happen.
Here’s my other main issue: my mother cooks dinner and I eat it. It is a rare occurrence that the protein served at dinner will not involve some kind of carb. She’s either fixing breaded meat, or meat blended inextricably with starch. Examples: breaded fish, breaded chicken strips, chicken fried steak, or spaghetti w/meat sauce, chicken and rice, fried rice and egg rolls (a double whammy). She will say that she understands if I don’t eat the family dinner, but she is clearly put out when I do that. It’s in her body language. I need to just ignore her and let her get over herself. My son and my husband have both approached me, independently mind you, stating that they think she is trying to sabotage me. She was getting depressed when the weight was dropping off, and is happy and chipper now that it’s clear that it’s not. I can’t ask her to cook just for me. That’s completely not fair. But I can choose to ignore her childishness and do what I know I need to do.
I worked out a fairly simple plan while talking to Rick last week. For breakfast, I usually have coffee. I’m on the run and just don’t feel like stopping most days. I’m not feeling hungry, either, so it’s all good. On the rare day I do feel hungry in the morning, I can have either a protein shake or protein shot – whichever I’m in the mood to deal with. For lunch, I have chicken Vienna sausage, tuna salad, loose lunch meat, or beef jerky. I’m usually pretty hungry by the time lunch rolls around (8th grade lunch is after 1pm), so this is where the bulk of any carbs will come into my diet. I can accompany the protein with one of the following: water and a piece of fruit, a small bottle of no-sugar-added fruit juice, or water and a Ritz Crackerful. I get the Crackerfuls that have the most protein and the least carbs (peanut butter or colossal cheddar), and this is the only food I eat that has more processed carbs than protein. Dinner is my cup of green veggie, and a protein source. If the protein served for dinner is more-or-less carb free, I can do that. Otherwise, I can have canned tuna or chicken, Vienna sausages, frozen tilapia, protein shots, or protein shakes. I found a good-sounding, but simple recipe for Parmesan-crusted tilapia today, so doing the fish should be pretty simple to do. If it’s good, I can actually mix up a large-ish batch of the crust mix, and refrigerate it to use as needed.
I did close to this on Thursday last week. Coffee breakfast, a 6-inch flatbread sub for lunch (turkey & black forest ham), a chocolate chip cookie for a snack, chicken salad for dinner (nearly no carbs at all!), and a very small bowl of cereal for before bed. I told family that I tore half the flatbread off and just had the sandwich open-faced, but the truth is, I didn’t. Since I went to Subway for lunch that day, I didn’t have time to eat it during lunch. I waited to eat it during my conference (last period, which is only 90 minutes after lunch. our lunch is REALLY late.). I was very surprised that I was able to finish the whole sandwich! I was VERY full when I was done, but still. It worries me that I finished it at all. Am I stretching my stomach back out? Despite the sandwich, when I weighed Friday morning, I’d lost two pounds. Keep in mind that my body is currently trying to hold onto enough water to turn the Sahara into a tropical paradise, and I still showed a loss. I don’t feel like I had very much protein that day, though.
I’ve been so much better with my eating on this break. Not perfect, but since when have I accomplished perfection? I’ve netted a loss every day. I was at 230.2 this morning, and yesterday my eating – comparatively – was shit. Today has been pretty good. Coffee breakfast, chicken salad lunch, meatloaf dinner, and a midday snack of a bakery slice of un-frosted cake. I was having a serious carb craving before I got dinner, so I also fixed myself a glass of sweet tea – the sweet coming from two packets of Truvia. I filled up on meatloaf and still have half the glass of tea left. It’s been about 90 minutes, and the carb craving is gone. Lesson: when you’re wanting carbs, fill up on protein and something sweet, but non-sugared to drink. See if the craving goes away when you’re done. If not, try a natural carb like fruit or fruit juice along with the protein.
I don’t want to fail at this. There are too many people watching me and making life decisions based on whether or not I fail. My mother being one. I’ve been watching her weight go up and up and up for the past year. It’s painful to watch, since that was me last July. Her diet is mostly carb with protein as flavoring. She uses the excuses that 1) she’s diabetic and 2) she’s had her gall bladder removed to not change her diet. I need to be the proof she’s looking for. I need to prove her wrong.
I REALLY don’t want to visit the doctor in three months (HOLY BATMAN! ONLY THREE MONTHS!!), with no weight loss. Clearly, I won’t have lost as much as I should have because I spent three months in weight-loss limbo, but some is definitely better than none. I don’t know that I can face the staff with a weight gain, or even maintaining. I haven’t even been able to face my own weight loss record!
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Anyway. Frustration upon frustration upon frustration. When life leads me to frustration, that often becomes the impetus to action. This needs to be one of those times. I can’t change the school system, and I can’t save money to do what needs to be done any faster, but I CAN and WILL change my eating so that I am losing weight again.
God's Weigh 